Introducing a whole new concept to the world of social business and social care: cost-per-retention. What exactly is it and why is it so important?
It has long been said (and shown through some pretty simple calculations) that it is far less expensive to keep existing clients than it is to acquire new clients. In fact, last year, Merchant Warehouse put together a great little infographic that showcases exactly that. This infographic showed that it is, on average, six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one, and that is due in large part to efforts such as loyalty programs.
But to say that acquiring a new customer is six times more expensive does not mean to imply that the cost of retaining a customer is minimal. While we often talk about the CPA or Cost Per Acquisition of a new customer, social media in particular gives us the ability to start placing more emphasis on CPR or Cost Per Retention (ironically, CPR is an appropriate term as companies often struggle to keep their customer base alive).
In order to understand your cost-per-retention, we need to start at the beginning and look at things like CPA and LTV (Life Time Value of a customer).
What Is CPA?
CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, refers to the cost a brand incurs in order to acquire a new client. Now you can either look at that from the perspective of total average cost-per-acquisition, or you can break that down into cost-per-acquisition-per-initiative. The two are distinctly different and lead to differences in your operations efficiency.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
To start, let’s take a look at overall CPA. This is a pretty simple calculation. First, select a period; for argument’s sake, let’s take a month. Now look at how many new clients you have acquired in that month. Next, look at how much you invested in all of your marketing and advertising initiatives. This includes PPC campaigns on social media or Google AdWords, media buys in traditional media, specific campaigns or promotions, and anything else you did in an effort to sign new clients. Now divide that total investment (let’s not get into the more complex issue of factoring in overhead and operating expenses for this example) and divide it by the number of new clients you acquired. The result is your CPA. (For the sake of this discussion, we assume a direct correlation between the clients you acquired in the month and the expenditures you incurred in that same month.)
If you were to look at initiative-specific CPA, you would need to evaluate each of those customer acquisition campaigns individually, see what led to new customers, how much was invested, and conduct the same calculation (investment divided by the number of new signups) to determine your CPA on each initiative. Don’t be surprised if your CPA appears high. This is where the relationship between CPA and LTV starts to come into focus.
What Is LTV?
LTV, CLTV or Customer Lifetime Value, is the total value of a customer over the course of their relationship with your business. Let’s say, for example, that you run an enterprise SaaS organization. Each month, subscribers pay $500 to access your software and the average customer uses the software for five years. This would mean that your LTV is $30,000. Assuming a 3 to 1 ratio of LTV to CPA, this means that spending about $10,000 to acquire a new customer isn’t completely absurd.
Of course, the goal of any business should be to decrease CPA and increase LTV. That is why companies – particularly subscription-based companies – are constantly making changes and introducing new features in an effort to keep customers around a little bit longer. And therein lies the concept of cost-per-retention.
What is CPR, or Cost-Per-Retention?
The name alone seems more or less self-explanatory; cost-per-retention is the amount of money that your brand must invest in order to retain clients. As noted above, just because it is, according to some reports, six times more expensive to acquire a new client, that does not mean that it is ‘free’ or even all that inexpensive to retain clients.
Quite a bit of an investment has to be made in order to keep clients coming back. Attrition – the loss of clients – is going to happen in any industry. In some industries, particularly those where brand or product differentiation is minimal, it is going to happen at a much higher and faster rate than others. So, what kind of an investment needs to be made in order to retain clients?
Cost-per-retention is going to be an amalgam of a number of initiatives. There are superficial efforts, like loyalty clubs, specials and rewards programs that are clearly seen by the audience, and then there are those investments that are less visible. First, let’s look at the cost-per-retention of some of those externally visible initiatives.
Running a loyalty program or offering returning clients discounts, special pricing or freebies; those costs need to be calculated. In other words, what are the ‘lost revenues’ so to speak of offering these kinds of benefits? And how much greater is the LTV of the customers that participate in these initiatives? Determine those two figures and make the same calculations as we did for the CPA and original LTV, but limit it to each retention-specific initiative. Now, what about those internal costs?
Let’s take a look at an example such as social care. (If you’re not familiar with the concept of social care, you can read up on it here. Essentially, it is the practice of offering customer service on social media.) Social care can be a hugely cost-effective practice. Some of the benefits can include improved response time, higher volume of customer issues addressed, decreased customer service overhead, and much more. But there is still a cost to offering social care.
While it might be perceived as a differentiating value added that retains a greater number of clients, there is still a cost to operating a social care team (or customer service in the traditional sense). This is an area where that cost will have to be determined, then weighed against the ratio of client retention versus attrition. Determine how much more you are making from the extended LTV as a result of offering this service.
