Many CRM companies have a common problem: despite that their content marketers spend a lot of time writing articles, their blog does not produce enough leads.

The end result is excessive spending and reduced efficiency of the company’s overall content marketing efforts.

The issue is not necessarily that marketers write poorly.

It’s more typical that the topics of their articles are too mundane, and simply do not interest their target audience.

In this post, we’ll analyze what types of articles successful CRM companies create, and show you how to search for hot and interesting topics for your own blog.

We’ve included 13 specific topic ideas for blogging for CRM that we created with the help of the methodology outlined below.

Why Do CRM Companies Write Blog Articles?

One of the main reasons why digital companies write articles is to turn prospects into customers, and eventually, build brand loyalty.

James A. Martin, a tech journalist and content marketing consultant at cio.com, says that a company interacts with its potential customers by entertaining them and solving their problems through effective content marketing efforts.

He also adds:

“The hope is that prospects will see the brand as a trusted, reliable source and, most importantly, a company they want to do business with.”

There are many possibilities for blogging for CRM companies. Since they provide a particular solution or product, they have a wide range of topics to cover.

For example, a great point to highlight and discuss with audience could be upgrades or changes in the company’s product.

B2B customers are responsible businesspeople who beware of losing their money, so it might be critical for them to get acquainted with all the product changes.

New modifications (for example, adding new features in the product or getting rid of old ones) may not be suitable for them.

CRM companies should explain how any changes will affect customers’ businesses, whether additional expenditures will be involved, and also what advantages and disadvantages these new updates may bring.

What Do CRM Companies Write About?

CRM companies mentioned below have learned which topics work in blog posts. You can use their articles as templates to create your own unique content.

As mentioned above, a company’s blog is a great place to tell customers about product modifications.

Here is an example for Capsule:

source: capsulecrm.com

Every page of their blog contains articles on various changes and updates in their product.

source: capsulecrm.com

CRM companies write about the advantages of using CRM solutions in order to promote their product.

CRM companies want to show that CRM tools have many benefits, can solve customers’ problems, and help them manage their businesses.

Thus, companies use blog posts to interest people and generate leads that will later become customers.

As a final touch, when people are convinced of the need for such a product, companies offer them particular CRM solutions.

Here is an article from the Insightly CRM blog:

source: insightly.com

Here, Insightly describes various issues with inbound marketing.

One of the problems is so-called “sloppy inbound lead management.”

Insightly suggests using a CRM tool to deal with this highlighting their own solution.

This is how it works. source: insightly.com

Also note the pitch at the end of the article:

The final step in product promotion. source: insightly.com

CRM companies write “lessons learned” and “findings made this year” articles.

There are two reasons why companies publish these articles.

First, they create emotional engagement between a potential customer and the solution provider.

Companies write these articles to show that they are made up of the real people with real problems.

source: groovehq.com

These articles’ authors have valuable experience and are eager to share it with readers.

source: groovehq.com

Second, these articles are just very interesting and entertaining to read, since they contain lots of “real world” examples.

source: groovehq.com

CRM companies write articles based on interviews with industry experts.

What could be more interesting, authoritative and useful than a guru’s opinion?

Many CRM companies understand this principle, and do interviews with industry experts as part of their content marketing strategy.

source: blog.hubspot.com

These articles allow companies to attract the attention of the audience and give readers useful and interesting information.

Companies write articles about the integration of their solutions with other companies’ tools.

Integration is important to many CRM providers, as it permits expansion of their products’ functionality without requiring additional spending on development.

These articles allow CRM companies demonstrate to the target audience the benefits of synergies between their products and those of other providers.

source: nutshell.com

In addition to attracting new customers, this type of content can help existing clients look at the company’s product with new eyes, improving customer retention and reducing churn rate.

Another advantage of this technique is that since integration is also beneficial to the company with which you are cooperating, that firm is likely to mutually advertise your product on their blog.

How to Find Ideas for a CRM Company Blog

Now that we’ve discussed the main types of articles for blogging for CRM, let’s see how you can come up with hot topics for them. Below we present an algorithm that will help you develop your own article ideas.

The process is divided into three main steps.

Step 1. Prepare for the search

1. Define your target audience

To ensure that your content is relevant and useful, you must accurately understand for whom you are writing:

• Understand the location of the target audience: US, UK, Russia, China, etc.
• Define the target companies’ size: SMBs, enterprises, and so forth.
• Determine the industry in which target audience specialize, such as retail, IT, etc.
• Think about the services that target audience offer, like product development or web design.
• Define the rank of your buyer persona (BP): CMO, VP of Marketing, Head of Marketing, CEO, Digital Marketing Officer (in other words, executives using (or potentially using) CRM products in their work).

The buyer persona is a personalized image of your target audience.

Both the information in the article and the style of its presentation depend on it.

If you want to know more about BP, here is our article on this topic.

2. Define the aim of the post

Here is an article by Sean Work, former Inbound Marketing Director at Kissmetrics, in which he lists the purposes for which blog articles are written.

By his post, we’ve partially founded our own classification of CRM blog articles objectives:

• Help the reader become acquainted with the recent CRM product updates.
• Generate organic search traffic.
• Obtain more leads.
• Prove expertise in the industry and establish trust with people.

