Should You Keep Blogging?

The answer? It depends.

How to Measure your Blog

Organizations come to us all the time asking if they should start a blog or keep their blog or change the content strategy of their blog. In fact, it was so important to answer this question, we created a whole new product called Content Strategy Boot Camps for companies struggling with this challenge.

Here are the questions we ask:

1. What’s the overall business goal of creating and distributing all of this content? Is it to pull in customers or patients or donors or applicants? Is it to position your organization as thought leaders in a particular space? Is it to have attraction content that magnetizes customers and brings them to your website or other owned media property?
2. Do you have the resources to support this effort? Many times we counsel clients to invest in blogging for six-months and position it as an experiment. If it’s successful, you have demonstrated a budgetary need for blogging. Or, you know that you don’t have the right resources in-house and are looking for external resources. Either way, you need a lot of talent to run a blog well: an editor-in-chief, writers, editors, fact checkers, legal reviewers, people who will distribute, people who will answer questions and comments, someone to analyze how the blog performs and so on. It’s a complex effort that requires coordination. It just may not make sense for where your organization is now.
3. If we don’t start a blog, what else can we do? There are so many other marketing vehicles. Just because blogging was once hot (and still seems to be chugging along) doesn’t mean there aren’t other types of content that would make sense for your organization. What about publishing a quality piece of thought leadership once a quarter or twice a year?  People will download content so you can use it as a lead nurturing campaign. What if your audience doesn’t read, but prefers videos or pictures? Tumblr, Instagram or YouTube might make more sense for you. Again, having the right resources to manage those channels is critical to define before you invest and begin.

The point is blogging isn’t dead. But it may not make sense for you. There are hundreds of ways to reach your target audience—you need to find the right ones for you.

And if you have already decided on a publication or channel, you do need a content strategy. Check out our content strategy boot camps, designed to help you craft messaging and train your teams on execution in two days!