There are also other initiatives that might seem like your average marketing practice, but also contribute to cost-per-retention. Take your company newsletter, for example. Operating a newsletter or running email marketing initiatives is, in part, a way to drive conversions. But there are plenty of instances where a newsletter is designed to maintain interest in a product or retain a client’s subscription, or promote one of the aforementioned retention-based programs.
The same holds true for activities on social networks. Maintaining brand awareness and driving engagement from existing clients is crucial to brand differentiation. How can these kinds of initiatives be measured? The practice remains more or less constant. Determine which of these initiatives, or what ratio of these initiatives, rather, are designed to retain clients. Then associate the relative cost of the overall initiative to the retention-based ratio of initiatives. Determine retention rates from individual practices, and calculate whether or not your efforts are generating profits.
Conclusion
Superficially, retention might not seem quite as expensive as acquisition, and for the most part that is true. But the important thing to keep in mind is the fact that we need to determine if the cost-per-retention outweighs the extended lifetime value, or ELTV.
Let’s go back to the initial example, where the initial LTV was $30,000, and the cost per acquisition, for argument’s sake, was $10,000. If we are running a retention program that costs us $1,800 for each user retained, that might look pretty good. But if the average ELTV is three months, or $1,500, we’re actually losing money on that investment.
It’s important to take a step back and evaluate how your marketing, customer service and client retention programs are helping drive additional revenues, because those reviews and studies don’t always take these kinds of issues into account.
What have you found to be the most successful retention program for your business? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
Introducing CPR: Cost-Per-Retention
/by Corey PadveenIntroducing a whole new concept to the world of social business and social care: cost-per-retention. What exactly is it and why is it so important?
It has long been said (and shown through some pretty simple calculations) that it is far less expensive to keep existing clients than it is to acquire new clients. In fact, last year, Merchant Warehouse put together a great little infographic that showcases exactly that. This infographic showed that it is, on average, six times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain one, and that is due in large part to efforts such as loyalty programs.
But to say that acquiring a new customer is six times more expensive does not mean to imply that the cost of retaining a customer is minimal. While we often talk about the CPA or Cost Per Acquisition of a new customer, social media in particular gives us the ability to start placing more emphasis on CPR or Cost Per Retention (ironically, CPR is an appropriate term as companies often struggle to keep their customer base alive).
In order to understand your cost-per-retention, we need to start at the beginning and look at things like CPA and LTV (Life Time Value of a customer).
What Is CPA?
CPA, or Cost Per Acquisition, refers to the cost a brand incurs in order to acquire a new client. Now you can either look at that from the perspective of total average cost-per-acquisition, or you can break that down into cost-per-acquisition-per-initiative. The two are distinctly different and lead to differences in your operations efficiency.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
To start, let’s take a look at overall CPA. This is a pretty simple calculation. First, select a period; for argument’s sake, let’s take a month. Now look at how many new clients you have acquired in that month. Next, look at how much you invested in all of your marketing and advertising initiatives. This includes PPC campaigns on social media or Google AdWords, media buys in traditional media, specific campaigns or promotions, and anything else you did in an effort to sign new clients. Now divide that total investment (let’s not get into the more complex issue of factoring in overhead and operating expenses for this example) and divide it by the number of new clients you acquired. The result is your CPA. (For the sake of this discussion, we assume a direct correlation between the clients you acquired in the month and the expenditures you incurred in that same month.)
If you were to look at initiative-specific CPA, you would need to evaluate each of those customer acquisition campaigns individually, see what led to new customers, how much was invested, and conduct the same calculation (investment divided by the number of new signups) to determine your CPA on each initiative. Don’t be surprised if your CPA appears high. This is where the relationship between CPA and LTV starts to come into focus.
What Is LTV?
LTV, CLTV or Customer Lifetime Value, is the total value of a customer over the course of their relationship with your business. Let’s say, for example, that you run an enterprise SaaS organization. Each month, subscribers pay $500 to access your software and the average customer uses the software for five years. This would mean that your LTV is $30,000. Assuming a 3 to 1 ratio of LTV to CPA, this means that spending about $10,000 to acquire a new customer isn’t completely absurd.
Of course, the goal of any business should be to decrease CPA and increase LTV. That is why companies – particularly subscription-based companies – are constantly making changes and introducing new features in an effort to keep customers around a little bit longer. And therein lies the concept of cost-per-retention.
What is CPR, or Cost-Per-Retention?
The name alone seems more or less self-explanatory; cost-per-retention is the amount of money that your brand must invest in order to retain clients. As noted above, just because it is, according to some reports, six times more expensive to acquire a new client, that does not mean that it is ‘free’ or even all that inexpensive to retain clients.
