8 Essential Skills a Social Media Manager Must Have

Originally by: https://blog.hootsuite.com

There’s not one secret recipe to becoming an amazing social media manager (if only it were that easy), but making sure you have the full range of essential skills to do the job well certainly helps.
And it’s a good time to be getting in the game. Social media manager was number 42 in CNN and PayScale’s list of the top 100 careers for “big growth, great pay and satisfying work.”
It makes sense. As people look to connect with brands on social media, companies need social media managers who can help grow their business online.
Whether you’re already an experienced social media guru or you’re just getting started, by the end of this post you’ll have everything you need to create compelling content and understand how it relates to your business’s bottom line. Or, if you’re a hiring manager looking to add a social media-savvy person to your member, these are the skills you want to look for.
At the end of the article you’ll also find a video that explores how Hootsuite’s own social marketing team works.

Bonus: Get the step-by-step social media strategy guide with pro tips on how to grow your social media presence.

The most important skills for social media managers (and the tools to help you get there)

1. Writing and editing

Whether you’re writing Instagram posts or Pinterest captions, words matter. Good writing can boost engagement, extend your organic reach, and help social media managers create an unforgettable brand.
Think of a few brands with strong social media followings—All Birds, Old Spice, Taco Bell. Love these brands or hate them, a distinct writing style is part of why they gained a following online.
But fear not! If writing doesn’t come naturally to you, there are tools that can help. One of our favorites is the Hemingway App, which helps you eliminate extra words and get straight to the point.
And while there’s no substitute for a good, old-fashioned edit of your posts, creating a brand style guide may also help.

2. SEO

Understanding the link between search engine optimization (SEO) and social media reach can be a bit confusing. Google suggests that social signals do not overtly affect your SEO rankings, but the full picture is more complicated.
Content that has a high social reach and gets lots of shares, likes, and comments is likely going to get similar engagement metrics that will be read by Google’s algorithm and positively impact your rankings. This is a correlation rather than a causation, so while you don’t want to build your social media plan around SEO, it’s a good idea to be aware of the common mistakes that social media managers often make.
Luckily, there are some great SEO tools out there. LSI Graph will identify relevant keywords and phrases according to what’s been searched on Google along with your primary keyword. This comes in handy if you’re looking for related topics to write about.
But, if you feel overwhelmed by the intricacies of SEO, remember that it’s all about creating great content that people will like and share.

3. Customer service

I know I personally hate waiting on hold, so I often take to social media to engage with brands or air my complaints. And I’m not alone. According to a study by J.D. Power, 67 percent of consumers use social media to ask specific questions or find help resolving problems. That’s huge!

So it’s important for a social media manager to have some basic customer service skills like:
• Be timely. Over 72% of people who tweet their complains, expect a response within 1 hour.
• Know how to find and monitor conversations relevant to your business. (Tools like Hootsuite and Talkwalker allow you to set up social media streams that monitor conversations and keywords across several social networks.)
• Don’t wait for a complaint. Be proactive when it comes to engaging your followers.
And that’s just the beginning. Check out the full list of customer service skills here.
It helps that consumers love brands who respond to them. A customer who enjoys a positive service experience with a brand on social is nearly three times as likely to recommend the brand to a friend.
So being active when it comes to customer service actually helps the other half of a social media manager’s job—connecting with consumers to build brand awareness.
The bottom line? The job of a social media manager is also to be a community manager, so acing customer service is win-win for your customers and your business.

4. Design and photo editing

Thanks to the smartphones we all carry in our pockets, anyone can be a photographer now. That’s why it’s more important than ever for a social media manager to have a good eye for design and the ability to recognize and create images that are on-brand.
After all, people remember 65 percent of a message when it’s accompanied by an image and only 10 percent when it’s not.
But you don’t necessarily need to have a degree in graphic design to create awesome visual content for your social feeds. As a starting point, there are tons of sites that offer free stock photography and there are lots of other tools to help with data visualization, fonts, and much more.
Hootsuite Enhance is a free tool that takes the pain out of remembering optimal image sizes for every different social network and can help automatically crop and store images for all your social media accounts. Easy peasy.

5. Analytics and reporting

Business is a results driven, well, business. So being able to prove a return on investment is a must-have skill for social media managers.
With a tool like Hootsuite Impact, social media managers can accurately measure the ROI of social media across paid, owned, and earned social channels. The tool connects to existing analytics systems so you can integrate social data with the rest of your business metrics. It also makes it easy to produce executive reports, and delivers plain-language recommendations to optimize your social media strategy.
Understanding how to prove and improve return on investment is also a huge selling point when it comes to landing a job as a social media manager.

6. Video creation

Video content is unquestionably an important way to reach your audience.
Over 500 million people are watching video on Facebook every day, according to Cisco’s research into global IP video traffic. And four years from now, video content is poised to account for 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic.
The bottom line? Social media managers need the skills to create compelling content for platforms like Instagram Stories, Facebook Live broadcasts, and Snapchat Stories. And with all these options, you’ll also need to know how to optimize video for all of your different social media channels.
A tool like Animoto can help beginners create compelling video content. But check out the rest of our social video toolkit here for even more tools that will have you mastering video in no time. Did I just hear someone say Spielberg?

7. Paid social basics

Understanding the relationship between organic and paid social is a huge asset for a social media manager. After all, one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal is your organic social presence.
You’ve got a focus group at your fingertips that isn’t afraid to let you know when they like something and when they don’t. And this lets you test new ideas and products, and ultimately put your advertising money behind the best one.
So whether you’re running a paid social ad campaign or just trying to figure out which posts to boost, understanding how you can use social ads to increase your reach or boost your organic ads is a powerful skill for any social media marketing professional to have.
You might also want to invest in a tool like AdEspresso, which lets you create and test hundred of ads in minutes. You’ll never have to wonder if a different headline or photo might have made all the difference in your campaign.

8. Research and planning

If you thought research skills stopped being useful once you left high school, think again. After all, you can’t tailor content to your audience if you don’t know who they are or what they want.
Plus, as a social marketer and expert in your field, your reputation is on the line. Make sure that all your data and ideas come from credible sources.
We’ve got some tips and tricks that’ll make it easier to find results you can trust. But, when it comes to online searches, the best tool, or at least the best place to start, is learning how to refine your results. This will not only save you time, but make your results more accurate.
The other half of research is understanding how your findings fit in to a larger plan both for your social media accounts and for your business as a whole.
This may seem obvious, but things move fast in the world of social media and sometimes it’s easy to get swept up in the right-this-second. Regular planning will help you keep your eyes on the big picture and ensure that your social media goals are aligned with your business goals.
Need help getting started with some planning tools? Check out these helpful templates to start building your own social media strategy and editorial calendar.

