How to write B2B content that your audience wants to read
- Ilaria Merizalde
- 4 days ago
- 7 min read
A Quick Start Guide for Small Businesses
Effective content is about earning your audience's attention and trust over time. The “trust-earning” process happens as you build your content library and as people explore your website.
Creating effective website and blog content is NOT just about promoting your products and services, even if you 100% believe they are the best out there. Anyone searching on the internet for a product like yours will realistically have dozens, or hundreds, of choices. And because people are overwhelmed with information, they tend to ignore anything that doesn’t immediately apply to them.
That’s why I’m writing this quick guide to writing effective, helpful content that presents your business as a trustworthy source of information and supports your business goals. I will also break down the factors to consider before getting started on a new blogging project.
Read this article if:
You are tasked with writing a blog for the first time, or
It’s been a while since you last wrote for the web, or:
You simply want to know the basics of content and blog writing.
First Things First: Know Your Audience
In a world of countless choices, your goal is to be relevant by addressing specific needs. And how do you become relevant? By doing a good job of answering your audience’s questions.
Firsthand Audience Data is Best
One starting point in finding out what questions your audience might have is to collect FAQs from your existing clients and prospects. What topics often confuse customers? What do they like to know more about?
Writing content that answers real, tangible questions is a great way to start helping your customers and show up on search engine result pages, where new people can find it. It also helps you show up in AI-driven search results.
Research What Customers Are Looking For
If customer questions aren’t available, there are countless ways to search the web for this information, like using SEO research tools, asking Generative AI (like Chat GPT and others – make sure you double check the source URLs), or you could try using your favorite search engine to get ideas.
Also, if you want to write a blog about what’s hot and what’s not, Google Trends can show how each topic is trending over time.
Whichever way you go, try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think of what topics they’d find useful.
Think of Why Your Audience is Searching
To deepen your understanding of your audience and how to best serve them with content, consider search intent. When you type a query into a search engine like Google or Bing, your query is the “what”. Conversely, the reason you’re searching – the “why” – is search intent.
Search intent can be divided into four categories:
Informational - Learning about a topic, using searches like: What is…, how to use…, best tips for…, all you need to know about… etc.
Navigational - looking for a specific site, like when you type “Amazon” in a search engine
Transactional - already done some research, looking to narrow down options before making a purchase
Commercial - looking to buy something specific, like a given brand, make, and model, or perhaps sign up for a certain service.
Different Intent = Differently Written Content
→ When writing a blog, you’re generally looking to fulfill an informational search. Your customer or prospect is looking to learn something, and you’re helping them out with a relevant blog.
→ The rest of your website is for all other types of searches.
Finding Useful Topics: Begin From Your Business
Even if you don’t have access to in-depth insights on what your customers and prospects want to know, you can still write interesting blogs by thinking of your current business, the people you serve, and related topics.
Let’s say you are a commercial building contractor. Your website already contains all the relevant details about products and services, but it lacks true informational content as described above, so you decide to start a blog.
Here are some possible blog topics* and related reasoning for creating them.
“How to Choose the Right Contractor for a Storefront Remodel”
This could help store owners looking for distinguishing factors among contractors
"10 questions to ask your building contractor before signing the dotted line"
This is an opportunity to distinguish yourself by focusing on common and less-common questions and clarify your approach
"Resilient buildings: Protect your facility from climate change"
Here you can help business owners understand their facility’s vulnerabilities and be prepared for the future
*This information is for illustrative purposes only. Not a real example.
Getting started is the hard part. But after that first hurdle, it will become easier to come up with more and more topics to grow your content library.
Next, let’s review the challenges and opportunities of content creation.
Content Goals: Capture Attention, Inspire Action
As you build a list of content to write, you’ll want to maximize the chances of it being read so it can be useful to more people. To do that, you need to capture their attention.
Reflect on how you read a web page vs. offline content. Unlike with, say, a book, when you first open a web page you probably scan it very quickly, then decide whether to read it or not.
The Clock is Ticking for a Visitor’s Attention
Estimates vary, but most sources say you have less than 5 seconds to grab someone’s interest. And that time span keeps getting smaller.
As a reader engages, there are four successive steps they might take on the page:
Scan
Understand
Read
Take action. If you’re directly inviting the visitor to carry out a specific action, that content segment is known as “CTA”, i.e., call-to-action. Examples of CTA are: “Schedule an appointment”, “Book a Demo,” “Download our Whitepaper”, and others.
Call-to-Action vs. Other Actions
While you definitely want to get people to click on the CTA and contact your company directly, that isn’t likely to happen right away, because:
Even Really Useful B2B Content Takes Time to Work
As said earlier in the article, your prospective customers are looking at endless options when exploring products like yours, so their research takes time. And the B2B purchasing cycle involves multiple steps, which may not happen in the order you expect.
So be patient. And keep publishing, because content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint.
Your Main Goal: Keep People Engaged
Aim to create content that captivates your readers and encourages them to explore your site further. Even if they don’t want to click on that CTA right now, perhaps they’ll check out your products, services, and company. On that note, it makes sense to consider how each piece of content links to others. More on content linking later in this article; now let’s talk layout.
The Importance of Layout for Scannability
“Easy to scan” is your first “make or break” factor for engagement. Successful, engaging content starts with blogs and web pages that are laid out in an organized way so they’re easy to scan quickly.
Tips for Easy-Scan Content
Use a visually interesting layout with varied elements. You or your designer can start by sketching the content blocks on paper, if you don’t have an existing template.
Employ images and other graphics related to the topic.
Use bulleted and numbered lists for topics to explain sequentially.
Bold the most important words, those that illustrate the premise of your blog.
Break up the content into short sections, like 50-100 words or less.
Create a logical outline with headings and subheadings dividing sections.
On a web page/blog, you’d have only one H1 (Heading 1), then H2s for all equally important paragraphs, H3s for any secondary paragraphs, etc.
If your content checks all the boxes, you’ve come a long way!
Review all your existing and new content to make sure it does, too.
Scannability as a Stepping Stone to Keep People Engaged
It’s a fast-moving world! There is precious little time to capture your reader’s dwindling attention:
→ If the content is hard to scan...
→→If it’s scannable but hard to understand at first glance…
→→→If it’s scannable and understandable at first glance but otherwise hard to read…
They’re out.
Link Topics Together to Keep Visitors Exploring
As said earlier in this article, website buyers click the CTA when they are ready, not when you want them to. Because buyers conduct extensive research to explore and narrow down their options, be helpful to them by making it easy to explore your website, understand your company, and learn about relevant services.
Connect to Relevant Information
Internal links help your visitor find related blogs or service pages on your website.
External links help your visitor verify the information you’re providing. E.g. If you're talking about “trends this year” you may want to include a link to an authoritative, respected source of such information, for example, in the introduction or elsewhere in your blog.
But wait, you ask, isn’t it bad to have visitors click away from your site? Not when you’re supporting your stats or claims via a link to an authoritative third-party site. And, you can set any external link to open in a new tab, so the visitor can quickly scan the authoritative page, close that tab, and continue reading your page.
To Write Content that Your B2B Customers Want to Read: Be Helpful
Writing effective content for your B2B audience starts with researching customer and prospect needs, thinking of ways to make information accessible and easy to find, and eventually guiding them to a purchase decision.
I hope that building trustworthy, strategic website and blog content will be less challenging with the tips above, and wish you all the best in your content writing efforts! If you’d like some extra guidance with content strategy or execution, we’re here to help.
