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A Surprise from Social Media Dallas!

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This morning I found a package from Laurie Shook of Social Media Dallas.

You know the feeling when you get an unexpected gift from a old friend?  That’s how I felt.

Laurie had taken the time to collect quotes from various Social Media Dallas members, print them out and stick them in a Scotty Vest.  This vest has many pockets, so there were 11 cool quotes placed in 11 pockets.

Social Media Dallas Vest

Two of these pockets had a crisp $100 bill with a quote from Benjamin Franklin.  And one had a quote from Abraham Lincoln, accompanied by a $5 bill.

Just imagine if I got a quote from Salmon P. Chase, who is on the $10,000 bill.

In addition to speaking at Social Media Dallas (where we discussed the “Facebook for $1 a day” technique, I had the honor of teaching two SIG (Special Interest Group) classes.  We covered the power of checklists, the 9 Triangles (core of everything we know), and how to build a proper social media plan.

The following months had Scott Monty and Brian Fanzo as featured speakers, so we’re in good company.

Thank you, Laurie, for being an amazing host and making me feel so welcome.
Looking forward to the continuation of our training in Dallas!

How to go from a one man show to an agency

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You’re good at what you do. Clients wouldn’t hire you if you weren’t. But you’re afraid that by hiring more people, you’ll lose the personal touch and the quality of your services will go down. At the same time, your business is growing and you’re not going to be able sustain this current effort level.

So something has to give: scale up (what you’d like to do), decline business (not smart in the long run), or work harder (impossible). Clients come to you because of your expertise and relationships. When you’re small, you are the face of your business, so your personal brand and company brand are synonymous.

To survive in the world of business, you have to find ways to start working ON your business instead of IN your business.

First, start documenting how to do the simple things. Billing clients, weekly performance reporting, and other simple stuff should be driven by checklists. You can have junior folks do these things so you can focus on the 10% of stuff that is truly high impact.

Do you know what items are highest impact?

Probably those that are strategic in nature, leaving tactical stuff to be competently handled by the rest of your team. Your documentation should be step-by-step checklists, assisted with video training snippets to make it easier to digest.

Use this same training to qualify your prospective staff as a real-life litmus test of what to expect. In doing so, you’ve also solved the burden of having to interview and qualify people one at a time– a real time suck. Tools like Infusionsoft and ClassMarker let you run people through self-serve training and quizzes which you can use in the qualification process.

Boil down your offering to just the essentials. Make a package that you can reliably and consistently execute. Then you know that your training and agency offering are in alignment. Clients don’t want custom, as much as you think– they want results.

Before you argue that this sounds cookie-cutter or eliminates thinking, would you say that a Tesla is low quality?

Even movie studios have a process for how they create films– a framework that enables creativity versus no structure leading to chaos. If you seek to do things differently for the sake of doing it differently, be prepared to fail a lot. You want to use proven techniques, especially if you’re doing something that can have standards, such as advertising, website building, or anything in digital.

Get out of the day-to-day. Hire a project manager if you need to.

Ironically, if you truly want to help your clients, you’ll focus more on troubleshooting than on administrative details you can delegate. This requires that you trust the people you’ve been training.

We look at three criteria for success:

People: Good character, since that can’t be trained.

Process: Do they know what to do?

Platform: Have you trained them on how to do it?

If you have these three, then you can attend every other meeting instead of all meetings (alternating tactical versus strategic).

One effective strategy to initially wean clients off you personally is to say that you’ll show up mid-way through the meeting. They’ll later find that you didn’t have to be there the whole time, giving your people a chance to shine. Don’t worry about “cutting out” of meetings — if you’re really that good at what you do, clients would expect that you are delegating to handle the workload.

Ideally, you should just review the work instead of doing it all yourself. If your process is solid (checklists with training videos), you should have consistent delivery.

Follow the Content>Checklist>Software process to scale up.

You can share your training publicly.

