Producing great content sounds easy, but the reality is often different for all but the most naturally gifted writers. Unfortunately many businesses start out trying to produce content, thinking it'll be a walk in the park -- and hopelessly fail. Their target audience doesn't instantly find their blog posts, and they give up to focus on more pressing short term issues. They start off writing a blog post every day, and give up after a week. Everyone's seen more than a handful of blogs that were active for all but a week or two. The internet is littered with them. So how can a B2B company like yours create consistent, compelling content? A great start is considering these 3 tips.
Develop Buyer Personas
This is my biggest tip, and it's something I consider vital to any B2B company's inbound marketing strategy. Without well developed buyer personas, your content is probably not going to consistently resonate too well with your readers. What is a buyer persona? Kim Goodwin, author of "Designing In The Digital Age", describes a buyer persona as follows:
"Personas are archetypes that describe the various goals and observed behavior patterns among your potential users and customers."
A buyer persona is effectively a personification of your ideal customers. Picture the different kinds of customers your business services, and think about their backgrounds, jobs, hobbies, goals and challenges. There's a simple worksheet PDF available here to help you get started.
Once you have clearly defined personas of your main customers (we recommend picking a maximum of three buyer personas to start with), make sure that every piece of content you produce is highly targeted at at least one of those personas. The better you can target your buyer personas with your content, the more engaged the right people will be with your company.
Start Slow
Beginning to implement an inbound marketing strategy for your business, and consistently producing compelling content often represents a step change in the way you work. You're far more likely to succeed when you make small changes to daily habits, than you are if you suddenly make huge commitments & changes. Dieting is a great example of this. You are far more likely to consistently stick to a small diet change (e.g. replacing an evening chocolate bar with an apple) than you are to stick to a huge diet change, like replacing all your meals with protein shakes. Once you have a habit embedded in your routine, you can then make another small change. All the small changes piled up over time result in big long term effects.
So if your business is just getting started producing content, start with a small commitment. For blogging, we often suggest that one blog post a week is a great place to start. Over time, you can slowly ramp it up, and take full advantage of the huge benefits offered by more frequent blogging.
Don't Give Up
It seems obvious, but bear it in mind. Your inbound marketing strategy will definitely fail if you give up. Blogging is often slow to drive traffic to your website. It can take a few months for you to start to notice reasonable increases in traffic, and it's typically a good 7-9 months before regular blogging starts to drive large amounts of targeted traffic to your website. The more consistently you post great, targeted content to your blog, the faster you will see results. So don't fall into the trap of only posting for a few weeks before giving up. Long term consistency truly is the biggest secret when it comes to driving traffic and generating leads with your blog.
So, why not get started today? Use the worksheet to begin thinking about your buyer personas, start slow, and don't give up. Less than a year from now you could be driving a ton of targeted traffic to your website with your content, vastly improving the results of your marketing.
