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Posted by randfish
When we take a data- and profit-driven approach to marketing, we can get so caught up in maximizing returns that we forget we’re dealing with people, treating our customers as simple transactions. If we’re looking for loyalty, we need to change that approach.
In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand details the virtues of marketing for long-term success and moving away from that transactional model.
The Best Way to Suck at Marketing – Whiteboard Friday
For reference, here’s a still of this week’s whiteboard!
Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I wanted to talk about something I see from a lot of marketers where we just kill ourselves, people. We’re dying. We’re really sucking at our jobs, and the reason seems to be very consistent. It seems like this is almost the best way, the most popular way to suck at marketing. I’ll show you what I’m talking about.
So here’s our marketer, and he or she has good intentions in mind, but he goes out and looks at every opportunity with the same lens on. So goes out and looks at partnerships and sees only the possibility of business development. Goes out and looks at other blogs and other places in the industry where they might contribute and sees only a guest post opportunity, a chance to earn a link. Goes and looks at their landing pages and sees customers, potential customers coming to their site and thinks only: “How many? What’s the highest percent of those people that I can possibly convert to put in their credit card right now and buy something or make a transaction happen?”
They look at conferences and events and see only, “All right, how do I speak there?” Or “Should I sponsor it?” And “How do I get the most customers I possibly can out of that event? How do I get coverage from press, media, and bloggers? How do I turn this advertising placement into ROI? How do I turn these people on social media, who are interested in my topic, into people who follow me, become my customers, and amplify my content?”
This transactional model of thinking is actually really similar to how we do a lot of discussion in the marketing field. I’m guilty of this myself. I talk about: “Oh, well, if you’re looking for folks on social media, how do you turn them into followers of yours? How do you turn them into amplifiers?”
These are important topics. They’re good tactics, but this view, this idea that all these people are just a chance to make money, just an opportunity, it’s almost like the prostitution of marketing. If you think about the difference between dating and paying for a physical relationship, they’re thought of in such different ways. One has all sorts of positive and romantic and long-term associations in the world, and the other has incredibly negative connotations. I won’t get into the morality of our different views on these things, but this same thinking applies in the marketing world. We’ve all been on the receiving end of it. We’ve all been these people who are reached out to by this transactional marketer.
Transactional marketing results in only one thing — transactional relationships. Those transactional relationships are representative because every interaction is viewed exclusively through this “how are you going to become money for me,” which is an ugly, ugly way to think and an ugly way to be thought of. We all can feel it when it’s coming from someone else. It means treating people merely as conduits. They’re conduits for either attracting or becoming customers. When you think in this model, you prioritize something that’s actually dangerous to your long-term success — your short-term success.
It’s funny how the inverse correlation works. But if you’re constantly focused on the short-term return over the long-term relationship or relationship potential, the transactional model means that people and customers are going to abandon your brand as soon as it’s no longer the best transaction for them because they have no preexisting relationship. They have no loyalty. They have no love for you or your company or your product. It’s merely, “What are you doing for me right now because I’m giving you dollars?”
No one is cheering for your success. That’s so frustrating. How do you build a community? How do you build a social following? How do you attract an audience if no one’s cheering for your success? These folks are somewhere between ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic.
I’m sure you can think of brands. A lot of times people complain about this when it comes to utilities. Think of your relationship with your cable television provider or with an airline with whom you’ve been very disappointed. These kinds of classic transactional models apply. There’s no brand loyalty. Occasionally, when there is, it’s so special, so unique, so rare and weird, that we talk about it and blog about it and tweet about it and share it. Perhaps the worst part is there’s no long-term magnification.
One of the things that I always talk about, that Moz always talks about, and that we’ve had a lot of success in investing in channels of all kinds is that because there is a long-term focus, because there’s a relationship that’s being built, we are essentially biasing to get long-term returns over short-term returns. That means, over the long term, more and more people magnifying, amplifying, saying nice things, helping us out when they don’t need to because they have that connection with the brand.
If you’re missing that, the flywheel that you should be building with things like SEO, with things like social media marketing, with things like content marketing encounters too much friction, and it actually becomes a transactional model, just like paid advertising, and you lose a ton of the benefit that you would normally get from inbound channels. So don’t do it.
Instead of doing this, I would urge you to seek common ground with every kind of relationship that you build and seek common ground apart from purely the relationship, although business and professional topics are certainly great places to start with those. If you can find the things that you have in common — these two for these guys — among any of these kinds of partners that you’re interacting with and any type of outreach that you’re doing, any type of relationship that you encounter, it’s going to remove the purely transactional from the model.
The thing is it has to be authentic. You can’t do this in such a way that you’re sort of going down a checklist of, “Oh, yeah, hi Fred. It’s nice to meet you. Are you also a Seahawks fan, because I am a fan of this football team?” It’s insanity. It’s obvious.
