Blogging is an essential part of your B2B digital marketing strategy. However, writing three (or more) blogs a week about your product, your service, or industry updates often feels like going to the gym on a Saturday morning - you know you should, you know it’s good for you, but do you really want to?

The key to breaking this habit is to make your content engaging so that prospects are encouraged to read more. If you can’t get excited about writing your blog, why should anyone be jumping to read it? Lots of B2B blogs are boring, superficial, or too sales-focused, which isn’t the best way to generate leads. We’ve selected 8 top tips for your blogging strategy to help create the perfect blog post, and turn your B2B blog into a lead generation machine.

Table of Contents

1. Know your blog audience

2. Hook your readers

3. Use relevant, surprising, and original statistics

4. Choose your writing style wisely

5. Think about your readers, not just search engines!

6. Solve problems, offer solutions

7. Be human

1. Know your blog audience

You shouldn’t even consider putting your hands to the keyboard unless you’ve narrowed down exactly who you are writing for. An easy way to figure out your audience is to create buyer personas - these are semi-fictional representations of your perfect customer and work as an in-depth study of who your content should be ‘speaking’ to. Stuck on where to begin? We’ve got you covered.

Once you’ve developed a persona for your B2B blog, you should have an understanding of how it is going to appeal to them. Take time to consider the tone of voice, blog style, and which topics interest them, as this is vital when planning your blogging strategy.

2. Hook your readers

It’s sad but true that the modern reader has a limited attention span. In fact, according to Copy Blogger’s statistics, of all the people who read this blog’s headline, only 20% will read the rest of the blog post (including you). You need to create immediate interest with each piece of content you write, so don’t be afraid of a little personality! B2B blogs often have a reputation for being lifeless, but a solid blogging strategy and content that appeals to your readers can combat this.

Make sure that your introduction pops by following some of HubSpot’s recommended rules - keep it short, keep it direct, and address your reader’s concerns. It needs to be relatable to your blog audience, and the perfect post has the right mix of empathy, specialist knowledge, and fact.

3. Use relevant, surprising, and original statistics

Statistics! They can be an incredible resource to take advantage of in your B2B blog, and when used correctly can help to illustrate your point clearly and concisely. Business-minded people love to see evidence, but overusing the same stats and figures time and time again can make your blog sound repetitive.

Where possible, try to use your own statistics. If you can prove that your customers saw an increase in efficiency using your product or service, shout about it! Highlighting your own facts grounds your writing in reality, and showcases to prospects that you have experience, and that your product works.

Don’t have your own statistics? Don’t worry - using popular statistics is a tried and trusted method in B2B blogging and can help to illustrate the point you’re making. Try to find surprising stats that are memorable and even shocking, so that your blog audience is dying to read more!

4. Choose your writing style wisely

This is where the importance of your personas really starts to matter. Once you’ve researched the type of audience you want to engage with your blog, you need to think carefully about the writing styles that are going to resonate with them. Will a busy financial director bother reading a 15-minute read blog? Or would they rather see something concise, factual, with plenty of statistical proof? Your writing style is very important, and can make the difference between alienating and attracting your target personas.

It’s a good idea to chat with your marketing team about the tone and voice of your company and this should come across in each blog that you write. There’s an important distinction:

Voice is the individual style in which you communicate with your audience in your B2B content. This can be something that you use as guidelines for emails, blogs, social media, and any other material that you produce.

Tone is the attitude or approach you take to a topic - depending on your persona, on the nature of the material, and the style of your content. Tone doesn’t refer to the overall company guidelines, but is more subjective, as different situations call for different tones of voice!

Making sure that your company has a specific voice and tone is something that will resonate with your readers. Seems simple, but it’s important!

5. Think about your readers, not just search engines!

Your blog should be readable, enjoyable, and informative. You write for humans, not for search engines, and it’s important to remember this when crafting the perfect post. SEO is incredibly important for getting your blog found, but with updates such as BERT, Google is becoming smarter about finding content that answers the needs of the searcher, rather than sticking on keywords.

Don’t worry about stuffing your blog posts full of your chosen keyword - instead consider whether your content is readable to an actual human being. Otherwise, you run the risk of sounding like a soulless robot - not the best look for your business!

6. Solve problems, offer solutions

Once you’ve written your blog post, go back through it again and proof. Does the blog answer your persona’s pains? Does it offer an effective solution? Does it encourage your reader to find out more by downloading additional content, reading more blogs, or getting in touch? If the answer to these questions is no, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

The primary reason that a prospect is reading your blog posts is to gain knowledge and find an effective solution - if your content doesn’t provide this, it’s unlikely that they will ever become a customer. Make sure that you are giving helpful and useful advice and information, no matter what you’re writing.

7. Be human

While B2B is technically “business to business”, you are actually creating posts that are going to be read by an individual. Therefore, your blog needs to develop a relationship that is more than just transactional. Crafting blog posts that are human and not too sales-focused makes your content more engaging - you wouldn’t deliver a scripted sales pitch to someone face to face, so don’t do it online.

The best way to achieve this is by weaving your company story into your B2B blog. Including real quotes from executive level, as well as personal successes (and failures), helps to humanise your content, and makes your blog posts much more relatable and believable.

For the best results, each of your blogs should be focused on your audience, relevant to your industry, and part of a wider B2B marketing strategy. The idea of blogging regularly may seem daunting at first, but once you have mapped out who you are targeting, what they want to learn about, and how you can deliver it in an effective, human way. Creating the perfect B2B blog post is tricky, but with these tips you can turn your blog into your biggest asset.

To give you a head start on your blog posts, we’ve created a free template! You can use this to plot out your posts, consider exactly who you’re targeting and why, and create an introduction and conclusion that will get your readers wanting more. Download it below!

This blog was originally posted in 2015. It has been updated in 2021 for clarity and relevance.