It was exciting to see that this company cared so much about the incoming talent that they had us create and train them on this document. There were seven sections to the document and each section had a ton of detail, but the idea was to create this so that it could continually live and grow over time as the community and the role changed. So, what were the seven most important things that the community manager needed to know? Well, here goes:

An understanding of the audience

Audience is first, as community is first in your title. You are managing a community; understanding that community and how it uses your products and services is the first thing that matters. You’ll need to know to whom you’re talking and what motivates them to care about you. Audience/customer first, always!

Tone

Community managers are responsible for creating, curating, and commenting on social. Knowing the tone to use to support the brand as you support the community is definitely a need-to-know. And in any possible case, it’s nice to show examples of what is meant by “tone”. Do this; don’t do that. That sort of thing. Tone in social can make or break a brand. So, a deep understanding of tone is vital.

Themes

Themes should tell you what you’re going to talk about in social. They should be consistent and on-brand. These topics support your brand position, but they also offer a significant WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). What are the informational topics that we are going to talk about? What is meaningful to our audience, but aligned with our brand, products, and services? These are your themes, and the community manager should know them backward and forward.

Calendars

Knowing what’s running when and at what time is key to a community manager. Calendars are not only valuable to community managers, but leadership and legal as well. These help everyone stay on task with what is happening with social content within the community.

Efficiency tools

Every community manager needs scheduling, listening, curation, and measurement tools. There are tons of tools out there that do these things, but it is nice to have all your tools spelled out in one spot so everyone knows what you use and why. Managing a community is a tough task. It can be 24/7, so tools to automate what you can while keeping the tone authentic makes it so that you can sleep. Mostly.

Curation sources

We harp a lot on 80/20: 80% of your content should be curated, which earns you the right to talk about yourself the rest of the time. To do this, you’re going to need a good list of sources from which to consistently curate content. The sources need to be credible and on-brand. And maybe most importantly they need to be aligned with your themes. The curation sources should be edited based on what’s working for your audience and what’s not. It should be a fluid list, but it needs to exist.

Response model

Every community manager—heck, every company—should have a response model. If you do not have one, please call me or tweet me. It is a quick, easy project that can be knocked out in a few weeks and will save you so much trouble and turmoil. A good response model will tell a community manager how to handle the community when something goes well, wrong, or in between. It sets it up so that when something does go wrong, you know how to handle it and who to go to. Being a community manager means that you are engaging the community in a dialog and sometimes, it’s nice to have a model to guide that dialog. It’s guardrails. It’s valuable.

Building and maintaining a community is a tough gig. And having a documented manual on how to manage your community is like an insurance policy. It’s also nice to have it all documented in one spot. You know, in case you need to take a day off or something.

What do you think? Did I miss anything? How would you level this up?

The post 7 Things Your Community Manager Needs Right Now appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

So to the High Performers out there, take solace, there is a place for you where your brand of magic making is rewarded. You just might not be there now. And if you are there, congrats! Keep making that magic.

The post To High Performers Everywhere appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Review the conversation about your category

The conversation changes all the time because the world is changing so fast. Last quarter’s insight may not even be a blip on the radar. If you are not listening to the conversation around your category, start today. It is far more illuminating than the branded conversation. Trust me on this: if you only listen to your brand, you are missing 94-98% of the conversation about your market. I do this listening once a quarter to see what’s new in my space that my customers care about. And then, I compare this to the content I am creating and sharing. This is how I can be nimble in what we write and share that matters to our audience. It helps me stay in tune with what matters most to people who may or may not buy my product.

Isolate your social users to see what’s converting

There are some tricks in Google Analytics that Morgan Lucas and Nichole Kelly showed me that allow me to isolate our social users to see what kind of content is converting our readers into people using our tools. This is a very cool little trick that can show you what your content is doing to drive leads. If you want to know more about it, hit up Morgan on Twitter. @MorganLLucas

Test something new

Every quarter, I commit to trying something new in content. Could be LinkedIn publisher, could be a Twitter chat. But I make a commitment to test something new each and every quarter. This test-and-learn mentality has driven so much learning. For example, solid participation in the right Twitter chat can drive so many new followers. It is mind blowing. We’ve increased twitter followers upwards of 10% in one Twitter chat with the right target audience. These new tests can infuse so much energy into your content strategy.

