How Do B2B Companies Use Blogs and Content Management Systems?

B2B companies can use a blog as a central place to publish useful, relevant content, then use a content management system (CMS) to organize articles, store information, and support future content inventories. The key is not necessarily having a blog, but being able to manage content easily and regularly check whether it meets readers’ needs. A blog is one way to present content, not the only option for managing it. (S1, S3)

Provide practical information, not just company updates

A study published by Backlinko in 2021 analyzed 502 B2B companies, 72% of which had blogs. Among the blogs analyzed, 38% published only educational content, just 8% focused exclusively on company news or public relations content, and another 51% included both educational and company-related content. (S4)

These findings describe practices in the sample at the time; they do not mean every company should adopt the same content mix. The study’s authors suggested that businesses investing in blogs might believe useful content is more likely to deliver good results than company news alone. This is not evidence of causation. Nor does the absence of a blog necessarily mean a company does no content marketing, since it may publish content on external platforms such as LinkedIn. (S4)

When choosing a CMS, start with ease of content management and presentation

Andrew Scherer’s advice on Local Search Forum is that using a blog or another CMS is not the key issue. Instead, choose an approach to managing and organizing content that suits your needs, and keep useful, relevant content on your website. This is practical advice, not a rule every business must follow. (S1)

If the blog also serves to improve search visibility, the supplied iThome article recommends checking two specific capabilities:

• Whether article structure can be standardized.
• Whether the front end can distinguish between main content, supplementary content, and advertising areas.

These can serve as items on a feature checklist, but they do not guarantee search rankings or traffic. (S6)

Use CMS data for content inventories, not just publishing

NN/g’s 2020 article on content audits notes that looking at pages alone is often insufficient: author information, dates, and metadata may need to be retrieved from the CMS, while performance metrics require consulting an analytics platform. Determining whether content truly meets user needs may also require qualitative research. (S3)

• Start by creating an inventory, recording information about each piece of content and making an initial assessment.
• Use CMS exports or a crawler to help collect available data such as titles, dates, and authors.
• People still need to review each item for content quality and then decide which articles require further investigation.

For example, a system can provide an article’s date and traffic figures, but those two data points alone cannot tell you whether readers found the answers they needed. Inventories and audits are also ongoing work, not tasks completed with a single export. (S3)

Plan quality reviews as well as a publishing schedule

In a 2021 article, Neil Patel argued that running a blog requires consistently writing or commissioning high-quality, in-depth articles, and that the returns justify the investment. In 2007, Jakob Nielsen used a simulation to discuss variations in quality, warning that low-quality posts could harm a brand and recommending rereading posts an hour or two later before publishing. The two take different positions on investing in a blog; Nielsen’s recommendation is advice from the author of a historical article, not a current platform rule. (S7, S8)