Today I want to talk to you about the enduring power of B2B blogging in the era of video sharing platforms, business podcasts, and social media algorithms.
Now, I’m not here to poo-poo any particular platform or media – hey, I’m making a video about it and sharing it on YouTube after all! But I feel that blogging remains an essential and impactful channel in the B2B space, and that putting your expertise out there into the world, in a text format, is still incredibly valuable.
I’d also like to acknowledge that a video sharing, podcasting, and social media presence is hugely powerful within digital marketing, and all have important roles to play. Creating B2B content on any platform is largely what you make of it, and all media and methods can be used to great effect with the right strategy.
But back to the topic at hand. Personally, I think blogging is the most effective content type to focus on – it’s the most cost-effective, the most time-effective, and the most effort-effective.
So let’s look at 5 reasons why blogging is still hugely relevant to B2Bs in the YouTube, TikTok, and podcast era.
5 B2B Benefits of Blogging
Number 1: Content On Your Own Site Gives You Ultimate Control
This is a huge factor for me. When you create content that lives natively on your own website – i.e., you aren’t relying on external parties like YouTube or Spotify to get it out into the world – you have ultimate creative control over that content – what it says, how it says it, and where it’s visible. You aren’t limited to the confines of one platform or one way of doing things – and if your website CMS confines you in a way you don’t like, you have more power to change it.
Though this does come with a considerable caveat – this also means you are responsible for distributing that content to your audience and ensuring that content’s visibility. You don’t have a Spotify or YouTube algorithm to find new eyeballs for you after all, and even search algorithms may not pay attention to a post if the SEO stars don’t align.
Let’s also look at this a different way: now more than ever, our browsing habits are being dictated by algorithmically generated feeds and suggestions designed to keep us on a platform for longer than we were planning to be on it in the first place.
Social media and media sharing companies make their money by keeping people scrolling away on their platform in order to serve ads. However you would much rather get your prospect over to your own site, your own walled garden of sorts, to keep their undivided attention.
Number 2: Blogs Are Easily Editable
As change is the only constant in life, this is another massive benefit in blogging’s corner. Things change over time – including your opinions, your advice, your company, your industry as a whole, and far more factors beyond that.
An old blog that is showing its age can quickly and easily be spruced up, brought into the modern day, and serve you as a funky new marketing asset.
However, if you have an old video or a podcast that is in dire need of an update, you will generally have to record it again. This can take a lot more effort than simply editing or rewriting parts of a text document as you need mics and cameras involved.
Number 3: Blogging Has a Strong Relationship with Search
Now this isn’t to say that video or podcasts won’t benefit you in search – search engines are getting better at looking at multimedia content and serving it in search results – but textual content has precedent of being easily indexable by search. The more textual content you provide on your website, the more information Google has to get its hooks into understanding what your site’s all about.
As I’ve already mentioned in a video before now, gone are the days when you can rely on search engines alone to get your content out there with no alternative distribution strategy. But the intent behind search is still great – you’re grabbing people who are actively looking for solutions, hands on the keyboard and mouse, ready to be fed information. You want to capitalise on that attention by bringing them to your own site at that moment, while the iron is hot – not somewhere else where they may get distracted.
If you embed unlisted content or use a media plugin that renders that content in a way that’s not viewable elsewhere, that might be an option, but then search engines are even less likely to see the contents of that media. It’s a swings and roundabouts situation.
Number 4: The Barrier to Entry is Lowest with Blogging
In order to blog, you simply need a website that accommodates blog posts, and some time to put blog posts together. A basic content strategy and a few set goals are nice to have too. But that’s it. Nowadays websites can be surprisingly inexpensive – even free if you’re happy with a few compromises. Free sites aren’t something I would recommend long term, but the point stands.
If you are going on a business-like video or podcasting journey, you will likely need to invest in some tech. Video-wise, smartphones are now generally powerful enough to capture great looking video, but you will likely need to invest in lighting, a tripod, and maybe microphones for the best video you can muster.
And podcasting can require some pretty decent hardware if you want to create a good impression – a good mic, an audio interface, a pop shield – things that not just everybody has lying around. And on both counts – let’s not forget editing software too!
Getting up to speed with multimedia can also be a lot of effort – it can be quite the learning curve when you’ve got your day to day business or department running to do. But CMS platforms for blogging are just a hop skip and a jump away from word processing tools you likely already know how to use. So blogging is a great place to start – you can always scale up to multimedia later. Bringing us nicely on to:
Number 5: Blogging is a Great Springboard for Other Content Channels
I think blogging is the best place to start on a B2B content journey, though it doesn’t mean you have to stop there. Once you have a bank of blog content, you can always use audio or video media to bring your wisdom to other channels and other avenues online.
This can be as simple as reading out a blog post in podcast form, or presenting a post as a video or a webinar. Providing read-out versions of posts is great for accessibility too as it presents an option to those with visual impairments, who struggle with reading, or who can’t look at a screen for too long.
That’s not to say that posts that were natively videos or podcasts can’t be turned into blog posts, but blogging’s lower barrier to entry and “editability” means that you can always update older content and turn it into a fresh new resource over a new channel. Beats writing something new from scratch!
A Few Statistics
But don’t just take it from me, let’s look at a few stats:
- Short articles, less than 3,000 words, ranked third in the B2B content assets that generated the best results in the last 12 months. (Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2021)
- 56% of marketers who leverage blogging say it’s effective and 10% say it generates the biggest return on investment. (Source: HubSpot Blog Research, 2021)
- Blogging is one of the top media formats marketers plan to leverage for the first time in 2024. (Source: HubSpot Marketing Trends Report, 2024)
- In 2023, one in four bloggers reported that blogging garners “strong results,” and over two in four reported “some results.” “Results” in this case included factors like website traffic, lead generation, brand awareness and email list growth. (Source: Orbit Media)
- The average blog post length is 1,427 words long. (Source: Orbit Media)
In Conclusion
Imagine a marketing channel where you can share the length and breadth of your worth and update that wisdom over time as it grows. A channel that can benefit you in search, and can be used across multiple platforms to increase your visibility. And it’s easy and relatively inexpensive to set up – and even to outsource.
Yup, it’s blogging. She says, on a YouTube video. The irony is deliciously crunchy.
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