I'm a content marketer. Kill your company's blog.

Last week for Thought Leadership on Thought Leadership, I wrote about how marketers need to pay less attention to the activities that drive up meaningless vanity metrics and more attention to the work that actually drives business value.

I run a content marketing agency. If I wanted to bring in revenue for my agency as quickly and easily as possible, I’d design blog programs for B2B corporations. Large companies pay for these services all the time, and content marketing agencies keep the lights on with these retainers.

Here’s the problem: 49 times out of 50, these blog programs don’t deliver any business value.?

Companies selling B2B services should be investing in good, effective writing. That means they should kill their corporate blogs.

Traffic! What is it good for?

There’s a reason why content marketers love blogs. When you publish content on your owned channels, you have complete control over your ability to measure its performance. It’s easy to set goals for SEO and track metrics like pageviews and clickthrough rates. Those numbers give you something to improve on — something to take to your managers and show that you’ve made progress against your goals.

I get it.

But let’s be realistic and ask ourselves two questions:

1. How do most people/companies buy expensive products/services?
2. How do most people use the internet today?

Buying an enterprise SaaS product (or construction vehicles, or airplanes, or lab equipment) is an expensive decision, and it happens on a near-individual level. These are products and services with executive buyers — a C-suite business leader signing on the dotted line.

If you’re channeling your writing resources towards a blog that’s meant to reach as many readers as possible, you are fundamentally misaligned with your sales process.

And let’s say that you’re writing solid, hyper-targeted content that aims to persuade those executive buyers. How do those buyers use the internet? Where do they hang out and what outlets do they read?

There are four websites I visit on a daily basis. I type these URLs into the search bar and read what they publish: apnews.com; bloomberg.com; espn.com; defector.com. I would bet that most people have between three and five sites that they visit on a daily basis. And I would bet that less than 1% of those regularly-visited sites are corporate blogs.

The internet is small and getting smaller. We each have our pet sites that we like to visit, and we spend the rest of our time hanging out in common spaces: Instagram, TikTok, Twitter (you can’t make me call it X), LinkedIn.

You have to work hard to get someone to come to your blog and read your posts; the numbers prove how hard it is. The dirty little secret of content marketing? A shocking number of those blog posts are read by 10 people or less.

Corporate blogs typically don’t have any connection to the sales motion, and it goes against people’s natural habits to get them to visit your blog. You need a better strategy.

Be where the people are

OK, so you’re ready to kill your blog. Here’s what you do next.

First, you go where the people are. For B2B companies, you will find the best bang for your buck on LinkedIn. Many of your buyers are already hanging out there, and your high-quality content will rise to the top of their feed without having to drive them anywhere else. What would otherwise have been a blog post languishing in obscurity can become a highly visible conversation starter, and you can post excerpts from that article for weeks as you continue to drive eyeballs to your content.

More importantly, you send the content directly to your buyers.

What media outlets do your buyers read? Do they use LinkedIn? Who knows. But if you’re far enough along in the sales cycle and you send your buyer — directly, in an email that you wrote and didn’t put in a Hubspot automation — a solid, well-written piece of thought leadership, they’re probably going to take the time to read it. If you’ve written the piece well enough and addressed some of their questions or doubts, it might even make a difference for their purchasing decision.

That means a hell of a lot more than pageviews.

OK, fine. Here are two exceptions.

Not all corporate blogs are bad.

Here are two cases in which investing in a blog strategy is acceptable:

• You sell an inexpensive product and can drive revenue with SEO. A few months ago, I needed accounting software for my content marketing firm. I typed “best small business accounting software” into Google, and The Algorithm suggested Quickbooks. This is a product that costs about $20–30 per month. There’s not a 12-month sales cycle; there’s a 12-minute sales cycle. Their blog is an asset in driving traffic and converting leads into customers.
• Your company is bigger than God. If you are the market leader in your category; if you have hundreds of millions in revenue; if you have more resources than you know what to do with — fine, you can have a blog. In this case, a blog can help you beat back competitors — pushing aside new market entrants and maintaining market awareness by dominating keywords. These companies are playing a different game on a different level. But these companies are few and far between — the vast majority of companies should kill their blog.

Rip off the Bandaid

We’re living through a period of transition. The economy is tight. Generative AI is changing the way many technology companies do business. Companies need to adjust quickly and not look back.

It feels extreme to pull the plug on an activity that so many companies considered essential. But it’s time to rip off the Bandaid and focus on the work that drives value.

Kill your blog.?