Where does your business rank?
Search is still an important area of online success. Companies that serve other businesses need to rank well – in paid and in organic – in order to appeal to B2B decision makers.
A recent report published in eMarketer by Marin Software shows just how important search remains for these decision makers.
From B2B Decision-makers Diversify Digital Research:
73% of US B2B information-gatherers who went online to conduct purchase research turned to a search engine to do so.
It’s interesting that blogging wasn’t included in the discussion of what ranks. There have to be results for all of these searches B2B decision makers are performing. The paid side is certainly important, but people still trust organic rankings as much or even more than paid rankings.
In order for your company to rank well organically you need to have a digital content strategy aimed at providing relative answers for the questions your customers are asking in search engines. The way to do this is with items like a blog or guides or video.
There are many ways your company can rank well for the keyword phrases your customers are searching for. A blog is a great way to target B2B decision makers. They are doing research as they search for other companies that can help them do business.
Say, for example, you’re an email service provider. Your main customer demographic is the small business. You specialize in affordable email service for businesses with under 25,000 email subscribers.
When your target customer is online searching for an email service they are likely looking for ways to save money despite having a small subscriber list. They are also likely looking for ways to save on email design. A third item they might research could be ways to market their email program so they can grow their list with minimal resources.
A company blog is a great way to appeal to these searchers.
The blog posts you could write for these potential topics would be something like:
- Inexpensive Ways to Manage a Company Email Program
- How Templates Can Benefit Small Business Email Programs
- How to Increase Small Business Email Subscribers
There are numerous other topics you could write about to target this particular B2B researcher. This person is likely going to take some time to make their decision. They will search around on various websites looking to gather information before they make a determination of what businesses they are going to contact for a request for proposal.
Now, when this person is ready to contact a company it’s important for your site to be ready. Most company websites with blogs will find their traffic comes first through a single blog post. The posts you’ve written above will be the first page your potential customers are seeing on your site. It’s important to make it clear, but not too intrusive, about how a person can contact your company.
You can put the email contact form link on the sidebar of each blog post. You could also include the phone number so this decision maker can contact you if they have further questions.
The decision maker is likely looking for just a little more information on your company before they make a final decision. If you understand how this process can work you can take advantage of the search opportunity with a company blog that’s paired with other content strategies like guides or videos.