Quite a bit of an investment has to be made in order to keep clients coming back. Attrition – the loss of clients – is going to happen in any industry. In some industries, particularly those where brand or product differentiation is minimal, it is going to happen at a much higher and faster rate than others. So, what kind of an investment needs to be made in order to retain clients?
Cost-per-retention is going to be an amalgam of a number of initiatives. There are superficial efforts, like loyalty clubs, specials and rewards programs that are clearly seen by the audience, and then there are those investments that are less visible. First, let’s look at the cost-per-retention of some of those externally visible initiatives.
Running a loyalty program or offering returning clients discounts, special pricing or freebies; those costs need to be calculated. In other words, what are the ‘lost revenues’ so to speak of offering these kinds of benefits? And how much greater is the LTV of the customers that participate in these initiatives? Determine those two figures and make the same calculations as we did for the CPA and original LTV, but limit it to each retention-specific initiative. Now, what about those internal costs?
Let’s take a look at an example such as social care. (If you’re not familiar with the concept of social care, you can read up on it here. Essentially, it is the practice of offering customer service on social media.) Social care can be a hugely cost-effective practice. Some of the benefits can include improved response time, higher volume of customer issues addressed, decreased customer service overhead, and much more. But there is still a cost to offering social care.
While it might be perceived as a differentiating value added that retains a greater number of clients, there is still a cost to operating a social care team (or customer service in the traditional sense). This is an area where that cost will have to be determined, then weighed against the ratio of client retention versus attrition. Determine how much more you are making from the extended LTV as a result of offering this service.
There are also other initiatives that might seem like your average marketing practice, but also contribute to cost-per-retention. Take your company newsletter, for example. Operating a newsletter or running email marketing initiatives is, in part, a way to drive conversions. But there are plenty of instances where a newsletter is designed to maintain interest in a product or retain a client’s subscription, or promote one of the aforementioned retention-based programs.
The same holds true for activities on social networks. Maintaining brand awareness and driving engagement from existing clients is crucial to brand differentiation. How can these kinds of initiatives be measured? The practice remains more or less constant. Determine which of these initiatives, or what ratio of these initiatives, rather, are designed to retain clients. Then associate the relative cost of the overall initiative to the retention-based ratio of initiatives. Determine retention rates from individual practices, and calculate whether or not your efforts are generating profits.
Conclusion
Superficially, retention might not seem quite as expensive as acquisition, and for the most part that is true. But the important thing to keep in mind is the fact that we need to determine if the cost-per-retention outweighs the extended lifetime value, or ELTV.
Let’s go back to the initial example, where the initial LTV was $30,000, and the cost per acquisition, for argument’s sake, was $10,000. If we are running a retention program that costs us $1,800 for each user retained, that might look pretty good. But if the average ELTV is three months, or $1,500, we’re actually losing money on that investment.
It’s important to take a step back and evaluate how your marketing, customer service and client retention programs are helping drive additional revenues, because those reviews and studies don’t always take these kinds of issues into account.
What have you found to be the most successful retention program for your business? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
5 Blogging Worst Practices to Avoid
/by Corey PadveenBlogging is a popular activity, but there are some worst practices out there that all bloggers need to avoid.
Just as there exist best practices when it comes to different activities on social media, there exist worst practices. Sometimes, knowing about the worst practices can be just as valuable as knowing what you should be doing.
These are five things that bloggers often do, but that should be avoided at all costs. Some make you look deceptive or unprofessional, while others are simply in bad taste. Have a look and make sure you aren’t committing any of these blogging fouls.
Undated Articles
It might seem like it isn’t all that big of a deal, but it is. That goes double for a post that contains stats or any kind of data. Considering how quickly this environment shifts, it is extremely important that posts are dated so that readers know whether or not the information is still useful.
Consider it this way: if you’re writing an article about Facebook, and you don’t know much about the network, you’re going to want to do some research. If you come across a blog that states that Facebook has nearly a billion users, that post is somewhat outdated, and the information you’re reading is wrong. It won’t look too good if you decide to share it. So, for the sake of your readers, let them know when an article was published so they know whether or not it is still relevant.
Misspellings and Grammar
Again, this might not seen like it make much of a difference, but it speaks both to the ease of reading your article and to your level of professionalism. A slight typo here or there won’t cause people to flee from your blog, but if you display a total lack of writing ability, people will be hard pressed to return.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
Take a minute or two to gloss over what you have written and make sure that you have both corrected any spelling errors and implemented proper grammar techniques. It is a greater pet peeve of the online community than most people think.