8 Canonicalization best practices in plain english

Canonicalization sounds like a process for recognizing sainthood, or maybe a training course in aiming large projectile weapons. But it’s actually one of the most important aspects of organic SEO. Good canonicalization means search engines crawl more pages of your site; it means that link authority and PageRank get consolidated, so you have a stronger link profile; and it means fewer broken links from other sites. Bad canonicalization gets you all that stuff, but with the opposite effect.
Canonicalization defined
The Ian-Lurie-mangles-the-meaning-so-computer-geeks-cringe-definition of canonicalization is: “every resource on your web site has a single web address.”
Every resource means every page, every image, every video, etc..
Single web address means there’s only one Uniform Resource Locator (URL) for each page of content, image, video, etc..
A URL looks like this:
http://www.mysite.com/
Or, it could be: http://www.mysite.com/blah/foo.html.
Or, it could be: http://www.mysite.com/blah/foo.php?meh=123.
Or… Oh, you get the idea.
Note that I said ‘page of content’. That means that a single article, product description or list of articles should appear at a single URL. You should never have multiple URLs for, say, one product description, or one article.
Some of the absurdly bloated content management systems and e-commerce suites out there make canonicalization a challenge. But it’s worth it.
Consequences of bad canonicalization
Here’s an example of ‘bad’ canonicalization: Let’s say I’ve opened a games store: Ian’s Nerdvana (I owe Dave Barry for the term ‘nerdvana’). My store’s home page lives at:
http://www.iansnerdvana.com/
But it also lives at
http://iansnerdvana.com/
and
http://www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html
So what? People will find the home page at all three versions. They won’t know the difference, right? Well, yeah. But search engines will. Googlebot sees the three above URLs as three different pages on the web. That has two consequences that hurt SEO.
First, you lose link authority. If blogger 1 comes to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’ and links to that page, blogger 2 lands on ‘iansnerdvana.com’ and links to that URL, and blogger 3 lands on ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ and links to that page, Googlebot sees three links to three different pages, and applies 1 ‘vote’ to each one. These three links could have sent three authoritative signals to Googlebot for my site’s home page. Instead, they’re split into three weaker individual votes for three different pages. It’s as if Ross Perot or Ralph Nader were sitting in front of my site, siphoning off votes. It’s link love mayhem.
If I weren’t such a loser, I would’ve set up my site so that my home page ‘lived’ at one unique URL – ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. Then all 3 bloggers would have linked to that page, and Googlebot would instead apply all three votes to a single page. If I care about link authority – and who doesn’t, I ask you? – then that’s a far better outcome.
Secondly, search engines won’t crawl your site as deeply as they might. Search engines allocate resources for each crawl. No one knows exactly how, but it’s safe to say Googlebot won’t just wander around your site until its found every page. At some point, it gives up and leaves. If multiple pages on my site have multiple URLs, then visiting search bots waste time tracking down all of those different versions. That’s time they could spend crawling other unique pages, instead. So fewer unique pages of my site end up in the search index, and I have fewer chances to rank.
Don’t feel bad, though. Even SEO agencies screw it up. Here’s one with their home page at both ‘www.site.com/’ and ‘www.site.com/index.php’. Oops:
Best practices
You can avoid the heartbreak of bad canonicalization, or at least minimize it, by doing a few simple things:
Use 301 redirection to ensure that your home page is only found at one URL. If you don’t know how, read Stephan Spencer’s column about rewrites and redirects.
Link consistently to your home page from within your own site. Use a single URL for your home page. Don’t mix in instances of ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/index.html’ with ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’. If you aren’t doing this properly right now, a quick change may have a big impact on SEO.
Don’t use tracking IDs in internal site navigation. A lot of sites add stuff like ‘?source=blog’ in their navigation. That lets them use their analytics reports to track user movement within, to and from their site. Instead, learn to use your web analytics referrer and navigation path reports. If you must use tracking IDs, change your software to use a hash mark (a ‘#’ sign) instead of a question mark. Search engines ignore everything after the hash, so you’ll avoid confusion.
Don’t use tracking IDs in organic links from other sites. If you get a link on another site, and want it to help with your SEO, don’t put a tracking ID in that, either.
Be careful with pagination. Many sites have pagination, where visitors can click a 1, 2, 3 etc. to jump to later pages in search results, product lists or articles. That’s fine, but make sure that the each page has a single URL. For example, if page 1 of the article is ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html’ when I click the article link from the home page, make sure that the number ‘1′ in the pagination takes me there, too, instead of to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com/article.html?page=1′.
Set up preventative redirects. Make sure that ‘iansnerdvana.com’ 301 redirects to ‘www.iansnerdvana.com’.
Exclude ‘e-mail a friend’ pages. Most content management systems that have ‘e-mail a friend’ options direct the user to a unique page that has the same form and content. But every instance of that page has a unique URL like ‘ID=123′, to tell the server which product or article to forward. It’s canonical higgeldy-piggeldy. Use robots.txt and the meta robots tag to exclude these from search engine crawls.
Use common sense when building your site. Think, man/woman! If you need to change the header, footer or other page element based on where on your site the visitor came from, do it with cookies, or by sniffing out the referring URL. Design to do this ahead of time.
What about rel=canonical?
The canonical tag is a neat little gadget that’s supposed to let you tell search engines the correct URL for any page. So, by adding <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.iansnerdvana.com/”> to any page, I could tell visiting search bots to index just that version, and to direct all link authority to that one URL. It sounds ideal.
It’s not. First, Yahoo! and Bing don’t yet have confirmed support for it. Second, you can’t rely on tags of this nature, as search engines may change their minds later. Google’s done it. So don’t stake your SEO strategy on it. Third, why not do it right the first time? In addition to SEO benefits, a canonically clean site should run faster, present fewer maintenance headaches and place less load on server and bandwidth resources.
Let’s get canonical!
So, get out there and start cleaning up your site. Canonicalization fixes are generally simple, have a broad impact and let you fix multiple SEO problems at once. You’ll get more link authority, deeper site crawls and better rankings. What’s not to love?

