B2B tech blogging is alive and well.
Marketers seem to just love killing things. In fact, just yesterday I read a post from a leader in the SaaS world about how various elements of conventional marketing are officially dead.
Cold calling, buyer journeys, and even email marketing have all been proclaimed DOA in the last couple of years (weeks?). It's a weird fascination, this wanting things dead (or actively trying to kill them) prematurely, and has evidently become one of our favorite pastimes.
Of course, sometimes proclaiming something is "dead" it's nothing more than clickbait to get some visitors or some cheap visibility. Other times it's a misread on a trend or maybe just an honest mistake.
The latter seems to be the case when it comes to blogging. Despite the deluge of gurus proclaiming blogging to be dead (on blogs of their own, no less), blogging in the B2B tech space is very much still alive and well.
Marketers eager to call time of death on blogging will point to a number of reasons to support their claims. They’ll say that consumers have shorter attention spans than they used to (true). They’ll also point out how the shift away from desktops to mobile devices has impacted the types of content they want—greatly preferring pictures and video to reading text. While these claims are mostly or even totally true, they don’t paint the entire picture.
Not your daddy’s blog
Blogging has been part and parcel of the marketing landscape for years. What started as an offshoot of personal blogging became the trendy way to push products or services. Since the days of Blogspot and Livejournal, blogs have evolved from mere attempts to make sales to a medium for educating and building trust with prospective consumers.
But building trust with an audience is just one aspect of blogging’s enduring influence. There are also a number of other benefits that very much align with more modern content marketing philosophies:
Blogging impacts SEO, which still matters a lot in digital marketing
Most contact between a consumer and a business still begins with an online search. Blogging fresh content on the topics your customers are searching will give you an advantage in Google and Bing search results. Even as search results begin to more heavily favor mobile versions of web content over desktop, blogging will be a critical part of your content marketing mix. Just make sure your blog design is optimized for mobile to ensure you’re not missing out on a huge swath of potential readers.
Blogs are the fuel for your social media engine
Almost every business has a social media presence of some sort. And if they don't, well, that's a different discussion for another time.
Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Instagram, having an active social media presence is a non-negotiable in today’s environment.
Blogging is a simple and cost-effective way of stocking your social media feeds with high-value, interesting content your audience wants to consume. Sure, you could keep a separate social media content calendar and rack your brain every day or week trying to figure out what to post.
Or, you can kill two birds with one stone (see? obsessed with death!) by maintaining a blog with informative posts and leveraging that content into more consumable bits common to social media feeds. More importantly, it’ll help create more two-way traffic (from the blog to social and from social to the blog) and, hopefully, more “stickiness” for your audience.
Tell more and better stories
While social media largely focuses on short, punchy posts, blogging can be a unique platform for telling stories. People love to organize their experiences into stories, and we love relating to the stories of others.
Your blog is a medium for telling stories with a depth that is not possible on social platforms and isn’t as formal or design-heavy as customer case studies. These can be the stories about your customers or even ones written by your customers or employees detailing their experiences and profiles.
And it’s not just text either. No one wants to read blocks and blocks of text (the irony of no images in this LinkedIn post isn't lost on me). Most content management systems will make it pretty easy to incorporate images, videos, audio, and other elements to bring the story together for maximum appeal.
Blogs are a great source of data
Pretty much every aspect of marketing these days is “data-driven” something or other. Your blog is no exception. The data that a blog will provide you can be an invaluable tool for planning future strategy. With the myriad analytics tools available today you’ll be able to start recognizing patterns and specific behaviors from your visitors that should inform your content strategy down the road.
You’ll learn which topics, insights, and formats connect most with your target audience most, meaning you can focus more of your time and resources to producing content that people actually want to read because, let’s face it, you don’t have time to write something no one will read.
Everyone else has a blog, you should too
As marketers, we spend an inordinate amount of time, effort, and money trying to stand out from our competitors. But sometimes the smart move is to be just a bit more like them. Despite all the other benefits of having a blog, one of the most compelling reasons that blogging is still relevant is simply because your competitors have one and prospective customers expect you to have one as well.
Today’s tech buyers have certain expectations of the companies they’ll consider working with. The barriers to entry these days include things like having customer case studies, offering some sort of free download ebook or white paper, and–you guessed it–having a blog.
It may not be sexy, but it’s important
The explosion of social media and the mass migration to mobile interactions have changed how people view blogs. Many business leaders feel that blogs are too common and the medium so saturated that there’s virtually no value in spending time or money trying to cut through the noise.
But blogs still have tremendous value in the B2B tech space as a flexible, multi-faceted medium for delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that it’s not quite time to kill off your blog, but instead worth the effort to rejuvenate it.