Attribution
See that little line in italics underneath the photo above? That’s an attribution. Blogger often use images – whether they use them properly or not is not the case, but you should always use them legally – without providing an attribution. Take a second and add in the attribution; not just for legal reasons but for proper etiquette as well.
Attribution not only protects the you legally when it comes to your blog, but it also showcases another degree of professionalism on your blog. It isn’t hard to do, but it will make a difference.
State Your Sources
Up above, the use of statistics and data was referenced. Well, those statistics and data should be referenced as well. Blindly stating a fact or figure in your copy does not look good and takes away from the credibility of your article. Adding a link can make a world of difference.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
Even in cases where you know something to be true, or it is ‘common sense’, you should still find a source and link to it. And make sure it is a credible source. Linking to another unaccredited blog is worthless. Find a scholarly article or an official report and use that as a source. It will, once again, increase the validity of both your statement and the article as a whole.
No Train of Thought Writing
A blog might be a more personal way of communicating with your audience, but there should still be a clear arc that is followed over the course of your article. Yes, your blog might be a little more personable and conversational than a news article or report, but it is still a written publication. Keep that in mind.
Though you might have an urge to veer off on tangents when writing, staying on course will mean two things: greater audience retention (visitors reading the full article) and a more positive and lively conversation around the topic.
Conclusion
Writing a good blog is hard. Maintaining a level of value in everything you publish can be a time-consuming task, and part of that value is staying away from these worst practices. Doing that will help showcase your blog in a more positive light and generate ongoing interest from your audience.
What are some other pet peeves of yours when it comes to blogging? Share them with us in the comments below or on Twitter!
2014 Social Media Dictionary [INFOGRAPHIC]
/by Corey PadveenThere are a few important terms with which every social media marketer should be familiar. Luckily, they can reference the social media dictionary.
There are always new buzz terms and hot topics that seem to be making their way through the world of social media marketing. Luckily, Adestra has put together the social media dictionary for this year that captures a lot of those hot button terms and explains exactly what they mean.
Are there any terms you see here that you haven’t seen before? Tell us what you have learned from this social media dictionary either in the comments below or on Twitter!
The Three Ts of ContenTTT Creation – Type. Tone. Timing.
/by Corey PadveenWhen it comes to content creation, there are a few very important criteria to consider.
Your content creation process should not be a fly-by-night approach in the hopes that it resonates with your target audience. Effective content creation and promotion builds off of a carefully laid out content strategy.
In order to begin developing and optimizing that strategy, there are several considerations that need to be taken under advisement. Among those, one of the most important is going to be the Three Ts – Type, Tone, Timing.
While the Three Ts is not the only component that will factor into your content strategy, it is going to be a vital component with regards to development, delivery and consistent optimization.
Type
First and foremost, you’re going to want to figure out what type or types of content resonate most with the audience you are trying to market to on social media.
Early on in your social business strategy, you should have identified a target social client persona. This is the audience to whom you would like to share your message. It’s not some broad range of demographics – this is a specific person that you envision as a qualified prospect.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
Look at your historical engagement rates specifically with that group of users. What kind of content resonates most with them? Aggregate data might suggest that you only share images, because they generate significantly higher engagement rates, on average.
You should be looking at your own content and, more importantly, the content with which this audience is most likely to engage, and build your upcoming strategies with a focus on these types of content.
If links or text-based updates outperform images for your audience, modify or update your strategy accordingly.
Tone
Should you share content with a casual, airy tone of voice, or should you be more professional in your tone? Again, you’ll want to see exactly what tone of voice your target client persona tends to be most responsive to and focus your efforts there.
While social media is all about being social, people are social in very different ways. Of course you want your brand to be personable online, but sometimes that personality is a professional one sharing important information in a more serious tone. That said, there is also as much of a chance that your audience will be most responsive to and engage most with a friendly, laid back brand persona.
The key here is trying out different approaches and seeing where you’re finding the greatest results. Keep in mind, however, that it is your prospects’ opinions and engagement rates that should dictate how you position your brand, not necessarily the overall sentiment.
Timing
When are your prospects online? When are they most likely to engage with your content?
You’ll want to share content enough over the course of the day or week that your audience in its entirety is given a chance to engage, but you’ll want to reserve those calls-to-action and more important content for the times of day when your target client is online and ready to engage.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
Just like the tone of your content, this is going to take a little bit of trial and error. Take the time necessary to test content at different times of the day and figure out when you’re best suited to share business development-oriented content. Maybe you have great engagement at three in the afternoon, and only a small rate of engagement before nine in the morning. But if you see that the morning engagement is coming from the audience you are trying hardest to reach, that’s where you’ll want to focus your efforts.
