Another channel that can be used for sharing valuable content to increase your inbound marketing reach is to publish and engage in social media.  Sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn have proven to be great tools for B2B companies, and Facebook is not far behind.

Twitter, a micro-blogging community, provides a portal to learn the behaviours and habits of the end consumer.  For B2B companies, this is a fantastic tool to understand their customer’s customer.

LinkedIn is a social media portal designed for businesses and business-people to connect with each other and share knowledge, ideas, and opportunities.  This has become the go-to tool for finding experts, employment opportunities, and potential employees.

ActiveConversion recently conducted a webinar on SEO, Content, and Social media. This webinar examined inbound marketing and the value of content in generating thought leadership and credibility for your company, products, and services.

Martha Boulianne also recently published this blog on FoundPages, that discusses the value of blogging and outlines eight ways to improve a corporate blog.

Here are the main points suggested by Martha on improving your corporate blog:

1. Spread the word.
2. Add quality content.
3. Blog early, blog often.
4. Link to your own old posts.
5. Add links and images to your blog posts.
6. Write comments on related blogs.
7. Write title tags for both your readers and Google.
8. Cover topics that need attention.

Read the rest of the blog here…

Related articles

• Corporate Blogging Tip: Use Your “More” Tag (socialtimes.com)
• Guilt-Free Business Blogging – 7 Ways A Blog Can Grow Your Business (blogherald.com)
• Corporate Blogging: You’re Doing It Wrong (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• Whiteboard Friday – Corporate Blogging Tips (seomoz.org)

My company is a services company, what can I blog about?

Projects in the works, recently completed projects
If you offer development services, post about projects that have been recently completed. For instance,  if you are a realtor, post about recently sold properties. If your organization works with other larger organizations, post about that. These kinds of posts will help re-enforce confidence in prospects and highlight services that your existing clients may not know you do. It’ll also keep you top of mind of your interested prospects and clients.

Process Highlights
Highlighting processes in the way you deliver your services to your clients can be the differentiator between your company and your competitors. It’s important to pitch your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) and it can be better received if it’s passively served via your blog.

My company is a product company, what else can I blog about?

Your products are your bread and butter and when possible they should also be the focus of your blog.

New Products or Vendor/Suppliers
It’s not uncommon for companies to bring launch products and fail to appropriately announce it. Use your blog as a channel to highlight when your company has something new to offer and the problem it solves.

Featured Product
Sometimes an organization has many products. With so many choices, prospective customers may find it hard to find the right product. Other times, product information pages can be too limited for customers to get the information they want. Highlighting products, particularly ones that are of high popularity can help your company around those issues. It’s particularly effective if images or videos are available with these postings.

Product Promotions or Discounts
Everyone likes a sale, particularly if you sell consumer products – a promotion/discount announcement can be picked up by one of the many popular consumer deals sites online.

Other Common Topics

• Success Stories
• Commentary on industry events or commentary from other industry leaders
  Posts that reference well known individuals are particularly effective in driving traffic from searchers online. Both commentary and client success stories help establish credibility for your company, which helps to differentiate your company and reinforce confidence in prospects.

I’m Still Stuck

Sometimes you just don’t have anything to talk about.  At those times, you have to defer to the backup plan.

• Best posts of July, September, 2009, etc
• Links to other industry blogs…
  If you choose to blog about another blog or resource, you should notify the person you are promoting and many bloggers will make a post about it, hopefully crediting your company or blog. This will help build up your blog’s network and credibility.

The Most Common Mistake

The most common mistake for company blogs is to only post company news or press releases. Although those types of posts can be a part of your company’s blog, they should be the minority of the posts. If you make this common mistake, the only people who will read it will be your company’s staff or your competitors.

An alternate form of blogging that brings it’s own basket of  benefits is what I’ll call “soft blogging”; not blogging analysis but rather easier, once a week, announcement-like content.  Here are five examples:

1. Customer testimonials; getting testimonials from happy customers is an obvious best practice, and when you do, a blog is the perfect venue for maximizing the return on that testimonial.  Include a small description of the service or product rendered to get the testimonial.
2. Portfolio of projects; this is for companies with fewer clients but bigger projects – this is a case study in effect.  Nothing makes you real like a list of real projects you’ve completed, far more so than all the “motherhood” statements on your website.
3. News and Press releases; all companies should put out press releases, submitted to an online wire service like PR web, once a quarter. They are like little golden micro-sites devoted to your company that deliver visitors for years.  Examples of what to put in them include a new management hire, a major client landed or project completed, a new service you now offer, or a new product line you’ve begun carrying (here’s a bigger list).  Publish to your blog as well.
4. Job postings; hiring people says your company is growing and the job description is a wonderful grab bag of what your company does well.  Blogging a job posting is one of the only ways a small business can attract attention to a job posting on its own without relying on a 3rd party website.  Once you hire someone, change the post to a hire announcement and re-publish.
5. Marketing and Sales collateral; you have brochures, and you have digital versions of them. Do a paragraph summary of what they contain and post them online.  Instead of emailing a PDF to a prospect, your sales person can now email them a link to where it resides on your web page, and if they do come to investigate it, they may partake more of your messaging on your website/blog.

A key element of this strategy is that the blog must be sub-domained to your website; the search engines will then see it as part of your website.  This is a bit technical, but here’s a company that will do it for you.  This approach is search engine ‘gold’.  You are adding new content to your website on an ongoing basis (I’d suggest once a week) and you are educating search engines (i.e. Google) about what you do.

In some ways for many companies “soft blogging” is more beneficial than “hard blogging”. Testimonials and /or a portfolio of projects is often a more powerful aid in getting new business than stating your opinion on topics many of your prospects will likely not have the time or inclination to read.  Getting new business is the acid test after all; will this activity bring you more business?  The answer is yes.  This approach will bring more visitors to your website, and you will convince more of them you are a real company that has happy customers.  More visitors will identify themselves and ask questions and request quotes.  Go “soft blogging”!

Lead nurturing is the process of communicating with prospects who are not yet ready to buy. B2B Blogging enables marketers to contact such prospects on an ongoing basis.

Only 10 to 25 percent of all leads are sales-ready. A similar percentage of leads are not qualified at all. This means 50 to 80 percent of all leads generated are potentially wasted if no appropriate action is taken.

With B2B Blogging marketers can realize significant benefits. Leads that are not sales-ready are not lost and significant online lead generation effort is not wasted. Automation of lead nurturing increases the ROI of all online marketing activities.

To download this whitepaper on implementing a blog for your business, click on the image!