Blogs generally have two purposes. One is to present your expertise to people who are visiting your website and checking you out to see if they like the look of you. These people could have found your website in any way. The other is for search engine optimisation where your blogs (and other content on your site) are specifically designed to attract traffic to your site by addressing the questions that people are searching for answers to.
It can sometimes be hard to think of blog topics and to keep a steady supply of new blogs coming onto your website. This is particularly the case in B2B where some topics can seem quite dry or without a lot of obvious potential for blogging. It can be helpful to remember that whether you’re talking to people who are already on your site or you are using your blogs to entice new people to the site, you are generally talking to people who are already interested in what you have to say. The topic is only dry to people who aren’t interested in it. People who are interested in it find it…well…interesting!
Here are some ideas for potential topics to get you thinking. We recommend sitting down with your team and working through these ideas, thinking about how they might apply to your organisation.
- Case studies – illustrate the real world benefit that your product or service provides for your clients. The more precise you can be, the better – if the client is able to quantify the benefit you offer then include these numbers in the case study.
- Expert / blog roundup – give your readers links to other blogs that you think might be of relevance to them and explain your choices.
- Reading list – recommend some books to your readers that they might find useful in their professional lives.
- Interviews – conduct interviews with other people in the industry that your readers might be interested to know more about.
- News and future developments – let your readers know about your product development roadmap and what you have coming up down the line.
- Event write up – been to a conference, a seminar or a training course? Write a review of it or talk about what you learned and why you found it useful.
- Guest blogging – do you have customers, suppliers or other contacts who might be interested in writing about the industry from their perspective on your blog?
- Client spotlight – rather than focusing on the results of the work you’ve done with a client as you would in a case study, here you can take a more personal approach and write about a client (or partner or supplier) that you’ve worked with for years, what you’ve learned from your relationship with them, how the relationship has developed.
- Frequently asked questions – talk to the customer-facing staff in your organisation and find out what questions they are most frequently asked by existing or potential clients. These can then form the basis of a series of blog posts.
- Your perspective on an industry question – is there some key development in your industry that you can give your own perspective on, or a controversial topic that people are discussing that you contribute to?
- Sales presentations – look for content that can be repurposed. Sales pitch documents, RFPs and sales presentations often contain within them content that can be repurposed as blog posts.
- Training guides and how to notes – blog about some aspect of your product or service that people sometimes struggle with.
- Lists – list blogs are very common and can work well, particularly if you pitch them in a way that’s useful to your readers e.g. 10 ideas to improve your email open rates.
- Use search terms as the basis for content – have a look in your Google Analytics and Search Console data and see what search terms people are using to find your site, what bits of content they engage with most and what they’re searching for whilst on your site (if you have a site search function). This can then tell you something about what your customers and potential customers are interested in, which gives you the basis of blog ideas.
- Follow your competitors’ blogs – what are your competitors blogging about? Can you address the same topics in a different way in your own blog?
- Break down ebooks into smaller chunks – do you have an ebook or other content such as white papers or research reports? These can often be broken down into smaller chunks that make good blog posts.
- Research – tools such as Survey Monkey make it relatively easy to conduct survey research these days. You can also run polls and collect similar research data via your social media channels. Ask your audience some key questions that you think will be of interest in the industry and then write up your findings in a series of blog posts.
If you’re struggling for content ideas you might find our Implementing a successful content development strategy on demand webinar to be useful.
