Digital marketing techniques are having a profound impact on small business performance. Now you can publish blogs that generate new sales leads at a lower cost per lead than traditional techniques, and free-up more time to run your business.
Small businesses are responding to the challenging economic climate by consciously reviewing the techniques they use to generate new business. The trend is away from traditional techniques like exhibitions and outbound calling and more towards blogging and social media. What’s more, this change appears to be having a positive impact on profit margins too!
Savings of up to 60%
Research published by Hubspot in 2012 reveals small firms are reallocating up to 21% of their marketing budget towards blogging and social media. These firms are finding that digital techniques can generate new business at a lower cost per lead. Some 52% of respondents felt blogs produced leads at a lower cost than traditional techniques whilst 45% claimed the same for social media.
Aligning blogs and social media to “Inbound” marketing, and tactics such as trade shows and telemarketing to “Outbound” marketing, Hubspot calculated the average cost per lead based on respondent input.
They found that the average outbound cost per lead came to $346 whereas the value for inbound leads was $135 – a massive 60% difference! Given the current economic environment, it’s no wonder small firms are re-allocating marketing budget towards blogging and social media.
Hubspot also asked respondents to rank blogging and the main social media channels in order of lead generation importance.
All channels scored 60% or more in terms of their usefulness in generating new leads. Even more revealing was that 25% said blogging was “critical” in terms of importance and a further 34% ranked blogging as “important” as shown in the diagram below.
Chart 1: Importance of blogging and social media to new lead generation activities:
The hidden costs of social media and blogs
Whilst digital techniques are proving to be more cost effective than traditional lead generation methods, they still have associated costs that can have a big impact on small business performance.
The sheer time and effort required to maintain a social media presence or create a quality blog is proving too much for many small business owners. Research elsewhere indicates that it takes three or more hours to create a single blog post. If you wanted to create and publish, say, three posts a week, you’d need to find an extra day on top of your already busy schedule.
You may be like a number of small business owners who want to spend less time managing social media and blogging; a third of SME’s feel this way. Understandably, you need to devote more time to running your business. However, if you stop publishing blogs you’ll be back to relying on traditional lead generation techniques and the consequent impact on your bottom line.
The opportunity cost of your time
As the owner of a small business you’ll be stretched trying to cover all the different aspects of your business. This makes you best qualified to act as thought leader. You’ll also be ideally placed to interpret an item of industry news and highlight the implications for your audience.
However, if you don’t enjoy writing or don’t feel you have the right style or approach, you will end up spending longer than is necessary on the task of blog writing; that’s wasted time that could be invested more productively elsewhere in your business.
What’s more, the material you publish is going to directly impact how your business brand is perceived by existing customers and prospects alike. The content has to be relevant and engaging, yet still include a subtle call-to-action. Plus, your audience will view typos and mistakes as badly as those found in a glossy sales brochure; blogging and social media for businesses demands higher standards than for personal use.
Unless you enjoy writing and creating charts, graphs, etc., you may be better off handing the task over to someone in your business able to focus fully on the job, or outsource the task to a professional. You’ll then be able to stay in control of the message by reviewing and influencing content before it’s published.
If you were to allocate the task of publishing just one blog post a week to someone else, not only would you be generating leads at a lower cost than traditional methods, but you would have an extra three hours a week to devote to running other parts of your business!
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Ghost blog writing and outsourced marketing for small businesses
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