Blogging Business to Business

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business marketingSome people think marketing is marketing and whether you are marketing to consumers or marketing to business, you’re still just marketing to people, right? “Business-to-business and business-to-consumer marketing are different,” explains blogger Debra of Masterfulmarketing.com. Actually, this is a question that comes up often when I discuss providing business blogging services.

How is B2B marketing different from B2C? Masterful Marketing lists several ways:

  • B2B has a longer sales cycle.
  • B2B is multi-step selling is multi-step.
  • B2B marketing depends on awareness-building educational activities.
  • B2B buyers make more “rational” decisions based on business value.

“There is a widespread perception that social media is mainly a business-to-consumer play,” says Paul Gillin, author of Secrets of Social Media Marketing. “Certainly,” Gillin admits, “the scope of B-to-B social media applications is smaller than in consumer markets.”   “Nevertheless,” he points out, “there is evidence that, once B-to-B marketers find value in it, they move more quickly than their consumer counterparts.”

As a freelance SEO copywriter providing corporate blogging training, I’m finding the same thing. More and more businesses are beginning to call on my company for blog writing services to help them get their message out to business buyers. The idea of an SEO marketing blog is still the same as one for b-to-c: bring readers to your website in order to convert them (in this case the companies they represent) into buyers.

And, experience is showing, the basics of corporate blogging for business customers remain the same – building trust and offering valuable information.

The recurring themes in blog posts, whether B2b or B2c, represent the beliefs and unique “slant” of the business, bringing out the “distinct voice” of the bloggers/business owners. In offering business blogging assistance where the target buyers are businesses, I remind clients that (exactly as Masterful Marketing stresses), their customers’ buying decisions are likely to be based not so much on a desire for status, security, beauty, and comfort, but on increasing their own businesses’ profitability and reducing their own business costs.

Business to business or business to consumer – writing for business is about one thing –  creating customers and keeping them engaged!

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Blogging for Business – What Makes You Tick and What Ticks You Off

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Tim GunnAt sales training meetings, in business books – if I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “People do business with those they know, like, and trust.” I’ve even used the expression myself in offering business blogging assistance. I don’t think the concept was ever as real to me, though, as when I was reading an excerpt from Tim Gunn’s Gunn’s Golden Rules.

That’s because, in that excerpt, Project Runway’s fashion mentor Gunn shares “what makes him tick and what ticks him off”.  In doing that, Gunn became someone I “know”. 

As a freelance SEO copywriter, I realized, although I’ve never met the man, his opening up about what’s really important to him about his work and about which bad industry practices he detests made him real to me. 

In today’s competitive business world, as blogger Thom Singer reminds us, “there are many complex issues that impact sales decisions. ‘Like’ matters. ‘Trust’ matters,” Singer concludes. As any good blog content writer needs to keep in mind, corporate blogging for business represents an ideal tool for “getting personal” and earning trust.

Too often, though, what I find is that business owners are so focused on marketing strategy and tactics development through blogging, they forget that the blog needs to express who and what they are, or to put it another way what their belief systems are. What makes them tick?  What ticks them off about their industry?

As a professional ghost blogger, one of the very first questions I pose to each blogging client is this:  “If you had only eight to ten words to describe why you’re passionate about what you know, what you sell, or what you do, what would those words be?”

There’s an old Hebrew saying: “A man may be known by three things: His pocket, his wine cup, his anger.” (In Hebrew these three are a play on words: Kee-so, Ko-so, Kaa-so”.) In short, what makes you tick?  What ticks you off?

When you’re writing for business, readers must be able to tell!

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Above-the-Fold Blogging For Business

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newspaperJust how important is it to keep business blog posts short enough so they fit above the “fold”, meaning short enough so that the reader has no need to scroll down the page? At least one commentator, Kelly A. Meyers, doesn’t think that’s something about which blog content writers need be concerned.

The expression “above the fold” derives from newspaper publishing, with editors careful to put the most important stories and photos above the crease of the newspaper so they would be visible in a face-up stack of papers.  Meyers questions whether there’s any validity to this form of content presentation when it comes to websites and to blogs.  “In a world gone mobile,” Meyers points out, “where iPhone and Android users spend their time touch screen scrolling,” she adds, “it really doesn’t matter whether the content is “above the scroll” or not.  

