How To Write B2B Content Marketing Blogs That Get Results
Content guide:
Is it ok to use AI to write blogs?
How long should an SEO blog be?
How long should it take to write a blog?
Why doesn’t my blog get any views?
Mistake #1: You only want to write short-form content.
Mistake #2: You don’t have a real copywriter on your team.
Mistake #3: You’re cramping up your writer’s style.
Mistake #4: You’re not a subject matter expert.
The difference between good and bad blog marketing strategies.
Take your blog content even further.
Social media.
Paid ads.
Gated content (Whitepapers, eBooks, Case studies, Webinars).
eDMs and newsletters.
Is blogging good for business or a complete waste of time?
Blog writing is one of marketing’s largest time sinks. Yes, even with ChatGPT. Sure, nowadays there’s AI to help generate blogs within seconds, but can you say with 100% confidence that AI written blogs will not only rank well but also draw in the correct eyeballs and push your buyers towards a purchase?
In a world where content flooding strategies are more accessible than ever, business leaders who remain deliberate in message crafting can separate themselves from the pack and rise to the top — both in search engines and their customer’s minds.
Is it ok to use AI to write blogs?
Despite what alleged AI and prompting experts might tell you, good blogs such as the ones described above take time to write. That’s not to say that prompting has no place in blog writing, but you’ll still want an experienced marketer to comb through every piece of AI-generated copy to keep your brand in check.
How long should an SEO blog be?
Reputable brands within the SEO space including the Search Engine Journal and Semrush agree that well-researched, SEO-optimised blog posts should be at least 1,500 to 2,500 words long. Length is necessary not just to give room for your ideas to breathe but also to give search engines more information to pick up on.
How long should it take to write a blog?
According to various sources, writing a quality blog like that may take anywhere from four, five, to even eight hours. Of course, that amount of time can be cut down significantly with the help of an experienced writer. At the same time, inexperienced business owners who are just starting out on their own may take even longer than that after factoring in SEO and cosmetic refinements.
Why doesn’t my blog get any views?
But perhaps you’re pursing your lips in scepticism. After all, as a content marketing agency, we have all the reason in the world to dissuade you from using AI for content writing. To be clear, copywriters at Kyyte are not opposed to AI and frequently use AI for first drafts, edits, or inspiration when the classic writer’s block hits.
However, there’s a big difference in AI’s final output when used by a writer versus a non-writer. The statistics speak for themselves, to date, 96.55% of pages only fail to receive any organic traffic whatsoever, a number that has grown from the low 90s before the AI boom we’re witnessing today. It’s likely that more businesses than ever are pushing out AI-generated content into the web hoping to cash in on automation, when in fact they’re throwing away hundreds of business days writing content that never sees the light of day.
So how does one squeeze themselves into the >4% of content that actually generates revenue? The short answer is: strategy. And if you’re committing any of the following errors, chances are that your blog marketing strategy is in dire need of a revamp.
Mistake #1: You only want to write short-form content.
Unless you're writing a press release or announcement, short-form blogs (about 300-700 words) are probably not worth your time, especially if you’re hoping to rank on page 1 and attract views organically. Of course, your mileage may vary depending on how competitive your niche is, but even if you do succeed in ranking high, a short-form blog will easily get outranked by a competitor further down the road.
Nevertheless, we understand where the demand for short-form blogs is coming from. When Instagram reels and TikTok constantly surround you, it’s hard to imagine how anyone would want to spend time reading a two-thousand-word essay on your business niche. However, business leaders fail to realise that you don’t need to grab the attention of every single person on TikTok, just the ones that your product is targeting. By investing a bit more time into a well-thought-out, high-ranking blog, you can ensure that your business shows up exactly when your dream client is searching for a solution.
Mistake #2: You don’t have a real copywriter on your team.
Everyone can write, but few can write well. A common mistake business leaders make is to delegate writing tasks to any marketer with white space on their calendar, or worse, someone with no marketing experience at all. After all, what’s so complicated about putting words on a document?
The truth is that effective copywriting is a craft of persuasion. Business leaders are often too eager to impress, which is how you end up with cliches such as number one, one-stop-shop, top-rated, and other marketing buzzwords that do nothing to separate you from the competition.
Seasoned copywriters understand that good copy is about persuasion and that nobody will care about how impressive a business is unless they can get something out of it. This ability to understand how a reader will receive every line of text is what separates professional writers from AI prompters, and the difference between hearing crickets or having your inbox flooded with more leads than you can handle.
Mistake #3: You’re cramping up your writer’s style.
Let’s say that you’ve gone out of your way to hire a professional copywriter, one who is not only an expert on your business niche, but more importantly, has a track record of increasing leads and revenue for businesses. Copywriters of this calibre are neither cheap nor easy to find, so you’ll definitely want to make sure that you get your money’s worth.
Unfortunately, many business leaders suck the life and potential out of marketing content painstakingly put together by their creative teams before it even goes live. We’ve seen this happen over and over again with clients who are deathly afraid of the teeny-tiniest chance of ruffling a few feathers. They may make ‘a few minor tweaks’ without realising that they’ve disrupted a very deliberately crafted word flow, or worse, request for changes over and over until the final copy is unrecognisable from the original.
