4 Strategic Blogging Tips for Building Targeted Content

The key to getting potential leads and customers to look to your blog or website for guidance is VALUE.

Providing valuable easy-to-digest information, gives peoples a reason to bookmark you, share you within their own community or preferably to link back to you.

The following four tips will help guide you in your content creation. Implement them and you will discover you can achieve both quality and quantity in your content creation.

1.  Be Strategic

Every single blog post should be well thought out and executed precisely. Do not just sit down at your desk and start blabbering on about your next big sale or incentive. This is a turn off and not the essence of a B2B blog. Instead, try to align your mindset with your customer. What are their pains? What are their concerns? How does your company help them solve their needs? You have made a career in your market by practicing this behavior. Now start writing content in your blog about it. A great way to help plan strategic posts can be found in this CopyBlogger article by Zack Grossbart and Justin Evans.

2.  Focus on the Buyer Persona

This tip ties directly into tip number one, but let’s take it a step further. Are you able to truly define your potential customer’s personas?  Do you know what your potential customer’s hopes, dreams, goals, and aspirations are?  If not, then how can you expect to truly connect with your target audience?

A great way to help get to know potential customers is to familiarize yourself with current customers. Reach out to existing clients and get a feel for what motivates them. Not only will you get a better idea of how to focus your blog’s content around potential customers, you continue to foster long-lasting relations with current customers as well. This will bolster your brand, help you promote your blog within your community, and lead us to tip number three.

3.  Maintain Brand Centricity

Your brand needs to be the center of your blog. Albeit this sounds painfully simple, over time you may find it increasingly more difficult to practice what I preach. Maintaining brand centricity follows tip number one in the sense that you are always preparing for your blog. If you feel that your content is becoming stale or dull, try other forms of engagement with your audience.

Upload a helpful video (or three) to YouTube.  Try adding some audio from a customer testimonial.   Above all else, do not fall into the trap of just writing whatever YOU think is great.  Yes, you will craft your own writing voice over time, but your B2B blog is not a personal blog so keep your personal interests at a minimum.

4.  Optimized SEO

Keyword (KW) optimization is huge in blogging and cannot be overstated enough.  That being said, targeting highly trafficked keywords is not the best practice to follow with your young B2B blog. Instead, focus on long-tail keywords (3-4 total words) of the main or core keywords  you wish to target.

There are a number of ways to accomplish this. Personally, I find that using a simple Excel spreadsheet works best.  Here is a simple keyword strategy to help you get started:

  1. Create three columns and title each one Prefix, Core KW, and Suffix.
  2. Now, think of geographic terms that may pertain to your market and add them in the prefix and suffix columns.
  3. Add other specific, descriptive, or relevant to your industry words into the prefix and suffix columns.

By adding words before or after the core KW, you have created targeted long-tail keywords that help ensure quality traffic flows to your blog.  Take these long-tail KW and start creating strategic, buyer persona focused, brand centric blog articles.