FutureNow’s Brendan Regan says a good part of success in writing for business comes from getting the mechanics right, including sparing readers the “inconvenience” of scrolling. In providing business blogging help and corporate blogging training through Say It For You, I advise making blogs as long as they need to be to get the point across, but not a single sentence longer.

Since the whole point of business blog writing is to engage readers and spur them to action, in offering business blogging assistance, I stress the fact that online searchers tend to be scanners rather than readers.  That means the most important task is, as early on as possible in the content of each blog post, to convey the message to those searchers that they’ve come to the right place for the products and information they need.

When it comes to Search Engine Optimization , use of key words and phrases in the title and “above the fold” makes a lot of sense. Having said that, I agree with Kelly Meyers: if a visitor has come to your site for a reason, and if your blog appears to be a good match for that reason, “they aren’t going to mind scrolling”.

OK, readers, you’ve already gone below the fold on this one – what are your thoughts?



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Don’t Get the Blogging Math Problem Wrong – special guest post by Ryan Cox

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Today’s post is by friend and fellow blogger Ryan L. Cox.

sprinterI’ll be the first one to admit it: writing was not my strength in academia.  I come from a math bloodline. My father was good in math, like perfect-math-portion-of-the- SAT’s good. "In math, Ryan, everything is black and white; there is always a right answer," I was taught.

Often times I find myself comparing the three L’s, Life, Love, and Law, to math, searching for the right and wrong, black and white. For this the math kid to find a natural fit in writing is simply preposterous, but it happened. And my advice to every business professional out there is plain and simple: if you are not blogging for yourself or having someone blog on your behalf, you are getting this math problem wrong.

We’ve sprinted, not walked, into a do-it-now-or-be-lost-forever Internet-driven business world. Technical innovation has swung the pendulum far past the point where business can remain entrenched in handling consumers. Does anyone remember near-time consumption?  Anyone? Bueller? We dove into the deep end of real-time. Consumerism can be described in one word: NOW!  If I think about something, I turn to Google and search for it. If you do not show up to give me information, I’ll have already given third party authority and my interest to someone else. If you do not have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, I’ll consider you old and outdated. If I cannot find that your website uses “flash”, or if your contact information is hard to find, I’ll forget your business exists.

The moral of this story: blogging is important to the marketing message.  Here are 5 easy-to-understand reasons why:

            It’s free.  
WordPress and Blogger are both free blogging platforms.  Even if you don’t have a website (you should have fixed this yesterday!), you can have a blog.  Heck, a well-customized free WordPress blog can be turned into your website!

            It gets people talking.
With the social sharing plugins that are available for a blog: (Facebook Like, Twitter RT, Buzz, StumbleUpon, Digg, Share This, Add This, etc..) you give your consumers the ability to share your message. From your standpoint as a business owner, that’s free marketing from unpaid workers.

           It’s expected.
Plain and simple, consumers expect you to have something that at least resembles a blog, providing new content on no worse than a weekly basis.

            It has search engine optimization (SEO) value.
Save for another conversation the debate of how much value.  The “low ceiling” explanation is that a blog sends signals to Google to constantly crawl your website for new content. The more history in the search engines, especially around the keywords associated with your business or product, the better.

         People are going to talk about your service or product.
         You might as well increase the chances that you can capture the conversation. 
         There is nothing stopping me (a competitor or consumer) from slamming your
         company everywhere I see fit.  However, if I know that you have a website and
         a blog, it’s more likely I will come directly to the source to complain giving you a
         better chance of putting out the fire.

The marketing budget for a business owner has been turned upside down by the emergence of social media, blogging and real-time communications. No one has perfected the dissemination of messaging from business to consumer. The pricing market for these services is still very fluid. Regardless, their importance has been made quite clear. So what is the takeaway from this post?

The right answer to this math problem is: You need to have a blog. Whether the “your own gun” or the “hired gun” method is better for conveying your particular message is dependent on your individual situation.ch individual. At the end of the day, a blog needs to be part of your marketing message.

I’m living proof: excuses are meaningless.  Shut Up And Do It Already.

Wow, Ryan – you’ve made quite a compelling case for blogging. Say It For You, of course, comes at business blogging from BOTH the "your own gun" (we offer business blogging assistance) and the "hired gun" (by serving as freelance SEO copywriters) angles. Blogging for business is not a be-all and end-all – it’s part of any company’s marketing strategy and tactics development.
Thanks for the reminder (warning?) that we all continue to sprint into a do-it-now internet-driven world. Business blog writing is one brand of "running gear".
 – Rhoda

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