How do you know what impact everything that you do in digital and social media marketing has on your business? The secret comes down to what I call the PDCA approach to marketing that my agency is named for, but more importantly, it comes down to visualizing your marketing funnel and aligning everything you do with a part of that funnel. After that it comes down to measurement and truly geeking out on the numbers in the reporting that I recommend you do.
Listen in for the full details as to how to effectively do this spending little time but having maximum impact on your business!
Key Highlights
[02:53] The Methodology On Measuring ROI
[03:21] The Importance of Having A Report
[04:51] PDCA Approach
[06:22] All About Funnel
[08:04] Next Step of the Funnel: Website
[08:51] Email Marketing/Marketing Automation
[09:29] Conversion Territory
[09:45] Why Email Marketing Is Critical
[11:48] Building Benchmarks
[12:01] The Easiest Social Media Platform For Organic Growth
Notable Quotes
Links mentioned in the show:
The 10 Best Social Media Marketing Podcasts to Listen to in 2020: https://nealschaffer.com/best-social-media-marketing-podcasts/
Episodes mentioned in or related to this one:
Learn More:
How do you know what impact everything that you do in digital and social media marketing has on your business? The secret comes down to what I call the PDCA approach to marketing that my agency is named for, but more importantly, it comes down to visualizing your marketing funnel and aligning everything you do with a part of that funnel. After that it comes down to measurement and truly geeking out on the numbers in the reporting that I recommend you do.
Listen in for the full details as to how to effectively do this spending little time but having maximum impact on your business!
Key Highlights
[02:53] The Methodology On Measuring ROI
[03:21] The Importance of Having A Report
[04:51] PDCA Approach
[06:22] All About Funnel
[08:04] Next Step of the Funnel: Website
[08:51] Email Marketing/Marketing Automation
[09:29] Conversion Territory
[09:45] Why Email Marketing Is Critical
[11:48] Building Benchmarks
[12:01] The Easiest Social Media Platform For Organic Growth
Notable Quotes
Links mentioned in the show:
The 10 Best Social Media Marketing Podcasts to Listen to in 2020: https://nealschaffer.com/best-social-media-marketing-podcasts/
Episodes mentioned in or related to this one:
Learn More:
Are you trying to figure out the ROI of everything you do online, in social media, your SEO work, your email marketing, ie trying to figure out what value it has for your business for your brand? If so, keep listening for another exciting episode of the maximize your social influence podcast. This is the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help sales and marketing professionals, entrepreneurs and small business owners build, leverage and monetize their influence in digital and social media. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, welcome to another exciting episode of the maximize your social influence podcast. So in the course of my career, in digital in social media marketing, I have done a lot of different things for a lot of different clients. I'd say most recently, a lot of the work I do is either focused on the agency side, or on what I would call a fractional cmo service that I provide where I literally work together with marketers out my clients, companies, sometimes on site, if they're located locally here in Orange County, California, and I help them actually do their work, right? Whether it is strategy creation, implementation, I am part of their team, often leading their team or advising their team. And we're getting stuff done. And I really enjoy doing this because I see the immediate impact of what I can do not just for the fact that I can see the results. But also I can see how the people I work with are growing and becoming smarter and smarter. And for the days that I'm not there to help them, they're able to move the ball forward. And specifically, when I talk about how I know I'm having impact, that is going to be the discussion we're going to have today, because I really want to help you, right? This podcast is all about growing your business using innovative marketing techniques. And let's go a little bit broader than just talking about influence today. Because I really want to help you measure everything you're doing, and put together basically a report that's going to tell you how much you're spending, what effect it has, and where you should be focusing your money on in the future. Does it sound hard to believe does it sound like a dream, it's not a dream. It's part of a rational approach that I have always taken to marketing. And I started out only looking at social media marketing, where they said you couldn't measure ROI. And I want to teach you all how to do this, to better implement everything that not only am I teaching in this podcast, but everywhere else in the world, that you learn about marketing. So let's get started. So the first thing, and basically this is a methodology that I use with my clients, I have found as especially when I launched my agency back in 2016. But also to generate value. When I am a fractional CMOS, that we can report back as a marketing team to the CEO, and say, This is what we've done, this is what we spent, these were the results, or we're gonna use this much money to increase sales