If it’s not, you might be a bit perplexed. After all, you’ve done the keyword research, you’ve audited your audience, and you even have a production calendar. By all accounts, your content should be hitting every target. So what could be causing it to miss the mark?

The answer is simple. You have the science, but did you remember the art?

To put it bluntly, your content isn’t performing because you’re not creating art.

When you start to commoditize content, producing for the sake of producing, you strip the art out of that content. Science might tell you what to talk about, but art is all about how you say it.

So what is art? At its simplest, art is anything that conveys a part of its creator to its audience. Sure when most of us think about art, we tend to envision cave walls, David and the occasional urinal, but blog posts, websites and infographics can be art. That is, if there’s a touch of soul put into them. If all you’re doing is pumping out work on topics just to capture those keywords. Chances are it’s not going to be art. It will be commodity content and it’s going to fail.

So how do you stop creating commoditized content and start creating art?

Art Takes Hard Work

There are no shortcuts when it comes to art. Even the urinal alluded to earlier in the post took some time to concept. Audiences appreciate the thought and work that went into “The Fountain,” that’s what made the piece a success. The same holds true for digital content as well. Audiences can tell when a blog post was banged out in thirty minutes. They can tell when a post is more concerned with landing a spot on Google than it is about conveying value to its audience. Conversely, audiences can tell when an author takes their time crafting their blog post. Hard work inspires appreciation and appreciation correlated to value. The more perceived work that goes into a piece of art, the more valuable that art becomes. High production quality, brilliant writing, poignant dialogue, all add to the value of a piece. Take just a bit more time on each content piece, and surprise yourself by the art that you can produce.

Art Inspires Passion – Passion Inspires Sharing

Commoditized content might make us think, but art makes us feel. Art inspires action, feeling, emotion. More important, art inspires sharing. When we’re touched by art, we want to share that experience with other people. In the digital world, this translates to social sharing. Think about the content that you see people sharing on your social stream. Is the majority of it commodity content, or is it art? Is it on your wall because it inspired something in its sharer? The golden rule: the better the art, the more it’s shared.

Art Stands Out

Take a look at most of the content brands or individuals are producing and ask yourself, is it good? Is it art? Or is it just being noticed because there’s so much of it. Visibility by volume, supported by the mindset, “Let’s create so much that audiences will just HAVE to see it!” If you want your content to stick out, make it art. Pour in the hard work, put in the passion, inject some soul and transcend to the next level. Art gets noticed. Art catches the eye. Fill your content production pipeline with less commodity and more art, and watch those success metrics climb.

Bottom line, invest in your pieces and reap the rewords. Or continue to produce content by the pound and drown in mediocrity.

Is it better to focus on the art or the quantity? Have an opinion, share it in the comments below!

The post Stop Creating Content appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Your Website Isn’t Optimized

By now everyone reading this blog should understand the importance of a mobile optimized site. But having a responsive/mobile friendly site is just one area of your website that needs optimization. Take a good look at your site, what’s the first thing you see. If it’s not a call-to-action to begin the sales cycle (or get placed into a nurturing campaign), then you could be losing potential conversions. You have to optimize the site for conversion. Make sure there is at least one call-to-action on every page of the site. You also want to make sure that you are split-testing these conversion points to continually improve your numbers. As silly as it seems, tweaking the color of a button or the wording of the call-to-action could add serious points to your conversion rate. Besides optimizing for mobile and conversions, you want to be sure your site loads at an acceptable pace. Your customers are not patient people. They are just like you. If they think a site or shopping cart is taking longer to load than what it should, they’ll bounce! They are going to lose interest and go to a competitor’s site. A competitor who has a better functioning site.

Your Messaging Is Confusing

The mechanics of your website might be working, but what about your messaging. Anyone who comes to your site should be able to get a near-immediate understanding of what your company is about. If it’s not crystal clear what service or product your company provides, you’re going to lose the sale. Think about it yourself. How many times have you gone to a site, read the “About Us” page and thought, “Okay…, so what do they do?” If you ask that question, you can be sure that your customers ask this question. Make sure they aren’t asking that question about your site. Every page on your site should speak, to some degree, about how your company is going to help solve your customer’s problem. This can be done through copy, product images (especially if you’re an Ecommerce shop), video, and infographics, anything short of a dancing bear in the corner of the screen.

Regardless of the medium you choose, make sure the communication isn’t too long, confusing or full of jargon/empty words. The better the understanding a potential customer has of your services or products, the more likely they are to convert.

