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Blogging is a lot like meditation. The people who practice it regularly swear it works. But it was historically hard to measure the benefits — until science advanced to the point that we could measure heart rate, hormone levels, brain activity, and more to see what's actually doing to the body.
Similarly, with the help of more robust marketing automation tools and website analytics, we now have tools to accurately measure content marketing ROI. You can see how it directly generates more sales qualified leads and improves close rates. You no longer have to imagine how blogging can increase revenues in your B2B technology company.
Thanks to martech, marketers can see the true potential of blogging across the B2B space. And you can also identify more quickly when a blog isn't delivering an ROI and gain insights to improve your content strategy. Here's the marketing ROI you should expect from your own blogging efforts.
More sales qualified leads generated
70% of B2B buyers would rather learn about a company through non-salesy content than an advertisement. And yes, they still prefer to read it. Videos, interactive content, and other formats certainly play their part. But blogging helps you generate the most sales qualified leads in the B2B technology industry.
We’re not the only ones who think so. 60% of marketers say blogging delivers the highest quality leads.
Why? Because the buyer is taking the time to read and learn. Often, they're finding posts that they're actively searching for in Google. They don't feel sold. Rather, they feel educated, respected, and valued.
Blogging allows you to connect with your buyer on a human level and fill that trust meter. When you can speak to your buyer persona's specific needs and goals and add real value to their lives, you can generate a consistent flow of high quality leads for your B2B technology company.
These interactions amount to content marketing ROI as you can track the number of leads generated through your blogging efforts. You can then see what percentage goes on to be paying customers and calculate the average order value (AOV) and customer lifetime value (CLV), and other critical KPIs.
To further enhance the blogging ROI on your blog, align your blogging efforts with sales enablement content. You'll increase sales conversions and sales-marketing alignment at the same time.
So to directly answer the question at hand: what marketing ROI should B2B technology companies expect from blogging? They should expect more sales qualified leads and faster, higher close rates on those leads.
Greater search engine visibility
When people come across your content via a search engine, they're most often very close to buying. They may need just a little more information to take that leap. When people find something because of SEO, the average close rate is 14.6% — compared to around 2-3% with direct advertising.
If you want to be visible in search engines, you need regular content that search engines can understand and your target customer interacts with regularly.
Blogs do this.
Blogging can increase the number of search engine indexed pages by over 400%. It's up to you to employ other SEO best practices to get those pages to page one. Fortunately, blogging gives you the quality content people are searching for.
Better social media visibility
75% of B2B buyers and around 84% of C-suite think of social media as a tool to make smart buying decisions. They follow helpful B2B technology brands. And they pay attention to the recommendation of influencers in the B2B technology space.
Blogging gives you cost-effective, regular content to share and promote on social media to build your social media brand in a place where your target audience is making business decisions.
When social media referral traffic converts on your site, that's blogging ROI.
The long-term payback
When you run a pay per click (PPC) campaign, you pay for every click. You can typically expect around a 3-4% conversion rate. But once you stop actively managing that campaign, the clicks stop. So do those visits. It’s a pop, then a drop.
You could just let that campaign keep running. But then there goes your Quality/Relevance score. Ads just keep getting more expensive.
Enter the blog post. You do invest more time and money into planning and creating it. But a good post can stay on your website for years and keep paying you back.
Initially, you'll need to drive traffic to it through marketing automation. But over time, it generates its own organic traffic through search engines and social sharing.
A blog post can lead to a significantly higher number of visitors to your website over many years. And it just keeps on generating sales qualified leads for you without you having to pay for every click or do much more than monitor and tweak the copy from time to time.
The conversion rate on a blog varies. However, once you have a post that's generating significant traffic, it's worth investing extra time into optimizing its sales qualified lead generation power so you get the highest content marketing ROI. Unlike ads, your blogs become an asset that grows organic traffic.
And blogging supports all of your marketing efforts to the point that marketers who prioritize blogging experience a 13X greater ROI on all of their marketing.
Want to learn more about increasing your marketing ROI? Download our case study to learn how we helped a B2B technology company generate 20X ROI and 83% more organic leads by leveraging the power of strategy, content, and marketing automation 
