6 B2B Content Marketing Lessons From Mashable
By Kipp Bodnar
Thu, Nov 19, 2009
Blogging, Communications, Examples, Marketing, Social Media 101
If you are new to social media, or are someone who has been in the industry for a while, you are likely familiar with Mashable, the most popular blog dedicated to discussions about the social web. Jeff and I talk frequently about what makes Mashable so successful. Interestingly though, how they succeed has a lot of application on B2B content marketing.
I have decided to break down some of the strategies that make Mashable successful and show how they apply to B2B social media marketing. When a site has an audience of this size, they must be doing something right:
6 Strategies From Mashable For B2B Social Media Marketing
1. Headlines Drive Traffic And Sales – A quick scroll through the home page of Mashable shows you that they have mastered the art of simple yet attention grabbing headlines. This is a key component of their success because great headlines don’t just drive pageviews, they drive engagement and make people want to spread the content across the social web. Writing good headlines is one of the most important things B2B companies can do when publishing digital content. Good headlines make a possibly complex issue seem more interesting and more approachable.
2. Being First Is Important – The web almost always rewards someone for being “first.” Mashable has become a master of breaking stories before other news outlets. Am I telling your B2B organization to start breaking news? No. I am asking you to think about in what ways your organization can be “first” on the web.
Many B2B companies fail to realize that in niche industries where none of the players have begun publishing on the web, the first one that does gets a huge advantage. Google rewards those who talk about a keyword first by moving them up on the search engine results page. Being first in B2B is about establishing credibility and building a long-term, sustainable audience on the web.
3. Three Blog Posts On A Topic Are Better Than One – Remember this: If one blog post works, three is almost always better. Looking through Mashable you can see that often they write a series of articles on one topic. To apply this to a B2B situation, if you are writing a recap of a recent tradeshow, break it down by sessions or speakers to create more blog posts. Sure, this is a little more work, but it provides your blog with more activity and creates more page titles and link text to help drive search engine traffic.
4. Having Multiple Contributors Scales Success – The same lesson above about posts translates to content creators themselves. Mashable has a team of writers and uses guest writers to ensure that all of the issues get covered. In a B2B organization, you can’t go and hire an entire social media team. The solution here is to get more of the current staff on the social media bus. By teaching them, creating easy to use workflows and showing them their value to the organization, you can have a team of advocates and content creators without hiring anyone.
5. Showing Trending Information Drives More Traffic – As you can see from the screen shot above Mashable highlights the most popular story at a given period in time with a banner on its homepage. This is the online equivalent of competition. People want to see what is popular with other people and peers on the web. This is not a need exclusive to the web. What if your sales team knew the top selling products by industry at any given time and could use that information to help close a customer on the fence. It seems simple, but how many times have you made a choice to by something based on the popularity of the item? I am betting many times.
If you are selling products online make sure that you can show which ones are “trending” at any given time. Also make use of buyers’ comments and reviews about products to include in content-rich marketing materials, like e-mail newsletters.
6. Awards And Events Build Traffic And Links – Success often comes in B2B when a company is willing to do what others aren’t or are too lazy to do. Mashable has annual awards and offline events that are a huge source of visibility and income for them. B2B organizations can take the same approach, but often choose not to. If you have a supplier award where you recognize some of your best business partners every year, think about the opportunity of these events now that we have the social web. Your customers will not only talk offline about it, but they will link back your Web site, send out news releases mentioning your company and share the news across their online social networks. All of this at what cost to you? Some staff time and money for some awards. Mashable would not have kept doing this if it didn’t work.
Many other strategies help make Mashable and other sites successful. I suggest taking a few minutes out of your week to take a closer look and deconstruct the success of your favorite sites.
What else do you think Mashable does really well?
Related posts:
- According To The 2009 Forrester Groundswell Awards B2B Social Media Is Still Mostly Tech Focused Since we started Social Media B2B we have spent...
- B2B Lessons From B2C Social Media Marketing Strategies Are there differences between B2B and B2C marketing strategies?...
- 5 B2B Online Marketing Lessons From Google The transparency that the Internet provides can be a...
- Blogging for the Future: The Long Tail of Search Everyone talks about the real time web and the...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: B2B, B2B Social Media, Content Marketing, mashable
Subscribe in your favorite Reader
Nice review of how Mashable post content. It’s a good example of how companies can follow their strategy to increase traffic and sales.
Excellent post! A lot of people would look at Mashable and not see a B2B strategy at all, but when you really think about it, Mashable is a resource for social media freelancers and small businesses. They are operating in a B2B landscape themselves – whether it be a primary part of their business strategy or not.
Very helpful info here. Your idea to take a few minutes to take a look at what makes a favorite website/s successful is a great one.
Back to Mashable. For me, it was their use of lists that drew me in and turned me into a regular reader. I get a lot of value out of them.
When I look at how popular Mashable has become, I often find myself scratching my head as to how they do it. However, you’ve just pulled out six great points as to exactly what is driving their traffic.
AND, when you think about it, if a B2B company actually employed the six tactics you mentioned, I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be successful. If a vendor I was interested in produced lots of good content, had many people contributing, and wrote headlines that pulled me in, how could I resist?
The key now is just to get more B2B companies thinking about social media and content marketing from this perspective.
Great post, Kipp!