Your Conversion Process Sucks

If your sales or conversion process is too complicated, it could be costing you conversions (sabotage). Complicated sales process include those with multiple, unnecessary steps, buttons that are hard to find, poorly worded field labels and anything else that makes a customer say, “Huh?” when they are trying to check out. Equally detrimental to closing the deal are buggy conversion processes. If a customer’s shopping cart keeps emptying automatically, or a form field isn’t working, that customer is going to become discourage. Discouraged customers do not buy.

So how do you know if your sales process is costing you sales? Well first, get some honest feedback from past customers on their check out or conversion experience. Even better, go ahead and set up conversion funnels and goals inside your analytics platform. This will visualize and measure each step of the conversion process so you can see where customers are abandoning the conversion process. High abandonment at a particular step is often an indicator of a problem with your sales process.

Closing the deal is hard enough as it is, so do yourself a favor and stay out of your own way!

Has your digital platform ever cost you a sale? Let us know in the comments below and join the conversation.

The post 3 Ways you’re Sabotaging the Sale appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Be Proactive With Your Communications

When you aren’t working together in an office, your team can lose the luxury of pop-up conversations. There’s no doors to knock on, no cubicles to swing by. These impromptu conversations can be important, especially when it comes to a team member letting you know of an immediate need or asking for a mid-project review. As a remote leader, it’s up to you to be proactive and instigate these conversations. You can’t wait for your team to come to you. Get on the line and check in with them on a regular basis to make sure they have everything they need to complete their work.

Make Your Communications Crystal Clear

When you give directions to a remote team, it’s imperative that those instructions are delivered with absolute clarity. Often our team works at different hours across different time zones. This sometimes makes it tricky to provide additional clarification on a project on the same day. Be as specific as possible in your communications. Provide file paths, deadlines, reference materials, whatever is needed to complete the assignment in the first communication.

Get On The Phone

While texting and emails do wonders for promoting frequent communication, it’s hard to replace a quick phone call. No other medium provides an easier way to build rapport, address questions and replace that “water-cooler” feel than some good old fashioned voice-to-voice communication. Our team has a daily call, it’s no more then 15 – 30 minutes, and it does wonders to ensure that everyone is up to speed on everything.

Invest In Effective Tools And Let Go Of Ineffective Tools

Nothing can make or break communication with your team faster then technology. The right tool can make managing your remote team a breeze, the wrong tool can cut your team off at the knees. Our team uses a combination of email, 15five, Basecamp, Gchat, Skype, GoToMeeting, Join.me, just to name a couple tools. We do this for a number of reasons, chief among them being that if one of these platforms go down (for whatever reason), we have other methods of communication. As we add new tools, we also look at tools that we are no longer using. There’s no need to bog your team down with ineffective platforms.

Be Available And Respond Quickly

Although we work remotely, I would say that I am more connected with this team than many teams that I’ve worked with in an office. My team knows that they can reach out to me through a myriad of channels. It’s not uncommon for the team to use a combination of Gchat, texting and Skype during the course of the day to reach out to me. When this happens, it’s all about the response time. If a team member reaches out to me, it’s usually with a question about a specific tasks. So getting these questions addressed quickly is imperative to ensuring that we over deliver on our client’s expectations.

Trust Your Team

You cannot look over the shoulders of a remote team. Physically, it’s impossible, or at the very least would require an awkward webcam set up. When you’re thousands of miles away from your team, you cannot micromanage. For a remote team to be truly functional, you have to trust them. Trust them to complete the work. Trust them to reach out with issues. Trust them to be available when you need them (during reasonable hours of course). The point is you need to have faith in your team and treat them like the adults they are. If you’re worried about a team member not living up to their bargain, consider that perhaps a remote working gig isn’t the best fit for them.

Lead by Example

Most imporant, your actions set the tone for the team. If you’re not working and following up with your obligations, how can you expect your team to meet theirs? No one wants to work for a manager that they believe is sipping Mai Tai’s on the beach. Roll up your sleeves and get the work done. If the team member is expected to be available for calls from 9 – 5, then you are too. Be the example that you want from your team. Anything else is just being a hypocrite.

Do you lead a remote team? If so, share your tips in the comments below.

The post Seven Tips For Leading A Team That Works Remotely appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

1. You get an idea for a social media post.

4. You create whatever’s necessary to bring your post to life (images, words, videos)

6. You publish the post!

7. You monitor the campaign.

8. You review the post’s performance.

9. You celebrate an awesome post with a big party.

10. You start planning for the next post.

What steps does your company take when publishing on social media? Leave a comment and join the discussion.

The post 10 Steps to Publishing a Social Media Post appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

I know what you’re thinking, “Blasphemy.”