copied, originally posted on Jun 17, 2010 at 1:14pm ET by Ian Lurie

Choosing a Website Designer

Choosing a good website designer is one of the most important decisions that you’ll make. Choose a bad one and you could be left out of pocket with a poor business image to promote, but choose a good one and your business will have an excellent grounding.
When choosing which website designer to go with there are certain aspects that require checking and questions to be asked:
Does the website come with a content management system?
If it doesn’t think strongly about whether you require one. Being unable to make text changes without sending over the changes to a web designer is time consuming and costly.
Check their portfolio
Look at the design of their websites, how fast they load, how they look in different browsers, and whether the sites have been a success. Don’t be afraid to ask to able to speak to previous customers – excellent web designers should be more than happy to provide you with references.
Agree on a fixed price for the project, not an hourly rate
Agreeing a fixed price is the industry standard but there are still some website designers out there that claim that they have to work at an hourly rate. Never agree to this. Paying hourly rewards inefficiency and you’ll almost always end up paying more than you should.
What happens if changes are required to the initial design?
Misunderstanding and bad feeling is sometimes created through customers asking web designers to make too many changes to the overall design. Clarify this process before going ahead – you should be able to request as many changes (within reason) that are required.
Never pay for everything up-front
If you’re paying builders to build a house you wouldn’t pay them all the money up-front. It’s the same with web design – the final installment should be due once the website is complete.
If they mention SEO see if you can find their other websites for particular keywords
Many web designers are mentioning that they can provide search engine optimisation (SEO) support as well as web design. In truth, few web designers fully understand search engine optimisation, and even fewer would be willing to dedicate the time to optimise your new site through researching appropriate keywords and working on link building. In short, if they mention SEO take a look in the search engines for yourself.
What kind of after-development support is provided?
It’s all very well having a website designed at a great price but if the after-sales support is priced extortionately then you haven’t got a good deal. Find out how much changes will cost, and if possible try to negotiate one month free support after your website has been completed – there are always unexpected changes that are required.
Ignore the size of the company
The web design industry is not about developing economies of scale. Size doesn’t matter. Often a smaller company will be the better choice as each project they undertake is more critical to their success.
Where are they based?
They don’t have to be based in your local area but it’s usually beneficial to have someone who is based in the same country. Having different working hours causes delays and is particularly frustrating when there’s a problem and your web designers aren’t even awake.
Feel free to ask about academic background and qualifications
Asking about these qualifications is fine but the answer shouldn’t give you your conclusive answer regarding whether to recruit them. Qualifications don’t create great designers – creative flair tends to come from within. Whilst qualifications do help with background functionality people who have taught themselves are often equally capable, and you can be sure that they enjoy what they do.
How long have they been in business?
This is important. You don’t want web designers that are around one day and gone the next.
Can they help with other marketing material?
Web designers will usually design your company logo but find out whether they can design your other marketing material as well, such as leaflets and letterheads.
How do they test on different browsers?
There are so many websites out there that are incompatible with certain browsers, and often the owners themselves aren’t even aware of the problem. Good website designers should check that the site is displayed properly in all browsers.
What security features are used?
No one wants to have an excellent website designed, build up a list of members, only to have a hacker destroy it all. Ask what the web designers intend to do about this.
Is the website database backed up?
Sometimes however much security you have an unfortunate incident or dedicated hacker can delete your database. Therefore check that your database will be backed up regularly.
Will you create your own unique design or customize existing design frameworks?
There are many standard design frameworks that can be used and using them is particularly appealing for web designers because of the time saved. Make sure that you’ll be receiving a unique design and, if not, that you’re paying an amount to reflect this.
What about hosting?
Find out whether the developers can host your site and if they can’t whether they can arrange for reliable hosting with another company.
Look for a rapport
This is very important. The relationship with your web designers is likely to be a long one so it’s vitally important that you get on well with each other.

originally:  http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/choosing-a-website-designer/

The Exact Content You Need to Achieve 6 of Your Biggest Marketing Goals

Want to know how I know I'm a marketer? 
The other day I caught myself referring to the message in a birthday card as "content." 
(I believe the direct quote was, "Don't lick that envelope yet, I still have to write the content.")
Needless to say, content is one of those "all-encompassing" marketing terms. It's eBooks, and blog articles, and infographics, and videos, and tweets, and birthday card messages, and, well, you get the point.
For this reason, it's common for marketers to feel overwhelmed when they are advised to "create content" for their business. 
It's not so much that they don't think it'll work, but rather, they don't know where to start. 
So, to shed some light on the situation, we've detailed six different marketing goals alongside the type of content you need to achieve them.
Goal #1: "We need more sales qualified leads."
The Solution: Educational Content
For website visitors to feel comfortable moving forward with a purchase, it's critical businesses have a plan in place for educating and readying them. 
Educational content takes many different sizes, shapes, and forms.
Most notably, businesses have seen a lot of success creating informational blog posts and eBooks as a way to address and alleviate consumer pain points.
Take Moz, for example.
Moz sells SEO products that help businesses improve their search rankings, drive more traffic back to their website, and ultimately, earn customers. However, in order for Moz to close a sale, it needs to ensure its audience a) knows what SEO is and b) sees the value in improving their search rankings. 
To do this, Moz offers a variety of SEO resources via the learning center on its website. 

These resources are bucketed into different categories, difficulty levels, and content formats to help visitors easily discover educational content that lends itself to their specific needs and questions.

Goal #2: "We need to keep visitors on the site longer."

The Solution: Free Tools & Interactive Content

If you want to keep visitors on your website longer, you need to give them something to do beyond skimming an article. This is where free tools and various types of interactive content really come in handy.
By serving up content that encourages more exploration and engagement, it becomes much easier to move visitors closer to a conversion.
If you can pair that participatory element with a piece of content that provides a solution to one of your visitor’s paint points, you have an opportunity to create a really memorable experience. 
For example, HubSpot created this free Invoice Template Generator to help small businesses get a handle on one of the less glamorous aspects of running a business: invoicing.   

The free tool allows the visitor to take control of the outcome by inviting them to plug and play their information, customize colors, and drag-and-drop brand logos into the mix.
When creating free tools and interactive content, put yourself in the shoes of your user.
What elements would you want to click on, customize, expand, and explore? Keep these things top-of-mind as you develop the content and it won’t go unnoticed.





Goal #3: "We need to grow our presence of social media."


The Solution: Shareable Content
When it comes to increasing social media visibility, creating content people can’t help but share is key. 
If you take a look at Buzzsumo’s analysis of the most shared content on Facebook in 2017, you’ll notice a few trends:

• Video content
• Quizzes
• News
• Research
• Emotion-driven content

This comes as no surprise, as the share-ability of a piece of content often boils down to format and subject matter, and while there’s no exact science for creating a viral piece of content, honing in on these shareable trends can help you increase the probability that people will share your post. 

Problem #4: "We need to drive more traffic back to the website."

The Solution: Search-optimized Content

Search-optimized content, as a general term, refers to any piece of content you’ve strategically created with the goal of increasing visibility, improving usefulness, or inspiring action.
From a tactical standpoint, this could mean:

• Blog posts or site pages optimized for a specific keyword
• Blog post or site pages designed to match a specific intent
• Blog post or site pages optimized for Google’s featured snippet
• Pillar pages that broadly cover a particular topic
• And more

For the sake of giving you something actionable to get started with here, let’s take a closer look at how featured snippet content -- the content that appears as a summary answering a query directly on a SERP -- can help you drive more traffic back to your website. 
Just take a look at this blog post from Search Engine Watch that appears when you search for “what is a featured snippet” on Google.


Aside from the fact that this piece of content appears at the very top of the page, it commands attention on the SERP because it teases a response to the searcher’s query. 
Want to try snagging a snippet spot for a search query that’s related to your business? Check out this article for tips on how to format snippet-worthy content.

