The ROI of Business Blogging–Insights from Charlene Li & Forrester

If you are debating the marketing ROI for business blogging for your company, you’re not alone. Even the staunchest business blogging proponents (often) have difficulty explaining exactly how blogging and other forms of customer conversation contribute to the company’s bottom line.  Let’s chalk it up to the unsolved art/science of measuring ROI for marketing programs. 

Never fear, our erstwhile, loyal blogger, esteemed analyst at Forrester Research, Charlene Li, comes to the rescue. Charlene’s January 25 post (here) provides a succinct summary of Forrester’s two newest studies on the subject of the ROI of business blogging. She’s always considerate to those of us in her small business blog readership that may not have the budget to buy the Forrester reports. 

Charlene Li’s post, in part says:
“We developed a framework that allows companies to track and measure the benefits of external blogs. From the companies and individuals we spoke with, the most common benefits are:   

• increased brand visibility
• savings from customer insights
• reduced impact from negative user-generated content
• increased sales efficiency

The hard part is coming up with metrics that reflect these benefits, and more importantly, how to value those metrics. "

Forrester used General Motors’ FastLane blog as an example to calculate ROI.  This is exciting stuff (well, maybe not SuperBowl exciting).  Here’s a comprehensive graphic from Charlene Li’s post summarizing key insights from Forrester report, “Calculating the ROI of Blogging:  A Case Study, A Look At the ROI of General Motors’ FastLane Blog”:

Here’s a big marketing takeaway from Charlene’s post for all companies—even if focus groups are not in your budget. (Click on the image for a larger view.)

“Let’s take for example the FastLane blog. One of the key goals of that blog was “to share information about its products and to start a dialogue between GM leaders and customers”. So a key metric would be to see how many times customers wrote a comment. FastLane has about 100 people commenting on the blog each month, which is equivalent to gaining customer insight on products and brands from a traditional focus group. We estimated that the value of this was equivalent to running a focus group every month at the cost of …

…$15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year. Voila – there’s the value of the blogging benefit laid out in black and white.”

Charlene’s complete post is excellent, well-worth a read, as are the large number of comments from her readers.

I think that small companies can take a page from GM.  Customer thoughts, questions, ideas, insights, opinions, problems, wish lists—customer conversations of most any form—should be the daily bread-and-butter of every company. 

What is your company doing to start conversations with your customers and prospects?  Are you relying on traditional, one-way monologue marketing methods?  Press releases written for the press?  Brochures that talk about your view of your company? Or, are you adding to your marketing efforts some of the newer tools brought to us by so-called Web 2.0?  Blogging? Podcasting? Click on comments above to share your ideas.