If you’ve been working on a content marketing strategy, you may be wondering if you even need to include a blog. Are blogs even still relevant?

They sure are. Businesses that blog receive 97% more backlinks to their website than those that don’t. Blogging gives your business credibility since you’re demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about- and this builds trust amongst leads and customers. Blogging is also crucial for SEO, since Google is constantly ‘crawling’ your website, and blog posts are a great way to rank for the keywords your target customers are using.

The biggest benefit of blogging is that it allows you to connect to your leads and customers. But your audience has more content at their fingertips than ever before. How do you stand out amongst all the other businesses vying for their attention? Here’s how you can write blog posts your leads will want to read:

Understand Your Readers

This is probably the most crucial step for any inbound marketing strategy. If you’re not completely clear about who your readers are, how will you write the kind of blog posts they want to read?

There are a few ways you can get to know your audience better. One of the best marketing tools is a buyer persona. This is when you use the information you have about your customers to create a representation of those customers.

For example, you may use market research and company data to create a buyer persona called Steve, a 52-year-old man who owns a construction company with fewer than 100 employees. Steve’s goal is to expand his customer base while maximizing profit margins. Maybe his biggest pain point is finding new equipment that he can trust to get the job done. And perhaps he finds it difficult to compare all the different manufacturers and models.

If your business provided construction equipment, you could solve this problem by writing detailed blog posts about the type of equipment available. These could make it easy for him to see the pros and cons at a glance, and answer the types of questions he would have about ease of use, downtime, and breakdown servicing.

Use Examples

Just like our buyer persona Steve, real-world examples and statistics are priceless. Whenever possible, make sure you’re educating your readers and demonstrating your expertise and knowledge with case studies, reports, data, and examples that break down key information.

If you can’t back up what you’re saying with actual data and examples, your blog posts will be ‘fluff’, which is the kiss of death for a B2B blog.

Format Correctly

No one wants to read a big block of text- especially online. Most of the time, your readers will be skimming your blog posts, looking for information that’s relevant to them.

This means you need to organize your blog posts so that they flow well. They should never be a stream of consciousness. One of the best ways to prevent this is to outline your blog posts before you begin writing. Make a list of the main points you’d like to cover and add a few ideas for each point. Make sure you use headings, bullet points, and short paragraphs to make it easy for readers to scan your posts.

Say Something New

Many people are dealing with information overload, as the amount of information available online grows significantly each day. If you want your leads to read your blog posts, you’ll need to say something they haven’t seen or heard before.

This doesn’t mean reinventing the wheel. You may have similar information to other businesses in your niche, but you can use your own data to communicate this information in a unique way. You can increase the chances your leads will find your information interesting and relevant by finding out what problems they need to solve and telling them how to solve them.

Blogging is still one of the key pillars of any content marketing strategy. If you need help with your blog, get in touch today.