Conclusion
Two things are quite clear: first, you should not rely on aggregate data to tell you how to structure your content strategy. When you’re first getting started, that might be a useful approach, but you will want to pay attention to the performance of your own content in order to determine how you will optimize your strategy moving forward.
Second, the most important thing to consider when developing or optimizing a strategy according to the Three Ts is your target client persona, not just the audience in general. This optimization process should be done with your business in mind. In order to do that, you will have to consider your target client and what they want to hear from you.
Try out the Three Ts the next time you conduct a content strategy audit and see what you learn about your audience!
Have you found a Three Ts strategy that works? Tell us about it in the comments below or on Twitter!
30 Digital Marketing Statistics You Shouldn’t Miss [INFOGRAPHIC]
/by Corey PadveenSome great digital marketing statistics not to be missed.
Thanks to the folks at Optimind, we have a great infographic here with some very interesting digital marketing statistics. Have a look at the data presented and let us know if any of these facts and figures surprised or shocked you!
Thought Leader Interview with Social Selling Expert Julio Viskovich
/by Corey PadveenWe took advantage of our relationship with social selling expert Julio Viskovich and decided to ask him a few questions about the field of social selling.
Not too long ago, we announced that t2 had teamed up with NexLevel Sales. Recently, we decided to reach out to the Forbes-ranked social selling expert Julio Viskovich, who heads up the NexLevel team. We wanted to get some detailed insights into a few questions around the concept of social selling. So, we decided to go to a renowned expert to get the answers.
How exactly would you define social selling, and what would you say are the biggest differences between social selling and conventional sales?
Social selling is interesting because it hasn’t quite been defined. The other part of it is that I see it as a separate entity from traditional selling only temporarily. What I mean by that is that I expect it to just become selling. It’s simply just the best way to sell and until it get utilized properly by the masses, we will have to continue to refer to it as social selling.
So to answer your question, social selling is utilizing social media and social to connect with prospects in the right place, with the right message, at the right time. Prospects are leaving hints about themselves and their business – be there to follow the trail.
Why do you think social selling is so much more effective than traditional sales practices?
Social selling is much more effective than traditional means because it provides salespeople with a mountain of information that they never had access to before. This means getting to know prospects better, building a relationship faster, creating instant rapport, and ultimately shortening the sales cycle.
Do you think there is one industry in particular where social selling will be more effective, or would you say it’s universal? Why?
Social selling definitely works better when you’re dealing with an industry that has adopted technology and social media. For example, technology companies like IBM, Oracle, Dell and others are encouraging most of their workforce to be on social media versus a manufacturing company who aren’t on board yet.
Have you found that there is a particular demographic that is more responsive to social selling than others?
I find that organizations that are leaders and innovators are the ones that are most responsive to social selling. This generally seems to include leadership teams that are tech savvy and concerned about improving processes. Older more traditional leadership teams, like many of us, are afraid of what they don’t know and are taking a more risk-averse approach and waiting until the entire mainstream market adopts it. In my opinion, the early bird gets the worm.
How can salespeople get started with social selling? What would you say is the most important habit to adopt?
Salespeople should get started and I recommend the following first steps:
1) Identify which social networks your prospects are one. Taking a buyer persona and mapping it back through demographics should tell you which networks they’re on.
2) The next step is to get on these networks and build out a professional and visually appealing profile.
3) Start listening. Spend two weeks observing the lingo and etiquette of each network and, if possible, access to training around these networks.
4) Share info that is valuable to your prospects and be there for them when they are asking questions. Don’t worry about creating content, there are myriads of it online. Be useful by sharing news and trusted industry info and insights.
Follow Julio on Twitter, and feel free to ask other social selling questions to t2 on Twitter!
10 Questions to Address in Your Social Media Audit
/by Corey PadveenThese are ten questions that should certainly be addressed when conducting your social media audit.
A social media audit can be an extremely valuable practice. It can provide you with some insight into your strengths, indicating where additional resources should be invested, as well as showcase weaknesses where you need to improve upon your performance or restructure a part of your strategy.
These ten questions are valuable inclusions in any social media audit, because they require you to take a step outside of your ownership and look critically at what you have done, what you are doing and what you would like to do.
On Your Business
Have you aligned your goals on social media with the goals of your brand in general?
Keep in mind that social media is a tool that should be used to achieve business goals. Superficial or quantitative goals like a growth in audience size are good to have, but the focus should be on how social media is helping your brand achieve business goals in the short and long term.
Are the right departments involved in the use of social media?
As with the point above, marketing is only one department where social media can have an impact. As a business, you might find that increased operational efficiency is a goal that social platforms can help obtain. In that case, determine which departments need to be leveraging social channels and make sure that they are doing so properly.
