And before Facebook, before Google, years ago, we had blogs. I started my blog in 1994.

We now come over 25 years later since the birth of the first blog, and blogs remain a staple of the contemporary web. B2B is especially big on blogs and 89 % of marketing teams share content via blogs in 2020.

It is this past that leads you to ask why, when technologies evolve every day, why do blogs still have a staying power, specifically among B2B marketers? And how to make the most of the blogging power?

Find 11 reasons why blogging is one of the most effective B2B marketing tools and how to leverage each of them for your business below.

1. Blog Marketing Is Relatively Cost-Effective

Building a blog post is very cheap when you know what you’re doing. You can have an internal person do the research and publish the post for you, but it takes time. You can even outsource blog writing to agencies or freelancers, and they will charge anything from pennies per word to dollars per word, depending on what kind of post you are after.

The publishing part, if you have a website already you can insert the blog post pages to your website without making a lot of money (or spending a lot of money, anyway).

Blog posts that work best are evergreen. So, they’re not a real-time, and the data will continue to deliver leads for months or years. You might need to make them up to date every year or two if they are factual or stats which may change over time, but you can take the meat of the content and sell it for years. That brings in the ROI no matter what you charge for your blog posts and can translate into a lower cost of acquisition for this kind of marketing.

2. The SEO Value of Your Website Increases When You Blog.

What blogs post do for the readers is not just to inform them. They’re a perfect vehicle for SEO. Every post you publish should:

• Put some terms people are searching on in order to find what you have to offer.
• Address specific searcher intent. For instance, if your keywords are “copy machine replacement cost”, “copy machine replacement vs repair,” and “copy machine service in Miami,” then the person searching for that information is probably trying to determine whether they should replace or repair a business copy machine in Miami. Your posts need to speak directly to that purpose and should be useful to know what drives costs and when a replacement is best over a repair.
• Respond to a few common queries users can have about the search. Google the keywords yourself and you can see “people usually ask questions” to help you with your content.
• Providing links inside your site to other pages that you might have interest in.
• Link out to authority sites that support data or statistics in your post.

These are all double-binding acts. One is that they help SEO score higher for each blog and your site overall. They are second, they establish credibility in your prospective customer’s mind through establishing that you are the leader and knowledgeable about the niche.

3. Blogs Allow You to Post Relevant, Current Content.

Firms that blog regularly bring in 67% more leads every month than competitors who don’t have a regular blog. These are some of the reasons you need to blog often:

• It builds trust. If your readers know that you post once a week, you establish yourself as trustworthy and maybe even a good business associate.
• It keeps content fresh. New content maintains your website’s relevancy on search engine result pages (SERPs). You can also blog on hot subjects to attract more search traffic in every season by blogging regularly. Though always green blogs are essential for long-term survival, if you blog frequently, you can write some time-sensitive posts as well.
• You can offer instruction. Business buyers are largely educated when purchasing something and Blogging is a wonderful tool to have a powerful website and marketing content that is packed with knowledge for the present and future customer.

4. Blog Posts Can Be Reused for Other Marketing Strategy Just by Copying and Pasting.

Blogs can be the perfect source of content for your whole content marketing strategy because you can repurpose your blog articles for other channels. That’s also another reason blog marketing is extremely inexpensive; if you’re smart and have the right marketing automation software, all that work you put into a blog post is really spread out over multiple platforms.

Examples of blog post repurpose:

• Repurpose stats and facts from the post for an infographic. So, add that in your post and use it on social media or landing pages.
• Turn some of your post into explainer videos to post on YouTube and social media.
• Pick out snippets or stats from the blog post and post them on social with the link to the whole blog post to get traffic to your site.
• Recombine blog posts about the same subject for an eBook or other longer download you can use as a lead magnet.
• Build automated emails using some of the best bits from your blog to help get people to landing pages or posts.

5. Blogging Lets You Share Your Brand Personality

The quality landing pages are key to bringing in the sale, but it is on the company blog where your brand can be the real star. Business blogging gives you the opportunity to show your audience who the brand is created by and educates them on what your brand is about.

The Content Marketing Institute reported that “generating brand awareness” is the #1 content marketing objective of B2B marketers (85 percent). And when you’re competing in a field where differentiation can be tough to find, personalizing your brand with a blog can definitely help with that.

