I get this question every time I start unpacking a big strategy with a client. It’s a good question, but it might be the wrong one to ask.
Here’s a better question: what’s the best way to tell your story to a broad audience? For a variety of technical and logistical reasons, blogging is the one with the lowest costs and the highest return.
So yes, you need to blog.
But it’s not just about “blogging”. You need to tell the story of your product or your business, and you should be doing that on a variety of available platforms. The question you should ask isn’t about blogging — it’s wider than that.
“What’s the best way to tell my story?”
That might be blogging. For others, it might be creating a Youtube channel. It might be as simple as advertising on low-traffic search terms on Google, particularly if those low-traffic search terms are late in your average customer’s buying cycles.
But you need to find a way to tell your story.
Blogging platforms like WordPress and Medium let us all run media organizations. Who better to tell your story than you? We all run media organizations now.
Some ideas: maybe the best way to reach your customers is to share their stories on a blog, or in your Instagram feed (with photographic evidence that your product makes people’s lives better!).
I know there’s resistance to these ideas in most organizations. When clients ask me, “Do I need to blog?”, they really mean something else: “Do I need to consistently spend time creating my own marketing content?”
The answer is yes. Yes, you absolutely do. Nobody else will market your products for you, so you either have to do it or pay somebody within your organization to do it.
The good news is, it doesn’t have to be big and extravagant. You could start small, so long as you start. This blog (which gets emailed to my newsletter at an earlier date) is me starting small. Every week, I get to share something like this with you. We communicate on a meaningful level. And I hope it brings you value.
But the fact that you’re reading this means it’s working.