Last week, my colleagues Tom Elgar and David Kirk attended the RSA conference in San Francisco. For those who don't know, the RSA organizes worldwide security events, and for many technology firms, the annual USA conference almost counts as an 'industry tax'. Whilst there, Tom and David informally surveyed 28 business leaders on their content marketing activities - particularly, how they rated them in terms of ROI and Ease of Execution.

The results (below) are fascinating. Speaking at a conference is valued as providing the most perceived ROI despite being, in many ways, the least quantifiable activity. It just shows the power of human-to-human interaction - as has been said many times, nothing quite beats word-of-mouth and recommendations from someone you trust, so events should remain a crucial part of any businesses' activity, however digital they are!

On the other hand, the survey seems to make clear that technology firms are not taking social media and blogging terribly seriously in terms of ROI, despite ranking them as some of the easiest activities to execute. It's very easy to blog and do social media badly after all - but we've found that in businesses across various industries that there is a clear correlation between companies engaging online and revenue growth. 

For instance, in our survey of the top 50 Insurance Brokers, we found that the top 10 performers in terms of social media and content marketing activity, had an average revenue growth of 8.9%, compared to a 7.9% in the rest of the  sample. Simply Business, ranked first in  terms of Passle scoring, enjoyed a 30.9%  increase in growth.