Problem #5: "We need to prove our capabilities."

The Solution: Case Studies

Case studies serve are an essential piece of content because they provide researching prospects with the evidence they need to pin your business as a credible one; one worth doing business with.
If you have a success story that you think would make for an awesome case study, consider the following before you get started: 

• Be specific: Avoid ambiguity by serving up real numbers. Defining actual data will help to clarify the impact your product or service had on the business or individual while increasing the validity of your claims.
• Make them available: Don't hide your case studies. In addition to including them in your main navigation, consider peppering them into email newsletters and email interactions with prospects.
• Explore different formats: While many case studies adhere to a traditional format, feel free to explore different ways of presenting the information. Podcasts, infographics, and SlideShares are all viable options. 

Looking for inspiration? Here’s a great example of how OpenTable -- an online restaurant reservations service -- lowered its cost-per-reservation and achieved a cheaper cost-per-click using Instagram ads. 


Notice how the “success story” calls out really clear, impressive takeaways upfront, and then dives deeper into the solution below the fold. The key is to catch a visitor’s attention early, so they can’t help but want to know more about how you helped that business reach their goals.

Problem #6: "We need to generate brand awareness."

The Solution: User-generated Content

User-generated content campaigns serve as a relevant way to create an invitation for interaction. With user-generated content comes dialogue, and with dialogue comes word-of-mouth marketing, which ultimately contributes to increased brand awareness. 
By employing a campaign that encourages your audience to submit their contributions through various social media platforms, you're tapping into their existing following to attract even more eyeballs.
For example, the American prescription glasses brand, Warby Parker, ingeniously invited its audience to try on a few pairs of glasses at home, and then post the various options on social media to solicit feedback from their following. 
The ask felt natural, as people are used to consulting their friends and family when making decisions, which simplified the decision to participate and resulted in a ton of engagement via the #WarbyParkerHomeTryOn. 

The best part? The content wasn’t limited to a particular platform, which meant people could collect feedback from the network where they felt most comfortable -- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and so on.




Originally:  https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/the-content-you-need-to-achieve-every-single-marketing-goal

Overview of Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising

Pay per Click (PPC) is an advertising technique used mainly on search engines, but can also be applied on websites and advertising networks. The most popular pay per click advertising network is Google Adwords.
Pay per Click has reformed the online advertising industry. Back in 2005 £4.70 billion was spent on pay per click marketing, and that figure has grown substantially in the last couple of years.
Advantages of PPC include that you only pay if people visit your website, therefore making it a highly accountable form of advertising. With some pay per click advertising networks, such as Google Adwords, you can also target specific geographical areas, set an overall budget, and a cost-per-click limit. This means that it’s suitable for even the smallest budget.
There are a couple of disadvantages with click-fraud estimated to be 15-20% despite being played down by Google, and it can be expensive to bid for keywords in highly competitive industries.
However, as a general rule all websites should strongly consider pay per click advertising. It can be very effective if done properly, and without a presence in search engines you’ll be missing out on many potential customers.

Steps to follow:

Choose keywords

Don’t target generic one-word keywords. This will be very expensive and the hits you do receive are likely to be relatively untargeted and speculative. Keep costs down and conversions up by choosing specific keyword phrases relevant to your industry or product.

Target effectively

If you have a UK-based site or one targeting only the local area then ensure that you specify this.

Writing the advert

Research suggests that click-throughs are on average 50% higher when terms in the title are repeated in the description below. Ensure that the title is relevant rather than intriguing so that only potential customers click on it.

Set a budget

Often you can set a daily and monthly budget. If PPC advertising is working well and producing sales profitably set as high a budget as possible. Setting a higher budget will also help your ad to appear higher in the sponsored links section.
Once set up your ads will often start showing within 15 minutes. It’s this speed combined with the highly targeted performance-based nature of PPC that has propelled pay per click advertising to be the most popular form of online advertising by far.
At first glance pay per click advertising can seem straightforward and simple. However, inexperienced users can quickly see their budget swallowed with very few results achieved. To get more from your budget check out how to get results with PPC advertising.

originally: http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/ppc-advertising-overview/

The 11 Video Marketing Metrics You Really Should Be Tracking

Video content is probably the single greatest thing since Google. There, I said it.
It’s become very clear in recent years that it is important but did we know it would be THIS important?
According to YouTube, they have over one BILLION users, and one BILLION hours of videos are watched on the platform every single day.
Those are some bonkers numbers ya’ll! How could you NOT be running out to buy everything on Zach’s killer office studio list, right now?
Ok, I’m sure I don’t have to sell you on the importance of video marketing much, but I do want to offer some advice.
If you still need to get your video studio supplies and strategy together or even if you already have a few videos under your belt, you need to monitor their performance.
You need to know if people are watching and, if they are, if it’s contributing to your bottom line.
This all comes down to metrics so, in this article, we are going to talk about what metrics you should look at and what exactly they mean.

First Things, First: Set Goals!

This may sound redundant if you are already investing in inbound marketing, but your goals are critical. The backbone of all that we do, goals tell us what we're working towards and help us evaluate how good of a job we're doing.
Charting your goals and milestones is best done through metrics, but video marketing metrics are a lot like those of websites -- There’s a lot to measure, but that doesn’t mean they’re all valuable or speak to your specific goals.
For instance, let's say you're trying to grow revenue from your website. You see your website traffic could be doing GREAT and don't understand why your revenue isn't growing. Traffic isn't the right metric to be measuring your success by -- conversion rate is. 
Videos are the same way. If you're trying to generate leads from your videos, but only track the number of views, you'll never be able to know if your video is actually working towards your lead generation goal. 
If people aren’t converting it isn’t what your buyer personas want to see, or if the wrong people are viewing your videos, the views don’t carry much clout.
You need to focus on the right metrics that are actually pertinent to what you’re trying to achieve. Measuring these metrics and understanding how they relate to your goals is a crucial piece of the jigsaw puzzle of video marketing and I’m here to help!
I am going to discuss which video metrics are relevant to common marketing goals and a little about what each of them.

Awareness & Reach Metrics

So, awareness. This goal is all about getting knowledge of your brand out there to your target audience.
The metrics below relate directly to this; identifying how many people are actually being exposed to your video and in turn your brand.

Views

View count is just that; it’s the number of times your video has been “watched” by an individual.
A view is counted as 30 seconds on YouTube, 3 seconds on Facebook, and 3 seconds on Instagram. This is a very deceptive metric as you can see by the wide range of what counts as a view. I mean, it’s possible to watch a video on Facebook or Instagram accidentally for 3 seconds.
This tricky metric can be great if you have a viral video that you want the world to see without an end goal, but if you are a company trying to reach a specific audience, not so much.
Treating  “view” count more like what typically would be considered reach would be is a good rule of thumb.

