Why your social media marketing isn’t working for you
Having spent the last few days learning more and more about multichannel funnels and examining the analytics of a number of people I work with, I can safely come to two conclusions for why social media marketing isn’t working for you. This is based on two metrics inside the multichannel funnel: assisted conversions and last interaction conversions.
Last interaction conversions are the ask, the “buy now”, the social pimp. They’re the final touchpoint before the goal is achieved. In order to make anything show up here, you need to have a fairly large audience of people who are qualified to buy from you, even if you have a product or service with a relatively short lifecycle. Asking the same 10 people over and over again if they’ve bought a car recently will generate rapidly diminishing returns and alienate them in relatively short order.
Assisted conversions are the high funnel “conversations” and interactions that eventually lead to and contribute to crossing the finish line. In order to make anything show up here, you need to be loading your traffic into the top of your funnel, which is marketer-speak for GET THEM TO YOUR WEBSITE. If all you’re doing is being friendly and conversational, replying to everyone on Twitter as fast as possible like a squirrel on crack, and generally not moving people to the start of the conversion process, you’re not going to show any results here either.
How do you make social media marketing work for you, then? Do the opposite of the above ineffective practices:
1. Constantly be building and growing a targeted network or you won’t have anyone to ask. The larger you grow your network, the more people who will be eligible and interested on any given day in doing business with you. This will produce more last interaction conversions.
2. Constantly be gently encouraging people to move into the top of the funnel by offering them content and value on your website, off the social network. I can’t stress this enough. Get them off the network and onto your site! This will produce more assisted conversions.
Do these practices diligently for 30 days and watch your social media marketing efforts suddenly blossom.
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Do you have a social network home base?
In the past I’ve talked about making sure your blog is your home base, which still holds true. If Twitter or Facebook or [insert network here] ever collapse, close, or become irrelevant (MySpace?), your blog or website will endure as long as you continue to grow it.
That said, you also need a home base social network. This is a network in which you focus more effort than others into growing. Ideally it has your target audience in it in some capacity, and ideally it provides some level of federated identity. For example, many sites now offer a “Sign in with Twitter” or “Sign in with Facebook” option as well as standard login forms.
Which network should you choose to be your home base? The first priority is wherever your target audience is. If you’re trying to build any kind of audience around a topic or a theme, then do the work to figure out which of the major social networks more of those folks are on. After that, decide which network’s federated identity scheme is more widely adopted. Right now, the main contenders are Twitter and Facebook, with LinkedIn and Google distant runners-up. I’m hesitant to recommend Facebook because most places have implemented authentication that uses your personal profile, which has a hard limit of 5,000 connections on it, whereas Twitter has no such limit. Right now, Google connects with your Google account and not necessarily your Google+ network (though I’m sure that’s coming).
Why does this matter? Three reasons. First, focus is important. Doing a little bit everywhere isn’t as beneficial and focusing in on one platform and growing it. There are only so many hours in the day; making the most of them demands focus.
Second, Metcalfe’s Law matters more than ever. Size does matter, for good or ill, and like attracts like in the social space. By focusing your efforts and attracting your right crowd in one spot, you increase the chances for serendipity and outreach beyond the borders of the friends you can contact directly.
Third, a focused goal of growing one network (with federated identity capabilities) means that you can grow secondary networks very quickly using those federated identities. My network of focus is Twitter. When I connected up my Twitter account with Stumbleupon the other week, I took my SU account from 0 to 2,500 followers immediately because of my Twitter network.
That’s enough to reap the majority of the benefits of Stumbleupon without focusing a lot of time or attention on it.
Take time to seriously consider your social networking strategy and if it’s not focused, if you don’t have a social home base, consider refining your efforts until you do.
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Delayed Gratification
One of the hardest lessons to teach anyone is the concept of delayed gratification, especially when the delay is over long periods of time. In the landmark paper, “Delay of Gratification in Children” by Walter Mischel, he explores the ways in which young children can delay gratification, from distraction to abstraction. Subsequent studies revealed that those people who could delay gratification as children were more likely to be successful as adults in longitudinal studies.