Make optimizing a priority

We all talk about optimizing our strategies, but how frequently do you stop and really take a look at what’s working and what’s not. If you’re anything like me, it isn’t very often. I really just keep plowing ahead most times, and it is wrong. So to me, optimizing is important, but it’s clearly not a priority. Because this is so clear to me now, I have set aside time on my calendar to review my content strategy each quarter. I actually block off a few days to look at data and find some new nuggets, but this will never happen if it isn’t on the books to happen. I encourage you to do the same.

It’s easy to get bored with all the content you are creating and curating. You get tired of the same messages and sometimes wonder if it’s worth it. I get there too. But I have some tactics in place to keep the fire lit under my content strategy so that it doesn’t get too stale and we can measure what’s making a difference. And that’s what’s cool, seeing what’s working and what isn’t.

The post Fix Your Broken-Record Content Strategy appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Conversion rate

The rate in which you acquire and convert customers is critical to me. It can give cursory validation to messaging and, in some instances, the product, services, or idea itself. Look at the number of people who visit your site; if you can convert 3% of them, you’re doing an average job. The better the conversion rate, the better (obviously). The conversion rate is a good measuring stick to what’s performing well and not so well on your site. But, it is cursory, something that you can dive deeper into to find ways to improve the overall experience on your site to drive conversion. Conversion rate can also be a good predictor when buying media, knowing you’ll need a specific number of impressions to generate an average conversion to a sale.

Cost per acquisition

This is the #1 thing your CEO cares about: cost per acquisition. It is how much it costs you to acquire the sale. CPA is a great way to predict spend based on your funnel. If we know that acquiring a customer is $20 or $2, we can plan for that. We can also look at how that trends over time. Is it becoming more or less expensive to acquire a sale? Why? This all-important metric is valuable to you in budgeting and in predicting outcomes.

ROI

“What was the return on our investment in terms of sales?” Answer this question and you will win big points with leaders in the c-suite. Marketing is responsible for the company’s growth, and yet we are viewed as a cost center. This tells me that the ROI conversation is not happening nearly enough. We should know what our marketing dollars generated in terms of sales. We need to stop being viewed as a cost center and start being viewed as a profit center; we can only get there by focusing on ROI. What’s delivering positive ROI, and how can we replicate those efforts? Better yet, make them even more efficient.

Lifetime Customer Value

If we want to really knock their socks off, we will know who our best customers are in terms of lifetime customer value. Roughly defined, Lifetime Customer Value is the projected revenue that a customer will generate during their lifetime. This helps you see the potential of each customer. By studying this metric hard, you can see how your products and service offerings can increase or decrease this number.

The other stuff

Agencies and consultancies love to create new metrics to prove that what they are doing is working. While some of them are nice key performance indicators of a program, they are not what will drive your career forward as an ROI marketer. And trust me, being an ROI marketer is the way forward as a career trajectory. So try not to sweat too hard over stuff like engagement, share of voice, traffic, uniques, time on site, bounce rate, and so on. I am not saying that these metrics are not important; what I am saying is that they are less important when wearing the ROI marketer hat.

Without a doubt, there will be comments talking about cost per lead and source. Cost per lead is important, but not as important as cost per acquisition. Track it, but be sure that it aligns with the cost per acquisition metric. As for source, I do not believe in last touch or first-touch attribution models. Until we can tell our leadership how our omni-channel efforts affect a sale, I do not think source should make this list.

Having seen all kinds of metrics in all of my jobs, wearing all of my hats, the only ones I report to my leadership are the ones listed above. They tell me everything I need to know about the health of my marketing work. Here’s to streamlining those reports!