Play Rate & Replays

If you are like most, you have videos embedded on your website.
Play rate is how many times a user clicks the play button on these videos (though this is anywhere, not just on your website).  
It is an excellent barometer for how well videos are placed on your website.
Facebook doesn’t have an embed option, but you can still see this metric as “Clicked-to-Play” in your video insights breakdown. This is important for Facebook due to the fact that many have autoplay turned off.
Replays are an even bigger deal than Play Rate. It’s just what it sounds like; the viewer liked your video SO MUCH that they had to watch it again.
This could be a great compliment and testament to content, or it could also indicate that people didn’t understand the message in the first watch. Be wary of taking this metric to heart!

Shares

The ultimate compliment, the share! The viewer liked this video so much that they wanted other people to see it.
The more your videos are shared, the more people see them, and the larger your reach.
If your videos aren’t getting shares, it never hurts to ask in the video. Just invite the viewer to share with someone whom they think would enjoy it too.

Impressions

Impressions are a great way of seeing how many eyeballs are actually on your content.
For clarification, impressions are the number of times your content is displayed, whether it was clicked or not, and is used on Facebook and most paid platforms. Impressions also counts each time a person sees your content.
If your video doesn’t have many impressions, it's a good indicator that something is likely off about how you're trying to reach your audience (i.e. posted in the wrong location). If they never see video then there’s no way for them to watch it, after all.
If you have a ton of impressions, but very few views, that may mean your subject matter isn't a right match for the audience it is getting in front of. 

Video Engagement Metrics

This one is going to be a quick overview because most of us are very familiar with how engagement metrics typically work and they are typically the same for most major social platforms.
Engagement is about taking someone from a passive viewer to an active one. It shows that your content struck enough of a chord to spur an action/reaction.  They're interacting with your content and communicating with your brand, not just ignoring it.
If this is your goal, these are the metrics you should pay attention to: 

Likes (& Positive Reactions)

If viewers thought this was a great video, they will “like” it. This is usually an indication of agreement that the video content is on par with what the viewer would like to see.

Dislikes (& Negative Reactions)

This is an option on YouTube (and now Facebook). It can indicate that either you disagree with the subject matter, or you generally didn’t like the content.
Because of this ambiguity, this is another metric that would require further investigation.

Comments

Comments require more effort and therefore can give you more in-depth insight into viewers sentiments, both good and bad, towards the video.
They can offer valuable feedback on the content you created and give you an opportunity to engage in conversation with your viewers. Even better, it allows viewers to engage with each other building a sense of community around your brand. 

Watch Time

Now, this is where you want to spend a little more time analyzing.
There is no denying that seeing a high view count or reach feels great. So many people are watching your video, and you get excited.
However, this is a vanity metric. If you want to see if your video is actually resonating with your audience, then a great place to start is watch time, or the time spent watching your video.
YouTube calls this metric, “estimated total minutes spent viewing your content,” while Facebook calls it “Minutes Watched,” and others say “duration watched” but they are all the same thing.
If your video is 10 minutes long and viewers are only watching for 1 minute, this is a good sign that your video content isn’t engaging with your audience and in turn, likely isn’t speaking to the right audience.  
On the other hand, if people are watching all the way through; you may have just hit the mark!

Conversion Metrics

If your goal is conversion, always include a type of call-to-action at the end of your videos. Direct viewers to different parts of your landing pages to take the next steps.
While the first metric you thought about when I said Video Marketing Metrics probably wasn’t click-through rate or Conversions, they are one of the most important when it comes to the success of your work.

Click-through Rate (CTR)

Just like with websites click-through rate and conversions will measure just how many viewers were engaged enough to be interested in what you are trying to get them to do.
To be clear, CTR is the number of viewers who click on the CTA that you have at the end of your video or follow through to the designated next step.
While you can see how long the viewer watched in the Watch Time metrics of your videos, the best indication of if your audience is watching, and that if your video content is effective all the way to the end, is if your CTA is clicked.
And to do even better than that -- If they convert on your website and do the action the CTA was requesting then you have hit a Grand Slam!

Buyer & Behavior Metrics

So, you’ve made a ton of videos. You have them on all your social platforms; You’re getting likes, comments, and shares. Your play rate is awesome; your watch time is through the roof!  
But is it as you predicted? Are they coming from the locations you thought they would? OR were you all wrong?
The metrics below, though qualitative, offer valuable insight into your strategy and how to improve it.

Traffic Sources

This one may seem like a no-brainer, but traffic sources within the platform can be a game changer.
If you are getting a lot of good quality traffic from YouTube, maybe you should do some research to optimize your visibility. If you get more traction on videos that are in a playlist, then create several more and see if you can replicate the success.
This will also give you insight into where those who are enjoying your content live, and how they consume media. Using this to your advantage you can plot your next campaign with this in mind.
Then comes the questions, are you reaching them on the right platform? If you see in your metrics that you’re getting the most traffic and views from YouTube but focusing on Facebook, this is a good sign that you should pivot your efforts to focus on YouTube.

Viewer Demographics

Analyzing who is watching your videos is no different than who is visiting your website. It’s THE most important part of the puzzle.
If you look at who your viewers are you can see if you are hitting your targeted personas. Are they coming from the sources you thought they would? Are you hitting the right age group, industry, or interests?
If you aren’t, then figuring how to direct your videos to those who are should be your first order of business.

Conclusion

Video content isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Learning how to use these key metrics to your advantage will set you on a path to having highly successful video marketing campaigns.
Creating great video content isn’t about being the next YouTube star! As a marketer for a business, you need to ensure the goals you set are being achieved. Just deliver great content to your targeted audience, engage them, push them down the sales funnel, and you’re golden!
Now get out there and start making some great marketing videos!

Originally:  https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/video-marketing-metrics

Getting Results with PPC Advertising

PPC Advertising is a skill which requires mastering but there’s no reason why anyone from outside the internet marketing world cannot master it given the right advice.
Follow our step-by-step guide below to learn how to get results with your PPC Advertising.

Choosing Your Keywords

Choosing Keywords – Be Specific

One-word keywords are searched for most frequently but also have the most competition and are consequently the most expensive. Avoid general terms such as ‘marketing’ or ‘gifts’ and instead target more specific keyword phrases such as ‘low cost marketing ideas’ or ‘gifts for boys’ – they may receive less traffic but your cost per click will be considerably lower.

Use the Negative Keyword Tool

One often neglected way of increasing your click-through rate and reducing untargeted traffic is to use the negative keyword tool. Enter individual keywords that you don’t wish to be found for. For example, if you’re selling a product you may not wish to appear in the search results when someone enters ‘free’ – therefore add ‘free’ to your negative keywords.

Location Targeting

If you target UK consumers only target UK people. Similarly if you can only cater for people in a certain town or within a certain distance of your location specify this to receive more highly targeted traffic.

