Social media is an essential piece of your inbound marketing strategy. Once you’ve created valuable content, social media is a great way to deliver it to your target audience. In addition to being an effective content distribution channel, it can also help you increase your brand awareness and visibility, connect with your audience, capture leads for your business and even drive referral traffic to your website.

Before you begin seeing results from your social media efforts, however, you must start with a solid social media marketing strategy. Below we’ve shared a few tips for businesses that need to start building your strategy and leveraging social media as an effective inbound marketing tool. These tips are the foundation of a successful business social media strategy to help get you started and get you going in the right direction.

I hear a lot of people in marketing and business development that tell me that they "blog." But I want to know what they are doing with their blog... are they getting results from their blog or just wasting time to say they "blog" with no proof of success? Do they even know? Or... do they even want to know?

Many of us have heard that personalized content is king in digital marketing. But what does that really mean? While over 91% of marketers surveyed say that they are doing content marketing, 65% of them say they are still increasing their efforts and 53 percent say they have small or one-person content teams serving their entire organization.

While the majority of marketers understand the importance of technology in their content marketing strategy, many still struggle to understand how to personalize their content marketing campaigns to their target audience. Technology has advanced the ability to segment and tailor your message based on customer data, but many marketers still struggle to identify the right ways to create a truly personalized experience for their B2B buyers. Fortunately, we've compiled these tactics to help you tailor your campaigns to deliver the right content to the right user, at the right time.

Here are five ways you can use technology to deliver personalized experiences to your customers to drive leads through the funnel and increase revenue. 

When creating content for your company blog, you’ve likely asked the dreaded question: What do we write about next? You may feel as if you’ve run out of post ideas or you’re writing about the same topic over and over. Regardless of your content dilemma, there are a few sources that you can use to extract new blog post ideas.

It’s important to note that when using these sources, however, the ideas aren’t always obvious and may not jump out at you instantly. Rather, this method requires you to dedicate time to collect information, analyze it, and brainstorm topics based on your findings. While this may take some time initially, it’s more than worth the investment. Not only will you have a list of new blog post ideas, but you’ll have the tools you need to create blog content that is relevant to your target audience - and their needs and interests - and that will most likely drive engagement and increase conversions.

Consider the following sources to help you generate more post ideas for your company blog:

In the past, I've written about how a company's employees are one of the most valuable resources when it comes to the marketing efforts, and today I'm sharing a few ways that employees can supplement and support the marketing strategy to help drive better results.

Your blog is a digital hub for the valuable, educational, and entertaining content you create for your target persona. Its goal is to increase awareness, drive traffic to your site, generate leads, and establish authority – leading to profitable customer action.  

But running a successful blog is a challenge for some businesses, and it requires constant analysis to ensure your current content strategy is effective. This can be done by reviewing the content you’ve created, assessing what worked or didn’t work, and creating a plan of action to improve going forward. Or in other words, conducting a blog audit.  

This process can help you uncover what content resonates most with your ideal prospects, and in turn, guide your content strategy and increase your awareness, engagement, and even conversions. It gives you a high-level view of how well your blog is (or isn’t) performing, and identifies gaps and opportunities in your blog strategy.  

The good news: it’s not as complicated as it sounds. And if you’re wondering where to start, what to evaluate or how to apply your findings, we’ve created a simple system to help you evaluate your own blog and begin seeing real results from your content. 

There was a time when writing a few good blog posts a month was enough to engage readers and keep them coming back. Today, however, there is much more at stake. User experience, or UX, plays a critical role in delivering quality blog content.

While it has its roots in design, UX - in this aspect - refers to how readers interact with or experience your content.

Are they able to understand the message you’re conveying? 
Can they find the information they’re looking for?
Is the content formatted in a way that captures - and holds - their attention?

When factoring in UX, quality content goes beyond the words on the page. It involves a number of considerations that can influence whether a reader bounces (leaves your website after viewing a single blog post) or stays to learn more about your business and what it offers - ultimately leading to a conversion. It’s not enough to have good content, you must also create an enjoyable experience for those reading it.

A few years ago you started to blog. It went well. Your brain was fresh, and ideas for new articles flowed. But then life happened. You got busy at work, and you got busier at home. Before you knew what happened, your once-a-week blog update slowed to once-a-month. And then it slowed further to one new update every few months. And then you woke up one day and realized that you haven’t posted an update to your blog in over nine months. 

Lack of time is an easy excuse. However, I guarantee you that if your blog was producing the results you thought, it would, then you would find the time. Let’s be honest. It’s not really the lack of time. It’s the lack of results.

Are you using content in the sales process? How do you use content in the sales process?

Likely, your marketing team has created a large amount of great content that's not only beneficial for lead generation, but is also helpful for lead nurturing. This content could range from informational blog posts to ebooks, checklists, or industry guides. 

In this video, I share one important way to utilize content in the sales process that many salespeople overlook. This one, simple tip can help improve a salesperson's sales performance.

As we kick off the new year, it's safe to say that content still reigns as king in the B2B world, and it seems that it's going to stay that way. With B2B marketers who use blogs saying that they get 67% more leads than those who don't, and companies who blog see 97% more links to their site than those who don't, it's clear that blogging should be a part of your B2B marketing strategy. 

So, do you really need to spend time to promote your blog? Isn’t the point of a blog to promote your website? Yes and yes. Your blog is, indeed, a big opportunity to drive traffic to your website and promote your business as well as your products and services, but it needs strategic guidance to be successful in driving traffic and converting leads. Many industry experts preach the 80/20 rule when it comes to content and promotion, saying that 20% of your time should be spent creating content, and 80% of your time should be spent promoting it. Think of your blog like a garden that's meant to feed your family. The whole purpose of the garden is to create food—but you need to feed it, water it, and tend to it to get the desired results. The same is true of your blog. 

When people ask us, "Where should I share my blog?" we suggest these eight free ways to distribute blog content. There are additional distribution channels that include paid promotion and advertising, but this list focuses on eight ways you can share you B2B blog content immediately that we've found successful for our clients and ourselves.