The real ROI of Blogging revisited

Real ROI of Blogging

Lewis Green of MarketingProfs defines the Real ROI of blogging by questioning the marketing efforts:
- Create customer experiences as measured by the happiness levels of our customers?
- Result in loyal clients?
- Result in revenues and/or profits?
- Result in leads and referrals?
- Result in getting us noticed?

Return On Investment

However a Return On Investment consists of an equation:
The investment of money, time, capacities, assets
versus
The return by revenue, benefit or profit

A blog is an Investment

We think Lewis Green has overlooked the investment part:
- The blog needs to be promoted, linked, and referenced.
- The blog requires writing about subjects related to your products or solutions
- The blog needs content
- The blog needs to be renewed with content several times a week
- Comments on the blog need to be moderated requiring time.
- The writing of the blog and the images used need to be interesting
- Editing of the blog for layout and links requires time.
- Nurturing: you need to nurture the audience with new content on a regular basis.
- Addressing the audience that would buy your products with appropriate content.

The investment in the blog is quite important and a return is only to be expected if the blog is marketed too and becomes a success itself.

If you blog, content is needed, and getting readers or getting noticed isn’t to happen automatically without efforts for promoting the blog.

Thus instead of just promoting your products or solutions, now you need to promote the blog too!

Addressing the right audience

Addressing the right audience (customers and leads) is possibly the most difficult.
You can blog on great ideas, concepts and content, obtaining a large group of regular readers.
However at the same time missing completely to address the target audience that would buy your products.
Thus a waste of time and effort.

The Return – the leverage

The main returns are those mentioned by Lewis Green:
- Leads
- Speaking opportunities
- Referrals from other bloggers
- Regular readers

We would like to add:
- Links: thus improving the findability and SERP (Search Engine Page Result)
- Authority: if the blog shows the knowledge of the blogger, it brings authority on subjects in your business.
- Trust can be created due to the regularity of the posts and identification of the blogger.
- Community creation in some extreme cases.

It all comes down to getting more sales.

The leverage

The return can be far more bigger than the investment, especially compared to costs for conventional marketing like advertising, direct mail, emailing campaigns, trade shows, conferences, …
This is where blogging becomes interesting: the leverage of the interest it can generate (viral). The leverage of getting more for less.

The ROI of a blog

The ROI of blogging is the equation between the effort and investment to create, promote and to continuously generate content for the blog and the return in sales value.
To be compared with the conventional marketing channels.