The Advert Text

Write Different Ads for Different Keywords

If you’re an online store selling a variety of products set up different ads with different keywords for each product. Link the advert directly to individual product pages rather than the homepage – this takes potential customers straight to what they are interested in, resulting in a higher conversion rate.

Include Keywords as Title Text

Include the keywords that people are searching by in your ad title text. Too many companies include their company name in the title – this doesn’t describe what the user is looking for and will result in a lower click-through rate.

Use Title Words in the Ad Description

Don’t be afraid to repeat some of the title text in the description below – research shows that descriptions that include words from the title obtain click-through rates of up to 50% higher than those that don’t.

Always Run More Than One Advert

Every individual keyword campaign that you have running with only one advert is a wasted opportunity. You should always run at least two different ads at any one time, testing different titles and/or descriptions. Often a slightly different title can produce significantly higher click-through rates.

Setting up a Campaign

Set a Budget and a Cost Per Click Limit

Always set a daily budget and a cost per click limit or huge expenses can be accumulated over a very short time. A reasonable cost per click will depend on the competition but as a general rule start in the region of £0.10 – £0.15 per click, a figure that you can increase over time once your keywords have been tested and optimised. Similarly, always start with a small overall budget and increase it over time once you have a good idea of the ideal keywords and cost per click.

Turn the Content Network Off To Begin With

There’s a huge debate regarding the relative merits of advertising on the Google content network, but in general it’s best to initially turn it off. Once you have your campaign optimised for the search network you can then begin to test advertising in the content network.

Track More Than Just Click-Throughs

With Google you can track more than just click-throughs, yet many people don’t take advantage of this. Ultimately you’re likely to be interested in resulting sales or registrations. Therefore track these actions through using Google’s free tracking tools – it’s just a case of inserting HTML code into the relevant page(s) on your website.

Additional Tips

Avoid the Number 1 Position

Don’t become obsessed with seeing your ad ranked number one in the sponsored links. Ads ranked at number 1 receive more traffic but also considerably more untargeted traffic – being ranked third for example is likely to be far more cost-effective.

Don’t Be Afraid of Reducing Click-Through Rates

You can write a great appealing advert description but if it doesn’t describe your product properly then you’ll be receiving many untargeted click-throughs. If you’re trying to make a sale don’t include the word ‘free’ – in fact, why not go one step further and include the price in your ad description.

Don’t Forget You Can Pause Campaigns

New websites in particular often have initial teething problems, perhaps with functionality errors or temporary down time. Don’t needlessly waste money attracting visitors to a website that isn’t ready – remember that you can always pause pay per click campaigns.

Looking Beyond PPC Click-Throughs

Look Beyond PPC to your Landing Page

It’s all very well writing the best ad description and bringing the most cost-effective traffic but if you haven’t tested your landing page then you’re probably losing out on many potential customers. Try out different pages to see what works best.

Test, Test and Test Again

Finally, constantly review the performance of your ads, keywords and landing pages. Continually try out new ad text and landing pages – over time you’ll be able to improve your cost-effectiveness by up to 500%.

The Top 3 Financial Metrics That Should Matter to Agencies (& How to Track Them)

The framework for financial analysis has evolved substantially since the arrival of easy-to-use big data tools.
As a result, there is a lot  of differing advice on how to identify “important” financial metrics within your business.
This can make the topic seem intimidating, especially for marketers, but it doesn’t have to be.
If you read my last article, you know I come from a financial discipline as opposed to that of  a seasoned digital marketer. This means I am very data-oriented and precise when it comes to making decisions. This is a bit at odds with most marketing reporting.


Most of the key performance indicators (KPIs) marketers  focus on evaluate brand awareness, driving leads, and engagement rather than overall business health and growth like most financial metrics.
While those KPIs are extremely important, they tend to only measure progress towards a specific, defined goal within your marketing channels. They’re only a piece of the puzzle.
My goal is to help you improve the financial literacy of your organization as a whole.
The goal of this article is to help you, as a marketer, identify and analyze financial metrics to improve individual project profitability, client satisfaction, and overall company health.
There’s quite a few, but in this article,  I will highlight the top three that I believe marketing agencies, specifically, should start tracking today.

1. Profitability

This metric shouldn’t be much of a surprise. As every business owner knows (and most of their team members should know), in order to keep the lights on, your company needs to make money.
From a marketing agency perspective, there are several different profitability metrics that I recommend you start tracking immediately (if you aren’t already).
First, is gross profit, which your agency is already tracking this gross profit on a consistent basis.
Analyzing this metric helps you understand how much your company is truly making from every dollar of revenue and further identify areas where you can be more efficient. For example, if you can cut an unnecessary tool or find a more affordable one.
It can be calculated by subtracting your costs of goods sold (customer success salaries, agency tools & tech, client travel, etc.) from your total revenue.
Second, you want to also be able to track profitability on a client and project level.
This will help to identify the type of projects that make the most money for your company, highlight your most valuable products or services, and help to deliver better value to your clients.
Lastly, for service agencies, the hardest part about calculating project profitability is figuring out how to track client deliverables from a cost perspective, in other words, how much time and resources go into fulfillment.
At IMPACT, we track the value we deliver to our clients using a point system, as opposed to the traditional time-tracking methodology, however, both methods have the same goal.
Ultimately, your company needs to be able to track and allocate the time your employees spend on every client deliverable. This information will allow you to calculate profitability at the project and client level.

2. Accounts Receivable Aging

Profitability is very important, but before you can begin to focus on profits, you need to attract new business, sell your services, invoice them, and THEN...dun dun dun... collect payment.
Collections is what we call, in finance and accounting, accounts receivable.
Simply put, the accounts receivable aging report will show you a detail of all unpaid invoices, the related client, and how old the receivables are.
It’s a tricky task for a client service agency to handle collections in-house. As Controller here at IMPACT, it’s part of my job to make sure  we as well as our vendors get paid on time.
However, I was hired as employee #60 and the first in our financial department.  Most small companies do not have the luxury of having someone like me in-house to make sure everything is getting paid on time.
As a result, you typically will see more client success team members bearing the responsibility of selling AND collecting.
As most of you probably can understand, this can potentially put your team and client in an awkward position and worst case scenario, harm your long-term relationship.
My recommendation would be to use a tool like QuickBooks or Bill.com to automate and streamline your invoicing process.
Not only will these tools automatically sync into your accounting systems for easier bookkeeping, they will allow you to easily send payment reminders via email, track your invoices on an individual level, and track the aging of your receivables (overdue, unpaid invoices) in real-time.
Accounts receivable management is a very important area of focus for any agency. If you are able to understand how long it takes your clients to pay on average (DSO, discussed below), you can better manage your company’s cash flow.

3. DSO (Days Sales Outstanding)

As your company starts to grow, you will also notice your accounts receivable account growing as well.

