Niche Market Development – The ROI of Blogging

Blogging Needs to Be a Part of Professional Services Business Development

Blogging has still not made great inroads in the world of CPA, law or consulting firm niche marketing, but there are plenty of great reasons to blog. Firms might be worried about the time, costs or resources involved, but when viewed through the lens of ROI, the value of blogging becomes significantly more apparent.

According to Rick Burns of HubSpot, the benefit of publishing a blog post is crystal clear and measurable: Each time you publish a blog post, you're purchasing an annuity.

He writes that, “Every time you write a blog article, you get an ongoing cash flow over the lifetime of your blog -- except instead getting cash each month, you get valuable search traffic.”

The ROI from blogging takes three forms:

Return on Spend (ROS): there’s no direct or out of pocket costs to do blogging, so consider this: one new engagement for your niche practice that can produce tens of thousands of dollars in revenue that starts with, or has a touch point in a blog posting, is Return on Spend at its very best.

Return on Influence (ROIN): a blog posting that reaches your suspects, leads, clients and referral sources can be at the heart of efforts to deliver thought leadership about a particular topic or issue of interest to the target markets in your niche. Here’s an even better way of leveraging ROIN: if the blog resonates with the eyeball it has reached, they’ll use e-mail and various social media platforms to pass it on to their friends, clients, fans, followers and referral sources.

Return on Personal Brand (ROP): CPA, lawyers and consultants know that 1:1 marketing is the most effective way of securing new business, and the ones that have been successful, are those who have built their personal network over a long period of years. With blogging, however, younger partners and rising stars can establish their subject matter expertise at no cost, other than the effort to write a few hundred words on a regular basis. Blogging accelerates the development of personal brands, and when done within the confines of niche market development, serves as one of the most effective tools for raising awareness and establishing personal credibility.

Last but not, there’s a direct financial benefit from blogging. Let’s say that you’re an accounting or law firm with an estate planning niche, and let’s say that you’ve optimized your blog to highlight the long tail keyword phrase “Estate Planning for Business Owners, Houston”. Using Google Adwords or other new, powerful marketing software, you can find out how much it would cost your firm per click if a suspect clicks on your ad that they’ll see if they search in this term.

Say that a keyword PPC campaign promoted around “Estate Planning for Business Owners, Houston” in Houston costs $3.00/click and over time, you get 1,000 clicks on your blog posting. That’s the equivalent value of $3,000 in paid advertising you don’t need to spend if your blog is optimized to show up on first page rankings! Here’s another insight: your blog will enjoy more credibility than a paid ad and will therefore most likely be selected by the searcher.

Bottom line: There’s ROI (ROS, ROIN, ROP) in blogging, and the investment is minimal.