The idea that big data is useless goes against everything we as marketers and business people have come to believe over the last couple of years. Data, whether big or small, is only useful when it’s being put to work. There is no inherent value to data. The value comes from the application of what the data says.

For many companies, the focus is on the collection of data. After all, as human beings we are prone to be hoarders. Wired by our survival extinct to collect and hoard for the leaner winter months that may come. So companies hoard data, as much as they can, for the illusive “What if?” scenario.  “Maybe this will be useful someday,” they say.

And it’s this hoarding without without a data analyst, without application, that makes big data useless.

As an agency, we have conversations all the time with our clients around the collection of data. When we ask them how much data they want collected, the answer is almost unanimous, ‘Collect as much data as you can! We want to know everything about anyone! Even if it’s not related to our product or the service we provide.” I’m looking at you here mobile games that ask for access to my phone records. Like knowing that I’m talking to my Dad is going to have any bearing on whether I purchase another level of “Mad Monkey Mayhem.”

Companies think they need to collect all the data they can get their hands on. Not surprising, a rare few companies should be gathering mountains of data. Most though, do not, simply because most companies do not have a plan for what to do with the data they are gathering. They don’t have an idea of how to apply any insights gleaned from the data towards improving their business. Heck, a lot of companies go out and collect mountains of data, only to end up not doing anything because they claim they have too much data to shift through!

At SMED (the agency arm of Social Media Explorer), we recommend identifying the type of data that you actually need to improve your business, and then only collect that information.

Some common data focuses include:

• Improving your customer service experience
• Improving your marketing to make it less interruptive
• Altering your product mix to better serve your customers
• Improving your logistics to deliver products to customers faster

The Negative Side of Collecting Data

Sure there are some big positives to collecting data (as long as you can analyze it), see above. But there are also risks involved with collecting big data. First and foremost is security. Where and how are you keeping this data? Is it in secured space, or just on a company server in someone’s abandoned cubicle? Another major consideration is privacy concerns. People have a limit to how much data they feel you as a company should gather. If you push this limit, you can turn away potential customers and foster distrust in your space. I’m not the only one that has decided not to download a mobile application simply because it was asking for more data than I deemed necessary.

So How Do I Know I Can Collect Data?

This is a pretty easy question. Take a look at the data you want to collect. Do you have a plan for how to apply this data? If not, do you think you’ll have a plan in the next couple months?

If the answer to the question above is yes, then start collecting that data (provided you store it in a safe space).

If the answer to the above is no, then reevaluate whether you really need the data or if you could be suffering from a data hoard attack.

Remember any data is useless without analysis and application. Big data included.

How does your company use, or plan to use Big data? Leave a comment and join the discussion. 

The post Big Data Is Useless appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

SME Digital (the agency arm of Social Media Explorer), prides itself on its “Work from Anywhere” culture. Our team is free to work from anywhere across the globe (provided they can find a strong internet connection and be available for client calls). I’m currently writing this post from a rental in Victoria, Canada, where I’ve been staying for the past couple weeks. Not going to lie, it’s a pretty wonderful experience and adds, for me, a unique level of value to the company. And that value-add is exactly why we have “Work from Anywhere” as part of our culture.

Strong, positive organizational cultures bring with them a host of added benefits. They empower teams to produce exceptional work; they can reduce turnover rates and can even supplement lower salaries/bonus structures. Likewise, a negative company culture can flat out destroy a company. It can lead to low productivity levels, petty theft, negligence, apathy and other destructive behaviors or actions.

Working in an agency environment, I have the privilege of partnering with some fantastic companies. Most of which have positive company cultures and a few others negative cultures. These negative cultures aren’t obvious on day 1. It’s not like any of these companies had a poster in their break room that said, “Only work as hard as you need to to not get fired.” Instead, the negative culture of a company would manifest itself through the everyday actions and conversations of team members, delayed responses, cancelled phone calls, missed project deadlines. Of these negative cultures, the most common and destructive we experienced is what I (and I’m sure others) refer to as a Culture of Fear.

A Culture of Fear is a negative organization culture where a perpetual, base level of fear (fear of being fired, being reprimanded, being ridiculed) runs from the top-down throughout an organization and has a negative impact on production and the employee morale. Cultures of Fear cripple organizations. Once this fear takes root, it manifests itself in a variety of negative ways. Some of the most common symptoms of this culture include: the halting of innovation (risk), the delay of projects as no one can feel confident in making decisions and an increase in employee apathy.

So how can you tell if you’re operating in a Culture of Fear?

Take a second to answer the below questions. Think about your responses and ask yourself if this describes your working environment.

