For B2C marketing, a blog is a cost-effective and long-term lead generator for your business. With a B2C business blog, you can:
- Educate your customers
- Build trust and authority
- Promote your products or services
- Share news and deals
- Improve your search engine optimization (SEO) results
- Generate brand awareness
- Drive leads and sales
But how exactly do you write a great (or even good) B2C blog post? Anyone can type some words in a content management system and hit publish. How do you ensure your time, effort, and resources aren’t wasted?
How to write a great B2C blog post
Use this step-by-step guide to create compelling blog posts and then measure your blog performance to see what works for your brand.
1. Research your audience
First, like any successful marketing initiative, research is critical before writing a B2C blog post. Learn who your current customer is, including what defines them demographically and what kind of pain points they feel.
Envision who your ideal customer is. Your ideal customer may look different from your current buyer. It’s essential to define them so you can better target them in your content marketing.
Create buyer personas for your target audience members that include:
- What challenges the buyer routinely faces
- How your product or service solves the buyer’s pain points
- What your current buyers like about your product or service
Your understanding of your customers will influence everything from the words you use to the images you feature in the blog. You’ll want to make the content relatable to grab your audience’s attention and keep visitors engaged.
2. Gather feedback from diverse teams
Go beyond your marketing team to learn more about your audience. Your customer service team that answers questions for customers and knows their problems is a great place to start. Learn about what FAQs they encounter. Ask about the most common customer pain points.
Talk to anyone who interacts with your customers directly, like salespeople. What do they observe from customers? What techniques do your sales team members use to sell more?
Also, ask your SEO team for insights. What are the latest Google trends and hot topics that relate to your target audience? What search intent is driving leads to your website? What interesting topics are your competitors covering that you could write about in a unique way?
You can also use market research to learn more about your target customer, from their typical hobbies to the types of events they attend and the entertainment they enjoy. The feedback you get from your staff and market research both inform your buyer personas.
3. Map out a customer journey
Using your buyer personas, map out what kind of customer journey they’ll take with your brand. The sales funnel covers the:
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Decision stage
At each stage in the customer journey, write out questions the customer might be asking or considerations they’re making. What information would help move them to the next part of the journey?
These details can provide many B2C content ideas for what to create for each part of the sales funnel.
4. Use content planning to meet customers where they are
Once you know your ideal customer and what they’re experiencing along the consumer journey, you can add timely and evergreen content ideas to a content calendar during content planning.
During the content ideation process, think about good content ideas that:
Provide helpful information for what leads are searching for
Identify what pain points leads face along the consumer journey. What words and phrases are they searching online to find the information they’re looking for? You can use those keywords as blog titles and address them in the blog post.
Educate leads and customers about your product or service
B2C customers may be looking online to learn more about how a product or service like yours works or how it could benefit their lives. You can create blog content that features research, expert guidance, or customer testimonials that provide more information to customers in the research stage.
Explain what makes your company stand out
Today’s consumers are increasingly concerned with buying from companies they feel they can relate to. According to Sprout Social, 76% of consumers would buy from a brand they feel connected to over a competitor. More than half (57%) of consumers are more likely to increase how much they spend with a company when they feel connected to them.
In order to do this, you can use your B2C blog post to:
- Highlight what makes your staff great
- Promote your company’s community service or donation efforts
- Explain how your mission, vision, and values impact your product/service and business
You can also use a B2C blog to spotlight your customers. Social proof is a powerful motivator for purchases. Your blog can showcase customer success stories and even be “written by” the customer in their own voice, with their permission. The customers featured may be likely to share that content on social media and with their friends and family, turning your blog into a powerful referral source.
Feature strong keywords
One major goal of most B2C blogs is to make a brand more visible in search engines. According to a Backlinko analysis of 5 million Google search results, the top 3 results get more than 75% of all clicks.
That’s why using keyword research is so essential when content planning. You can use keyword targets in blog titles, subheads, title tags, meta descriptions, and throughout the blog body. You can also add these keywords to content promoting your blog, like social media posts.
It’s also vital for blogs to be valuable and relevant to searchers. Google’s main algorithm factor is quality. The search engine wants to provide the best quality results for the search intent. Only use keywords in natural and relevant ways that make sense to your target consumer. Keyword stuffing can get your blog penalized, which can be difficult to recover from.
Stand out from competitors
Competitor research can benefit your business in many aspects, including blogging. If you’re new to business blogging, see what your top competitors are posting. What blogs are their social media users responding to the most?
Think about how you can make your content on similar topics 10 times better. You might:
- Add additional research
- Offer more in-depth insights
- Answer as many questions as you can think of that relate to the topic
You can be more thorough in your content production by creating pillar pages on popular topics related to your brand and branching off from those pages with more detailed blog posts. You can create listicles or how-to posts that cover topics more closely.
You can also use competitive analysis tools to learn more about your competition’s blog performance to make your B2C blog post efforts even more effective.
5. Use web content best practices
In addition to what you write in your B2C blog post content, you want to make the blog itself user-friendly. One way to do that is to make your writing scannable. Break it up with subheads, bullet points, and/or numbered lists. This formatting helps keep blog visitors engaged since they can see what you’ll cover in the blog to decide if they want to keep reading.
It may help to create an outline of your blog before you start writing. This process will help you organize your thoughts and sufficiently research each point.
Also, implement calls-to-action (CTA) in each post. Ideally, you’d want people to spend as much time on your blog and website as possible after visiting that first post. Add a call-to-action that points them to another post, page, or action on your website so they keep interacting with your content.
Before you publish your content, get an editor’s eyes on it. Your blog content reflects your brand. Misspellings, grammar mistakes, or offensive content could harm your business reputation. Make sure you’re confident in how the blog represents your brand before you share it.
Measure your results and evolve your strategy
Your business blog content should evolve as you learn what resonates with your target audience. Use data tools like Google Analytics to track your blog content and see what posts are popular and where users are coming from to find your site.
As you publish content and gather insights, you can optimize your B2C blog post strategy. The best content ideas will engage your customers, whether that’s by providing them with useful information, solving their pain points, or offering content so attractive that it demands to be shared.
Need help coming up with high-quality, engaging, and optimized content for a B2C audience? ClearVoice’s professional writers, editors, and SEO experts can create ready-to-publish content that search engines and your target audience will love. Talk to a content specialist to get started.
