Marketing Your Organization Without a Blog

Is your organization’s blog counter-productive?

Note: this post is about how an organization markets itself, not its products.

Hiring and retaining the right people is the number one driver of organizational success.[1]

Marketing

Marketing is required to sell people on your organization, and maintaining a web presence is an essential tool for effective marketing. Potential hires are the highest priority audience for your web presence and possibly the only audience.

Make Potential Hires Feel Welcomed

Potential hires should feel welcomed and quickly find the information they seek about what you do and who you are. For example, a potential candidate should see people in the images that they could imagine themselves working with each day. They should read the organization’s mission to know that the organization even has a mission and if it resonates with their values. And most of all, they should be able to find and apply for open positions.

A Blog?

Having stated all this, which may seem quite obvious, it is not uncommon for an organization to maintain a blog and social media pages that do not address potential applicants’ immediate concerns without having even a basic website that does.

The problem with so many organizational blogs is that they are not actively maintained. While Microsoft may not have this problem, if your organization doesn’t have a dedicated marketing department, you might. Blogs have to be earned, and the only organizations that deserve a blogs are those that can actively maintain one. Think about it, if an applicant visits your organization’s blog, and the most recent post is three years old, they may wonder if the organization is still in business. Even then, an up-to-date blog should supplement core pages that contain mostly static content about the organization.

Static Content

Instead of looking to WordPress or Medium, organizations that are at the early stages of launching their website should consider static website publishing. Once an organization can achieve that effectively, regularly posting blog entries could be part of a social media strategy that provides the impetus for new and repeat visits.

In my current workplace, we have retired a Medium blog that has been difficult for us to maintain and have replaced it with a static site that directly communicates everything that the blog attempted to sub-communicate. We may never have the capacity to maintain a blog strategically, which is fine because we are supporting our hiring process entirely without one.

Static Publishing Tools

We chose Pelican, a Python-based static site publisher, similar to Eleventy, which is powering this website.

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