Finding Time to Blog in B2B Businesses

I have a client who recently came to me and announced he wanted to start blogging. He knows it’s an excellent opportunity to showcase his expertise and establish himself as a thought leader. Blogging sounds pretty straight forward considering the ROI you get from creating some simple yet juicy content that people are really interested in, right? Not necessarily – read my colleague Lisa’s post on whether blogging is a great marketing tool for B2B companies.

Those considerations aside, if you’re like many B2B companies who do want to blog, your concerns are probably around two questions - who will do the blog writing and what will the topics be.

To tackle the first question, think about everyone within your company who interacts with customers or develops products. Think about your sales team, your product development teams, your service teams and your management. They all have specific issues they deal with on a daily basis. They can all contribute to a blog. And having several writers creating new and fresh content representing different aspects of your business will bring more credibility and trust from your readers.

To tackle the second question, take a look at all the issues the groups above deal with. What questions do they get regularly? What emerging issues are they dealing with? Think about your product line too. Did you recently launch a new product in the market? Product launches make the perfect post; everyone wants to learn about something new! All of these topics make great blog topics. And don’t forget about materials and content you’ve created in the past. See Lisa’s recent blog on Seven Great Ways to Repurpose Your B2B Marketing Content.

Now, how do you convince your team that they have the time? I recently read a book on doing just this called 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. Consider for a moment the fact that there are 168 hours in week and that setting aside one to two a week or bi-weekly may not be that much time in the grand scheme of things. Approaching blogging with this mindset makes blogging more attainable.

If you’re keen to get blogging going in your company, think about blogging in 3 steps:

1. Time – Find the time to blog by putting aside projects that aren’t generating ROI. Check out a previous post on calculating marketing ROI.
2. Content – Repurpose. Repurpose. Repurpose.
3. Resources – If you really can’t find the resource to execute your blogs or other key marketing tactics – give us a call!

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