Sales From Blogging

John,
Good observations -- although we'd love to be able to tell our clients that a blog will increase their sales, as in nearly all public relations campaigns, unfortunately the ROI isn't as clear-cut as that.

Thanks Laurie, I think we do have more tools than we once did to measure public relations, or even blogger relations than we once did. An example would be to see a spike in direct traffic, if you recently had an article published. If you can offer a coupon or some other sort of offer with your PR efforts that's a great way to measure, but you are right there are still a lot of gaps in measurement.

Having worked in search marketing for a while, I am always aware that I will not always be able to measure everything accurately, but I definitely have better numbers than marketeers once did have for print advertising. I also think that the discipline of measurement from Internet marketing is helping marketing people to measure traditional forms of marketing. One, as people now have to report and make the comparisons and two, people understand the strategy as a way of producing the best results.

A caveat however, is that sometimes your efforts will produce overall results but will not be totally measurable. I think that's why we see the dramatic differences between paid search and organic search. It's a lot easier to put a budget towards paid search, there is at some level a guaranteed level of results, and while with organic search a company is dependant upon search engines for their rankings. To me that’s interesting as the strategy of lots of good relevant content, votes in terms of links and an accessible search engine spider site may take more planning and effort than paid ads, but the results and ROI can be higher. If developing lots of good content on your industry may be something that your competitors don’t follow as a strategy, you can beat the competition by building the best website in your industry. Oh, blogs, forums and wiki’s and other social networking websites now have a big part to play in that process.

John,

I have heard anecdotally from clients that blogging helped them in sales relationships. That is, when they walk into an initial meeting the person on the other side of the table may have read the blog (usually thanks to a name search). If that happened, then some of the early ice breaking and relationship building is already done.

Also, the blog can help continue and extend the relationship with prospects, even if they are not now ready to become a customer.

Is that something that has a hard ROI tied to it? Probably not, but it does help in the overall sales process. I wonder if more data would let us argue that it shortens the sales cycle.

Chuck,

You raise a very good point, one of the corporate blogging survey readers recently emailed to ask me that very question.

Thinking about this issue again, many of our clients come to Backbone Media looking for higher search engine rankings to generate more traffic and potential sales. We help to provide the results.

One of the original reasons that I was interested in researching blogging was to discover its effects on search engine rankings. I definitely understand the benefits for higher rankings can be generated from blogs. To me however, what is interesting are the consequences in terms of speeding up the process of relationship building between a customer and vendor.

I have a case study on Indium from my presentation on blogging at the business blog summit that illustrates how through blogging Indium has garnered many more sales opportunities. There’s the pdf but I will also get around to writing a blog post.

John