More traffic is not the answer

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 20, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing | 16 comments

Over the past week, I’ve had the opportunity to have some great conversations with companies, individuals, and groups looking for my help growing their businesses (as I’ll be leaving Edvisors at the end of the month). There’s been a common question among all of them:

How do we get more traffic to X?

This is the wrong question to be asking, folks. Yes, absolutely, more feet in the door is critical to long term growth, but you don’t start fixing or improving your business at the top of the funnel.

You start at the bottom.

Which would you rather have? A web site with 1 million visitors a year that converts 0.5% of them, or a web site with 20,000 visitors a year that converts 30% of them? Everyone clamoring for more traffic says “I want the million visitors!” but the answer is the latter, in case you’re mathematically disinclined.

Fix your funnel from the bottom up. Why? Two reasons – you make the conversion engine more efficient, so when it’s time to build traffic, you can make use of it, and the further down the funnel you go, the more control over its outcome you have.

If you don’t know what your funnel is, now’s a good time to map it out. I suggest this order:

• Awareness
• Traffic
• Leads
• Customers
• Evangelists

Start at the bottom, which is evangelists, the people who love you so much that they spread your message for free on your behalf. If your product or service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. If your customer service sucks, you won’t have evangelists. Put time and energy into making a killer product and helping people make use of it, and every referral you get from your evangelists will bring gold to your doorstep.

Making customers is a function of sales. If sales can’t take a qualified lead and turn it into a customer most of the time, your sales process is broken or your sales team sucks. Ask your leads why they didn’t become customers, and fix that. Sales force automation tools can give you more insights into aggregate info about who tends to convert or doesn’t convert, but nothing beats asking the folks who didn’t buy.

Making traffic into leads is a function of marketing. You want as many qualified leads as possible – so if you’re not turning your traffic into leads, chances are marketing’s not doing its job demonstrating the value of what you have for sale, or the mechanism for conversion to a lead is broken. Are your web site forms working at all? Have you tested using things like Google Optimizer? If your lead quality is poor, are you asking the right questions and filtering out the garbage before your sales force has to handle it?

Building awareness and getting traffic is what you handle last – as said earlier, the higher up the funnel, the less you have control over the outcome. This is where stuff like search engine optimization, social media, and the variety of traffic building mechanisms come into play, and this is where most folks think you should start, but it’s where you finish.

Make sure the engine is working before you start blinging the shell of your car. More traffic without a conversion engine is just wasting your bandwidth, your resources, and your time.

Photo credit: Chris Brogan

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In the absence of other metrics

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 15, 2010 in Advertising, Marketing, Technology | 11 comments

I had an interesting conversation last night with a photographer friend who said he faced a dichotomy in his work: on the one hand, he doesn’t overly care about others’ opinions, and on the other hand, he feels as though he should shoot for views as the best way of seeing how his work is being valued as he doesn’t sell his photos.

To me, there’s no dichotomy here. We focus on things like views of a photo, followers, retweets, fans on a fan page, etc. because these are the measures and metrics we know about. This is the best we have to work with, for the most part, and so valuing them isn’t wrong or crass. In the absence of other, better metrics, we value what we know.

To alleviate my friend’s dichotomy, I suggested he consider other metrics that would more accurately gauge his work – in essence, expanding what he knows about his work and how people perceive it. Sales, of course, is one such measure. It’s easy to click follow or subscribe or friend someone, but it’s much more of a commitment to open your wallet and purchase the work of an artist. You have to be much more invested in it to put up some money.

If you’re in it for the love and not the money – which is perfectly okay and good – dig deeper into your analytics. Last night in my USF Advanced Social Media course, I talked a bit about using Google Analytics to measure inflows and outflows to social networks as a way of better gauging what people are doing with your stuff. Here’s two examples.

1. Measuring outflows. Using Google Analytics’ virtual pageviews, you can tell whether that giant Twitter badge on your blog is worth keeping around. Set up links using an arbitrary virtual pageview, and every time someone clicks out to a social site or platform from your blog or destination site, you’ll know. That giant “BE MAH FRIEND” badge may be taking up valuable real estate for little value. Add a virtual page view to high value links or affiliate links as a sanity check for your affiliate reporting, too.

Example code – no virtual page view:

What World of Warcraft's Holidays Should Teach You About Power Blogging

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 13, 2010 in Blogging, Marketing, World of Warcraft | 0 comments

World of Warcraft has in-game holidays that closely mirror many real world holidays, such as Pilgrim’s Bounty (Thanksgiving), the Feast of Winter Veil (Christmas/Hanukkah), Noblegarden (Easter), Midsummer Fire Festival (Fourth of July), and so forth.

Savvy auction house marketers know exactly what goods and commodities are needed for each holiday and have them up for auction the moment the holidays begin, often at ludicrous markups. For example, for the Feast of Winter Veil, small eggs used to cook gingerbread cookies and egg nog, normally for sale for 50 silver (think 50 cents), rocket up in price by crafty salesmen to 9-15 gold each (think $9-$15) for a few days until the laggards in the market realize the holiday’s on and start undercutting prices.

Here’s the funny thing: the in-game calendar is published months ahead of the actual events, in the game and on Blizzard Entertainment’s web site. Every player of the game is given in-game notices in major cities about the impending holiday. There’s plenty of time to stock up the goods you need to sell…

… but few ever do. Few are willing to plan that far ahead, to farm the eggs or deeprock salt ahead of time and be ready for the doors to burst open the moment the holiday starts. As a result, those few who look at the calendar and plan accordingly reap huge profits.