Depending on your goal, you must decide whether the article should be entertaining or strictly informative.

The goal also affects the size of the article.

There is no particular need to write lengthy and detailed articles if you want to create shareable content.

However, if you want to show people that you are an CRM expert, you need to write long and thoughtful articles.

3. Define your buyer persona’s problems

Figure out exactly what people want to read about.

Visit websites such as AngelList, Indeed and others. Enter the BP’s position and region in the search line.

Open the jobs list, select relevant entries, and look through sections like functions, job duties, responsibilities:

source: localwise.com

source: localwise.com

4. Turn buyer persona’s problems into bases

BP’s problems will come directly from responsibilities.

You should transform responsibilities into bases, two-to-three-part queries that summarize the essence of the problems/tasks of the buyer persona, and can be made into a keyword. Examples: omnichannel marketing, crm marketing, crm integration, marketing transformation, etc.).

A few bases are enough to start with.

Now you can roughly imagine on which topic you can write your article.

But we still recommend you do not hurry and go through our plan until the very end. So postpone your bases for a while – they will come in handy a little later.

5. Find popular competitors’ blogs

Locate several blogs that contain articles intended for a similar target audience, including those of competitors.

Here are some examples:

CRM Outsiders – A platform where people talk about CRM, its trends and strategies.

CRM Search – An independent resource describing the CRM phenomenon to business owners, and helping them сorrectly apply CRM technology to their companies.

As well as bases, these blogs will be useful to us in the second step of our plan.

Step 2. Search for ideas

We suggest using three well-known services to find ideas for your articles. You can use them separately, or combine them for maximum efficiency.

Ahrefs

There are three ways to use this service for finding topics.

The first two will help you understand what your competitors are writing about, and what topics are of particular interest to their target audiences.

The third will help you come up with ideas for a blog focused on the bases described earlier.

1. Site Explorer section

Insert a competitor’s domain name into the search bar. Then look through these two sections:

• Top referring content

These are the third-party articles that refer to your competitor.

• Top content

This is the content that competitors create themselves.

By looking at what is written in these articles, you will learn what material you should create, or at least, what competitors are writing about, and what topics are of particular interest to their readers.

Repeat the same process for all the competitors that you have found.

Ahrefs can also help you find more competitors if you know at least one competitor’s website. Just press the Competing domains button.

2. Content Explorer section

Enter in the search line one of the bases that you came up with in the preparation phase. Requests must be made using the In title option.

Analyze what people write about. Then repeat this process for all of your bases.

3. Keywords Explorer section

Insert one of the bases into the search line, then click View full report.

The keywords for your potential topics should meet two criteria:

• Volume > 200 – Don’t write about topics that are not interesting to anyone.
• Keyword Difficulty < 30 – This measures competition for the keyword on Google, and you want to avoid clashing with a large number of competitors’ articles.

Used properly, Ahrefs is enough by itself to develop ideas, but you can use two more services to find topics for blogging for CRM even more efficiently.

Buzzsumo

Insert into the search box one of the bases found in the preparation section, then study the list of the most popular and shareable articles. You can use filters on the left for more precise searches.

Analyze what the articles are about. Repeat for each of your bases.

Quora

Enter one of the bases you determined earlier, then study the list of most popular questions.

This will help you understand what people are trying to learn about the topic. Again, repeat this process with all your bases.

Step 3. Brainstorm

Based on the analysis of Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, and Quora, develop your ideas for blog posts. Make sure that the topics are original and not hackneyed.

Do not write articles like “Why Do You Need CRM Tools?” or “What Is CRM?” – there are thousands of such posts and people are likely to know everything on these topics.

Try to ensure eventually all of your ideas look like ready-made headlines for the articles you plan to write.

In the next paragraph, we show what good ideas for CRM company’s blog can look like.

13 Grab-and-Go Ideas for CRM Companies

Here are some specific article ideas for CRM company that is leveraging (or is planning to do that) the power of content for lead generation.

Feel free to take any topic from this list and write a quality content on it for your blog.

Conclusions

A hot topic is the minimum for the successful blogging for CRM company. Our algorithm will help you create entertaining content for your target audience, which in turn will bring your company more leads.

Here are the main ideas of this article:

Content marketers write articles to turn prospects into customers, in the hope that they later become loyal to the brand.

Since CRM companies provide a particular solution or product, they have a wide range of topics to cover in their blog.

There are many types of articles that CRM companies post; these are the most common:

• Articles about the company’s recent product updates and changes.
• Articles about the advantages of using CRM solutions in order to bring in leads and to promote the company’s product.
• “Lessons learned” and “findings made this year” articles.
• Articles based on interviews with industry experts.
• Articles about the integration of the company’s tool with those of other companies.

The algorithm offered to develop article ideas consists of three major steps:

Step 1. Prepare for the search. Define the target audience and develop a buyer persona, a personalized image of the target audience.

Step 2. Search for ideas. Use Ahrefs, Buzzsumo, and Quora to find out what articles your competitors write, find relevant keywords for your articles, and discover what topics people are interested in.

Step 3. Create the final result. Based on the analysis of Ahrefs, BuzzSumo, and Quora, and knowledge of existing and competitors’ articles covered the bases you have chosen, develop specific ideas for blog posts.

Roman Davydov

Marketing Specialist at Kraftblick