Authentically seeking out relationships as you’re going relationship building, rather than biasing and prioritizing the transactional model, can be felt in every interaction that you have. Go out of your way to help. Go out of your way to help, and do it before you’re asked to do it.
One of the things that I love to do is when I encounter someone who impresses me, a product that impresses me, a company that impresses me, I like to share it. Because I have a reasonably nice social following, that actually turns into a lot of amplification, and those people are often very appreciative. But when someone shares something of mine, even if they have five followers on Twitter, no presence on Facebook, they pinned something on Pinterest, and they have four followers on their Pinterest board, it doesn’t matter. Especially if they’re doing it before there’s any kind of interaction or before there’s any kind of ask from me, it shows me that they truly care and they value something of mine, and that feels good. That’s a great way to start a relationship.
Don’t negotiate hard to get every last penny. I think that one of the things that we’re trained to do again as marketers is, in these kinds of marketing opportunities, we go out and we see, “Well, what’s the maximum that I can possibly get? I’m going to push this other person up against the wall until they’re getting minimum return and I’m getting maximum return.”
This is actually a terrible way to build a relationship. Of course, it results in this feature where people abandon the brand as soon as you’re not providing the best service to them or as soon as you’re not the best transactional option for them.
So if you can follow these things and go and change the way you do outreach, the way you do social media marketing, the way you do business development, the way you do advertising placements, the way you do pitches, generally speaking, I think you’re going to see a much greater return.
All right, everyone. Hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next time. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
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I recently came across a series of articles that talk about how cancer is caused by body getting out of its pH balance, basically becoming an acidic environment. It turns out that dr. Otto Heinrich Warburg discovered this in 1923, and won a Nobel prize in 1931 for this research. In his scientific work “The Metabolism of Tumours […] Continue reading →
Posted by jennita
Let’s be real here, measuring your social efforts is a pain in the butt. I mean, there are tons of metrics to track, and data to look at, but actually knowing if you’re making an impact to the organization, that’s a bit trickier. Right? It’s simple to track followers and see which platforms send you traffic, but how do you know that you’re meeting your goals? How do you make sure everyone understands social’s impact on the organization?
Follower counts are boooooooring.
These are the types of questions I often hear when people are grasping with “proving their worth” or getting management and other team members on board with making social a focus. It’s so easy to get caught up in doing the things, that you sometimes forget to measure and understand why the things need to be done.
Today I want to walk you through the process we use here at Moz for measuring our social efforts. This is a process we’re constantly working to improve, and we have just recently added new metrics and changed our goals a bit. It’s something that you don’t do once, then set aside.
Before I dig into the specific metrics, it’s important to take a look at your business goals. At Moz, we use the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) system throughout the organization. This helps to ensure that we’re all measuring things in a similar way and that we’re all working toward meeting and impacting the company’s overall objectives.
Since social media is pretty top-of-the-funnel, you’ll often have goals around increasing engagement and traffic to your site, or growing community and improving customer service, and not as much around increasing sales or subscriber numbers. Moz has always been a very customer/community-centered organization, so while the community team will always be focused on customer service and expanding the community, on a quarterly basis we additionally focus on helping to meet the goals of the marketing team as a whole.
Let’s take a look at one of these examples:
Marketing Objective: Increase Site Traffic, Engagement, and Customer Flow through Site Funnel
Key Result: Improve Non-paid traffic to the site from all sources by 25% by end of Q2
Social roadmap: Increase engagement with community by 5% on Social channels in order to increase traffic from social by 15%
Ok, so you know how you want to use social media to reach goals for your organization. Engagement is a great goal, because it can impact the business by increasing traffic, growing brand awareness, talking with community members, showing your voice. But “engagement” isn’t a simple number like followers. It’s a fuzzy word we like to use to mean “interactions with your brand.” Plus, every social channel is completely different, and engagement isn’t the same for each, so how can you measure it? On top of that, how are you going to gather all the information? Which tools will you use, or do you have to go to each network to grab the info?
But what if I told you that actually all the social networks (including your blog!) really do have the same engagement metrics? Several years ago, Avinash Kaushik wrote a post where he touts the best social media metrics are Conversation, Amplification, Applause, and Economic value.
We’ve adopted this method of engagement tracking, and actually use this not only for our social sites, but also for engagement on the blog and in other areas of the site. Let me explain what each of these means for different platforms, and how they’re really all the same. 🙂
Conversation rate – This one is fairly straightforward in that it’s based on the number of conversations per post. On Twitter, this is replies to a tweet, or on Pinterest, Facebook, and Instagram, it’s a comment on the pin, post, or photo.
Amplification rate – Any time a post is retweeted or re-shared, it’s being amplified. All the networks allow you to do this, so think of this one as the number of re-pins, retweets, or reshares of a particular post.