While you may be tempted to jump to conclusions about your collections process, it’s important to take a step back and analyze further.
Normally calculated monthly or quarterly, Days Sales Outstanding, or DSO. It tells you how many days, on average, it takes to receive payment from the invoice date. So, for example, if your average payment terms are Net 15, a DSO of 15.0 days would indicate a healthy, efficient collections process.
It’s important to understand your collections process and how long an average customer takes to pay in order to avoid any unexpected cash flow issues. For example, you want to collect payment for work completed as soon as possible so that you can use the cash to grow your business.
DSO is calculated by taking the ending Accounts Receivable for the period divided by the total Agency Sales Revenue for the period, multiplied by the number of days.

I am constantly thinking of new ways to improve our business processes here at IMPACT. One initiative is to sign as many new and existing clients up for ACH (aka Automated Clearing House, these payments are usually instant ).
Not only does this ensure timely payment, but it also can also potentially save you and your client some money on credit card processing fees/interest. A “win-win” as they would say.

Becoming a Numbers Nerd

In the interest of improving our overall financial literacy, let’s take a moment to digest all of that.
This is by no means an all-encompassing secret guide about three magical financial metrics that will transform your business overnight. That doesn’t exist. Every single business is different.
However, we fortunately have an amazing community of entrepreneurs, marketers, and agencies here at IMPACT, all learning and iterating as we go.
As for you, I’m happy to help you figure out the right financial metrics that do work for you and your organization, how to track them, and how to improve.
What financial metrics are you tracking and how is it working for you? If you ever want to talk numbers, feel free to email me at echoma@impactbnd.com because I am an actual nerd!

Originally: https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/financial-metrics-marketing-agencies

26 Ways to Increase Your Website’s Conversion Rate

1. Web Statistics Packages – most web businesses have one but most don’t use it to its potential. Find out how long people are spending on your site, what keywords people search by, which page they leave at, and where people click on the screen. An excellent free option is Google Analytics.
2. Eyetracking – where do people look on your site? Maybe many don’t see the important registration button or spend too long looking at the ads instead of your site? ClickHeat is a free open source heatmap statistics application.
3. Click Mapping – this refers to where people click. What action do you want people to take when they visit your website? Are too many people clicking on unimportant links? Or are people skeptical and clicking on your ‘About Us’ page to find out more? Click Mapping can provide an invaluable insight into what your visitors do and what they are thinking.
4. Surveys – don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from your customers. No one knows why they bought your product better than them.
5. Copy Your Competitors – this shouldn’t be your main strategy but if one of your competitors is doing something right then don’t be afraid to copy it. Copying their good points and improving on their bad points can be an effective strategy in the short-term.
6. Product Placement – identify your top selling products and make sure that they are positioned at the top of the relevant product pages. These products are obviously popular so make sure visitors to your website actually see them.
7. Top Sellers Web Page – go one step further and create a web page of your top-selling products. It uses the concept of safety in numbers. People feel reassured when they know that other people have purchased the product that interests them.
8. Have a Guarantee – buying online is still seen as risky by many people, especially when it’s something that traditionally needed to be seen first and tried first, such as clothes. Have a guarantee and make it as generous as possible. Many people won’t take it up, but the increase is sales could be significant.
9. Phone Number – display a phone number in a prominent position, preferably on the home page and not tucked away on the ‘Contact Us’ page. People like to know that if they are any problems they can speak to someone so make sure they know that you have a contact phone number. Don’t worry, hardly anyone will actually call the number.
10. Testimonials – many businesses don’t bother with testimonials because they say that anyone could fake them so their customers wouldn’t believe them anyway. The evidence actually shows that people do value testimonials, particularly those from the media. To increase the credibility of your customer testimonials try to include their full name and even a photo if possible.
11. Information Above The Fold – research shows that people expect all the important information to be right there in front of them when they visit a website. In fact, many people never scroll down meaning that if important information is down there it’ll never be seen by them. Take into account different screen and resolution sizes when evaluating what aspects of your website are above the fold.
12. Images – vitally important if you’re selling products, don’t leave anything to guess work. You wouldn’t expect people to decide to buy a t-shirt in a store having seen it lying flat on the ground. Try out different images or, better still, offer a selection of images, including different angles, the product being used or worn, and so on.
13. Don’t Have Tiny Images – let people zoom in on images so they can clearly see what they’re buying.
14. Image Captions – one thing that research shows is that people do read image captions. This is valuable information and something that should be used to your advantage. Display captions under products reaffirming the benefits of the product. For example, if you’re selling large gloves insert ‘Never let your hands feel cold outside again’ in the caption.
15. Adopt A Customer Mindset – what are the common objections or worries from your customers? Bring peace of mind by addressing them all.
16. The Registration Form Length – do you really need all the details that you’re asking for? Long registration forms are an obstacle. Don’t let them be one for your business.
17. Timely Reassurance – whenever you ask for information or a booking confirmation provide a timely reassurance, such as ‘We’ll never sell, rent or share your personal details” and “Product is fully refundable if not satisfied.”
18. Accept Telephone Orders – people like to have a choice when deciding how to purchase a new product. Some people are still concerned when it comes to buying over the internet, partly illustrated by the huge numbers of people who research products online before setting off to the shops to buy them. Therefore start accepting telephone orders. May businesses don’t realise how easy this is to set up through getting a PayPal Virtual Terminal.
19. Discount Deterrents – boxes such as “Enter your Promotional Code” can actually turn away people who don’t have a code. If possible remove this.
20. Credibility Logos – if you’re a small business the chances are that someone who finds you through the search engines has no idea who you are, and as a consequence you need to build their trust. One excellent way of doing this is to piggyback on the credibility of existing brands through displaying their logos on your site.
21. Show Your Face – people actually like buying from small businesses. Show who’s behind the company in the ‘About Us’ page instead of portraying your company as a large faceless organisation.
22. Small-Scale Viral Marketing – after an order is placed low cost viral marketing techniques can be used, such as “Recommend us to 5 friends through entering their email address below and we’ll give you 10% off your next order.” It won’t increase your conversion rate but it will increase the value of each customer to you through having them spread the word and encouraging repeat orders.
23. Different Browsers – is everyone seeing what you see? Check what your website looks like in different browsers.
24. The Length of Tests – when testing two different ads or layouts don’t end the test too soon. Quick judgments can lead to wrong assumptions. Split Tester is a good tool for this.
25. Content – use the word ‘you’ so that it’s as if you are speaking to your customers.
26. Test, Test and Test Again – finally, don’t be afraid to continually test different formats and ideas. If something doesn’t work your conversion rate may fall temporarily, but for everything that does work you’ll have a higher conversion rate forever.

Originally:  http://www.marketingminefield.co.uk/increase-your-website-conversion-rate/

What are Marketing KPIs?

Marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are specific, numerical marketing metrics that organizations track in order to measure their progress towards a defined goal within your marketing channels. 


