http://offers.hubspot.com/marketing-benchmarks-from-7000-businesses
HubSpot has just released its Marketing Benchmarks From 7,000 Businesses report, and found some cheery news about blogging.
Its blogging benchmarks studied the impact that the monthly volume of blog articles has on inbound traffic at both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies, at both small and large companies.
Companies that publish 15+ blogs per month garner 5X the traffic than companies that don't blog at all. Small businesses can expect even better results: those of 10 or fewer employees tend to see the highest gains in traffic when they publish more blogs.
The average company can expect 45% growth in traffic from increasing total blog articles from 11-20 to 21-50 per month. And B2Cs can expect a 59% increase in traffic from growing total blog articles from 100 to 200 total.
So blogging can generate traffic and, if used well, can generate actual leads. Companies that increase blogging from 3-5 times monthly to 6-8X times almost double their leads. Also true, B2B companies that blog just once or twice per month generate 70% more leads than competitors who don’t maintain a blog. "In other words, blogging even just a little bit can make a big dent on your leads goal if you previously weren't blogging at all," concludes HubSpot.
Blogging is not as common among the Fortune 500 companies as one might expect. August 2012 findings from the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth are that 28% of Fortune 500 companies (139) have public-facing corporate blogs in 2012. That 28% represents a 5% point increase from 23% in 2011 and 2010, and a 75% rise from 2008.
The 139 Fortune 500 corporations with blogs represented 54 of 71 industries in the Fortune 500. Of those industries, telecommunications led in adoption percentage, with 40% of its companies maintaining a blog (6 of the 15). In second place were commercial banks (30%; 6 of 20), followed by utilities (27%; 6 of 22) and specialty retailers (25%; 7 of 28). Some industries have none (e.g., pulp and paper, with no direct-to-public sales).
