ROI of Business Blogs

Forrester Research has released a new report on The ROI Of Blogging, available to anyone with $379 burning a hole in their pocket. For those of us who don't want to spend that kind of cash on a 15 page report, Forrester blogger Charlene Li provides a summary and excerpt. While the value of business blogging is widely accepted, it can be difficult to quantify that value, and Forrester's aim here is to provide businesses with a method for measuring the value of their blogging efforts.

Some potential benefits mentioned in the summary are increased brand visibility, increased sales efficiency, and savings on customer insight. Charlene reveals some interesting details on this last benefit, regarding the value of customer insight in their case study of General Motor's FastLane blog:

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.

Small businesses may not have the budget to run focus groups in order to learn what their customers want, but a simple blog is within the reach of everyone. There's no need to limit yourself to posting news and announcements on your business blog. Instead, consider telling your customers about a new product you're considering and solicit their feedback. Ask visitors to comment about what they think of your new service offering.

The important thing is to actively encourage participation among the customers who visit your blog. If you make it easy for customers to tell you what they want, and what they think of your business, you'll be able to get significant value from your blogging efforts.