Should you create blog content?
Should your team be investing in blog content?
Well… The data is in, and it speaks volumes:
Upon analyzing the most successful B2B tech brands in the world, the ones that generate the most traffic all publish blog content. The ones that generate the most traffic publish blog content more regularly than anyone else in the market.
Here’s the data from our own analysis of over 1,300 SaaS + cloud brands:
The outlier (and curve) is worth noting.
The companies that publish 100 – 500 blog posts a year generate more traffic than those who publish 26-100… And the ones who publish 26-100 generate more traffic than those who publish 11-25…
And the companies that publish over 500?
Well…
They’re in a class amongst themselves.
Scaling a content engine that leads to over 500 net-new pieces in 4 quarters might immediately feel overwhelming for some.
But there are a few things you can do that will make this type of high-volume content production both efficient and effective, without a bunch of headaches.
Here are a few simple ways to scale your content engine:
- Work with guest contributors to increase the velocity of content
- Work with a content agency that can produce high-volume / value content
- Create an internal content team that focuses on product / culture content
- Build a bench of freelancers that can support your growth & hire a manager
At Foundation, we’ve always preached the philosophy that content can shape culture.
It’s this idea that has allowed us to help brands create content that generates millions of dollars worth of traffic every single month. It’s this idea that has helped us create content that reaches millions of people every single year. And it’s this philosophy that has helped us influence the pipeline for some of the most ambitious and impressive brands in the world.
We get the power of content.
We think about content daily, and we understand how it can be used to drive results.
But let’s get tactical for a second and talk through how:
First → You need to understand your customers. I don’t mean going to ChatGPT and asking AI to create a customer persona for you. I’m talking about taking the time to actually look at your top 10% of customers and start looking for trends. Here are a few trends to consider:
- Do they work in a certain industry?
- Do they have a certain job title?
- Do they have a certain company size?
- Did they find you through a similar source?
- Do they use the same features as everyone else?
- Do they follow the same content on social media?
- Do they listen to the same podcasts as each other?
- Are they active in a certain Subreddit or niche forum?
All of these questions should be looked into…
The reason you’re doing this research is because you are trying to understand the types of people you’re selling to. You’ve isolated it to the top 10-20% because it’s these people who are your most meaningful customers and the ones you want more of…
Now, give them a name.
You can call them Molly the Marketer. Drew the Dad. Jessi the Janitorial Director. Louis the Lawyer. Fred the French Translator. Chris the Creator. Whatever…
Now that you know who you’re talking about… It’s time to start thinking about the journey they go through to make the decision to buy your product. A lot of marketers make the mistake of thinking linearly about this, and it’s a trap. It’s a trap because it leaves many marketers in a silo without having the ability to see nuance across other channels.
You know the saying:
If the only tool you have is a hammer, the answer to every problem is a hammer.
The same thing happens in marketing.
A lot of marketers get so comfortable with a certain type of content – they view the solution to all their problems as being that type of content. It’s a brutal habit to have but also very difficult to shake. For example, a lot of people who have managed blog content for years – think that blog content is the only type of content that they should be producing.
That’s wrong.
Does blog content drive results?
100%.
You see the data above.
But it’s not the only type of content you can create.
One of the things that many people overlook is the fact that there’s different types of blogs. The same way that there are different types of ice cream — there are different types of blog posts. Now that you know your customer, it’s time to figure out what types of blog posts are more likely to support your team in achieving their growth goals through content.
Here are a few examples of blog types:
- Thought leadership content
- Culture / HR-specific content
- Business-specific content
- Backlink-oriented content
- Keyword-driven content
- Use case-related content
- Customer-driven content
What type of content should you invest in?
That’s all dependent on your audience, budget, company size, and growth strategy.
I was keynoting a presentation in Burlington, Vermont a few weeks back for an community for B2B marketers called Exit Five. I spoke about how brands should research their audience, create great content and then distribute it like wildfire. The audience loved it. But the most interesting thing to me was seeing the CMO of Copy AI speak the day after me.
He brought up this slide and talked about how their strategy (and he thinks every brand’s strategy) should 100% always include three types of content:
- SEO / Keyword Driven content
- Thought Leadership content
- Use case-specific content
He called these the un-questionable must-haves.
And in many ways…
I agree.
If you’re constantly producing these three types of content — you’re probably doing better than your competition. If you can create 500 of these types of content per year — you’re definitely doing better than your competitors.
The identification of what topics you should cover based on these can come from some pretty straightforward research:
- SEO Content: Conduct a keyword analysis and develop a keyword-specific TAM analysis
- Thought Leadership: Analyze the communities your audience spends time and look for trends around topics that get people fired up, engaged, debating, and upset
- Use Case Content: Cross reference keyword demand and your product feature set
Do these three things and you should be able to create a content calendar that is going to serve your brand for months to come.
Not sure where to start?
Not sure your team will know where to start?
Book a discovery call today. I’d be happy to chat.