The post The only four metrics that matter appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

When you couple this with the fact that the C-Suite is looking for measurable and tangible results from the marketing spend, we could be in trouble with our current way of doing things. You know, the whole advertise and interrupt. It might be time to let go of a few things are re-think the way we go about marketing our wares.

Let go of brand ego

We are not the center of their universe. We are not even in their consideration set 90% of the time. I get to do a lot of social listening in my job and I have found that people talk about categories, not brands. I wonder if it is even possible sometimes to move the needle. Even the best-case scenarios, the people are only talking about brands 15% of the time.

But it isn’t only the notion that we rule the world. There are countless other ideas that we should start thinking about letting go of because our current model isn’t sustainable. The results are showing that we can’t continue to spend and spend and spend to get a split second’s consideration.

Ego is the driving force around brand feedback and listening. Stop spending all of your time getting feedback on the brand and the products. Talk about the needs of the customer, and then figure out if your product and brand fits into those needs. Now, I am not advocating that we abandon all product testing; I am just saying that we need to do more testing around the needs of the audience. In terms of listening, stop only listening to your brand. You are missing 85-98% of the conversations that should matter to you if you want to cut through the clutter.

“Without the customer, there would be no brand”

Let go of “relationships”

Our way of thinking about the customer is becoming a dinosaur; actually, it may have always been a mirage. We are not in a relationship with a customer. The idea is so romantic, but it is false. We trade stuff for money with them. That doesn’t even resemble a relationship. Yet we continue to stand up communities and websites and content that people have to come to “us” for. This is flawed. We should be looking for ways to integrate into the customer’s day vs. hijacking it.

The answer is to let go. Let go of thinking that you are in a relationship with a customer. You aren’t. Let go of needing their referrals. Let go of making them to come you. Let go of all of it. Let go of the brand ego. Realize that the customer is the center of their universe and our brands just might make their days incrementally easier.

Start making grabs

Instead, let’s try to make some different grabs. How about making a grab to add value? Being valuable and a trusted resource is where you should be sitting. We need to start creating opportunities for advocates to champion our value. And for the love of Pete, stop being afraid to measure what you’re doing. It’s chicken shit. Put the customer at the center of your universe, and measure the impact of this shift.

We cannot continue to expect people to come to us. We cannot continue to believe that our brand is the center of the universe. Because without the customer, there would be no brand. It is about the customer and it always should be.

The post Let it go appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Social recruiting has been around for quite some time. In fact, I remember developing my first social recruiting strategy about 9 years ago and it involved MySpace (hello, dating myself!). And sadly, not much has changed in this time. Social media is such a huge missed opportunity for recruiting. With over a billion people using social tools, the chances are really solid that your purple squirrel is out there and they are using one of the many social channels.

You continue to post and pray

The number of times I see a major corporation regurgitating job postings and links makes me want to run screaming from the room. I will repeat myself for the billionth time: Social media is NOT a job board. It is NOT a broadcast tool. You have a gajillion job boards in the world. And mostly people are going to use Google or Indeed to search for jobs. That is where job postings go. Not on your Twitter feed. No. No. No.

You’re not providing value

Like most consumer brands out there, you are only promoting you. You are not thinking about what value you can bring to the job seeker who may choose to follow you. Curating smart content to help job seekers stands out. Being valuable to a job seeker makes your employer brand mean something when it comes to making decisions.

There’s more to life than LinkedIn

LinkedIn is not the only place in the world. It is a great tool for sourcers and recruiters. But it isn’t the only place in the world. Your candidates are using a bunch of different social tools. They’re pinning and using Instagram. They are on Twitter and Facebook. They read blogs. You need to think about how your brand can fit into any of those channels and then produce and curate amazing content to support the channel.

You aren’t paying any attention to your followers

I am guessing you have no idea who follows you. This is a mistake. These people are really interested in your employer brand. These people are your advocates. But most employers are doing nothing to engage their followers into becoming advocates. Heck, I am guessing you’ve never looked at your followers against your applicants. And you should.