Do proper strategies exist for each of these departments, and are these strategies being adhered to?
Once again, building off the last question, it is crucial that for each department where it has been determined that social media can be useful, a proper strategy has been developed and is being executed efficiently.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
On Your Analytics
Do you have measurement criteria in place for all of your goals?
You have a set of goals that you are trying to achieve with the use of social media, and in order to measure those goals, you need to have certain measurement criteria in place for each one. Make sure you know what you are measuring for and that those measurements are being carefully evaluated.
Do you have measurement tactics in place for all of your KPIs?
Not all KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are easily measurable. As noted above, you might be able to look at purely quantitative results with ease, like the growth of your audience, but others might be trickier. Determine what a successful benchmark is for each KPI (discussed in the following question) and be sure that you have a process by which that benchmark can be quantitatively and qualitatively measured.
Are you surpassing your benchmarks?
Just because you can measure your results, it does not necessarily mean that your results are always positive. Pay attention to whether or not you are achieving or, better yet, surpassing benchmarks. At this point, reset your benchmarks to new levels and ensure that you are working towards surpassing those before your next audit.
Image Credit: Shutterstock. Used under license.
Have your test runs succeeded or failed?
As noted in the question above, at each point of the audit you’ll need to be setting up new benchmarks and testing new criteria to see how it performs on social media. Then, at each subsequent audit, you’ll need to evaluate your tests to see if they should be implemented on a full-scale basis or scrapped from the program entirely.
On Your Audience
Have you sufficiently defined your target social client persona?
Your target social client persona is the person (not just demographics or archetypes, but more or less a definition of an individual) that you are trying to engage with your program or individual initiatives. In running your audit, evaluate if you have targeted the right client persona, or if there exists an opportunity to target new demographics based on spike in individual engagement rates.
On Your Budget
Have you reached your ideal results with the budgets you have allocated to social media campaigns?
There are several metrics to consider when it comes to evaluating the effectiveness of your budgets. What’s more, these criteria can be very useful in determining the need to increase or reallocate budgets. They can also help you determine if your campaigns are effective in driving traffic, your audience is properly targeted or your landing page properly optimized. For example, a high click-through rate and low cost-per-click are great, but if you are not generating conversions, you might need to change your target audience or properly optimize your landing page for the remainder of the campaign.
On Your Tools
Are you tools acting as complements to one another, or against one another?
You will always want to ensure that your tools are working as complements to one another. Ideally, tools will be able to produce reports and provide value that, together, help you achieve your goals in the shortest, more cost-efficient way possible. In your social media audit, it will be important to evaluate the tools you are using in order to ensure that they are working for you and not against each other.
Conclusion
A social media audit is going to be a valuable component in any strategy. It is extremely important to spend time whenever possible evaluating how you are performing on your networks and with regards to your strategy as a whole. These are just ten questions of the dozens that might be asked when conducting a social media audit, but they are important ones that should be included in virtually all cases.
What questions do you ask when conducting a social media audit? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
6 Tips to Help Brands Use Pinterest Effectively
/by Corey PadveenWhen brands use Pinterest, they need to think about how the network can help them achieve business goals. These tips will certainly come in handy.
Pinterest can be a hugely valuable asset to any brand, but in order to see brands use Pinterest effectively, there are a few tips and guidelines that should be followed. The personal and subjective nature of Pinterest makes it such that simply posting content to a few owned boards will result in slow growth and a lack of user engagement (and, subsequently, referral traffic).
These six tips can help brands use Pinterest more effectively and start driving growth and achieving network-specific objectives in a much shorter timeframe. Implement some of these best practices and watch as Pinterest starts to work for you!
Reserve Pinterest Sessions
Creating and implementing an editorial calendar might work for some networks, like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter, but Pinterest is all about the experience. Simply posting an image or two according to a schedule isn’t going to work in the long-run.
Instead, devote some time each day (even a 15-minute session is better than nothing) to playing around with Pinterest, sharing content and engaging with other users. These sessions will yield much greater results because of the nature of the network.
Repin, Repin, Repin
On any network, people love seeing their content generate engagement. The same holds true for Pinterest. Search keywords relevant to your boards and start repinning content that you find interesting and that your audience will find relevant.
This practice will accomplish two things: first, it will increase the volume of your pins with the curated content, which is great for your existing audience, and second, it will increase your exposure on Pinterest and lead to a greater reach and greater audience growth.
Leave Comments
Just as you should repin interesting content, you should engage further and start commenting on user uploads to increase engagement and reach. Comments can go a long way. Again, they will help you boost your visibility with key audiences (assuming you are commenting on posts that are relevant to your account’s theme).