Don’t be afraid of your “competitors” stealing your know-how or clients deciding they don’t need you. If that were to happen, then you don’t know enough or have enough depth to deserve serving clients. What happens in most cases is that prospective clients appreciate your sophistication and this INCREASES your new client growth. So engage in “content marketing” with no fear.

Fire the bottom third or more of your clients — the ones that are a big headache or make your staff unhappy. The clients that treat you best are usually the ones that pay the most and demand the least.

You should keep the kind of clients you want more of– handing the rest to “competitors”. This way, you have consistency across what you offer and can double down on process bits instead of trying to do everything.

The corollary to focusing on the ONE thing you do well– then doing it over and over– is to say what you DON’T do.

We like to say we don’t make creatives, don’t do SEO, don’t do community management, and don’t do strategy. What we do is implementation– drive traffic and conversions on existing assets that are already converting. The marketplace will believe you when you demonstrate you’re world class at doing one thing repeatedly well.

A good test for a great client is to raise prices– gasp, I said it. If you’re truly delivering value, they’ll have no problem paying more. Even I often struggle with mustering the courage to do this, but if you’re proving your value, then making the case should be easy.

You don’t want to be the cheapest and you do want a few clients to balk at your price. If nobody ever balks at your price, you’re undercharging for most deals and those who are paying less will often think you’re not as good, since your prices are low– a double whammy.

Avoid bad hires. Elevate your team. As these junior staff move their way through your checklists and up your leveling system, encourage and praise them. Build their personal brands and give credit where it’s due, publicly where possible.

The sum of the personal branding efforts of your teammates is your content marketing at the company level. This way, it’s not about you, unless you mistakenly named the company after you– change it, if you’ve made that mistake. At this point, you’ve gone through the steps to grow your business versus just being another employee working in your business. I think you’ll find that developing others is more rewarding than trying to micromanage every bit yourself.

You’ll have to be patient and tolerate some level of work that is worse than what you’d do personally, but if you have rapid iteration, mistakes are small and adjustments are quick.

We call this “trial and error” process MAA for Metrics>Analysis>Action, and it’s fundamental to marketing.

If your training content is solid, you’ll have produced checklists for execution. These checklists repeated at scale create opportunities for automation– so you’d build or hire this out.

When you have a repeatable process, you effectively have a franchise, with you as the first franchisee. And when you have your franchise you can prepare to supercharge your agency’s revenue.

You’re blazing the path for others to follow, so they can learn in your footsteps, do according to your checklists, and teach others who are a couple levels below them.  We call this LDT for Learn>Do>Teach:

If you find these principles powerful, check out all nine triangles and discover how they fit together.

Have you implemented any of these processes in your business?

Want to read more by Dennis Yu? For more content follow him here:

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/author/dennis

https://www.facebook.com/dennisyu

https://twitter.com/dennisyu

Why your personal brand is more important than your company.

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A long-time friend of BlitzMetrics, Leonard Kim, constantly inspires us with his personal branding insights. I recently sat down with him to learn how he became a personal branding leader:

What inspired you to work in your industry?

I tried a few different projects in the meantime until one day it dawned on me: I had already figured out a formula on how I developed my personal brand.

I tried it on a few clients as case studies- It worked, every time. I was sitting on a way to mentor others to duplicate my exact success, without being stuck working 120 hours a week, but I just didn’t see it earlier. The way to help others duplicate my success is through the course I have set up at InfluenceTree.com.

I saw on your website that you wrote a book on social media. Can you explain the primary purpose of social media for the average business?

What type of business you have doesn’t matter, whether it be a cancer center, nursing home, or even a manufacturing company.

You need to be on social media.

Social media isn’t just a way for you to talk to people who may potentially visit you. It’s a way of getting your name out there into the world. So when someone needs your services, they can find you.

There are many separate components to this, all equally valuable. The most important ones:

  1. Locations: these integrate into mapping software, which helps consumers find your business.
  2. Reviews: which help consumers identify which business they want to work with.
  3. Advertising: which helps get your business in front of more people who are actively looking for what you have to offer?