You aren’t doing any listening at all

Listening is big for brands, but the recruiting teams are missing out on this intel. There are tools out there that will tell you where your job seekers are using social media, what they are saying about you (important), and what they are saying about the job search in general (more important and even game changing). Listening can inform the channels you use in social and the content that is most valuable to people. It can also lead to you creating and curating more relevant content for your ideal candidates. If you want to know more about listening, hit me up on LinkedIn, Twitter or in the comments below; I can absolutely help you figure this out.

You fail to tell stories

Storytelling has been around forever. In fact, there was once a position in big manufacturing plants for someone to read to the workers as they worked. Storytelling is important to any brand and even more critical to the employer brand. The decision to change jobs is not like buying laundry soap. This is an emotional decision. People want to know what it’s really like to work somewhere. Without storytelling, you fail to deliver that need to people, and in some cases, they make the wrong choice and end up leaving. When you tell authentic stories, there’s an opportunity to decrease turnover because there is less buyer’s remorse.

You aren’t measuring

Do you know how many candidates came from social media last year? How many are still with you? Were they quality candidates? You should be well-versed in these metrics, but many recruiting functions have no idea where their candidates came from. This has to change. And it isn’t a social recruiting problem. It is a recruiting problem.

You aren’t responding

Along with post and pray, this is the easiest thing in the world to do, and it does not have to take much time. You need to be responding to people on your social channels, and you need to be doing it regularly and in a consistent voice, tone, and approach.

You’re keeping your current employees off social

Employee referral is the #1 source of hire for most companies. And in many, many companies, employees are banned from social media. This is straight up insane. Your people are your best storytellers. They are living the brand. Let them tell your story. It is more authentic and believable when it comes from your people.

Social recruiting continues to be such a missed opportunity. I would welcome a conversation with anyone on how we can right this ship. And if you think your brand has a GREAT social recruiting strategy, hit up the comments with your story; I would love to talk about your successes and challenges. There is so much that can be done to make social recruiting all that it can be, and to be very honest, the benefits of a good social recruiting strategy actually have a positive ROI, something that all businesses could use.

The post 9 reasons your social recruiting strategy sucks appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

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Leslie’s ideal to run social media for any company. But, it seems like she has another plan; therefore, I will forever ask myself WWLKD?

The post Fire your social media team today, and hire Leslie Knope, instead appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Create Emotional Connection

The gold is found when brands create emotional connection. Creating emotional connection is real and authentic. Connecting an emotion to your brand is #winning. Making people cry over absent fathers, daughters going to war, or children unable to grow up because you failed to use safety locks does not in any way connect those emotions to your brand. It feels manipulative, and the last thing you want your customers to feel is manipulated and cheated. Which is how we got to #Downerbowl as a trending hashtag. I found that hashtag embarrassing to my profession. And to be completely honest, I did feel manipulated. And it made me actually angry at the brands for trying to get tears from me to buy a car.

Before #Downerbowl, we had a few great ads that made emotional connection to the brand in a powerful way. Dove does a great job with their Real Beauty series. Always did it with Like A Girl. And Similac recently did a great thing with their recent video. All of these examples tied the emotion to the brand. Dove and Always are about making women feel ok about being women and aging. They make the viewer feel powerful. And in Always’ case, they elegantly pointed out that “Like a Girl” is an insult that’s time has come. Similac tackled the age-old parenting battles that tear people down and remind us, it’s about our children because we are all doing our best to raise kids despite our differences.

Connect Emotion To Your Brand

The lesson here is to find a way to connect emotion to your brand. It is not easy. At all. If it were, the ads that fell flat would have been stars. But, they weren’t. Creating emotion is a ton easier. But it isn’t enough.

If you want to go the emotion route here are a couple of tips and tricks to consider:

Do not sell fear

We all see this one a lot. We saw it in the Nationwide ad that lit up Twitter in the wrong way on Super Bowl Sunday, but we also see it all the time in social. Fear baiting is not the way to create emotion. In fact, I have seen countless brands lose a big chunk of fans by posting a significant amount of content that may have been perceived as frightening. Financial and insurance institutions that have posts about fraud, theft, or what to do when you lose your wallet scare the daylights out of people. When people are on using social media or watching the Super Bowl or Oscars, they are catching up with friends; they do not want to be greeted by Debbie Downer scaring the crap out of them.

