Blogging, The New Telemarketing

Back in the 1980s it was widely known that telemarketing was the most cost efficient means of marketing for most businesses. That’s why everyone was doing it. For just a few pennies per phone call, you could reach your target audience at prime time when they were most available to discuss what you had to offer. Sure, you had hang ups, rude retorts, and lots of rejection, but for most companies, a single sell could pay for days or weeks of telephone calls. Not a bad ROI at all.

Telemarketing isn’t quite what it used to be. Even when the salesman called and people were rude in their response, they were talking to a real human being. Today, many companies are using automated dialers and computer-generated voices, which are ten times more annoying. I’d rather talk to the human telesales representative than C3PO.

Telemarketing’s Problem, Blogging’s Solution
Besides the automated dialers making telemarketing calls even more annoying, most people these days have called ID and screen their phone calls or just don’t answer the phone. With the don’t call list hanging over telemarketers’ heads, many companies have the additional expense of screening phone numbers in order to protect themselves from lawsuits or have diminished returns due to the cost of dialer technology, fewer results, and the higher cost of utilities. Telemarketing isn’t quite as cost efficient as it used to be.

Blogging, on the other hand, is. The advantages of blogging over telemarketing is that you can reach the right target audience for your product or service by allowing the right target audience to find you. It is less work to write daily keyword-rich posts that are found by people searching for information on your product or service than it is to buy a list, call the numbers, make the sales pitch, filter through rejection upon rejection, and then track your results and make sure the product is shipped to the right place. Spend $300 per month on a blog ghostwriter – compared to $300 per week on telemarketing in the 1980s – and you can get even better results. For many companies, one sale will more than make up for the expense.

One of our customers recently informed us that his company received three leads from their blog in one month. That’s a lead acquisition cost of $100. Multiply that by 12 and the cost of your leads is $3,600 for 36. Close on one of those leads on a product that will net you $10,000-$20,000 in revenue and you can see that the ROI is HUGE. And we’re talking about pre-qualified leads here. Blogging is targeted advertising at its best.

Telemarketing may not be as cost efficient as it was in the 1980s, but blogging, it seems, is turning into the most cost efficient means of marketing for the 21st century. That’s why companies are turning in their dialers for a blog ghostwriter.