What exactly is brand management, and why is it important?

Your brand is the most valuable thing you have. It’s how your consumers see you — and what keeps you fresh in their mind when they think of who to speak to when they need services.

Let’s say you get into trouble and you need a lawyer. There are thousands of criminal defense attorneys in Los Angeles. But how do you know which one to choose?

Let’s go into the mind of a future defendant. They will be scared and won’t know what to do. First, they might Google criminal defense attorney, but whose names will they recognize?

They could read reviews and ask friends. But that one incessant ad on the radio or TV… that one will likely be who they select.

Why? By managing their branding properly, they became the sought after expert in the criminal defense field.

How do you stay ahead of the curve in the industry?

Have a proactive mindset.

You have to stay consistent with what you are doing, yet at the same time continually test new theories and concepts to see what works. When you find something that works, keep doing it, while looking for the next thing you can improve upon, then the next thing and the next thing.

Without constant improvement, you will never stay ahead of the curve, then you will become complacent and may end up being replaced by a competitor.

Do you have any advice for startups or entrepreneurs?

You’re an entrepreneur running a startup who’s taken the risk of a lifetime to go out there and pursue your dreams. You know the odds are against you and that 95 percent of businesses fail within the first five years.

You know that you will have to sacrifice everything you have ever loved to get to where you want to be, but you are doing it anyways.

It’s applaudable but won’t get you to where you want to be. The only way you’re going to be able to increase your odds and achieve true success is to put your personal brand at the front of the company. Because guess what, it doesn’t matter how great your products or services are, no one cares unless they know who is running the company.

They want a leader who they can buy into, someone who knows what they are talking about who’s an expert in the field. Someone they can feel compassion for, an underdog that they can root on to victory.

Otherwise, you’re just another company in a pool of a million. And guess what, your unique selling proposition isn’t that strong when you’re just another face in the crowd. You need to work on your personal brand so that you stick out.

One book that changed your life?

“The Four Agreements” by Don Miguel Ruiz. The principles are simple. The execution is simple. All you have to do is adapt four new mindsets and daily habits, but the results are life-changing.

Three goals you’d like to accomplish (Note: they can be long-term and /or short term, serious, crazy, etc.)?

I tried having goals in the past. When I was 21, I wanted to sell 25 cars in a calendar month. I sold 22 or 23. I made five figure and was the #2 top salesperson that month. But when I went home, I was disappointed and angry at myself for not hitting my goal.

Les Brown says shoot for the stars and if you miss, you will still land on the moon. I think that’s bologna. You’ll land wherever you land, but you will be frustrated, angry, and disappointed in yourself for missing your mark and won’t be motivated to try again.

I don’t have goals. Instead, I create habits that I stick to each day. What I do is I reverse engineer what it takes to hit something, figure out what actions are necessary to get there, then work on those actions every day until they’re habits.

By focusing on the habits, I’m continually surprised with the results I get. I never thought I would have 2 million views on my content within the first six months, let alone 10 million a year-and-a-half into writing. Or that I would have a quarter of a million social media followers, or be featured in leading global media publications. But it happened because I was focusing on the habit, not on the result.

When you buy into the result, you are left with disappointment. When you let go of the result and focus strictly on the action, you’re continually surprised and happy with the progress you make.

What do you feel makes you stand out in the market?

People buy into me first, not my company. Once they buy into me, they want to learn more about my company.

But why do they buy into me?

I’m honest and genuine. I say things as they are and speak from the heart. I don’t do anything extraordinary to stand out, but do what all of us fear. I share pieces of myself and embarrassing moments that people can potentially ridicule me over. But for some reason they call me brave or inspiring instead.

You should try it. You’ll be surprised at the results you get by being open and vulnerable.

What challenges do you face when helping others build their brand?

