Is a blog actually effective for B2B marketers? 76% of B2B marketers answer with a resounding yes, stating that blogs have proved an essential part of their marketing plan. Through a blog, you’re able to provide helpful information to your customers while boosting your SEO to drive more traffic to your website.

The problem is coming up with a steady flow of blog topics. Most B2B marketers conduct a search of commonly used industry keywords and construct a blog around that general subject. Researching blog topics from your competitors can also help to give you an idea of what your customers want to see. Here are a few blog ideas to spark inspiration for your B2B blog:

Tell Your Story

What led to the creation of your business? Who runs your business and what’s their background in the industry? This is usually covered in your About section, but you can go into further detail on the blog, even interviewing the CEO to get first-hand insight. What were the steps that led to them deciding to provide the product or service that they offer to businesses around them? 

This can be one of your first blogs, a sort of introduction to your customers. From there, you can branch off into all kinds of topics.

Feature Your Customers

B2B is all about forming relationships with customers. A good business partnership can last for years and offer untold benefits to both the supplier and the customer. One way to show potential clients that you are trusted among your current clientele is to create a blog highlighting a customer testimonial, or even offering a featurette on your client.

There are a few things you can do here: 

• Make a blog surrounding a customer testimonial. 
• Pair the customer testimonial with a case study of the project you took on for a particular client. What were their needs and how did you meet them? 
• Create a blog that features your client, who they are and what they do, before segwaying into the service you provide for them.
• Interview your client.

Obviously, this method won’t work for everyone. If your work involves any confidentiality, as with corporate law firms, you won’t want to mention your clients by name or go into too much detail about what you do for them. For any B2B blog, make sure you have your client’s permission to reference them in your blog. They may see it as an opportunity to boost their own visibility, as well.

Write a Long Form Blog With Lots of Research

Business executives love to see numbers and facts. A long form blog backed by trustworthy research is an excellent way to boost your authority — both in the industry and on Google’s algorithm. It may not be every single blog, but you should at least try to aim for one blog a month that is rich with research and hard data. 

The sources you cite will matter, of course. We all learned in college not to use Wikipedia as a source. You also don’t want to use a competitor’s website or a clickbait article. Where you can, consider linking to actual studies or university articles that provide specific data and numbers.

Let Customers Interact With Your Blogs

This doesn’t just mean leaving the comments section open. Consider incorporating interactive elements into your blogs. A quiz or a poll can be a fun break from the wall of text, and it helps customers feel as though they have a voice in your content and your decisions. The quizzes and polls can also help inform your marketing and lead generation choices. They could even be opportunities to generate leads themselves.

Try to keep these short and sweet. A quiz within your blog shouldn’t take up too much time, so try to keep it under 10 questions. A poll should have a few options to choose between. You don’t have to go in depth with these, but use them to compliment the rest of the content.

Offer Educational, How-To Guides

Educational, informative content that actually helps your clients is always bound to go over well. Of course, you don’t want to tell your clients how to do what you offer on their own. But you can offer how-to guides adjacent to your products and services, or offer them a guide on how to find someone who offers your products and services — tactfully pointing to your business as a possible solution. If you offer a B2B product that requires maintenance, you can also offer a how-to guide about maintenance of that product.