• Are you, or your team members, terrified about trying out a new tactic or initiative?
• Do you feel uncomfortable if pushed to make a decision on your own?
• Do you find yourself wondering how to “spin” something to a senior team member or supervisor?
• Are you constantly concerned about the security of your job?
• Is your supervisor concerned about the security of their job?

If your answer to the above questions is yes, and the frequency associated with these issues is daily or weekly, your organization might be infected by a Culture of Fear.

How do we stop being afraid?

So, how do you transform you company culture and shake off this crippling fear? It starts from the top-down. For most companies, culture is an extension of the values and actions of the leadership team. The CEO needs to not be afraid of the board, the VP’s need to not be afraid of the CEO, and so on from there. If you’re an entry or mid-level employee, you probably won’t be able to change the organization; but you can start by changing your personal environment. Start by having an honest conversation with your supervisor or team lead. If that thought terrifies you, ask yourself why. Are you afraid of looking weak? Are you afraid of being ridiculed? Fired? Take a moment to sit and explore these feelings. Are they warranted?

You will never do your best work if you’re constantly looking over your shoulder. If there’s no way to shake off that fear, start looking for another job. Extricate yourself from the situation and start sleeping through the night again.

Company culture has a direct impact on a company’s ability to be successful. Strong, successful companies have strong, positive cultures. This isn’t a coincidence. If you’re not happy with the level of success in your company or team, take a good look at the culture. Chances are you’ll find some answers there.

Do you work in a Culture of Fear? If so, share your experience in the comments below.

The post Five Signs Your Organization Is Crippled By A Culture Of Fear appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Gone are the days where marketers and agencies had to herald in the era of mobile, clamoring cowbells screaming, “Mobile is coming! Mobile is coming!”

Because guess what it’s here.

According to the team over at PennyStock Labs (and their infographic included below), 1.4 billion smartphones are in use worldwide, and this is just the tip of a much larger potential pool. As mobile carriers and infostructure penetrate rural Africa and Asia, that number is only expected to rise. If you add in the number of tablet and all other mobile devices, the number of mobile devices worldwide jumps from 1.4 billion to 7.7 billion. That is six hundred million more devices than there are people in this world (currently around 7.1 billionish)

So, honestly, are you ready for this golden age of mobile? Start by taking a look at these three areas.

Your Social Postings

Are you posting mobile optimized Facebook updates, what about running mobile optimized social ads? With 370 million daily mobile users, Facebook has clearly become a habitual ritual of mobile users. Add in the 80 million hours of mobile YouTube footage viewed daily and there’s no denying the integration of social and mobile. .

To make sure you’re firing on all mobile cylinders, make sure that you’re posting mobile optimized content to each social platform. Facebook and Twitter makes this relatively simple if you follow their sizing guidelines. Further, make sure any destinations you’re promoting are also mobile friendly. You don’t want to be the brand that uses a mobile Facebook ad to drive traffic to a flash-based landing page.

Your Conversion Experience

$1.1 billion in purchases made daily on mobile devices. That’s “billion” with a “b.” This is a pool of money you’re missing out on if you aren’t using a mobile friendly checkout process. Purchases aren’t the only points of conversion that should be mobile optimized. Take a look at your site and all its points of conversion. Are you expecting your audience to fill out forms, make reservations or utilize a click-to-call button?  Then they better be mobile optimized. Your audience is busy (those “It’s Gonna Be May” memes aren’t going to post themselves); they don’t have time to stumble through a clumsy conversion funnel. If you’re conversion points aren’t optimized, you’re going to lose this business.

Your Consumer Reach

Beyond just simple social uses, is mobile even a consideration in your marketing strategy? If not, it needs to be. Americans are spending an average of 3.3 hours a day in front of their phone. This is almost as long as they spend in front of the TV. The rub, even when they are watching TV they’re still on their phone. In fact, 88% of consumers admit to using their phone while they watch TV. Savvy marketers see this tend and understand it’s no longer about segmenting ads by channel type: only mobile ads on mobile phones/only TV ads on TV shows, it’s about integrating all channels. This dual-media phenomenon has led to the rise of the second screen experience and provides easier ways of integrating terrestrial and digital advertising. Case in point, the call to action included in a TV ad that drives traffic directly to a time sensitive mobile coupon claim. Two separate platforms, one audience, and one goal.

At the end of the day, if you are still discounting mobile, you’re discounting one of the single largest, world-wide, audience reaching platforms currently at our disposal.

Take a look at the infographic below to see the data. Do you agree we’re in the golden age of mobile? Disagree? Leave a comment and join the discussion. 