this much. It all comes down to having a report, especially as an agency, and my monthly calls with my agency clients are based on the report where the ROI of everything that my agency does, is all included in this report. So that we're all on the same page. This is what we did. These were the results. And based on these results, this is what we're going to do next month. And by the way, these are things that I'd like to ask you to improve to help us reach this results next month, it all comes down to this report. Now, it for those of you that have read maximize your social, it came out back in 2013. It's not the newest of books, right? It has a chapter on Google Plus, I'm sort of embarrassed to say. But there is a lot of evergreen content in there when you take out that chapter on Google Plus, when you check out the other chapter where I talked about visual social, all in one chapter, you know, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, this is even before Snapchat, take out that. And what you see though, is the framework for how to create a marketing strategy and how to create a marketing report to enable you to see your ROI. Now, this is something and I think I've talked about this before on podcasts, maybe not this one, maybe when I've been a guest on others, but you need to have processes behind what you do. Because social media can use up all your time and you might have absolutely nothing to show. Right. So you need to document this. We first taken a step back from the report. We need to talk about this PDCA approach. Not Just a social media marketing or digital marketing but marketing in general, which is why my agency is called PDCA soldier I should say my brand when it comes to consulting or fractional CMO or agency work. And the PDCA stands for plan, do check action. And the plan to check action comes from something called the Deming circle, which is something that the godfather of quality control, Professor Edwards Deming created some time ago, you've probably heard me mention this on a podcast before, but it bears reminding plan, do check action, it's how you manage experiments. It's how you know what you're going to do, how you do it, you're gonna know what to measure when you do it. And then you know what to optimize. And the measurement goes into report. And that's really what I'm talking about here. So we first start with, what are we trying to do. And what really helps, what I find with my clients is to visualize what we're trying to do in terms of a funnel. Now, we're not going to go back to business school talking about marketing funnels. That's not the intent of this. But there are steps that your customers have to make in order for you to generate business. And especially with marketing, and especially with digital marketing, these steps can all be measured, and clearly defined. Now, in general, when I work with my clients that the funnel is the first thing I show them, and everything that we do in marketing, it has to somehow fit in that funnel, it has to fit an objective, generally speaking, because you're listening this podcast, well, you're obviously pretty savvy and intelligent, because you're listening to this podcast. But that aside, you're active in social. So really what I consider for most companies, when we talk about digital marketing, what is it the very, very top is the fact that you're in social media, and you're building communities. That is why you're there, you're building a community in hopes that they take the next step down in the funnel, which is they come to your website, you're not going to close business on Instagram or LinkedIn now. I know. Hey, Neil, no, we can do Instagram shopping, shoppable posts, I get it right. So there are aspects in which you might be able to actually close business and social media. But those are still very rare today. At the end of the day, you're building this massive brand awareness using social media. And this is generally true, I know that this funnel I'm talking about is not going to be for every industry, right? I was recently interviewed on the water utility, I believe, or the power utility for Ottawa province in Canada. So they're going to be a little bit different than what I'm talking about here in terms of what their funnel looks like, because it's a monopoly, in essence. So obviously, every industry is different. But generally speaking, you need to be able to rationalize all of your activities. And the first way you do that is if we're going to use social media, we want to build a community. And not only is the size of that community important, and the influences of what we do in social is important as well. But at the end of the day, the thought process is if we have a larger community, they see more of our content. And that brings them to the next level a little bit further to becoming our customer, which is a website visit, right? This is where we tend to close business. Now. If you sell primarily through retail, it's going to be a little bit different, right? But generally speaking, for most b2b is if you do e commerce or what have you, we want to get people back to our website where we have some control. And if we're in social media, and they're going to buy from a Walmart or Costco, we don't really have much control over that, either, right? So we can only measure what we can measure. But let's say we use website traffic as sort of the