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Do you spend a lot of time knee-deep in Google Analytics, looking at the rise and fall of pageviews, unique visitors and referred traffic? While it pays to know your audience, focusing too much on the numbers isn’t the best use of your time. To gain more value from your marketing blog, think less about organic traffic growth and more about the impact of your blog on your pipeline.

A corporate blog’s success isn’t measured in pageviews or any other traffic metric. Why not? Well, your objectives are totally different. You aren’t trying to amass impressions to generate advertising views, which is the prevailing model used by most of the blogs you probably read. Rather, you want to attract attention that will translate to inquiries from prospects, who you then hope to advance through the sales cycle.

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All the buzz has been focused on online and social media marketing, but it would be unwise to forget about direct mail. According to the Direct Marketing Association, direct mail marketing is set to increase by more than $1 billion in 2010. In 2009, $44.4 billion was spend on direct mail, with the 2010 total expected to reach $45.5 billion.

The DMA has also found that non-catalog direct mail is still delivering a solid ROI. For every dollar spent on non-catalog direct, the DMA found that it returned $15.22 this year. E-mail, on the other hand, isn’t as effective as the marketing community once believed. Commercial e-mail led to $26 billion in sales in 2009 — compared to $445.8 billion for non-catalog direct mail.

[Via deliver magazine]