The post Bring On The Golden Age Of Mobile [INFOGRAPHIC] appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

What if I told you, before I handed you that $1,000, that I was about to hand you a random amount of money anywhere between $1,000 and $100,000,000?

That $1,000 doesn’t feel as sweet anymore.

Now, what if I told you I was going to hand you a random amount of money between $1 and $100 and then surprised you with $1,000 in your hand.

Feels amazing, right?

Witness the power of expectations.

In all three scenarios, the end result is the same. You’re  getting handed a grand, just for being you. Yet, the experience of that handout, and the emotions it leaves you with, vary on the expectations that were set. If you were a victim of scenario 2, you might even be walking away thinking that you completely failed as you ONLY received $1,000.

This is a standard part of human nature. Regardless of the outcome, if it doesn’t match up with our expectations of what the outcome “should be” we’ll either be delighted or disappointed.

Not quite convinced, check out all the 5-star Yelp! reviews that contain some variation of the phrase “It was better than I expected.” Then check out the 2- and 1-star review that contain something like, “I don’t know, it was good, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t meet my expectations.”

Once you set the expectation. You set the bar. A disappointing meal in your personal life isn’t fun for anyone. Unmet expectations in the business world can be downright devastating.

As the Director of Client Services for SME Digital (You knew we had an agency arm right?), managing expectations is a key part of our business. But don’t think that I’m only talking to agencies here, managing expectations is a skill that is also useful client side. From setting a bar with a CEO or supervisor, talking budget with a vendor or handling project timing with your direct reports, you need to be managing expectations.

So what expectations should you manage?

Expectations around Costs

Nobody likes a surprise bill. Whether it’s an extra charge showing up on your monthly phone bill or an extra “0” tacked on the end of a vendor invoice, we can all agree that a surprise bill is damn-near rage inducing. As an agency, it’s your job to set clear expectations around costs at the onset of any relationship. Present it in writing, and make sure the terms are agreeable to both you and the client, before you start working together.

“But what about changes in scope?” you ask in a frantic voice.

Well, that’s why someone invented change orders. If a client requests a scope change halfway through a project, communicate the impact this will have on the final invoice and set that expectation.

Now what if the change in billing was your agency’s fault? Maybe you underpriced a certain aspect of the project, or the media flight came back more expensive than you had planned. That’s a tricky area. The best offense is of course a good defense. Before presenting any number make sure you’ve done your due diligence. Thinking that a certain number sounds right isn’t an option. This is especially true if you have to partner with another agency or vendor to help execute the work. Assuming that they’ll do the project for a certain amount isn’t going to cut it. Work with that partner; settle on a number that works for both of you, and then (and only then) do you present a proposed budget to your client or stakeholder.

If you do need to go back to the client due to an under-budgeted project, be honest with the client, explain what particular piece was under-billed and work together on a solution. The sooner you can have this conversation, the better.

Manage Expectations around Timing

Repeat after me, “I will never tell a client, or stakeholder, day-of that a project or campaign isn’t going to launch.”

Breaking this news on the day the client is expecting something to launch is an absolute recipe for disaster. It makes your agency look like it doesn’t know what it’s doing, and it makes you look incompetent by not being aware of the launch status. Even worst, it makes the client contact look bad in front of their team (who have expectations of their own on launch timing).

Timing expectations can be tricky, but as with the budget, early warnings go a long way when informing the client of a potential missed deadline. The minute you are 100% sure that a project’s timing could be negatively impacted (maybe a client didn’t review a document quick enough, or maybe a piece of code was trickier for your developer to write than planned) be sure to let that client know.

Besides letting them know that of the delay in the project’s timing, you also want to tell them the cause of the delay, and what the revised timeline looks like. Remember your contact is also managing expectations of their own, whether they’re with a supervisor, the CEO or even the boardroom.

Due diligence plays a huge part in setting the right expectations from the get go. Don’t ever assume that something should take a week or two, get confirmation from the creative team, development team and whoever else is having a hand in the project. Again, you want to set the most realistic expectation from the start.

Set Expectations around Results

You’re not special; don’t just assume that your campaign is going to outperform the world

Too many agencies and professionals feel like they need to promise the moon to sell in an idea or win a new piece of business. What happens next? The agency struggles to produce results that were unrealistic to begin with. I see this client side as well, with a campaign manager setting themselves up for failure with their Director of Marketing because what they are promising is unattainable.

In many ways, this is the worst false expectation you can set. Timing impacts and budget changes are annoying but workable. However, fail at hitting your promised level of result, and you face an uphill battle to prove success. Regardless of the success of a campaign, you still would have to communicate that you didn’t hit the promised goal.