next stage for most companies. And like I said, especially for b2b and E commerce, what happens after the website? Well, they get to the website, they consume content, we want them to take the next step. That next step generally, is email marketing slash marketing automation. So you probably hear me talk a lot about the six major components of digital marketing word Where do influencers fit in? Well, influences can help you at every stage here. They can help you expand your community and social they can help you bring more website traffic. And if you include them in your content marketing, they can help you with generating more email signups, right, and those email signups don't necessarily come directly from social or directly from your website. They could come from, say, a webinar. But at the end of the day, you're using social and you're using your website, you're using your email list to promote the webinar. And at the end of the day, they're getting added to your email list. So then we get when we keep going further down, then we get more into conversion territory, right? We would expect that because and you should go back to and I'm forgetting the episode, but it's going to be in the show notes. The episode where I talked about lead magnets and email marketing this webinar that I did together with get response that email marketing is still critical and when you need to get multiple touches with someone because people buy from only companies or they do business only with companies that they know like and trust. You need to be able to get them on your list because that gives you multiple touches, because social media doesn't guarantee your touches, and you can't expect them to come back to your website every day. And I don't expect you to send them emails every day. But at least if you're at a minimum weekly cadence, you are keeping in touch and building those touches so that you increase that like no interest. And at some point, hopefully, you get them to a conversion. So this is a simplified look. Now, it might be that you're on your email list and until you convert them, they first need to sign up for a trial, or they need to sign up for a one on one conference call or a demo. Once again, this depends on your industry. So there might be additional things in between, say, the email list and converting into a customer. But regardless, you need to be able to go to well, if you're the business owner, this is yourself, if you're not the business owner, and if you're not an entrepreneur, if you work for a company, or you run an agency and you have clients like I do, you need to go back to them and say, This is what we're doing. This is why we're doing it. Because everything we do fit something here in the funnel. And that is my challenge for you. Is everything you're doing in digital and social media. Is it fitting somewhere in the funnel? This gets really, really important. When we start talking about budget, where are we spending money? What are the results that we're getting for that money? And what happens is, if you begin to build a monthly report, based on everything I'm talking about here, did we grow our community? Where's our website traffic coming from? What sort of content is doing really well with Google? What sort of content is doing really well with social because content is the currency of all this? Where are we seeing email signups from? What sort of conversions are we getting? Where are those conversions coming from? If you do this on a monthly basis, you begin to build benchmarks. Actually, everything you do begins to be a little bit more predictable, especially if you're not doing any paid social, and you just do organic. What I noticed, for instance, is community growth organically, Twitter, absolutely. Facebook LinkedIn page, really hard to get organic growth. Well, LinkedIn company page is actually a little bit easier. And I suppose Facebook, as well as you can invite your friends, right. And with a LinkedIn company page, if you make other employees admins, they can invite their connection. So LinkedIn company page actually, is probably a little bit about Facebook in terms of organic potential organic community growth. But Twitter by far is the easiest one to grow. And probably below, that's going to be Instagram. And I'd say Pinterest is sort of up there with Twitter if you're curious. So these community growth, you're going to find organically, some sites are going to be easy organically to grow without spending money, some really become pay to play. And then in terms of the website traffic, that, again, is going to depend on the social network, Instagram was not created to there's no way to put links in your posts, right? Unless you have unless you advertise or you have a account with more than 10,000 followers, and you do an Instagram story. And you expect people to figure out that they need to swipe up in order to access the link, which not everybody does, which is why even today on my stories, I still put these funky little swipe up gifts to remind people the swipe up, but it's still not something that's native to the platform. On the other hand, Pinterest, Twitter, these are sites where people expect to click to get to other sites. And it's these two sites become more of like search engines, where twitter, pinterest don't care, they encourage you to link out unlike LinkedIn, and Facebook would prefer you to use