People want to lead with their company instead of their personal brand. They understand that they need a personal brand, but they’re stuck thinking the company needs to lead.

Your company needs a leader that the world can buy into, not just your employees.

If you’re an inventor, share your vision on why you created the product. Not why it’s some revolutionary product that some company developed. No one cares about the company.

Companies don’t get medals of technology and innovation from the President. People like Mark Humayun from Keck Medicine of USC do.

But guess what happens when people get that medal? It automatically elevates the status of the company that they are associated with. So why keep trying to win when you’re playing with a self-imposed disability, when you can kill two birds with one stone by elevating yourself, which ultimately elevates your brand?

If you can collaborate with one major brand who would it be and why?

Do you remember how T-Mobile just used to be a discount phone company? Well, I’ve been with them for over a decade so I knew what their brand proposition once was. Nowadays, they are seen as innovators and are leading the market. But how did they do that?

They put John Legere in charge. When he walked in as CEO, he went out there and used his personal brand to revolutionize the telecom industry. He made statements and promises that a telecom company couldn’t make.

He spoke with a voice that the company voice couldn’t embellish.  By utilizing his personal brand at the forefront of the company, he made T-Mobile one of the most sought after telecom companies in the industry.

If I could work with one major brand, it would be one in an industry that’s been beat up and criticized over the decade, and help them recover their positioning at the forefront, much like how John Legere did for T-Mobile.

What is one major failure that you’ve had and how did you overcome it?

Back in November of 2011, I had barely started living on my own again after almost going homeless and having to move back in with my grandmother. I was working at an entry level job at a Fortune 100 company, but I was still trying to be an entrepreneur on the side.

I tried to put together a few business deals, but they all fell apart. I started talking to my ex again and all she would do was call me a complete loser and make fun of me because of how unsuccessful I was. Then I started dating a girl who ended up kicking me out of my own hotel room and charged a love kit to my room.

I was so devastated that I didn’t know what to do. I felt like the purpose of my life was to continually fail. I had nothing.

All the startups I worked with failed. My business deals were poisoned. I was sleeping on a sofa and couldn’t afford to live on my own. I was mocked and ridiculed by the love of my life. The woman I thought I had something with slept with someone else in my hotel. I only earned $13,223.33 for the year. Things were so bad, I wanted to kill myself.

I wrote a letter to my ex saying goodbye. I planned out how to do it. I role-played every scenario in my head until I found one with a high probability of success. The day I planned to do it, my ex came and saved me and talked me out of doing it, by doing what she does best. Telling me how stupid and ignorant I am.

She helped me get out of my own mind where I was drowning myself into an endless pool of misery and helped me see hope at the end of the tunnel.

I used that opportunity as a second chance at life. I wasn’t in a hurry to go out and succeed. Instead, I wanted to go back and find myself. When you work in startups, you spend so much time working, you don’t have time to reflect. So I spent an entire year reflecting back upon all the decisions in my life that got me to this point, then searched endlessly for the lessons of each one.

By the middle of 2013, I had started to encompass what led me to where I was, what I learned and how to do better the next time around. I also dabbled in sharing a few of my thoughts, being more open with friends and trying to be as honest with myself as possible. Next thing you know, I gave writing a try, then shared what I learned in the process. Now, I’m here.

But I could’ve been dead at the end of 2011 without ever having achieved anything at all with my life. So it just goes to show you, that anyone can really go out there and make it, no matter how unsuccessful or scared you may be. Because trust me, I still feel fear every single day, but I do what I can to overcome it and push forward. Usually, I’m quite pleased with the results.

 

 Now Scammers Are Selling Influence

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The latest wave of SEO spammers are now selling “influence”– to get your articles on high power sites, create that content for you, grow your followers, and drive high levels of fake engagement.

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See this chart as an example of what it costs for a posting on each site.

“TAT” is turnaround time. We write for most of these sites and know the content standards. Charging someone per post, as this consultant is offering, is against the rules and unethical.