6. Blogs Create Network and Trust.

It is sometimes an added bonus of being authentic with your brand and being quirky on a blog that you form community and trust. It’s a content marketing goal shared by over 60% of B2B marketers in the CMI survey.

Some ways to use your blog to gain trust that leads into your sales funnel:

• Post on a schedule. Two to four times a week is the best ROI; Marketing Insider Group tells us. But better you publish one time a week every week if that’s all you have time for, then try to post multiple times a week and just don’t.
• Answer client questions. You get a lot of the same questions on social media from clients or you, so write a blog post about them and show you listen and know the answer.
• Encourage comments. Get people to take active part in your comments or on a website’s forum if you can monitor that. This allows you to form an outside of social network community that you are in more charge of.
• Create high-quality, relevant content. Always write something that your visitors are going to want to read, so that they can return to your site in the future.

7. It’s OK to Have More Than One Media Type in a Blog.

Blogging is a great way to attract all types of people. That’s because you can add in different media to suit visual, auditory, textual learners and people with auditory or visual impairments. Here are some kinds of things you could try in your B2B blog:

• Embedded videos
• Embedded audio
• Images with captions
• Infographics
• HTML — Variable text (headers, bullet points, callouts, text boxes).

8. Blogs: a Great Place To Convert Traffic into Leads And Leads into Conversions.

In the past, online ads point back to your products landing pages. But don’t feel that you can’t try Google and other ads using blogs. You could, for instance, associate a Google Ads campaign with a pillar post about one of your services. A pillar post is an article that’s longer and discusses a large-scale topic with related sub-articles as the connections.

Let me give you a concrete use-case for how this could work:

• An agency selling food service equipment to restaurants and other hospitality companies can write a pillar blog about refrigerators.
• The brand could then run a search engine ad campaign on business users who are looking to purchase a refrigerator.
• Business users are enlisted by the ads during the research phase of the buyer journey and a click takes them to the pillar page.
• The pillar page includes all the information that the user needs to carry out the research like the other blog posts and product pages.
• Now the user has more chances of going on their buyer journey in that company’s website and so, they have more chance of eventually purchasing from that company.

Write an editorial plan for blogs in this way when marketing B2B. Here are some primer steps to help you out:

• Perform keyword and intent research. Discover using SEO and marketing data tools what the people are looking for and why. Develop lists of keywords and topics.
• Sort those keywords and phrases based on searcher intent. For instance, in the food service scenario, “purchase refrigerator”, “purchase commercial oven,” and “search for food safety information.” could be a few examples.
• Come up with categories with subtopics. If it’s the “buying refrigeration equipment” category, then subheads would be “commercial refrigeration units’ type,” “fee of refrigeration unit”, and “How to measure for a refrigerator unit”.
• Develop blogs for each of your subtopics. Then create a pillar post in long form connecting all of the topics and subtopic blog.
• Hyperlink products or pages of your website on these blogs to give the prospect a breadcrumb trail to take them on a buyer journey.

9. Blogs Help You Generate Organic Backlinks.

As Ahrefs says: The better backlinks, the more organic traffic the page receives from the search engines. But the backlinks are a driving force behind the SERPs, but this correlation of backlinks with traffic also comes from the fact that high quality content pages which receive lots of backlinks are usually high-quality content which would make it to the SERPs anyway.

Blogs are also great for natural backlinks. Write what is helpful and useful to other people and they will share and link back. That increases the SEO and authority of your whole website.

10. Blogs Make You Build High Quality Internal Linking Architectures.

Internal linking maintains your visitors when they click from link to link. But it’s SEO-friendly as well. Good internal linking not only allows the search engine bots to crawl your page faster but it informs the search engine AI what exactly your page is about. You can include a few links to some of these internal pages on every blog post, without your page appearing as spammy.

Implementing the pillar page method mentioned above to develop a content hub around a specific topic is a good way to leverage your internal linking strategy.

11. Blogs Drive Long-Term Results

A business blog is an indirect marketing platform that is meant for B2B purposes, so don’t count on viral success overnight. Indeed, viral isn’t even a very good target for a business as you’re not trying to get the whole Internet to notice you. You want to have a durable base for your audience. Relevant, high-quality blog articles published regularly do just that.