photos or especially videos so that people stay on the site longer. It's just a completely different paradigm. But when you do this for a month, two months, three months, you begin to see trends in Okay, here's where communities growing, here's where it's not. But more importantly, these are the social networks that we begin to see website traffic from. And this is the sort of amount of Digital Influence we have a Google as we see, where is the SEO traffic coming from? What are the blog posts that are attracting SEO traffic? What are the blog posts that are resonating really well on social media, we begin to see all this information? And then for the email, what's converting them? Are their lead magnets? Are they naturally coming from social media from Google search? And then we begin to see, okay, if we have this many people on our email list, well, how many of them actually convert into becoming a customer? Where do our sales come from? And you might find out that 25% of your sales or leads, and maybe that's the bottom of the funnel for you, maybe 25% come from search 25% come from social 25% come from these sort of content marketing initiatives that you have, like webinars or white papers or events, what have you and maybe 25% come from email signups. So the question then becomes, how are you spending your money? Is it equal to all four of these areas as maybe it should be? Or is it completely misaligned? You're not doing anything in social, you're spending all your marketing budget on SEO, but SEO is only generating 25% Just to be aligned with where the business is coming in from. And that, my friends, is when you begin To do a report on it on a monthly basis, you get these baseline metrics, you begin to see what is working and what is not working, you begin the PDCA starts to flow. And excuse me for being a Southern California here, but this natural sort of yin yang, you're surfing on the perfect wave, it all begins to make sense, then it's like, okay, I know that if I do this, I can generate more of that. And it gets really, really critical. Like I said, when you have paid spend, when you pay money to increase your community, in social media, when you pay money to boost posts, in hopes of website traffic, or perhaps you boost money on creating content, for better results in SEO, or you have money invested in SEO, or you invest money in posts that are related to content marketing, to build up your email list, or you have money in advertising, that goes directly to hopefully convert people. So you begin to see how you're spending the money, what results it has, from a paid aspect, and what results it has, if you spend no money from organic aspect, and you begin to see, you know, in the age of influence my new book, hopefully, some of you have read it by now. But I talk about paid social, and if you've ever seen me present on it, it's like a water spigot, when you need to hit your goals, you turn on the water and the water flows, it's predictable. To some extent, the ROI of the advertiser is not predictable. But if you spend enough money, you're going to get enough collects, you're going to get enough leads, right? It's just a question of cost per lead cost per conversion. So this is where we begin to see okay, next month, we need to grow by 10% Every month, across the board. So do we need money to do that? Or can we do it organically? By focusing? Where can we do that, and this is where that report that I talked about. And if you reread maximize your social for those that are read it, you'll see my instructions on how to create this report. But hopefully, by listening to this podcast, you'll get a better idea as to what to look for, what to measure, and how to display it both organic and paid, aligning with the funnel, all of your digital and social media marketing activities. So you get a really, really crystal clear picture as to what you should be doing more of, and where you need to be investing more money, I realized that reporting is not the sexiest part of marketing, I really, I nerd out when it comes to reporting, because for the same reason that I started my career in b2b sales, I get to see the results in numbers of what I did. And that is what when you build a report, and when you create a process, to manage and actually create the report, first day of the next month, I do my monthly processes. And when I work with my clients, that's report time, right? We want to get that information as quick as possible, and analyze as quick as possible and gain the insight to maximize our social. And that is the process that I hope after listening to this if you're not doing it, and by the way, just a little disclaimer, no social media tool provides you a perfect report, you need to customize this yourself, you need to be able to go into Google Analytics into Facebook insights into Twitter analytics, your LinkedIn company analytics, your Bitly, analytics, whatever it is, you need to figure this out yourself. And I know that there's a lot of sophisticated tools out there. But at the end of the day, I really want you to think holistically and to be able to do it yourself and only use a tool when it fits everything you're talking about when all these pieces you can plug in and create the perfect report. I've listened to other podcasts where there are marketers that will use something like Monday comm to plug in all these different aspects