The ROI Case For Business Blogging
How Much Does Blogging Really Cost?
While discussing our marketing options for siphs.com, Tom and I debated the merits of transforming the homepage into a blog. Given limitations on both time and money (we’re self-funded), we wanted to, as any business would, maximize the bang for our buck. For us, that means a relentless focus on minimizing the company’s average subscriber acquisition costs. The business model is simple - the cheaper the costs, the higher our company’s profitability.
In our search for data points to aid our decision making process, we came across Geoff Livingston’s book “Now Is Gone, But It’s Not Too Late.” In it, Geoff claims social media marketing, the collective efforts of blogging, social bookmarking, commenting, online networking) should not take more than 10 hours per week. For the purpose of this analysis, we will assume that it costs $0.00 to setup a blog and that the rate limiting factor for social media marketing is time. Over a 52 week period, the commitment amounts to 520 hours per year. Your business investment then largely depends on the value you place on your, or your employee’s time. At $25 per hour, your annual investment would be $13,000 USD. At $50 per hour, the annual investment rises to $26,000 USD.
As a small business owner, you should conduct your own Return on Investment case for blogging. Will the investment meaningfully impact your company’s top line? Our perspective is that, other than the expert advice found on the web, we simply don’t know. But given that the investment is time and not cash centric, we are willing to experiment with the medium and compare it to our other efforts. My personal opinion is that it will take much more than 10 hours to read, write, and otherwise engineer your blogs content to attract the target demographic - though I am an awfully slow, deliberate writer!
Why Should You Blog?
The Return on Investment (ROI) case for blogging goes well beyond the simple my blogging activities cost me $x.xx and generated $y.yy in sales. There are three harder to measure, but equally important benefits.
First, a blog lets you engage current and potential customers in an informal way. It provides potential customers with insight into your business that they would not otherwise have. The best case scenario for making any sale is to make one without any hard selling tactics - give your potential customers ALL the information they need to make a decision. For those quantitatively inclined, one can create a model that links blogging to the costs associated with maintaining and managing both an inside and outside sales force.
Second, as a direct consequence of the above, blogging fosters trust. Before anyone buys something from you, they have to trust you. Creating an informal avenue of conversation and seeing your (your the business owner’s) responses to comments gives a potential customer some insight into how they will be treated. I won’t write much more on this since I have future on trust in the works. Be sure to subscribe to this blog or check back - you don’t want to miss the upcoming post!
Third, and this assumes you already have an active, participatory readership, blogging simplifies the process of conducting consumer research and obtaining customer feedback. During the earliest stages of designing and releasing a new product, the more feedback you get from real users, the more likely it is to succeed. I can not think of a better way to take the pulse of your future customers and gauge interest. If I recall correctly, this is exactly how 37Signals launched their ridiculously successful suite of small business products.
Finally, blogging gives current and potential customers something to talk about. If your blog posts are interesting and valuable enough (ultimately a testament to your writing & creative abilities) then the word will spread, and could spread fast. You are in a sense creating your own online advertising space and facilitating the most effective way to grow your business - through word-of-mouth marketing. And that my dear reader, is the cue for siphs.com. We give you the tools to make word-of-mouth marketing possible, to track the medium through which people are sharing your content, and to enhance the impact of this tactic through custom messaging and branding.
Stay tuned for more…
-Arpan
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