Do you see this trend of selling influence ruining journalistic integrity, that it’s already happened, or that it’s selectively happening among publishers? Here’s what Leonard Kim of InfluenceTree thinks:

image04As a contributor to multiple publications including Inc., Entrepreneur, Huffington Post and more, it makes no sense for me to risk my columns to earn a few hundred dollars to place someone’s link or article onto the platform.

Why in the world would I go out of my way to risk getting outcasted from a network that significantly adds to my own personal credibility?

It just doesn’t make sense to me.

As a contributor to my columns, my duty is to provide value to the reader, not to the person who wants me to write about them.

That’s why I designed a course at InfluenceTree that teaches people how to build their personal brand, growth hack their social media following and get featured in publications. I’ve helped multiple people get their own columns in The Huffington Post and earn features in other publications by having them refocus their message away from ‘me me me’ to ‘how can I provide value?’.

If I’m teaching people all the inside secrets to get their own content up themselves and earn their own media wins, why do I need to do it for them?

Media companies that don’t allow this behavior, whether intentional or not, will gain trust by vetting potential contributors who are trying to make income on the side.

Quite a temptation, since most journalists make a pittance for their work– freelance contributors make only a couple hundred dollars per article. 

Credit:Venngage

Credit:Venngage

Selling your influence is no different from lip syncing. You can give anyone the stage and a microphone, but without someone else’s voice, the show is over.

The very idea of monetizing a following or authority undercuts the core of what a personal brand is– a representation of a person that’s built over time, driven by experience and proven results.

Mark Lack is a thought leader aimed at helping young adults with their success. He’s shared the stage with the likes of Tony Robbins, Arianna Huffington, and Deepak Chopra– and he’s only 25.

His success in the industry and development into an authority figure at such a young age didn’t come from buying spots on various publications – it was hard work:

image00As an influencer who’s invested hundreds of thousands of dollars and years of my life to building my personal brand…I can tell you that it’s not easy, but it is a science. It doesn’t happen by accident.

It’s unfortunate that nowadays anyone can appear to be an influencer with fake likes, followers and engagement but true influence takes years and in some cases decades…true influence is measured by impact.

In order to have major impact, you must start with and continue working on yourself, so that you are the shining example of whatever your message of influence embodies and stands for. Influence starts with you.

Phonies won’t last for long on bought authority when they’re found out for not having any real expertise. Unfortunately, there are no promises that the market will close on people peddling influence any time soon.

Rest assured that BlitzMetrics will never sell influence, since integrity is the most valuable thing you have.

We will help folks who have a compelling message tune it, get it out there and drive leads, but will never sell placements.

How do you feel about the peddling of influence? Let me know in the comments below.

Your Idea of a Facebook Funnel is Backwards

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In the Ultimate Guide to Facebook Advertising, Perry Marshall and Keith Krance demonstrate the typical funnel, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom:

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The three layers (audience > engagement > conversion) allow you to cast a wide net, so then you can conceivably lead people down a path of engagement and remarketing.

And it would appear that Facebook agrees with this approach, as you can see in their training:

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Facebook even pushes this further. When you create a new campaign in Facebook, you start by choosing an objective within this three-layer funnel:

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But what these last two images don’t show you is that the funnel is actually NARROWEST at the top and WIDEST at the bottom.

It should actually look like a cone. In this article you’ll understand why you need to “flip your funnel” (a term I’m stealing from our friend Neil Patel) to get Facebook ads to work properly for you.

Here’s how the funnel should really look:

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Admittedly we’ve been preaching the standard funnel for a long time, so we’re embarrassed to admit that the old ways aren’t as effective anymore.

Social proof is your true converter. Boosting posts only requires a dollar a day. A micro-budgets targeted to a micro-audience, and then oCPM does the work for you.

Use small saved audiences to build awareness, custom audiences to drive engagement, and lookalikes to achieve conversions.