Play to hope

I want to believe that tomorrow is going to be better, and if your brand can help tomorrow be better – this is an easy win. Show people how tomorrow will be better by using your products. And I do not mean that tomorrow will be better if I have a new car. What I mean is what is your company doing to make tomorrow better and why should my buying your product fill me with hope for the future. If there is no direct play with your product making things better tomorrow, you can always try to tackle a subject that is top of mind to your customers and tackle that in an attempt to be the brand that starts a conversation (without killing a fictional child).

Remember the context of your ads and when people will be interacting with them. I still contend that useful will win the day. But as we are smack dab in the creating-emotion theme in the ad game, I would recommend that we move the bar higher and stop creating emotion; instead, work on creating emotional connection.

The post My Inner Crybaby Is Crying Uncle appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Knowing KPI = $$

Do you ever wonder what happens when you don’t measure? Well, our friends at HubSpot and Qualtrics recently published a report that was pretty dire for those who are not measuring their marketing efforts. And coincidentally gives my assertions of the importance of measurement even more oomph! The study found among other things that 74% of companies that weren’t exceeding revenue goals did not know their visitor, lead, MQL, or sales opportunities. One could make the leap that not knowing your KPI makes it harder to exceed revenue goals.

When you couple this with the fact that many CEOs do not trust their marketing team because we are not measuring, we should all be placing calls to IT to figure out where all of the data is located. It doesn’t have to be hard; let’s look at that list: visitors, leads, qualified leads, and sales opportunities. We should all be able to get at this information pretty quickly. But very few of us seem to be making it a priority. I have to wonder why? I know it is hard to look at the data because we are worried we might be failing. But in reality, that’s a story we are telling ourselves. If you’ve never looked before, it can’t be as much failure as it is a baseline from which you can start measuring.

You will fail if you do not start measuring.

Where to start

This information should be easy to get, easy to track, and easy to adjust tactics because of. And if you are not looking at this information regularly and planning your campaign tactics around your data, this is where failure is going to be found. You will fail if you do not start measuring. In fact, according to the study, if you don’t know your KPI, you are likely failing to meet revenue objectives. And for the department charged most frequently with growth, we must start measuring the KPI of growth, traffic, lead volume, cost per lead, cost per acquisition, and sales. The rest doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Much of this data is available to us. You need to get into your Google Analytics (or similar) account today. If you don’t know where your data is, call someone right now and find out. Get access. Start looking. If you need help looking or making sense of it, tweet me, I’ll help. You need to set up goal conversions in your analytics account. I know this sounds completely stupid to even write that in this blog, but I am guessing that many people do not have that set up yet. Again, need help? Ask. There are people all around you who probably know how to do this, and if you don’t know who can help you, ask your agency partner. You need to know this, and you need to know it right now. Your brand’s revenue goals are depending on it.

Now you’ll need to partner

This will at least get you the traffic and leads. As for qualified leads and sales, you need to work with your partners in sales to get at this information. You need to be able to access this information within your systems, and you need to be tracking this over time so you can see what your efforts are generating in terms of traffic, leads, MQL, and sales. Then you can simply do the math of what you spend on marketing to calculate the cost per lead and cost per sale. If you really want to shine, make a sweet little dashboard and share it with your boss so they can see the company’s month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter progress.

When you know these things, you are in a position to generate better results; you have information from people who consider and buy your product, and that is the only feedback your marketing strategies need. You need to know what works for people who consider and buy, and, until you know your KPI you’ll never grow the brand effectively.

The post Don’t know your KPI? Prepare to fail appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

My friend and colleague, Danielle, recently shared this article: “How to Craft an Agile Marketing Campaign”. It’s a solid how-to piece that you should read. But when I think about these principles for a large-scale enterprise, agile has a few hurdles to cross before it is widely adopted. Which is a huge risk for large-scale enterprises. The risk is this: Your scrappy competitors will beat you to agile and will know more about what works faster, giving them a competitive advantage.

