Blogging Business to Business

Some 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!