Conversion Vs. Growth - What Are You Doing?

Conversion

Remember when you built your website and obsessed over the front page, the product pages, and the bio pages - especially the bio pages!  All that effort was directed to one aspect of the customer journey - conversion. 

These “static” pages exist so that when someone arrives on your website they can find what they need quickly and easily contact you.

But these pages don’t bring in new customers.

Growth

Go to analytics and check the top 10 pages on your website.  If you’re executing a growth strategy at least half of them should be blog posts.

New content is what gets distributed across social platforms, it’s what grabs people’s attention and generates shares which in turn generates traffic II: which in turn generates links which in turn generates greater visibility in search, which in turn generates traffic :II

The Power Of A Single Post

If you don’t have any blog posts in your top 10 pages, maybe it’s time to sit down and think of what you could create. 

I’m not talking here about an easy to replicate and systematize process, not like a weekly or even a monthly thing, I’m talking about something pretty one-off that you would be super proud to create, publish and shout about.

While consistency in publishing is important, throwing in the occasional longer form content piece is a good way to build anchor posts that will consistently drive traffic to your business.

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit: Learn Music Theory.net

How To Tell The Future

Can you sense it? 

It’s almost the end of June!!

In just 8 days we’ll have KPIs from not only one month, or even one quarter, we’ll have data for a whole half year!  I’m so excited I might need new pants!

Looking Back

People think that Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) only measure the past - and when it comes to monthly and quarterly data, that’s generally true.  But 180 days - that’s a whole half year of your life, if you’ve been doing something that long - you’ll have developed a habit - a trend - and trends project the future.

Resource Allocation

Half year trends allow you to make fairly accurate projections as to what will work going forward.

$5k or 5 hours a month allocated to the wrong tactic is money and time down the drain, but allocated to the right tactic can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Becoming Zoltar

While I’d like to finish this email with a link to a Webinar series where I take you through the esoteric world of Scrying, Tarot decks and bone reading...I’m sorry - it’s a little duller than that.

Determine the performance indicators you want to track and the behaviors you want to measure, create a spreadsheet and allocate time every month to fill it in and then analyze the results.

It’s not sexy, it’s kinda boring, but if you do it, the results are magical!

Feeling a little down? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.

Image Credit:  Zoltar by Widomirama on Flickr

Gift Horses, Mouths and the Network You Should Revisit

Back on the 11th of this month Justin Bieber had his wisdom teeth pulled, 3 days afterwards a sole tweet consisting of the hashtags #pain and #wisdomteeth had over 83,000 strangers wishing him a speedy recovery.

I’m guessing you’re not a Belieber - but have a think about that - what does it mean for your business?

Straight from the horse’s mouth

Twitter is about strangers - it’s about opening communication between people who don’t know each other, without filters, direct to the individual.

If you’re in the market for new customers and clients - Twitter’s ½ billion users would seem like a good place to look.

What’s new with Twitter

Here are three things that have got me looking at Twitter again for my own businesses:

New Analytics

Twitter’s new analytics interface is super clean, easy to use, focuses on the key metrics and makes compiling KPIs a dream.

Google Indexed Tweets

A recent study a few months after the Google / Twitter deal showed that tweets are now 4 to 5 times more likely to appear in search results.  And while those tweets tend to belong to authority users, it’s a clear indication that Twitter’s becoming more visible again.

Persicope

The moving selfie (thanks @lizmarshall) is here and it’s just going to grow, here’s a great article explaining what Periscope is and how it works.  

With Twitter buying periscope they’ve turned themselves into the #1 network for streaming video.

When was the last time you looked at Twitter?

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Written while listening to: The Bench 163 V 1 by music2work2

Image credit: Horse Macro_5251 by Kit Logan on Flickr

Why Sometimes The Evil Voice In Your Head Speaks The Truth

• http://www.businessinsider.com/overconfidence-and-bad-reasoning-2015-5
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
• http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/overestimate.aspx

You’re not going to read those links so here’s the tl;dr version:

You’re really bad at estimating your ability when it comes to digital marketing.

Why this is a problem

When you overestimate your ability, marketing goals become unachievable.  A vicious cycle starts and before you know it your attitude to marketing sucks and your business fails,...miserably.

Why I'm so happy

Client sessions in early July are awesome!  We start with the June figures, move on to Quarter 2 and then finish with the half year.  Trends are crystal clear and we have a handle on what can be achieved with the available time and resource.

As a result, our objectives for Quarter 3 are strategic and achievable.

It feels great!

How you can feel happy too

It’s summer - it’s likely that you’re going to get less bang for your content buck than you would come September.  So please, if you don’t have them - I implore you - take some of the time you were going to spend on content creation and spend it on KPI creation.

I don’t say this often - but:

TRUST ME

You will thank yourself in a year’s time.

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Written while listening to: The new Yamaha NU1

Image Credit: Hello I’m Awesome by Jamey M. Photography on Flickr

What’s Going On In Your Business?

• How did you perform in June?
• Can you compare that to May?
• What about June last year?
• How was your second quarter?
• What are the trends that are now visible through the first half of the year?

If you don’t the know the answers you’re clearly not measuring KPIs.  

If you do, the question now becomes:

What are you going to do with that information?

Metrics move when humans change

Spreadsheets full of numbers don’t in themselves do anything.  

It’s the behaviors you implement in response to those figures that will grow your business.

Do this

Create a new text document and save it where you keep your KPI spreadsheet.

Write down the one or two things you want to achieve in Quarter 3, then write down the behaviors you will need to implement in order to deliver.

I’ll remind you to revisit that document on Thursday 1st of October.

(Oh, and if you don’t have a KPI document, you should probably get in touch.)

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Written while listening to: Me getting to grips with my new Vintage Steinway D-274

Image Credit: Metric Spaces by stuartpilbrow on Flickr

Make This Small Change, See A Big Difference

You are still compiling your KPIs - Yes?

Here's something to try this quarter:

Change your tracking of social interactions from received to given.

In other words - stop recording how many likes, re-tweets, comments and shares you get and start tracking how many you give.

Do this

I treat each social network on a KPI document separately, for example, this is what the Facebook rows look like:

• No. of Facebook Friends / Page Likes
• Time spent on Facebook
• Likes given
• Comments made
• Shares given

Use the above format for each network you're active on: Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.

Beware too much data

You could of course track both, given and received, but it's been my experience that the longer a KPI document is, the less likely it'll be filled in, so - for the next few months - just track your own behavior and watch the follower count, you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Oh - and if you're not measuring your marketing efforts, maybe book a session and let's get you set up for the year!

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Written while listening to: Fly Away Pain - Development by music2work2

Image credit: Giving is receiving by Patricia Piolon on Flickr