Comments will also go a step further to show that you are in fact engaging with your audience and not simply sharing content in the hopes of leveraging Pinterest’s referral traffic power.
Maintain a Theme
If there is one thing that doesn’t look good for a brand, it is when their Pinterest profile is all over the place. Though Pinterest is a network where you should be sharing content that inspires, a professional account will try to adhere to at least a semblance of a theme.
This is not to say that you should not have fun with your Pinterest account – you certainly should. By in sharing content, make sure that it relates to your brand or your brand’s personality in some way. Keep the personal pins to your personal account, and leverage Pinterest s=to showcase your professional creativity, and content that interests and relates to your brand and audience.
Invite and Join
One great thing about Pinterest is the ability to invite users to pin to your boards and accept invitations to pin to others’ boards. This is a feature that should certainly be taken advantage of whenever it presents itself.
If you have a board that begins generating a lot of interest, begin inviting fans of the board to share their pins. It will greatly increase both the content shared to your board as well as the exposure of the board and, subsequently, your brand. Additionally, sharing your content to others’ boards will help increase your account exposure and drive new traffic to your boards and possibly website (assuming your pins link back).
Link Your Pins
This is a commonly referred to best practice, and there is a reason for it. Above the backlinking capabilities of Pinterest are referenced. These are only possible if you are embedding your pins with links, and pinning images directly from your website and blog posts.
When an image is pinned to Pinterest directly from your webpage or blog post, it automatically features a link. When you share images directly to a board, however, you will need to add the link in yourself. Don’t forget about this, because it makes the network all the more valuable when it comes to driving site traffic.
Conclusion
Pinterest is a powerful network and virtually any brand can find a way to take advantage of it. These best practices will certainly help brands use Pinterest more effectively. If you’re planning on getting started with Pinterest, be sure to include these activities in your strategy.
What else have you seen work on Pinterest? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!
5 Things to Keep in Mind when Running a Contest on Social Media
/by Corey PadveenIf you’re planning on running a contest on social media, be sure to keep these best practices in mind.
There is no shortage of brands that have found great success from running a contest on social media. Contests are easy to design, simple to execute and are great ways of activating your social audiences (that can often find themselves dormant). When running a contest on social media, however, it is important to keep a few things in mind both from a superficial level (i.e. what people can see) and internally (i.e. what you need to remember as a business).
These five best practices will help you ensure that the next contest you decide to execute with the help of your social networks will be one to remember!
Cross-Platform Promotion is Key
People are never going to know about your contest unless you tell them about it. It sounds simple enough, but too often brands assume that simply launching a contest on social media means that their audience will flock to the sign up page. You’re going to need to go above and beyond in order to ensure that your contest – whatever it may be – is seen by audiences on every one of your social networks, when it’s appropriate, of course.
Your LinkedIn audience may not be as interested (or appreciative) in you promoting your contest as, say, your Facebook audience. Know the demographics of your network’s audiences and be sure that you share as much information about the contest with the right networks.
Take Advantage of Social Advertising
Just as with cross-platform promotion of your giveaway or contest on social media, advertising is going to be a crucial component to helping it pick up momentum. Again, people are not simply going to stumble upon the promotion you’ve worked so hard to develop. Creating a set of hypertargeted (if you’re not familiar with the term, learn more about it here) ads and running them on an ongoing basis will be hugely beneficial in driving signups that you want.
As a business, there is a reason why you’re making this offer, running this contest and giving something away. You have something to gain in the long run as a brand. That, in all likelihood, is going to come from a targeted demographic that you deem valuable as an audience. Take advantage of the targeting capabilities with social ads and get your target prospects signing up and giving you their information.
Enable Fangate and Collect Data
One of the nicest byproducts of a giveaway or a sweepstakes is that it can help you build your audience very quickly with some highly targeted audience members. In keeping with the theme of hypertargeting your social ads in order to promote your contest/giveaway with target demographics, you will want to be sure that Fangate is enabled in order to help build your social audience and stack it with audience members you hope to target with business-relevant messages in the future.
While, on the surface a contest might simply look like a brand being kind and generous, there are always business motives behind any decision. For your contest or promotion, be sure to require participants to ‘Like’ or follow your brand in order to participate. What’s more, you should be sure to collect as much data as possible. If people are interested in what you are giving away, they will likely be willing to share with you a whole lot of information. Think about what you want to collect (email addresses are a given) and include those fields in your signup form.
Protect Yourself with Detailed Terms & Conditions
If you think that simply adding an email address to a database without getting a user’s signoff is going to fly, you’ll have to think again. Without providing clearly laid out Terms & Conditions for your contest on social media, you’re going to open yourself up to a whole host of issues, including being labeled as a spammer.