As an agency that has written top-performing blogs for a wide range of clients, trust us when we say that nobody is taking your blog as seriously as you are. If you’re already publishing blog after blog with nothing to show for it, then butchering the copy that your writer has put together for you is definitely not going to change that. So instead of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, trust the process and let your writer take the lead.
Mistake #4: You’re not a subject matter expert.
Apart from hiring a copywriter with domain expertise, the only other way to write content that drives authority and revenue is to supply the writer with access to experts. In fact, the latter scenario is probably what you’ll find yourself with more often than not, since no single person in the world can be a good writer and a subject matter about everything.
So if you’re going to hire a writer or content marketing agency to shape your brand, make sure that you’re ready to touch base often and answer any questions that they might have about your business. Marketing is not one of those things that you can outsource and let it run on autopilot. Because when all your competitors are using ChatGPT to generate the same talking points, your unique perspective will show that you know what you’re talking about and give consumers the confidence to purchase.
You don’t have to be the subject matter expert, either. Most business leaders aren’t. Just make sure that your writer has access to someone who understands all the inner workings of your business during the drafting process and you’ll be golden.
The difference between good and bad blog marketing strategies.
While bad blogs are a complete waste of company resources, good blogs filled with high-value content will be referenced and reshared by your target audience over and over, continuously driving up your website’s SEO juice and attracting leads weeks, months, and even years after you’ve hit the publish button.
If you’ve invested in a long-form blog where every sentence is crafted with intention (as opposed to being written out to fill up space), then you’ve effectively built yourself a mini-content bank that you can draw from to create snippets on LinkedIn, Instagram, and any other channel that your target audience happens to be active on.
Take your blog content even further.
Now that you’ve invested a significant amount of time and money into crafting a killer set of blogs, you’ll want to give it the best chance it can have to succeed. After all, SEO is a highly unpredictable and competitive space, and it may take a while for your content to be picked up by the algorithm and/or build up enough backlinks to rise above the competition. In the meantime, however, you can boost your chances of success by inviting users from other platforms onto your website. And if your blog does have valuable information, readers will surely stick around and drive up your rankings.
Social media.
Most companies promote their blogs on the usual social media channels to little success, often because they use a spray-and-pray method (or maybe add a couple of hashtags) hoping that the algorithm will one day make their B2B blog on agile workspaces go viral. We don’t mean to burst your bubble, but with sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn becoming more pay-to-play than ever, the chances of you going viral with a generic blog post are effectively zero.
Instead of simply posting on your company profile, you’ll want to sniff out communities where your target buyers are hiding. These include Subreddits, community sites, Facebook groups, and even slack channels. Of course, doing so is easier said than done. Waltzing into these digital spaces to drop off your link will most likely look tacky, and can even get you outright banned, which is why you’ll need to be actively participating as a genuine group member long before you start promoting anything. Yes, it is a lot of work, but it beats receiving less than 50 impressions after posting on LinkedIn for two years.
Paid ads.
If you want to get your message out there to the most number of people in the shortest amount of time (as a business with very little visibility), then ads are possibly the most effective means of doing so while you wait for your SEO and community integration efforts to take effect. Of course, you’ll want to engage a paid marketing expert who can optimise numbers and audience targeting in their sleep to get the most out of your investment.
You don’t have to do this with every single blog that you publish, especially if you’re working on a tight budget. But, if you’ve written something that you believe will truly resonate with your audience, don’t be afraid to crank up the settings and allow your content to receive the recognition it deserves.
Gated content (Whitepapers, eBooks, Case studies, Webinars).
Some business information is simply too valuable to be given away for free. Things like the solution to a problem that has stumped everyone else in your industry up until this point. If you’ve gotten your hands on information like that, then you’ll want to lock it behind a form for your audience to fill out so that you can build up a contact list.
If you’re unsure about whether a piece of content is good enough to be gatekept, think about how rare said information is. If it’s your generic, run-off-the-mill listicle, then it's best to leave it on your free-to-read blog section (or better still, have a writer improve it first!). But if it's a demo video of your product, case studies from clients that only you have access to or a webinar hosted by experts, then by all means use that bargaining chip to gather valuable contacts to build up your mailing list.
eDMs and newsletters.
Gated content is so valuable because it facilitates email marketing. Only people who are interested in your brand will bother filling in a form to be contacted. In other words, contacts are hot leads. Build up a large enough list, and you’ll have a large audience to promote your blogs, products, and promotions the moment they’re released.
Be warned, however. When we say ‘large’, we’re talking about mailing lists with six figures worth of contacts. After all, email marketing has a click-through rate of just 2.62% across all industries, with the most engaging industries capping at 5.01%. If you only have a hundred contacts, then you might want to consider building up your list further before investing time in writing emails. But if you’ve got 100,000 contacts, then 2% of that is still 2,000, more than enough to promote for that sweet engagement traffic.
A final word of advice: Measure everything.
There are no guarantees in marketing. As much as we would like to believe that posting five times a week at 9 am will catapult our business to algorithmic success, the reality is that the internet is way too saturated for such cheap tricks to work any longer.
Moreover, every single business — and by extension, the target audience, is different. So what worked out for one company might not necessarily work out for you. So don’t take anything that anyone (us included!) says as gospel. Test things out for yourself and be ready to pivot if things don’t work out. And if you’ve really given your marketing strategy a good go and still find yourself stuck in a rut, reach out to Kyyte and let’s figure out how we can make your brand rise above the rest.