Why agile?

Agile is not expensive. Agile is cheap. Which is why smaller, scrappier companies can win with the tools of agile. Agile also does the one thing large-scale campaigns don’t do…test and measure and adjust. Most large-scale campaigns take months of planning, even more months of tweaking, only to launch during the Super Bowl to crickets. Very. Expensive. Crickets. Agile is smaller in nature. You have to start smaller and more rough in terms of campaign. And (broken record alert!) you have to measure everything.

But, we’ve been doing it this way forever. We plan, we focus group, we adjust, we execute, we develop wild contingency scenarios. It is an epic effort to develop a campaign today in our omni-channel world where leaders require results. The problem I see with making the change to agile is three-fold. and the solutions are really simple.

Selling small is impossible to leadership

Agile requires that we start small. The agile campaign is one that starts with a nugget and lets the data determine next steps. That is a tough sell to almost anyone in leadership. Can you imagine that pitch? C-level leadership: “Tell me about the 2015 strategic marketing plan.” Marketing team or agency: “So, we’re thinking about a small Facebook campaign where we are driving traffic to the site using this type of messaging.” More crickets. Potentially career damaging crickets.

Take off your control freak hat

The hardest part for modern marketers with agile is that it requires that we stop trying to control every possible scenario and every possible communication. The reality is this: we are not in control of any aspect of our marketing outcomes. And we never will be. We should work to give up this stress-inducing, arm-flapping habit right away.

We don’t even know where the data is

I’ve talked to far too many clients in my day, and I always ask about results and ROI; I am never shocked to learn they have no idea where the data is. IT and Marketing work in separate, and sometimes combative, relationships. If we are going to be agile, we need to start asking questions about tracking and metrics that we’ve never asked before. We need to know where our customer data lives and how we can tap into it to see if our work is contributing to increased basket size, repeat purchases, account growth, etc. Until we know where the data is, we cannot be truly agile.

The solution

In all of these instances, the insane pitch to leadership, the desire to control everything about a campaign, and our resistance to real ROI measurement doesn’t have to be this way. The truth is this: agile should start with a small piece of the marketing puzzle as a proof of concept. And as any proof of concept, the best stuff stays; the rest is either ignored or re-tooled into a different test. This is how agile could easily be propagated through a large enterprise. Start with a measurable goal. Then, take the time to understand where the data is. Create an outline of what your campaign should be. Take the experimental money you’ve set aside this year, find a use case or a specific product to promote, and do it in agile-style. See what works in a small way before going bigger. It is after all, the agile way.

The post You heard the very expensive crickets. Now, hear this. appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

We’ve all read the reports that tell us that CEOs don’t trust marketers (unless they are marketers who measure). In fact, AdAge pointed out that in 2013, of the 9,800 board seats at Fortune 1000 companies, only 38 are held by CMOs. And I am relatively sure that the number hasn’t grown 60 fold in the last two years. So, could it be the magic? Let’s explore some of the ways conjuring is holding us back.

The language problem

Magic doesn’t translate well to CEOs. The language of CEOs is very black and white. Did we turn a profit? Did we increase sales? Have we grown shareholder value? These are numbers-driven questions. They’re scientific. CEOs and CMOs do not speak the same language. When we are talking with CEOs, we are talking about messaging and brand. We talk about campaigns and creative. Things that are far more gray. And in marketing, it is a blend of art and science. And we’ve been talking art for a long time. The CEO wants the science. They want the math. If we want to get a seat at the table with the C-suite, we need to start framing our conversations in black and white and avoid the gray. When we talk about brand, marketing, advertising, we have to learn to frame it on the language of profit and loss. And if you go back to the study mentioned earlier, these are the marketers who’ve earned the CEO’s trust and a seat at the table.