into one dashboard. Now, I have not gotten that far yet, I really like to maintain control over the data. And by directly accessing and it's we're not accessing 10 different sites here. It's really, you know, Google Bitly, email, and then every social network site that you're on, so maybe it's six or seven sites, it can be done. And you know what, once you get good at it, it's only a few hours a month, really. But for the time invested, it is well worth it. So I hope you'll join me in geeking out about numbers and getting excited about numbers. Because we have to be data driven. This is what data driven means. If you've ever wondered, it's basing your decisions off of data. So get collecting data, start reporting. If you need my help reach out to me if you have any questions, you know where to find me. But that's the basis of why I'm so excited about reporting. And really, I wanted to make sure on this podcast that I talked about this earlier rather than later. So that you also understand the benefits and that you will start the process and the routine of doing this and reaping the benefits because I don't think many of our listeners if you're a business owner entrepreneur, obviously agencies are very well versed in doing reports, but a lot of you may not be so I hope that you will take my advice and begin doing it and I'd love to hear how it goes. Feel free to take a screenshot or podcast tag me you know, comment somewhere on social media or on a blog post. I love to hear how it goes. Or and as always, I really thank you for listening on a final note just A few things here. First of all, I mentioned on the last episode we we ran out of my interview podcast. So we have new ones coming up. And I am really excited of the people that we are going to have on this podcast in the near future. We have Carla Johnson, who is a marketing author, she's going to talk about innovation. I'm really excited about that. One of the true leaders her in marketing, her book was on my epic marketing books giveaway. I'm going to be talking to the founder hopefully, we're going to finalize the date of Link tree which is one of the most popular link sharing services on Instagram. You see a lot of people in their profile link their their bio profile, they'll use link tree. So we're going to talk all about that and best practices in leveraging that sort of technology. We're going to talk to the CEO of the Digital Marketing Institute, in which I am part of their Global Advisory Council. And probably the one that I'm most excited about because I'm a total fanboy is VIV and Tosh from the ace the gram podcast. If you read my blog post, I'm going to put it in the show notes of the top 10 Social Media Marketing podcast to follow, you'll know that ace the gram is one of the top 10 It's the one that I follow viven Tosh, they're from New Zealand. And they are awesome at anything and everything Instagram, but they're just awesome people. They're the people you'd want to invite over for glass of wine and just chat the entire night about Instagram and also because they're also involved in influencer marketing, they're going to have some advice there. So I hope that you're going to hit the subscribe button because you're not going to miss those. And I also want to thank those of you that have went out of your way to leave a comment. Comments are what drives my passion in podcasting. So I really hope that you'll take a minute to leave a comment, leave a review, wherever you're listening to this. I want to share with you a review from my friend Mike Gingrich, where he calls himself Mike G technic. Now, Mike Gingrich is the founder and owner of tab Site tab site is one of these Facebook lead generation tools that you can use for Facebook contests, Facebook apps, and Mike I believe I'm gonna have to go back I think he's the only guy who has been or only person I should say, because this podcast has both men and women that I interview, the only person that has been interviewed twice on this podcast and we're still only at episode number 167. I interviewed him both at social media camp in Victoria, British Columbia, which is I think Canada's best social media conference and Social Media Marketing World. So Mike says I love being able to participate with Neil on this podcast episode. This is episode number 110, where we were able to talk about the opportunities and potential for generating leads for a business from Facebook, great time discussing this like all of Neil's podcasts, they offer tremendous value. Thank you so much, Mike. Mike has also been a regular contributor to my Neal Schaffer blog for many, many moons. So thank you, I hope that if and when you leave a review, that you'll also leave your name so that I can publicly thank you here on this podcast. I also want to thank those that have purchased my new book, The Age of influence, and those that have went above and beyond that, and that I've reviewed that on bookselling sites like Amazon. I'm really grateful for all your support. And I want to thank you for that. And I probably don't say that enough, but thank you. I got dolt Shay, Massey. Dunker Sean. I'm gonna make which is really quick, but I think you get the point. All right, everybody. Let's end the podcast here. And once again, make sure you subscribe to catch those interviews. And wherever you're on in the world, make it a great virtual social Day. Bye Bye, everybody.