Results are the truest indicator of ROI for an agency. If the client isn’t happy with your results, they’re going to walk. That’s the nature of the beast. If you don’t set the right expectations up front, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Of course you shouldn’t sandbag either. Instead, start the results conversation by asking what the client thinks success looks like with a particular campaign or project.

You can then work from there to establish realistic, collaborative goals. If you’re pitching new business, use average figures, costs and responses in your pitches. You’re not special; don’t just assume that your campaign is going to outperform the world.

Of course there’s always an opportunity for a campaign to surpass its promised results, but you know what, no client ever got upset over beating a goal.

Expectations are powerful. If you aren’t managing them, they will manage you.

The post Manage Expectations or They’ll Manage You appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

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After all, you aren’t an effective marketer if you aren’t tracking the numbers.  Even more, you aren’t a top-notch marketer if you’re not tracking the one metric that matters above all others: Cost per Acquisition (CPA).

Now don’t get me wrong, all those other metrics are important too. Metrics like:

• Click-Thru-Rate
• Cost per Click
• Cost per Conversion

Just to name a few.

But, while these metrics are important to any well run campaign. They don’t hold a candle to the Holy Grail of marketing metrics: Cost per Acquisition. In other words, how much do I have to spend in marketing dollars to get a paying customer?

So why is Cost per Acquisition so important? Simple, it’s the quintessential metric for determining true return on investment.

It doesn’t matter how many clicks or eyeballs a campaign receives, if it’s not generating revenue, it’s not successful.

Case in point, I was working for an agency charged with managing a company’s PPC account. My team’s ads were performing well above average (on paper). Through aggressive split-testing, we were able to attain a CTR greater than 4% and had the CPC down below a dollar; just fantastic. Yet, when we went to share our good news with the client, we were surprised to hear that they had only received one sale; just a single sale from all our efforts.  Their Cost per Acquisition was the entire spend on the marketing campaign to date. Not good. So instead of focusing on CTRs and click costs, we focused on Cost per Acquisition. The result, we began creating campaigns that drove sales, thrilling the client. Sure the impression counts and click rates weren’t always high, but they worked where it mattered, driving revenue.

Cost per Acquisition vs Cost per Conversion

For the record, Cost per Acquisition is not Cost per Conversion. The term conversion is often used for describe anything from making a purchase, to liking a brand on Facebook. Acquisition is centered solely on making somebody a customer. It’s all about revenue.

Cost per Conversion is great for answering the question, “What does it cost to get this newsletter subscription?” But you also need to answer the question, “How many newsletter subscribers do I need, on average, to make a sale?” This is Cost per Acquisition.

So What Should My CPA Be?

The most common question we hear from clients on Cost per Acquisition is what makes a good CPA? How much should we be spending to get a new client?  The answer, of course, is that it varies; it all comes down to what your average revenue is per customer.

There’s plenty of ways to determine your average revenue per customer, but a good starting place is to take your total revenue over a period (year/month) and divide by the number of customers you had during the same period.

Average Revenue per Customer = Yearly Revenue/Yearly Customer Count

Sure there are other formulas that take into account purchase frequency, lifetime value and average order size, but honestly the formula above is the easiest place to start. Once you know how much an average customer is worth, than you can see what your average profit is.

When you know how much you make from a customer, then you can know how much you’re willing to spend to get a customer.

Armed with this number, take a good hard look at your current marketing initiatives. It should be pretty obvious which channels are creating profitable customers and which channels are costing you far more than they are worth.

How Do I Track Cost Per Acquisition?

If you’re an Ecommerce company, great, CPA is easy enough to track, just look at the source of your sales, use custom links, and you’ll be good to go. For the rest of us out there, it gets a little trickier. Get aggressive with your tracking codes, get aggressive with building custom links, close the holes in your sales process, use unique promotional codes, and implement a CRM system. Most importantly, ask your new customers where they are coming from. By being smart, (and partnering with a company that gets ), anyone from long sales cycle B2B companies to retail locations using radio can track their Cost per Acquisition.

Remember, marketing isn’t a black hole anymore. Learn what works for you, get the , commit the funds and make it happen.

How does your company track Cost per Acquisition? Let us know in the comments below

The post Why Cost per Acquisition Is the Only Metric That Really Matters appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

But this post isn’t about all the great brands that we work with. No, this post is about the brands we would never choose to work with. The three types of companies any blossoming agency (or consultancy or freelancer) should avoid like the plague and jetpack away from the second the words, “Let me send you our thirty page RFP!” are uttered.