AUDIENCE

We used to be vehemently opposed to boosting posts.

It was the joke of social media marketing– a technique only for noobs, certainly not us pros that use Power Editor.

But then Facebook let us boost against custom audiences and various combos of saved target audiences.

And that let us execute the Dollar a Day strategy with ease. And we do mean ease, 80% of our work we could do right in the timeline, never having to go to the Ads Manager or Power Editor.

You can literally select the post, the pre-made audience, and the budget, all right from your page.

Then navigate down the newsfeed, taking 20 seconds for each boost.

It’s so easy and effective that we demonstrate how to boost posts live at conferences.

Set aside your fear and give it a try.

There are 6 amazing things you can accomplish boosting posts:

  1. Influencing the media
  2. Surprising and delighting friends
  3. Fighting back when the big company abuses you
  4. Growing your client/customer base
  5. Getting more speaking opportunities
  6. Growing your personal brand

Each boosted post spends a dollar a day targeting narrow audiences consisting of only a few hundred people.

You might even accumulate 20 or 30 of these minions to do your bidding, stacking up more and more dollar a day posts running evergreen.

The strategy behind this is that people trust their peers more than they trust anything you have to say.

So you’re amplifying (advertising, in layman’s terms) what influencers in your industry and clients have to say, anything but what’s on your site.

Call it old-fashioned word-of-mouth but with a social media advertising twist to scale it.

ENGAGEMENT

You learned in your undergraduate marketing class that the average buyer must be exposed to your message 7 times before they even notice it.

84.7% of statistics are made up, anyway.

The point of “inception” in the above audience building phase is to implant the seed of trust. That way, when they see your next piece of content, they have a fuzzy familiarity with it.

So of course then they will click.

  • If they click on a link to your website, they become part of a website custom audience you can remarket to.
  • If they like, share, or comment on your post, they become part of a post engagement custom audience which you can remarket to.
  • If they watch your video for more than 3 seconds, they are now in your video view custom audience.
  • If they click “learn more” in your Facebook lead ad, they can give you their contact information in an auto-filled form.
  • If they install your app, you have them as a user and can ask for their email, too, among other things.
  • If they check into your retail store, they can be a check-in audience.

Whatever they do, you can reach them with the next message in your sequence, that’s remarketing.

But most people think remarketing is just those dumb ads that incessantly follow you around the web after you leave an e-commerce site.

Marketers are unaware that you can use Facebook’s ridiculously good database to remarket cross-channel:

  • Find out how many people have been to your site, but aren’t fans, and target exactly them.
  • Find out who is a fan, but hasn’t used your app recently.
  • Find out who is on your email list, but hasn’t seen your new products.

And so forth… until you have many custom audiences built up to remarket to.

I don’t know what percentage of spend average Facebook marketers dedicate to remarketing, but I’d guess it’s under 10%.

Of course, the “right” number depends on your sales funnel, but I’d say that 30% would be a healthy number.

Also in the engagement category is boosting posts to interest targets and lookalike audiences.

These audiences are far larger than the “inception” targets of the audience phase, so your engagement layer in the funnel has more spend and much larger audiences.

CONVERSION

Most direct marketers proportionately overspend on conversion, we typically see over 85% of budget spent on conversion. We think it should be about 30%.

And like the earlier caveat, every vertical is different. You may face seasonality, and flat out might not have any content funnels (common in B2B and local).

You’re running remarketing campaigns to drive engagement custom audiences into your conversion points, a lead magnet, free trial, tripwire, core offer, upsell, or whatever structure you have in place.

But the workhorse of your conversion campaigns are your lookalike audiences.

Facebook builds lookalikes from the seeds of your custom audiences; so the stronger your custom audiences, the stronger signal you send Facebook in building lookalikes.

Lookalikes can be as small as a million or even as high as 10 million, so don’t let that scare you.

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We used to pride ourselves in being thoroughly targeted in our conversion campaigns, to boast of efficiency in reaching the right folks with creepy accuracy.