Be sure to include a box that participants must check in order to participate that indicates that they have read and understand the terms of participation. In those terms, be sure to lay out what it is you intend to do with the information provided. People have a right to know and you, as a responsible brand, have an obligation to tell them.
Take Advantage of Rich Media
There’s no way to deny the fact that audiences of all types respond most to rich media (photos and videos). When promoting your campaign, take advantage of these kinds of media whenever possible. Be creative and think outside the box. There is so much content out there – and among that content, so many other brand including your competitors – that simply telling people about the opportunity to participate might be overlooked. Show them what it is being offered and encourage their participation with a unique message.
Conclusion
A contest, promotion, sweepstakes, or giveaway is a great way to attract attention to your brand, and it has never been easier than it is with the strategic use of social media. But in order to find that success, you’re going to have to put it the right mix of ingredients. Keeping these best practices in mind will go a long way with regards to finding success with your contest on social media.
Have you run any contests that leveraged social networks? Tell us about them in the comments below or on Twitter!
6 Productivity Apps Every Digital Marketer Needs
/by Corey PadveenIf you’re a digital marketer, then you’ll want to download these six productivity apps to make your life a whole lot easier.
Smartphones can be a lot of fun, but they can also make our day-to-day life a lot easier when we use them for business. As digital marketers, we all know that the job is far from over when we leave the office. Depending on what’s happening, it might just be beginning. These six productivity apps are amongst the best on the App Store or Google Play, and will make the life of a digital marketer much easier.
Chrome Remote Desktop
One thing that Google has done (and they’ve done it very well) is integrate all of their platforms for seamless use. So while you might not ‘use’ Google+ every day, if you’re logged into a Google profile, you’re active on Google+. And if you’re using Chrome, you can take your office with you everywhere.
Chrome Remote Desktop is an excellent platform for accessing your desktop when you’re out of the office. Regardless of your hardware – be it a Mac or a PC – all you need to use the app is a Chrome browser installed and linked to your device. Unfortunately for iPhone users, the Chrome Remote Desktop is only available on Android devices (phones and tablets).
Sociidot
Setting goals is a crucial part of our daily routines. We have small tasks that we want to accomplish, and checking them off of a list makes us feel like we have had a productive day. But there are not too many productivity apps out there that create goals in the way that Sociidot does.
In this app, the focus is much more on the bigger picture and tasks that need to be accomplished in order to achieve those longer-term goals. Create a Story and assign due dates to each of your tasks (or, Dots) and watch as you come closer to reaching major milestones and achieving business relevant goals.
EasilyDo
Don’t you wish you had your own version of ‘Jarvis’ like Iron Man? With EasilyDo, you’re not too far off. EasilyDo is described as ‘Your Virtual Personal Assistant’ and it really does to all the things you need done for you, saving you time and helping you organize your day a little more efficiently.
If you’re traveling on your best friend’s birthday and are expecting a package delivery and need everything taken care of, EasilyDo does it. It tracks things like birthdays, organizes contacts, checks local traffic and weather and, yes, tracks your packages so you can get everything done as it needs to be done without skipping a beat.
CamScanner
You need to get a copy of a client’s artwork to your creative department and you’re sitting in a client’s conference room with no scanner, computer or corporate email in sight. Enter CamScanner to save the day.
Not only can you take a picture and send it as a PDF, but you can crop, enhance and modify the picture taken in order to ensure that you are sending the highest quality version of this image to whomever you need to send it to.
Zamurai
If you’re working with a team on a project and you’re not always together, it can make completing tasks tough. That is especially true if you’re not using Drive or some other cloud-based collaboration tool. Zamurai takes the whiteboard out of the office and puts it onto your smartphone.
The app is designed to allow for brainstorming-like collaboration using a whiteboard template. You can also take notes on a presentation as a group and share ideas and changes to a project in real time. In this way, no matter where your team is, there is never a moment lost while working towards an objective.
Google Now
OK, granted, this isn’t just to make a marketer’s life easier, but it needs to make the list. It can sometimes seem scary how tuned in our devices are to everything we are doing; this is particularly true with Google Now, but in the best of ways.
Similar to EasilyDo, Google Now is a virtual assistant of sorts, but with a unique ability to intelligently analyze circumstances and provide you with necessary information without you ever having to ask for it. Google Now also works with your multiple Google devices, so if you are a Google loyalist, it becomes even more in tune with your patterns and habits.
Conclusion
Our smartphones are called that for a reason. If we really use them to their fullest extent, our lives as marketers will become a whole lot easier. So take advantage of the productivity section of the App Store or Google Play and see how much more you can get done!
What are your favorite smartphone apps? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!