Delaying gratification is one of the secret “soft” skills that no resume or CV can ever easily reveal, yet if you need a soft skill in a team member, it’s one of the most valuable. A coworker, subordinate, or superior who can pull themselves away from staring at daily metrics or stock prices, put away the instant reward mindset (so very prevalent in social media marketing), and can focus on long term strategies and plans is far more likely to be successful than someone constantly looking for the next quick hit, the next viral video, the next shiny object. Someone who can work very hard on something very boring with no promise of immediate reward is going to be a tremendously valuable team member in an age when most of your coworkers and competitors are scrambling like rabid squirrels on meth towards any available shiny thing.
How do you identify this essential trait? One way might be gaming, ironically. If you know a game well enough, you can identify whether someone has a lot of patience working towards a long-term reward or whether someone goes for the quick hit constantly. Here are two examples from World of Warcraft (both mine, to avoid insulting anyone).
The first example is my paladin, who is one of my main characters. He’s equipped in gear that takes an awful lot of repetitive, very boring play to get. There are no fewer than 3 repetitive “grinds” needed to achieve this set of gear, from battlegrounds, Tol Barad dailies, and Mt. Hyjal dailies. Seeing a player decked out in high-end gear that requires a lot of monotonous, not necessarily fun gameplay would be an indicator of this personality trait.
The second example is my warrior, who is a bank alt (non-main character responsible mainly for banking and transactions). She’s equipped in gear that you can buy instantly for relatively short money or items left over from questing to get to the maximum level. Very few of her items required any effort to get, and most of them are impulse buy items that, on someone’s main or only character, would indicate they’re not especially good at delayed gratification.
Lots of other games can indicate whether someone is good at delayed gratification. In virtually every strategy game built, there are objectives that are short term and objectives that are long term, objectives that deliver instant gratification and objectives that deliver very delayed gratification. Another example? Most of the free to play games have “power ups” that you can purchase for real money that let you skip or accelerate grind-style play. Ask someone how many they’ve purchased. Someone who purchases a significant enough number of these has a problem with delayed gratification (which is what the game manufacturer is counting on).
There are plenty of other areas where you can see the results of delayed gratification. It’s no coincidence that many successful businessmen and women are marathon runners – talk about delaying gratification over 26.2 miles. It’s no coincidence that so many successful folks play golf. You’re taking a stick and hitting a small ball across hundreds of yards over and over again. To prove that you’ve got the ability to really delay gratification, you have to do it 18 times in a row. Look at people who achieve high grades in martial arts – someone practicing for 20 years before getting a black belt has that trait. (conversely, schools awarding black belts after 8 months are probably not a place you want to invest your time in)
What about non-leisure activities? If you have a delayed gratification problem, you probably gave up your blog (or resorted to “phoning it in”) years ago in favor of the instant gratification environments of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. If, on the other hand, you can delay gratification for quite some time, chances are you’re cranking out blog posts of good quality over a period of years.
What if you don’t have the ability to delay gratification? Are you up a creek without a paddle? No, not necessarily. We’ll explore how to cultivate that skill in an upcoming blog post. Stay subscribed.
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Disaster Rice Tabbouleh
One of the best disaster prep foods I’ve always found to be reliable is good ol’ brown rice. It’s dense, full of nutrition, keeps reasonably well (not as good as white rice, but you sacrifice nutrition for longevity), and is relatively easy to make, especially with a rice cooker.
In advance of Hurricane Irene, in addition to all the other sensible disaster prep stuff, I put on an extra large pot of rice as well. Now that the hurricane has blown through, I have a lot of cooked rice on my hands. Luckily, there’s a great rice salad that you can use the leftovers with, using ingredients familiar to anyone who knows the middle Eastern dish tabbouleh.
Ingredients
- 1 large pot of cooked brown rice
- 1 large cucumber
- 2 medium onions (medium = tennis ball size)
- 1 medium carrot
- Basil
- 1 teaspoon Salt
- 1/2 teaspoon Pepper
- 1/4-1/2 cup lemon juice
- Jalapeno sauce or other spicy sauce
Directions
- Chop up all the vegetables into small cubes.
- Mix in a large bowl with the rice.
- Add in the rest of the ingredients except the jalapeno sauce.
- Stir.
- Add in jalapeno sauce to preferred spicyness.
- Let sit overnight.
- Eat.