So what does this have to do with blogging? The same applies in the blogosphere as in Azeroth. Google Calendar has a holidays calendar for every nation in the world. It lets you see all the major holidays you could possibly want, for your country or others, for different religions, for just about anything that you can stick on a calendar and call a holiday.

The power bloggers can look at the calendar and decide in advance, like an editorial calendar, what should happen in the lead up to the holidays on the calendar. Do you blog about marketing? You know when Valentine’s Day is – work out now what things you want to blog about as that holiday approaches. Do you blog about history? Seems like everyone’s got a holiday about them.

Having your blog posts published in advance of the holidays ensures that search engines can index your content. Having a decent social network ensures that you can move the needle in real-time search on the day before and day of the holiday. Having time to plan ahead lets you come up with creative memes that can stick well ahead of time – you can even beta test memes and hashtags to your current followers to see who says “heh, that’s clever” or the equivalent reaction you’re looking for.

You’ve got the calendar in front of you. The holidays on it are not a secret by any means, but know that most everyone in blogging and social media is probably going to wing it at best on the holiday. Farm your small eggs and deeprock salt now so that in 2010, you can profit handsomely when the times are right.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go hit some rock elementals for deeprock salt. We sold out this year, so I’ve got a year to farm for next Winter Veil.

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Fresh starts

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 11, 2010 in Awakening, Blogging, Marketing | 51 comments

So, a scant 11 days ago I blogged about making this year a year of playing to your strengths. Karma has a funny way of making you walk the talk, because a few days later Edvisors, the company I’ve been with for six and a half years, and I agreed to part ways. We each have different strengths, and we both want to take those strengths in different directions. For example, my love of things like public speaking, new marketing, social media, and the ever-evolving relationship between marketing and technology are areas I want to more fully explore, and those don’t always integrate with the world of financial aid as well as they should.

If we’ve worked together in my work at Edvisors, you’ll likely get an update as to whom you’ll be working with next. If we’ve collaborated in the past, I hope to do so again, especially as there are several opportunities I’m looking at for my next move that promise increased collaboration and exploration. I’ll still remain connected to financial aid here and there; for example, I’ll still be presenting at College Goal Sunday at the end of the month.

As this transition progresses, a few things are on my mind:

• Six and a half years is a lot of unwinding. To the extent that your marketing or media product/service/system can make transitioning roles easier, faster, cleaner, and less painful, please always plan for those eventualities when you’re designing product or slinging code. I’m running into an issue now where Google Analytics does not let you transfer analytics from one account to another; the workaround is to remove access for a certain user on a site by site basis, but this is obviously much less than ideal.
• Sorting out and separating personal from professional is harder than ever, because professional things can easily bleed over into personal and vice versa. Amber Naslund pointed this out recently in a post about boundaries. Where do you, the person, and your work begin and end? The catchphrase in social media last year was “be human”, but there’s also the quandary of when the human and the company need to part ways, who gets what in the divorce? I’m approaching by area of focus. Work I did that relates to Edvisors’ core mission is clearly theirs. I’m fairly certain they don’t want my Warcraft videos or coffee roasting techniques guides.
• A corollary is to explore, but keep your home base strong, sage advice from Chris Brogan. Six and a half years ago, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and social media weren’t more than vague ideas in someone’s mind. Now, having a personal brand that incorporates what you do professionally but isn’t married to your professional life is more important than ever. Companies change. People change. Markets and economies change. Life changes. If you aren’t doing at least a little work to ensure that you exist outside of your work, then the day will come when your work will vanish – and you’ll have that much more trouble getting resettled. Invest at least a little time in yourself and your reputation now to provide for unforeseen contingencies later.

I’m eager and excited about the fresh starts ahead. There’s so much opportunity, so many different ways we can make a difference together. I’m ever thankful and grateful for everyone who subscribes to this blog, who listens to Marketing Over Coffee, who has stayed in touch on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn over the years. I can’t wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.

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What RoboCop Can Teach You About the Dangers of Social Media

Posted by Christopher S Penn on Jan 10, 2010 in Marketing, New media, Social networks, Technology | 9 comments

Fans of the original RoboCop movie remember all too well the searing disappointment with its two sequels. The original RoboCop movie was bloody, intensely violent, dystopian, and wonderful to watch as we saw nearly-deceased police officer Alex Murphy wreak vengeance on his would-be killers and try to find his humanity again inside his robotic self.

The first RoboCop movie was a box office success, which immediately activated the sequel machine. In the following movies, producers largely made the human story a subplot to lots of shooting, lots of gadgets, and even more gadgets. I can just hear the conversations in the executive suite now…

“RoboCop needs more cool somehow… I know, to jazz up this franchise, let’s give him a jetpack! The kids will love it!”

What made RoboCop successful wasn’t the gadgets. It was the stories, the fairly complicated subplots in the original that were abandoned for larger explosions and more gadgets in the sequels, which did increasingly poorly at the box office.

Your social media efforts aren’t so different.

Rather than looking for the next big thing, the next shiny object, the next bit of wizardry to spruce up your social media presence, stop for a moment and assess what has given you success so far. If you’ve achieved any level of success, a good bit of it is likely from your human efforts, from your story-based work and not the social media equivalent of rocket backpacks.

As you assess your social media efforts for this year, put aside the platforms and technologies for a little bit and look at what stories you are currently telling, what stories you plan to tell, and how your audiences and communities will receive those stories. This year, I’m certain the platforms will change. Stuff that’s hot right now will be less so, and there will undoubtedly be newer, shinier things.

Had the producers of RoboCop’s sequels left the gadgets behind and focused on the story of the human beneath the machine, they might have made even more box office gold. Don’t let the same fate happen to your social media efforts. Forget the gadgets. Bring out the human behind your social media machinery and tell those stories instead.

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