When it comes to setting and tracking your marketing KPIs, many marketers and business owners are fully aware of the usual suspects.
Sales revenue. Leads. Cost per acquisition.
But there are a number of other KPIs that you should be tracking in order to execute a more successful marketing campaign.


No one wants to support a marketing activity that's losing their company money. By tracking the right marketing KPIs, your company will be able to make adjustments to various strategies and budgets.
Without the right ones, however, your company might be reporting and making decisions based on misleading information.

The 10 Most Important Marketing KPIs You Should Be Tracking

1. Sales Revenue

How much revenue has your inbound marketing campaign brought your company?
Understanding your sales revenue is important to knowing how effective your inbound marketing campaign is. No company wants to spend money on something that isn't generating money.
Most likely you would move that money to other marketing activities. To determine your sales revenue from inbound marketing you must first have a thorough understand of what you mean by inbound and outbound marketing.
You can calculate your sales revenue from inbound marketing by utilizing the following calculation.

(Total sales for the year) - (Total revenue from customers acquired through inbound marketing)

Note: At IMPACT, we track this metric and a host of others for clients in a custom Databox template. You can get the template for yourself here!

2. Cost Per Lead

Not only do you want to calculate your customer acquisition costs for inbound marketing, but outbound marketing as well. How much is it costing you to acquire a customer through inbound marketing versus outbound marketing?
Calculating your customer acquisition costs requires the integration of your marketing automation and CRM platforms as well as accounting for all relevant costs associated with ERP integration.
Calculating CAC for inbound marketing, relevant costs include:

• Manpower (creative and technical)
  
• Technology and software
  
• General overhead

Calculating CAC for outbound marketing, relevant costs include:

• Advertising
  
• Marketing distribution 
  
• Manpower (sales and marketing)
  
• General overhead

Once calculating the costs associated with your inbound and outbound marketing campaigns, you can directly account for new sales, as well as allocate particular budgets for each campaign.
If your company is utilizing mostly inbound marketing, you can break down that component further by campaign types then assess how successful and profitable each activity is. When you know that, you can start implementing activities to improve over time.

3. Customer Value

With inbound marketing, there is no better way to measure customer value than reach out to your current customers. Not only can doing this help you keep in contact with leads, but it can also help reduce churn, keep your customers happy, and expand your customers lifetime value.
You can calculate the lifetime value of your customers by using the following calculation:

(Average sale per customer) x (Average number of times a customer buys per year) x (Average retention time in months or years for a typical customer)

A great way to increase the lifetime value of your customers is by developing lead nurturing campaigns that reach out to existing customers.
Providing you and your sales team the opportunity to inform existing customers about new services, products, and resources.

4. Inbound Marketing ROI

Every company wants to see their return on investment!
Calculating your inbound marketing return on investment is huge to help assess your monthly and annual performance. Equally important is the ability to start planning strategies and budgets for the following year or even months.
You don't want to continue adding money or increasing your budget for a marketing activity that is costing your company money. So, no matter what marketing activity your company is using, your return on investment will determine the future with that activity.
Use the formula below to calculate your inbound marketing ROI:

(Sales Growth – Marketing Investment) / Marketing Investment = ROI

5. Traffic-to-Lead Ratio (New Contact Rate)

Understanding your website traffic, especially knowing where your it is coming from, whether it's organic, direct, social media or referrals is extremely important.
If your traffic is steady or increasing, but your traffic-to-lead ratio is low or decreasing, that's a surefire sign that something is missing on-page.
In the spirit of conversion rate optimization, track this number to help you determine if and when a change in your website's text, design, form, etc. may be needed.

6. Lead-to-Customer Ratio

After all of your marketing efforts, it's important to know how many leads your sales team is able to close. You will want to calculate both your sales qualified lead conversion rate and sales accepted lead conversion rate.
What's the difference between the two?
Sales Qualified Leads are leads considered to be sales ready based on their lead score or specific activities/triggers they completed. Most companies would consider a lead who filled out a form, such as "contact a rep" a lead who is ready to buy your service or product. For example, a waste management company with a lead who filled out the form  "rent a dumpster," would be considered a sales qualified lead.
Sales Accepted Leads are simply leads your sales team considers opportunities, and have either contacted the lead directly or a scheduled call.
Looking at these two ratios, ask yourself the following questions:

• Is my campaign capturing leads?
• Is our CRM successfully passing qualified leads to sales at the right time?
• Do we have high close rate?
  

If the answer to any of these questions is no, meet with your sales team to determine what, if anything, is missing and how you can work together to improve your numbers. Here are a few questions to help encourage sales enablement and move the conversation along.
Note: This is another metric we track in Databox. Get our "Ascend" template here. 

7. Landing Page Conversion Rates

So your landing page is up; it's beautiful, it follows all the best practices, but is it actually converting?
A landing page that doesn't generate leads is useless, no matter how much traffic it gets or how beautifully designed it is, so monitor your conversion rate. Find out how to improve your landing page conversion rates here.
Like your traffic to lead ratio, if your landing page is getting a lot of traffic, but has a low conversion rate, then it is a red flag that you need to change something on the page.
For example, try A/B testing some of the changes below to see which delivering the highest conversion rate:

• Change your CTA color
• Convey more value in your CTA text
• Make your written content more persuasive
• Shorten your form
• Add social proof (i.e. reviews, social counts, awards, etc.)

Note: We track this one in our "Convert" template on Databox.

8. Organic Traffic

The goal of any business using inbound marketing is to have most of their traffic come from organic search.
High organic traffic means that people are finding your website on their own, minimizing not only your effort for your cost of attracting them to your site.
It should come as no surprise that organic traffic is directly correlated to your SEO strategy, so make sure to monitor this number (along with your keywords) and refine your SEO strategy accordingly.

9. Social Media Traffic (and Conversion Rates)

Many clients are often wary about the importance of social media in their inbound marketing, but over the years it has proven invaluable to every campaign's success.
Metrics you can utilize to show the importance and impact of social media on your marketing efforts include:

• Number of lead conversions generated via each social media channel
  
• Number of customer conversions generated through social media channel
  
• Percentage of traffic associated with social media channels 

With social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram you might not have all the time in the world to effectively utilize every platform, but breaking them down by the number of leads, customers, and percentage of traffic coming from each will help you determine where to focus your efforts.

10. Mobile Traffic, Leads, and Conversion Rates

Is your website effectively optimized for mobile? With so many people browsing the web exclusively from their smartphones and devices and Google showing preference for sites optimized for mobile, you need to know how your visitors are using it.
Pay close attention to:

• Mobile traffic
• Number of lead conversions from mobile devices
• Bounce rates from mobile devices
  
• Conversion rates from mobile optimized landing pages
• Popular mobile devices

Understanding how and what your visitors are doing on your website on mobile will help you improve the experience, and optimize it to increase mobile conversions.

Originally: https://www.impactbnd.com/the-10-marketing-kpis-you-should-be-tracking