This makes as little or as much rice salad as you want. It’s very tasty and super easy to serve. It’s best cold, which also means that it’s great for taking to work. It works on the same principles as bulgur wheat, so any recipe for tabbouleh can also use brown rice instead of the wheat.
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What Multi-Channel Funnels Mean For Digital Marketers
I wanted to take a few moments today to talk a bit about multichannel funnels, since some of the implications of the new service from Google Analytics can be a bit far-fetched if you don’t really sit down with them over a coffee or a beer. There’s a reason why I say this is the biggest change in marketing analytics in recent days. (read more about them here and here)
For the longest time, marketers have struggled with last touch attribution. In the official video, Google rightly and cleverly cites a basketball game as the example. In last touch, the only person who matters on your team is the one who shoots the basket. Except that anyone who has ever played any team sport understands that in winning teams, it’s every member of the team that contributes, and if one falls down on his job, the entire team suffers.
Multichannel funnels help you to understand how all of the players in your marketing team are working together to score.
Now, it’s important to understand that multichannel funnels aren’t new. Very high end analytics packages have had this for years now, but for those of us who can’t afford $50,000 a month in analytics software fees, it really is brand new.
Why is this such a game changer?
1. It helps you understand and quantify the value of high funnel activities. There are a lot of activities we do in marketing that seem to not have any direct conversion impact, especially when the price of whatever’s for sale is really high or the process of the sale is very long.
Replying on Twitter to someone rarely causes an immediate sale. Posting a video on YouTube rarely causes an immediate sale. Writing a blog post rarely causes an immediate sale. Sending out a weekly or monthly email newsletter rarely causes an immediate sale. Yet once you turn on multichannel funnels, you see these activities show in the funnel path. You start to see referrals, social media, email, etc. in things that you previously just attributed to low funnel activities (landing pages, squeeze pages, etc.) and now can understand their value in a much broader perspective.
2. It helps you understand and quantify marketing synergy. When you look in your multichannel funnels and start to see that conversions are being driven by several different channels working together, you’ll understand that no marketing channel is an island. Very few things work alone. Instead, each touch of a customer or prospect advances your goals.
3. It helps you understand and adjust your marketing resource allocation. What if you saw that social media was showing up in nearly every multi-part, multi-path conversion? Would that be a compelling case that you should invest more resources in social media? Absolutely. What if you saw none? Perhaps that social media expert you hired that was blustering about return on conversation didn’t know what they were talking about. Do pay per click ads influence organic search? Now you’ll have a way of making that determination. If they’re not delivering direct traffic and not boosting organic traffic results, it might be time to turn them off.
By showing all of the indirect impacts of your various marketing channels, you now have a way of determining what’s delivering results at any level and what’s flat out not working for you at any level in the marketing funnel.
4. It gives you a whole new set of dimensions to test. Perhaps you see right now in your multichannel funnel reports a set of paths that look like this:
Organic Search > Email > Social Media > Referral > Convert
If social was in the middle of the path towards advancing the sale, what if you got ambitious and tried to move it earlier in the process? Suppose you invited people to have a conversationn first, rather than push a newsletter? What if the reverse were true? You’ve now got insight into customer behaviors that you previously didn’t, and that should give you plenty of new ideas to try.
The opposing view
There will be some people who will be highly critical of multichannel funnels. If you’ve been working with, as an example, a social media “expert” who you suspect has been feeding you a line of crap (“return on influence! return on engagement! return on conversation!”), this tool is going to help reveal the truth about their efforts. You’ll see whether or not their work is having any impact at any point in your funnel.
Frankly, there are a lot of bad social media “experts” who should be absolutely terrified of multi-channel funnels, and a lot of legitimate practitioners who should be rejoicing that their efforts can finally be quantified and included in the overall marketing picture.
This is going to be true for many marketers across channels. There will be channels that, beloved though they might be, will be shown to be bringing in smaller than hoped for results. A number of uncomfortable questions will be raised, and as marketers we’ll need to be able to answer them.
The ultimate goal
The ultimate goal of the team is winning, and if you’re doing legitimately good work, creating legitimately good value in all of your different marketing efforts and channels, multichannel funnels should prove this. Value created at any stage should now be easier to see in the big picture, so your long term ultimate strategy should remain the same: create value for your customers and prospects and they’ll ultimately reward you with the conversion.
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