But in the last year, we found that too small of an audience won’t give the algorithm room to “breathe”, to do the work for us.

For example, we’ve tested with ZERO targeting on campaigns. These campaigns have not only gotten some traction, but many of these ad sets beat out our well-targeted ads.

The system learns when you feed it the right inputs and allow oCPM to do the heavy lifting.

And usually the client or agency messes things up when they meddle, since they inadvertently exclude audiences that would convert.

They also think they understand who the purchaser is, but are often way off.

If you don’t know about oCPM, it’s the default bid type selected when you choose a business objective.

So choose “website conversion”, “lead ad”, or whatever your goal and let Facebook whittle down to exactly the right audience.

Lookalikes are based on the same logic as collaborative filtering, which has made Amazon and Netflix so popular (people who bought A, also bought B).

For every custom audience that’s worth tracking (not every stage in your shopping cart, please, or every single landing page), you’d want to create a lookalike audience.

  • Find out who bought product X and might be interested in product Y that you offer.
  • Find out who didn’t buy product X, but looks just like people who love product X.
  • Find a 3% lookalike audience who looks like product X purchasers minus the 2% lookalike audience.

So your conversion campaigns have the largest audiences of them all, since you have a bunch of custom audiences and the related lookalike audiences (that are a couple million users each). And if it weren’t for oCPM, you’d blow all your money trying to hit everyone, instead of letting the system sub-target and bid for you.

CONCLUSION

Are you now convinced that your funnel needs to be smaller at the top and larger at the bottom?

If not, I hope you are working for one the competitors of our clients.

Just kidding, we hope that you’ve enjoyed the latest in funnel and ad targeting strategy.

While Facebook changing is a constant complaint, what you can glean from this is that they’re moving towards AI.

This means that eventually you’ll just input your goals, content, and targeting into the machine– then it will do the rest.

But until then, you have rebellious teenager (born in 2004) that you must treat just right to get the results you want.

Now you know the 3 types of audiences to create (custom, lookalike, saved) and how to use them in your 3 layer funnel.

 

Don’t make me chase you

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Don’t make me chase you– because every step that I take doing so is a step back from making progress. We’re not in grade school anymore, and playing tag over email isn’t very much fun. When you say you’ll do something and then don’t, it makes me feel like you did so with your fingers crossed behind your back.

We’re older now, and all of this running around is hard on the body and mind, and we shouldn’t feel the need to play dodgeball with emails. We’re on the same team trying to deliver results for the client.

If I’m communicating with you, I trust and depend on you. When my advice and instructions fall on deaf ears, it makes me feel like you don’t value my expertise, or are too afraid of failure to take the first step forward.

The first step into a forest is one of the last steps to get out of it. You should not let fear take over and freeze up– most of the time, the solution is right in front of you. By simply communicating, you can alleviate 99% of any issue that can arise.

Even if you’re sick, your wifi is down, you’re out of town, or any of the other various excuses that exist, it’s not an excuse to just go dark. If anything, you should be more on top of your communication when these things come up so you can avoid any potential issues they might cause. That way, the task can be delegated to another team member.

Your team is counting on you. Don’t leave them hanging for days while they assume you’re still doing your part. Let them know something has come up so they can help. That’s what teams are for.

The key is to not get overwhelmed. Often times you may be assigned a task that may seem so large that it feels crushing. Take a deep breath, figure out an action you can take (however small it is) and do it. Just start somewhere. You’ll feel much better about taking baby steps (which is what iteration is) than if you had put it off and made excuses as to why you hadn’t started yet, then having to breathlessly run to the finish line.

If you lack the skills to complete a task, ask for help! If you put something off until later, it will be too late, so handle it while it’s fresh– this means when that phone call comes in or you get that email, you act immediately instead of putting it off.

This is easy to remember: it’s 3 D’s– Do, Delegate, or/then Delete. This, and will alleviate that dread you get thinking about the email you’ve been putting off reading for weeks.