Company Type Never To Work With Number 1 – Companies That Don’t Make Money

It seems pretty obvious. Only work with brands that are financially solvent. And yet, how many times has an agency taken on a client that they were pretty sure couldn’t pay them on-time for the chance at a big payday at some point down the road. Sure, sometimes the gamble would pay off, but rarely. Most often the company in question runs out of money, and you’re left holding unpaid invoices glaring at the stack of awesome work that your dedicated team has been pouring themselves into for months.

I’m sure we’ve all been here. Maybe your agency was swayed by a passionate CEO, or maybe they thought that they can get in early with the latest, sexiest startup, whatever the case, I’ve been in enough of these situations to learn that before you sign on that dotted line, you better be darn sure that bills will get paid (Obviously this rule has an exception with pro-bono charity work and non-profit support pricing). So what type of clients does this include? Startups that don’t have any serious funding yet, companies that try to talk you into a pay-for-performance model and, most of all, companies that are steps away from bankruptcy.  Which brings us to our next client type to avoid working with…

Company Type Never To Work With Number 2 – Companies That Are Failing

There is nothing worse than pinning your agency’s future and reputation on a sinking ship. If the company knocking on your door is moments away from bankruptcy, politely ignore the pounding.  Your brilliant marketing campaign is rarely going to be the white knight that saves their day.  In a failing company, marketing is hardly ever the sole cause of disaster.

We’ve all seen this; a client comes to the agency complaining about lagging sales and a market that seems to be getting softer. They very rarely realize that they have a company-wide problem, and instead feel that all they need is an awesome _______ (advertising campaign/website/mobile app). Just a simple little marketing magic, and all their woes will vanish.  Yet, somehow, despite your best efforts – efforts that would have killed in a company that wasn’t going under – the company still bleeds money.

Now however, instead of recognizing the problem, the client ends up blaming you and your agency, claiming that your work wasn’t good enough to save their company. This not only destroys internal moral, it can also irreversibly damage your agency’s reputation. Companies that are going down are like a black hole sucking everything up with them. You can pour the best marketing campaign in the world into them, but you’re not going to get anything back out.

Company Type Never To Work With Number 3 – Companies That Make You Compromise Your Values

By far, the absolute worst client type you can work for is one that makes you compromise your values as an individual and as an agency. Sure it’s not always easy to turn down a giant truckload of money as it’s backing up. But you know what else isn’t easy? Living with that slimy feeling that comes with selling out, that feeling that doesn’t wash off even after a hundred showers, that feeling that you’re not only working for a company that you don’t believe in, you’re actually improving their business so that they can do more of what you don’t believe in.

In our opinion, falling asleep with a clear conscious is worth far more than that pile of dirty money. Case in point, at a previous employer, I once had a client whose CEO was an absolute racist. Meetings with him were incredibly uncomfortable, but we kept going on with them because they paid us, a lot. For longer than I’m proud of, my agency kept him on the client roster. Eventually we finally reached our limit, and we fired them. While it was upsetting to lose that monthly revenue boost, the feeling of relief that we no longer had to rationalize working with a racist prick was pure gold to us. Team moral quickly improved, and we were able to replace them with a client we truly loved working with.

So what client types do you want to work with? That’s the easy part. You work for successful, growing brands whose mission you can get behind 100%. You do that, and you’ll never have to worry about the brands you work with again.

These are SME Digital’s rules of engagement, what are yours? What type of clients do you tend to avoid working with? Leave a note in the comments below and let’s share some wisdom!

The post Three Clients You Never Want To Work With appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

To the brands that look at this piece of content and dismiss it with, “Well yeah, right place right time. I guess they just got lucky.” I call bullshit. Oreo didn’t get lucky, that tweet was a product of purposeful, planned intent. No, they didn’t know three months beforehand that a blackout was going to plague the Super Bowl, but they had the foresight to know that something was going to happen during the biggest game of the year. So they put together a team of strategists, artists and copywriters to capitalize on that unknown something. Guaranteed if there wasn’t a blackout, Oreo still would have posted something great in the 3^rd of 4^th quarter of the game that would have had us all talking.

So what was their secret? A huge team? Millions of capital and resources? No.

The secret was simple, they planned for spontaneity. They had no idea what they were going to produce, but they knew they were going to produce something.

When it comes to content production, there are two types of content: premeditated and spontaneous. You already know what premeditated content is. It’s your evergreen blog posts that have been vetted and approved by everyone from the CMO to the custodian. It’s the video, whose script was rewritten more times than you can remember. It’s the … well … you get the picture.