Applause rate – Every social network out there has an “easy” touch point to show appreciation, or applause, if you will. Twitter has favorites, Facebook has likes, Google+ has plusses, heck even most blogs (such as our own) have thumbs up or up-votes. So the applause rate is based on the number of “likes” each post gets.
Economic value – This is the sum of short- and long-term revenue and cost savings. Now, I have to be honest, we don’t have the economic value part all worked out yet for the community side of things yet. But it will be a focus over the next few months to have things set up correctly.
Relative Engagement Rates – This is something that actually gets me all giddy. 😀 So, you have all these engagement metrics, but what do those numbers even mean? How can you compare the conversation rate on Facebook with the conversation rate on Instagram? This is where the relative rates come in, think of it as the average number of conversations happening per post, per follower (fan, encircle, etc.).
Think about it this way, using the relative engagement rates, you can start to compare followers to followers on different networks. Now, Facebook and Twitter (or Pinterest, or G+, or Instagram, etc.) are obviously not the same, but if you can determine the engagement rate per follower, per channel, you can then work to improve those rates accordingly.
This way, when you increase your follower count, you can also focus on sustaining (which is actually an improvement all on its own) or improving the engagement rate per follower. So you can show your boss or client, that not only have you increased followers, you’ve also increased engagement per follower. And at this point, the traffic to the site from social has probably increased as well.
Ok, these numbers aren’t rocket science, and honestly they’re not that hard to get, I mean it’s mostly math. But the very smart folks over at TrueSocialMetrics have made it super easy on all of us by essentially creating the tool that Avinash pleaded for in his initial post. (Also, bravo on seeing a need and making it happen!)
As I mentioned previously, you could go about grabbing these numbers on your own and calculating them by hand… but why in the world would you do that when TrueSocialMetrics has already done all the work for you?
Your first step is to run over to TrueSocialMetrics and sign up for a free account. With the free plan you get 12 social networks and a month of data history. I personally prefer the “small” plan which is only $30/month and gives you a year of data history. (FYI, we have no affiliation with them, we’re just a happy customer!)
Once you sign up, you’ll add connections to all your social networks, including your blog, and then start calculating the data right away. The initial dashboard looks something like this:
Holy numbers, Batman! Remember, right now we’re just at the point of tracking the data, we’ll make this look a bit prettier in the next step.
Here at Moz, we capture our metrics on a weekly basis, and then send a monthly email to the entire staff, showing how we did during the previous month. We’ve toyed with a number of ways to show this data, and make it clear what’s moving the needle.
Every Monday morning, Megan logs into TrueSocialMetrics and grabs the following numbers for each channel for the previous week, and adds them to our spreadsheet:
What I like about this is that you’re essentially using this for data storage, and anyone can do it. It’s not a method that only one person knows how to do, it’s a simple process of adding numbers to a spreadsheet. Then you’ll make something a bit easier to digest that you send around to the rest of the team, or to your client.
Having the data and doing something with the data are two different things. Not only do you need to use the information to help meet your goals, but there are always other folks who are dying to know the ROI of what you do each day. So how can you take these metrics, and report them to the team in a way that is easily digestible? In a way that shows performance over time and helps everyone understand what’s going on from a social perspective.
The first thing we did, was to create a Community Action Plan, which is a quick and easy way to see where we’re at with reaching our goals at any given time. It shows our weekly KPIs, the baseline for each metric, the percent increase for this current period, our goal by the end of the period, and where we’re at with that goal.
On a weekly basis we grab the data, throw it in the spreadsheet, and then our action plan magically shows us how we’re doing against our goals. I <3 magic.
You can download a sample version of spreadsheet that we use for this here:
Sample Social Media Action Plan
In addition to having this easy-to-read dashboard, we also send out a monthly email to the entire staff which shows our engagement rates over the past six months, traffic from the social channels, as well as a few other community metrics we look at that aren’t social specific. We lovingly call this email the “Community Chronicle.” 🙂
Here’s a taste of what it looks like this:
Notice the downward spiral of Facebook engagement and traffic, while Twitter continues to soar? This is a trend we’ve been noticing for the past few months, ever since Facebook made some algo changes to their feeds that shows less and less updates from brands. *insert sad face here*
But this is exactly the kind of trend we want to know about, so we can react to it. We’ve been testing various ways of increasing engagement on Facebook, and we’ve seen a slight up-tick. We’ll all surely be watching this over the next few months to see if we can get those numbers back up organically, or if we’ll be forced to pay the man! The Facebook man that is.
Well, now it’s your turn to take action. Capturing the data is the easy part, the tough part is to do something with it. You’ll need to decipher the trends, determine when to make changes, what works, and what doesn’t work. Since it can be different for every organization, I’d love to see how you set up your action plans and if you add other metrics to it. If you do create one, send it over, I’ll add a link in this post.
Social media can be a tough one to explain to the boss/client, but it doesn’t have to be. Put it into simple terms and track it over time. Let me know how it goes!
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