B2B Content Marketing Strategy: How NOT to Write a Blog Title

An engaging blog title can make or break your B2B content marketing strategy. Here's what not to do to create yours! Have you spotted these errors online?

Picture of Lauren Nuttall Lauren Nuttall

Published: 12 Mar 2021

5 minutes read

B2B Content Marketing Strategy: How NOT to Write a Blog Title

Here’s an interesting thought: a significant number of tweets get retweeted without anyone clicking the link and actually reading the promoted content. While this perhaps speaks volumes for our dwindling attention spans (that is another issue completely), it highlights one other very important fact for B2B marketers - the importance of an engaging business blog title can’t be overlooked in your B2B content marketing strategy.

For some marketers, blog titles are often seen as merely ‘ticking a box’. However, a B2B blog title has the power to sell the value and relevance of your content, empowering prospects to decide whether your blog is worthy of reading. If you ignore your blog title, you might as well not bother with the rest of your post. As highlighted by Buffer’s research, eight out of ten prospects will read your headline, but only two out of ten will read the rest of your blog. This highlights how blog titles can make or break your content marketing strategy. However, with great power comes great responsibility and it seems that some blog titles are missing the mark. Learn how to avoid these common errors and create blog titles that propel your B2B content marketing strategy. 

Don’t overload keywords 

While blog titles play an essential role in SEO, remember – they are for humans first, search engines second. Cramming your blog titles with keywords will not win you any favours. Google’s algorithm has become more sophisticated throughout the years and will spot your spammy practices from a mile off. To humans, an overload of keywords appears confusing and annoying.

It’s best practice to use one keyword (either short or long-tail) in your title to keep your content concise and to help both readers and search engines understand the focus of your piece.

Stop abusing character length

Trying to condense a single blog post into one title can be tricky. However, long titles can be cut off by search engines, exceed social sharing limits and be displayed awkwardly in emails. When blog titles aren’t displayed fully in search engines it gives a reader an excuse to click on a competitor’s post – which is what you want to avoid! 

When it comes to title length, the holy grail to aim for is 70 characters or less. As discussed by Neil Patel – on average we read the first three words and the last three words of a blog title when skimming search results, making efficient use of space a necessity. Ensure that every word has a purpose by removing conjunctions and connective words where possible. 

Don’t ignore your persona pains

It can be easy to overcomplicate a blog title. Too often, blog writers try to be overly creative to spice up frankly boring blogs. However, obscure titles which aren’t directly connected to your blog topic do little to resonate with your audience.

Think about what your audience actually search for when online. Often, a typical B2B prospect will be searching for a defined solution to their problem, so use your titles to solve them and offer value.

Let’s take a SaaS company that specialises in cloud collaboration, for example. A prospect may be struggling to encourage team collaboration, therefore a blog titled ‘How to revolutionise productivity with cloud collaboration’ resonates with this prospect’s problem, while offering a defined solution.

Don’t click-bait

Ever clicked on to an intriguing blog title, only to find that the blog itself is either irrelevant or woefully underdelivers on its promise?

You may be familiar with variations of these (fictional) examples:

“Content marketing is dead”

“The technology sector hate him – find out why”

“The one thing that will make your marketing explode”

If you can truly deliver on these intriguing blog titles with exceptional and educational content, then this approach can harness substantial results, as showcased by news and pop-culture site Buzzfeed. However, if your blog content doesn’t deliver, chances are your prospects will quickly click off your site and will be left with a negative perception of your business. This is what we call click-baiting and this method of gaining clicks is widely used in the industry (and is unlikely to go away anytime soon). Prospects who quickly click on and off your site are unlikely to remember your business, let alone read enough of your blog post to progress further along the buyer’s journey. 

Click-baiting doesn’t just leave people with a sour taste. Search engines penalise sites which operate this tactic. If a headline uses certain keywords and the corresponding blog post doesn’t, this signals inconsistency, which can impact search ranking and page authority. 

Instead, craft blog titles which are relevant and don’t oversell, ensuring that your title is accurate to the blog content. 

Don’t write your blog without a working title

Which came first, the blog title or the blog? If you try writing a blog before you have a working title and topic in place, you may find that the focus and overall purpose of the blog piece can get lost. A working title doesn’t have to be perfect initially, but it will help guide the structure of your blog as a reference point i.e. x examples of good cloud collaboration. Once you have finished writing your blog, you can then go back and adapt your title into something more eye-catching and reader-friendly.

Ready to grow?

Our content marketing guide has everything you need to know about becoming a great B2B content writer, including top tips and best practices.

DOWNLOAD