Buffer, Kabbage, and Suster agree: blog.

I preach every day that every company should blog, especially startups and small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Pushing your content out via your blog is the starting point for your entire digital marketing strategy, which encompasses your content marketing strategy. Blogging requires only your time, and your organized thoughts put to keystrokes that tell your company’s story as it unfolds.

But don’t listen to me. I’m just a lowly blogger who preaches and teaches this stuff. Listen to the people you’re already listening to, or you should be listening to them anyway.

Buffer, a leader in social media marketing tools, had this to say about their social media presence:

Our blog content is a key component to our social media strategy. Ninety percent of our social media updates are based on content we’ve written on the blog.

Ninety percent of all of Buffer’s social media updates come from their blog. Like I said above, the content of your blog is the lifeblood of your digital & social strategy. If you don’t have a blog, then what are you posting to your social media channels? Yes, there is a whole internet full of stuff that’s relevant to your business that you can share, but it’s not yours. Do you want people to trust you for original thought in your area of expertise? Then you have to create content.

Side note: what’s in that other 10%? Personally, I think it’s the freedom, mindset, and brand to pay attention to the world around them and make ultra wins like Arby’s and Oreo have done simply because they can.

Still not convinced? OK, let’s bring it a little closer to home in Atlanta with Kabbage, a rapidly growing small business loan source. In a blog post earlier this month titled, “5 Steps to Outpace Your Competition in Google Search on a Shoestring Budget,” the author of the post put it more simply than I ever could:

First and foremost, you should have a blog on your site where you create compelling content.

Couldn’t agree more. Kabbage has been very successful, and they have a very strong content marketing team and plan. Another Atlanta startup has taken a turn towards very aggressive content marketing by teaching their audience how to use their product, from beginning to end. Codeguard’s latest series of blog posts is driven by video content on how to use their product.

Finally, from your startup turned VC hero Mark Suster, you get a one word response to the question, “should you actually write [a blog] if you’re a startup?“

“Absofuckinglutely.”

Any questions? Survey says you need to blog for your startup.