What’s behind the decline in corporate blogging?

April 13, 2016: The percentage of Inc. 500 companies with an outward-facing business blog has declined for the second year in a row, according to a study conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts. In 2015, only 37 percent of Inc. 500 companies fielded blogs – down from 46 percent in 2014 and 52 percent in 2013.

Late last year, the same researchers recorded similarly steep declines among the Fortune 500. In 2015, only 21 percent maintained outward-facing blogs, down from 31 percent in 2014 and 34 percent in 2013.

What explains the decline?

While the study did not ask its respondents to explain why they’ve grown bearish on blogging, it’s likely that the following causes contributed to the continuing decline, among them:

1. Unrealistic expectations. Creating and publishing high-quality articles, infographics and/or white papers day after day takes time, talent, and work. The specialized, often insular nature of content on a corporate blog often militates against outsourcing this work to freelancers or an agency. Some corporations may have decided that investing in the blog channel just isn’t worth it, even though — as UMass noted — there’s general awareness in the C-suite that blog posts are the best vehicles to convey thought leadership.

2. Availability of better non-blog publishing platforms. LinkedIn is the most oft-used social network used by the Inc 500; in 2015 it launched its Publisher Platform (now known as “Pulse”) aimed at the business sector. Upstarts like medium.com are also presenting themselves as “post-blog” platforms where it’s easier to gain attention than on a lonely corporate domain. It’s likely that some on the Inc. 500 list have decided that these alternatives provide better venues for their content.

3. Ineffective content marketing. According to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, only 30 percent of B2B marketers say their content marketing efforts are effective – down from 38 percent in 2015. Interestingly, the same study reported that the biggest challenge facing corporate managers was the task of “producing engaging content.” It is likely that many of these firms are finding that making the transition from sales content to user-centric content is harder than initially anticipated.

Is corporate blogging going away?

Corporate blogging may be in a state of slow decline, but this doesn’t mean that the tactical advantages of maintaining an outward-facing business blog are any less compelling than they were 5 or even 15 years ago. These advantages include:

An environment for premium content completely under the control of the business.
A place where calls-to-action can be placed to move interested prospects further down the sales funnel.
A place where the collective thought leadership of the organization are available in one place within one attractive UI.
A “hub” that can function as the destination for all inbound links from social channels.

While the payoffs for maintaining a robust corporate blog may not always be immediate, the long-term benefits accrue and compound. As Didit’s Kevin Lee observes,

There’s no question that it takes time and money to assemble a body of content sufficient to be “interest-bearing” in terms of generating leads, traffic, or other behavior desired by the business. Successful content marketing empires accrue their value over time.

How much time should be allocated to accomplish this goal? I’d venture a minimum of six months to one year. How much money? Such a figure depends on your ability to staff, hire, recruit, or crowd source sufficient suitable content. You can keep costs down by intelligently repurposing everything you create, but you’ll still have to pay somebody to create the content you will be serving out.

How much content will you need to accumulate to reach “critical mass”? While there are no benchmarks I’m aware of that specify a threshold, I would offer that 50 articles (with unique URLs) is a reasonable goal. Many successful B2Bs may get fewer than 100 visitors a day, but if they make the most of these visits, their lead flow can begin to generate sufficient income to begin turning a cost into a profit center.

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