So, your B2B company has a blog. That’s great!
Now comes the hard part: filling it with content. Of course, if you wanted to, you could write up a post in a half-hour and slap it on there. Or you could post two times a week … or just once every six months.
Shrug?
Sooner or later, however, every B2B content marketer writer runs into the same question: How often should I update my blog?
Let’s be clear. Blog posts require a lot of input on your end, from researching the topic (if needed), to writing, editing, posting and general maintenance. Running a blog is not a task for the faint of heart. So if you’re willing to invest the time, you should probably have a clear strategy in mind for the blog’s existence in the first place.
Blogs are incredibly useful tools for content marketers because they …
- Drive traffic to your website
- Are a great way to generate organic, quality leads
- Help build a long-lasting content machine for your brand
- Are liked by Google, which means better SEO benefits
- Support your other content strategies
If your blog doesn’t seem to be doing any of these points, there’s a good chance it’s because you’re not hitting the sweet spot between quantity and quality. We frame “quality vs. quantity” as a scale because the further you tip to one side, the less of the other you’ll probably have.
You could churn out 15 blog posts a month if you wanted to. They might be short and the subject matter might be ultimately useless to your readers, but hey! At least you’ve got content on your blog now, right? Alternatively, you could pump out a Pulitzer-winning post once every six months. Where’s the good middle ground to aim for?
It depends on your team and your industry.
Think about it.
If you operate in a highly regulated and complex industry, you simply cannot produce high-quality blog posts for them on the fly. “What am I saying?” and “How am I saying it?” are guiding concerns that must always be present at every step of the content journey.
Smaller marketing teams who don’t rely on an outside agency tend to have a smaller scope and longer review cycles, so they might not need to produce as often.
On the flip side, a full-fledged content marketing team can crank out seven or more pieces of content a week. In this scenario, a content marketing team that only puts out one piece of content per week is underperforming. After all, Google will turn to other sources if you’re not producing content frequently. And if you’re not putting anything worth anything out there, why would Google waste its cyber resources crawling your site?
Keep in mind that other folks in your industry are likely in a similar boat. More content is always better than no content, but don’t feel bad if you can’t produce as much as you think you should.
The B2B Content Marketing Numbers Game
Ray Bradbury once said, “Quantity produces quality. If you only write a few things, you’re doomed.” Turn to Google and you’ll find a slew of studies claiming that companies who posted X more times than other companies earned Y greater ROI.
We would agree … with a word of caution. These studies are often conducted and/or sponsored by content marketing platform. They make their money from people using them to produce and manage content. (So obviously, they’ll want you to use them to produce as much as possible.)
Here’s the guiding principle: Produce content that is in line with your industry. Creating ”more” is mission-critical to driving organic search traffic and quality leads. If content marketing is something you do, you should be doing more of it. But don’t feel bad if you can’t produce as much as you think you should.
Hitting the Sweet Spot
Want to know the secret to scoring the right mix of quantity and quality?
Write what you know.
If you write what you know, the blog writing will come easier to you and the end quality will inherently be better.
Writing should not be a struggle. If it is, take it as a sign that you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. You might have some really good topics; they just might not be good topics for you. If you know you don’t understand a subject but it’s still worth exploring on your blog, find someone who does understand. Ask them for an interview (or just have them write it).
Another trick to churning out quality content that is helpful to your specific audiences is to look at your communication with your clients. Have you written long “how-to’s” to answer clients’ questions about your products and services? Has your company achieved something pretty cool on behalf of a client, or made a fascinating discovery in your industry?
Turn it into a blog post.
For example, if you handle content marketing for a SaaS company, you’ve definitely received questions from customers asking how to do X in your software. Since you already know that there’s a need for this information, and you have the answer, why not put it on your blog?
The goal is not to win Pulitzers or be cited, quoted or footnoted. The goal for your blog’s content is to be useful to your desired audience.
Think of it this way. A blog is a transactional relationship between you and your reader. They clicked on the post because the title and meta description seemed to answer a specific need or question of theirs. They’re not sticking around if that need isn’t met, so offer up something useful to earn their attention.
The Thought Leader Trap
Every content marketer is going to have a client at some point that says, “We want to be a thought leader in our industry.”
Stop.
Statistically, almost nobody is a thought leader. You either are or you’re not, and most of us are not. That’s okay. Being a thought leader takes more than having a snappy opinion on something. BizLaunch writes, “Becoming a thought leader takes a lot of time and energy to achieve. And more importantly, it requires leadership. You have to offer a unique perspective that’s worth the follow.”
Are your thoughts really newsworthy, or are they only interesting to you? If the goal of your blog is merely to position your company or client as a thought leader, it’s almost guaranteed to be unfocused and ineffective.
Learn to ask yourself if what you’re putting out is something that someone in its intended industry would actually spend time reading.
