Do companies really blog to feel self-satisfied or is it an exercise in making themselves famous? Not really. Any business blog has a certain predetermined objective and laid down goals. A business makes an investment with a targeted return in mind and with a purpose.
All marketing activities have different approaches to measuring the return on investment generated on them. In terms of blogging, which is a central piece in content marketing today, the process of measuring is different but completely doable.
Blogging has come a really long way since 1999 when there were 23 blogs to the 1.5 billion blogs in existence in 2017, and their numbers swell every day. Blogs are already a central channel of communication for many businesses, while many professional bloggers create awesome communities and become powerful trend-setters.
The best part is that blogging is extremely easy to implement because WordPress is already so widely accepted that creating a blog from scratch couldn’t be more seamless. The initial investment is minimal (less than $10), but the potential return is limitless.
Let’s move ahead and understand the returns on investment blogging can generate.
Augmented Engagement and Wider Reach
Thanks to the ever-spreading digital revolution, a blog has the capability to reach millions of readers all across the world. Blogging metrics in the field of customer engagement and interaction are many: the number of likes or shares per week or a month, number of unique visitors to the site and also the quality and quantity of comments received on blog posts.
While publishing original and innovative blog posts is important, their social promotion and marketing is essential as well. It will be of no good if you have a fantastic and original blog post full of unique content with hardly any readers or social shares. Building up audience and user engagement is crucial to moving on to the next step in the sales funnel process.
Increased Lead Generation
According to recent research, business to business marketers that use blogs as part of their marketing strategy received more than 67% leads as compared to marketers who didn’t do so.
This is an astounding number, considering that leads convert to customers. If a marketing mix tool is successfully able to generate that much-increased leads, it makes perfect business sense to devote more time and energy to that particular strategy.
Sales & Revenue Growth
While reading blog posts, there are a number of businesses who can and who do offer call-to-action words to close the sale on the blog post itself. This step is actually doable and is not really jumping the gun.
A blog post is normally an informative article to which a reader has come to read and understand better the topic and not necessarily to make a purchase. In specific circumstances, it is possible to suggest a closing of the sale on the blog post itself. For example, in the case of an online tutorial website blog, a blog post can give out useful and beneficial information and simply give a line suggesting to ‘Start Now’. This is perfectly legit and may, in fact, get a good number of actual sales.
It is simply amazing that companies who blog reported receiving 97% more links to their website. So go ahead and add share buttons to your blog posts and leverage the remarkable power of social media to the advantage of your blogging ROI.
An incredible additional 13% return on investment is reported by business to business marketers who have dedicated marketing time and content budget specifically to blogging. With 51% of blog readers shopping online and viewing multiple online sources before making their purchase, the role of blogs in the entire customer decision-making process cannot be overemphasized enough.
