Agency blogs
I talk to a lot of agency leaders who are very proud of their blogs, but don’t really talk much about what value it adds to the business. Of course, many of these professionals made their marks as journalists and, therefore, look to their blogs as hobbies. But these blogs are often carried under the banner of the agencies they run. So I ask: Why do you blog? What’s the ROI back to the agency?
We blog because as an agency founder, I expect my senior team to have an opinion on events/trends/issues impacting our industry.
Although we hope it will attract prospects, we do it to provide value to anyone who reads it.
We don’t look at the ROI in terms of landing accounts, but instead consider it an education expense. We expect our people to spend some of each day thinking about the industry and putting their thoughts on “paper.”
Our blog gives a great inside view of life at our agency. It’s the ‘transparency’ that we ask our corporate clients to embrace. For clients that want to know the ‘real’ people, our voice, our results, our other clients, they see the discussions practically in real time. For prospective employees, they also learn more about how we operate, think and our corporate culture. (We even provide guidance on what not to do in an interview.)
It has also been a great marketing tool for our company - bringing in traffic and leads to our corporate website.
Hey Rockstar,
I bet you won’t get a lot of responses as there is no direct ROI for social networking or blogging.
The value lies in that extra page or mention of a client or campaign that will be indexed in a Google search. The more pages and keywords, the higher your corporate site goes on a search engine. The ROI is indirect but the value is there.
Three major reasons:
“Google juice” - the blog puts my name on th e first page of Google results making it easier for people to find me.
Demonstration - shows clients and prospects that we know and use the tools we recommend to them.
Time saver - allows prospective clients to see how we think, how we work and who we are.
Of all of those, only the first is measurable, but considering what many companies spend on SEO, it’s a pretty good one.