An insights programme that quadrupled blog traffic for a B2B firm

The firm had been blogging for years and had very little to show for it. Posts went up when a partner had a spare afternoon, covered whatever that partner happened to be thinking about, and were never linked to from anywhere else on the site.

Meanwhile the expertise the business actually sells, the judgement calls its people make every week, existed only in proposals and in conversations. The trade press was outranking them for the questions their own clients were asking.

We started by mapping the questions the sales team gets asked, sorted by where in a buying decision they come up, and matched them against what the site already covered. Most of the gap sat at the top and the bottom: nothing explaining the category to someone new to it, and nothing that helped a buyer justify the decision internally.

From that map came an editorial calendar with a fixed monthly output rather than the burst-and-silence pattern the firm had before, and two formats with distinct jobs. Long-form guides do the discovery work and carry the internal links. Whitepapers do the harder job: an original argument, a defensible position, something a reader can forward to a colleague who was not on the call.

The writing came out of interviews with the firm's own specialists, transcribed and edited, rather than out of a brief and a search engine. That is slower per piece, and it is the only reason the output sounds like the business rather than like everybody else. Internal linking was designed alongside the calendar, so each new piece strengthened the pages that generate enquiries rather than sitting on its own.

Across the programme:

• blog traffic up 400%
• leads up 350%
• top three in its industry for authority

Leads rose almost in step with traffic, which is unusual and is down to format: the whitepapers attract people already in a decision, so the audience that grew was the right one rather than simply a larger one.