Company blogs provide a consistent drumbeat, enabling brands to share helpful and relevant information and stories directly with their audiences. Today, we’re exploring how to fuel B2B business growth through content marketing with a company blog.
In 2016, I pivoted into a newly created global content strategist role at a B2B company. As I officially embarked on creating a new corporate blog, I was looking for content solutions to address a few global marketing challenges.
Three Common Global Marketing Challenges
Several years before launching the company blog, I led global communications for the same organization. That gave me a 360-degree view of marketing communications and marketing operations within the organization.
I noticed that our global marketing team, including personnel at both regional and corporate levels, repeatedly faced the same three challenges.
Let’s explore each of these global marketing challenges in detail.
Challenge #1: One-Hit Wonders Were Killing Our Efficiency
We were crushing it in the category of content one-hit-wonders, which is not a category you want to win! Our approach was highly inefficient.
We were guilty of over-investing our limited resources, specifically time and budget, in developing custom content for both earned media and paid media channels.
Challenge #2: Consistently Deliver High-Value Content to the Edges of the Global Organization
Our small team had regional and global marketing responsibilities. As we were scaling up quickly, we had yet to implement basic content governance practices to enable efficient, coordinated communications.
We continually reinvented the wheel, creating content tailored to custom requests in various parts of the world to meet business needs.
We needed a coordinated, scalable approach to efficiently and effectively reuse and repurpose valuable content across the organization.
Challenge #3: Media Mix Too Focused on Rented Media
We relied too heavily on traditional media companies to spread our message through paid or earned channels. The traditional media model that supported our marketing communications across the organization was outdated, hindering the efficiency and effectiveness of our efforts.
As a content strategist, I understood that developing an overall content strategy and investing in a company blog would partially address all three of these common global marketing team challenges we were experiencing.
It was time for us to embrace a content business strategy mindset, where we prioritized developing our owned-media strategy first, then supported that with rented media.
Two Bonus B2B Blogging Benefits
- A company blog can help fuel sales enablement by providing an owned media channel to promote new company research to the market quickly.
- It also provides a media publishing platform for sharing stories, which helps to humanize your brand.
Three B2B Blogging Success Factors Revealed
- Success Factor #1: As part of my team’s B2B blogging success, we committed to a consistent publishing frequency.
- Success Factor #2: We prioritized getting our enterprise-level “search house” in order by establishing and maintaining an efficient, effective, and coordinated approach for our organization’s organic and paid search across our digital universe.
- Success Factor #3: We focused on formalizing content operations by designing workflows to ensure high reuse and repurposing of blog content.
In 2019, my team's corporate blog was recognized with a National Golden ARC award and a National AAEA award. But more important than any accolade was the site's delivery of a differentiated content-driven experience that our audience valued.
Ultimately, delivering a differentiated content experience helps companies build brand trust.