Should Your Blog Be The Center Of Your Content Strategy?

In the beginning, the blog ruled…

Before there was streaming and podcasts, even before it was easy to upload videos and images, there was one reliable form with which to communicate with customers, followers, and visitors. This was the blog post.

The blog post was a perfect format for individuals and content writers to write directly to their audience and create relationships and engagement without beating people over the head with a hard sale.

Bloggers could provide their readers with expert opinions, insider views, entertainment, instruction, or predictions for the future. Business owners were also able to use blogging to create a relatable, human side to their companies in ways that they never had before.

The Impact of New And Changing Social Media Platforms

Then, things began to change. Other platforms made it possible to share other types of content. Twitter, for example was perfect for getting out short pieces of content such as announcements, acknowledgements, and teasers.

This evolution continued and it became easier to create and curate visual content through platforms like Facebook as well as Twitter. Now, of course, there are also platforms such as Instagram and Snapchat that are not just visual friendly, but also visual centric.

Perhaps the biggest impact of all of these social media platforms is the speed at which someone can create and publish a post, and the speed at which they can also comment and reply.

Changing Customer Expectations Regarding Content Consumption

Of course, it wasn’t just the bells and whistles of these advances that began changing the content landscape. The way people began offering and consuming content took a turn. Twitterstorming, for example, became a way of content writing to be used as a way to release a fairly large amount of information broken up into small pieces.

Not only is that more digestible, there is an automated optimization in the process that has to be forced in longer content forms such as blog posts. This rapid succession posts also makes writing mistakes easier to overlook, making this a good option for those who are more business savvy than writing savvy.

Outsourcing Publishing And Distribution

In addition to using traditional social media to share content, many bloggers are using alternatives to their standard WordPress blogs or websites for publishing their long form content. Now that websites including Huffington Post, Medium, and LinkedIn publisher have given bloggers a place to publish their content, many content marketers are taking advantage of the opportunity this affords them.

After all, a large platform like Huffington Post already has access to an audience of hundreds of thousands. For many businesses, it makes sense, so it seems, to use these websites as a place to distribute content and generate organic leads. It may be a small thing, but it should also be noted that there is a small, but emerging trend that has many content writers using terms such as writer and article, instead of blog and blogger.

Increasing Mobile Device Usage

Of course, when anybody discusses the future of blogs, or the lack of future, they cannot ignore the role that devices are playing in this. Smartphones are simply better at consuming short form content and visuals than long blog posts. When smartphone users do want to consume long form content, they can often access podcasts to meet those needs without concerning themselves with screen size constraints.

Too Long May Not Always be The Issue

Depending on the audience, the problem with blogs may not be that they are too long, and not as naturally optimized to mobile as other forms of content. It may be that blog content is typically not long enough. Anybody who is blogging in the B2B segment should consider that their audiences may actually want longer content (think white papers), if they are relying on your content to make executive decisions.

What is Going Right With Blogging

First of all, anybody who is willing to go through a learning process, can do some pretty amazing things with blogging, just by using the plugins and other technologies that are available to them. This includes, embedding videos, live streaming content, creating infographics, and many other actions that make blog posts rich and interesting, and result in more shares and views. Bloggins actually are more dynamic that it ever has been.

Is Blogging Dead?

Blogging is not dead, but it may be dead for your brand. There is absolutely no mandate that a blog has to be the central part of your content marketing strategy.

In fact, there is no mandate that you need to have a blog at all. If this is simply not a form of content that your followers are interested in consuming from you, you may as well devote your content marketing resources to other types of content.

However, there are a few more things to consider. Your blog may not be drawing people in like you expect, simply because of quality issues. If you aren’t using the latest technology to make your blog interesting, if you don’t have good writing help, if you aren’t optimizing your content, you could be driving people away from your blog.

Another issue is that you simply may not be giving your readers the content that they want to see. This is why revisiting customer personas every so often is a good idea, as well as paying close attention to your analytics and your customer feedback. A final issue has nothing to do with content quality, your audience, or optimization, it may be that you are falling flat when it comes to your promotional efforts.

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