Spontaneous content on the other hand, is content that you produce on the fly. It’s reactionary, seasonal, and is more often influenced by an external factor (reaction to a customer’s tweet, major sporting event, Ben Affleck being cast as Batman). It can also be some of the most powerful and memorable content you produce. Why? Because most businesses either are afraid to put out spontaneous content, have internal rules that prohibit publishing spontaneous content or are just flat out awful at it.

So how can you and your company start producing “Holy Smokes” worthy spontaneous content?

Start by identifying the type of spontaneous content you can produce

Producing a spontaneous 30-minute podcast or 15-minute webisode on the fly might be a tall order for most businesses. So start small.

Begin by taking a look at the internal resources that you have available. Do you have a talented writer or two on your staff? Have them start producing a couple impromptu tweets. Perhaps you have a solid photographer on your team? Tap them to begin producing spontaneous content for your Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest pages.

Quick tip: If there’s a big event coming up, take a page out of Oreo’s playbook and consider creating a taskforce with the sole job of publishing spontaneous content during the event.

Stream-line the approval process

You will never be able to successfully and consistently publish spontaneous content if everyone in upper management needs to give their stamp of approval. Spontaneous content has a shorter shelf-life and needs to be pushed through the approval process as quickly as possible. Make sure your content doesn’t die on the vine by cutting the approval process down to one person. Better yet, empower the author of the content to publish as they see fit, and eliminate the need for managerial involvement.

If the idea of giving your current content publishers permission to publish without approval gives you the willies, consider creating a new team (composed of employees that you trust) to be responsible for producing spontaneous content.

Leave the schedule out of this

So far you’ve identified the type of spontaneous content you’re going to produce, you know who on your team is going to be in charge of publishing the content, the next question is: When are you going to publish this content? The answer – whenever it makes sense.

Unlike your premeditated content pipeline, you can’t publish spontaneous content on a schedule. Trying to force spontaneous content is painful, obvious and painfully obvious. So stay away from saying anything that resembles the sentence, “Alright Amber, I need you to create and publish two spontaneous tweets a week and a spontaneous Instagram picture that has to do with a helicopter.”

I’ll be talking more about creating a kick-ass content production plan during Social Media Explorer’s Social Media Domination Webinar Series with Exact Target on Wednesday, Sept. 25. The webinar is completely, totally, 100% free. So there goes your only excuse for not attending.

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Sure you know where the gold is buried, but without a shovel you have no way of getting to it.

Coincidentally, your content strategy is a lot like a treasure map. Obviously you aren’t going to find your content strategy stuffed inside an empty rum bottle; but like a treasure map, your content strategy does outline the steps you need to take to find true content success.

However, a content strategy will only take you so far. I’ve seen too many people create a content strategy and then assume that success is already theirs, “We’ve got our content strategy right here! The gold is ours!” A strategy is only part of the success equation, at some point you’re going to need to put down the map and start digging. 

You’re going to have to start producing content, great content.

How To Start Producing Great Content

Great content can’t simply be willed into being.  Consistently banging out last minute blog posts or frantically editing your company’s next podcast does not lead to consistent content greatness. Great content needs to be planned for. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Give Great Content The Resources Due

Take a look at your content strategy and compare it to the internal and external resources you have available. Great content takes both time and money. If need be, can you bring on new team members? Do you have the budget necessary to hire an outside partner to create those new webisodes you’re dreaming of publishing? If you don’t have the resources to produce the content identified in your current content strategy, than it might be time to redraw that treasure map.

Create A Content Production Calendar

A single calendar entry on a random Wednesday that reads, “Publish that blog post!” does not make a content calendar. If you really want to start digging, you need to think through the entire content production process. At the very least, a content production calendar should account for:

• Brainstorming
• Production Assignment
• Initial Version Received
• Iterative Reviews
• Finalized Content Version Received/Approved
• Content is Published
• Celebratory Drink!

Clarify Content Pieces Early On

Don’t wait until you’re in the middle of creating a piece of content to determine things like focus or audience. The sooner you clarify the main aspects of a content piece, the easier it will be to produce it. Once you have an idea for a content piece finalized, take a few moments and create a content outline to accompany it. The outline should identify the content’s intended audience, main focus, finished length and lastly, the Holy Smokes factor.  By identifying early what a piece of content needs in order to be considered “great,” the more likely you are to produce great content.

True content success comes from having both a solid content strategy and a clear production plan. As I said earlier, a treasure map without a shovel is just a sheet of paper with a pretty drawing on it. Conversely, if all you have are shovels, than sure you might dig a lot of holes, but you’ll never find that chest of gold.

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