The measurement problem

Because art has been the side of the marketing equation we have all become more comfortable with, we have ignored the science; this is our biggest folly. Because our magic just might be too mystical for the C-suite. As we learn to speak their language, that includes their KPI. Until we embrace their KPI and find ways to talk in terms that they understand, we will not have a seat at the table. And when we try to introduce new KPI, we look untrustworthy. We have to master their KPI and make them relevant for our discipline. We need to talk about cost per acquisition, not engagement. We need to talk about cost per lead, not organic reach. Talk about the sales funnel. Unless we talk about black and white KPI that roll up to profit and loss, we will not matter to the C-suite. And we should matter to the C-suite.

The irony is this: We are the group most frequently charged with growth. However, the group that is most frequently charged with growth is also viewed as a cost center. This is not how it should work. We need to be creating real metrics that show that our work actually worked in terms of driving growth, sales, and market share. The rest is magic, which, in this case, is a career limiter, something none of us aspire to.

Our goal at SME is to teach marketers to be business rock stars. We do this because we want to see more marketers in the C-suite and on corporate boards. We believe in the profession and the impact it can have on a company. We just need to learn the language and get committed to measuring our efforts so we can transition from cost center to profit center. It actually might be possible, but we have to start.

The post Is making magic killing our careers? appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

I have banged my head against the wall about this for years. I will never understand this. Ever. Because my brain doesn’t work that way. Here’s how my brain works. When I get magical results…I want to invest MORE into that thing that drove the magic…not less. I want to replicate that magic across everything I do. Conversely, when something isn’t working…you know what I am not going to do? Throw more money at it. A campaign with zero recall is not a success no matter how many awards it garners. Yet, we keep making them. I do not understand.

What can we do about it? Well, I happen to have a little soapbox here at my desk and I would like to pull it out and make a little four-part rant.

<rant>

Measure it

If you are not measuring your marketing spend and have no plans to start, quit now. The rest of the world will be passing you by in 3-2-1. If you are planning to start: Start. Now. Right now. When you’ve stopped reading this, go measure your efforts. If you need to help someone understand why they need to start measuring, have them read this, this, this or this. Or look at anything Nichole Kelly has written or spoken about. You have to start measuring to see where the magic is happening. Until you do that, you will continue to invest in the wrong place and people.

Stop investing in poor performers

We all have a soft spot for something. I call them blind spots. Some people believe you only need to create your own content. Others believe that email is a magic bullet. Whatever the case may be, you will find a poor performer in your marketing mix. Do not. I repeat, do NOT keep it because you like it. Remind yourself that you like profit more than a broken tactic.

Find the magic and replicate it

When you’re measuring, especially if you are measuring completely and not just looking at last touch attribution, you will see some magic. You’ll see something producing the lowest cost per lead and a compelling cost per acquisition. You can see how different tactics contribute to a lower cost per lead or acquisition. When you see the customer journey, the lifetime customer value based on how they interact with your brand, and what value you bring to the table as a brand, you need to see what that is and find ways to make that magic happen over and over again. For example, if you find that people who interact with content you curate on social media spend more time on your website and convert at a higher rate than those that do not interact with curated social content, you should look at what kind of content they’re interacting with, and see if there are partnerships you can explore with those creators. You could also look at that content to see what you might be able to do with it in terms of original content creation. These nuggets of magic should drive future plans and strategies.

Reward the high performers with budgets worthy of magic

The people who innovate in your company and deliver magic for you should be rewarded with budgets and teams that support the magic they’ve created. They’re obviously high performers. High performers are your greatest assets and far too frequently their needs are ignored because they are always delivering magic. I’ve seen this time and again at countless companies. The best of the best deliver magical results. And way too often, the best of the best are then asked to replicate the magic in bigger ways with fewer resources. And this has to stop. We need to be sure that when we find the magic, we are not only replicating it, we are growing and rewarding the magicians who made the magic.

If you know the results you’re generating as a company, imagine what they could be if you were really measuring and optimizing your efforts. What if you were growing the stuff that’s working and eliminating the stuff that isn’t working? You might be getting even stronger results. It’s worth a shot. I know it doesn’t happen as often as I’d hope.

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