Reach out to your team and utilize what’s around you instead of taking it on alone. Tasks will be much easier, and you’ll be much happier in the process.

The hardest part of getting back to work is always the first 30 seconds when you start working. But sometimes you will amaze yourself how a surprisingly simple task was put off with more consideration than was needed to actually execute the task. The sigh of relief from completion is always more satisfying than the extra moments bought on borrowed time.

download-216Keep in mind what Mark Lack, author of Shorten the Gap, says about avoiding procrastination:

“A great way to avoid procrastinating is to commit to chunking down your activities and taking action towards its achievement no matter how small the effort or time. The habit is more important than the effort.”

Print out this image to help you out the next time you reach for an excuse and remember that it’s always better to take some form of action rather than sit on it.

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Only 119 more days …

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… Until Christmas that is, the culminating point of the holiday season. Are you going to be ready?

Most people start doing their holiday prep around Black-Friday.

Black-Friday-Shopping-lines

 

 

 

 

 

We shouldn’t have to tell you, but as a marketer, if you wait until Thanksgiving to get ready for the Holidays you’ve burnt the chicken or turkey, or whatever.

As a marketer you need to be ahead of the curve. If you want the holidays to be successful for the brands/products you’re working on the time to start preparing is now.

Wait until November and you’ve fallen behind. As with any task the first challenge is getting started. Facebook has shared with a us their checklist to navigate through the holidays.

Holiday Campaign Checklist 2016

On top of that here is a list of their Tips and Tricks to help make this years holidays a success.

Holiday Planning Tips & Tricks

Lastly make sure to take advantage of current trends among users. Facebook reports that 52% of people buy gifts for themselves and mobile shoppers are 1.8x more likely to do gift-research on Facebook.

Holidays 2016: ‘Tis the Season of Surprises

How will this impact your marketing efforts this holiday season?

 

 

 

Have you checked your Facebook yet today?

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Do you feel like everywhere you go everyone just stares at their phone? Don’t expect this trend to die when Pokemon Go does.

Our friends at Facebook shared with us their Q2 reports today that show 145M users access Facebook daily from their mobile device.

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Have you observed this yet?

If you need to contact someone you can either e-mail them and wait for days to hear back, or reach out on Facebook and get a response before you’ve had the chance to return your phone to its pocket.

Facebook is changing the way we connect. With features like Facebook-live and Moments there is no better way to share the excitement of an event as it’s happening.

Don’t lie, have you been on your Facebook account at least once already today?

So I decided to give LinkedIn ads another spin. Here’s what happened.

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LinkedIn recently released Sponsored Updates, allowing us to hit the newsfeed.

We love Facebook, but also test our business strategy across multiple channels.

The current stigma tied to LinkedIn ads is that they can work, but only for B2B. Our latest experiment was a sponsored post for a Social Media Club Dallas event. The goal of the ad was to drive more engagement and awareness around the conference and workshop.

We followed the same $1/Day strategy that has proven successful on our Facebook ads.

Targeting was based on job titles and locations honing in on digital marketers in the Dallas area.

Budgets on LinkedIn…

LinkedIn enforces a $4.75 minimum CPC and $10 daily minimum budget and doesn’t have ad sets or oCPM yet, so optimizing ads can become expensive.

If you’re confident in your creative (you anticipate a high CTR) you could bid for CPM (cost per thousand). But again, there is a $17 minimum daily budget here.

Scheduling ads

Make sure you expand the options tab, to be able to set an end date for your campaign. Otherwise it will run forever.

Here’s what we saw at the end of the campaign:

We spent just over $20 and got 47 actions.

Most of those actions were post likes, which drove additional organic impressions, but not necessarily site visits. If we count only the 12 link clicks we come out with a $1.68 CPC.

Does this hold up against Facebook advertising?

Here is our CPC (link click) for 877 campaigns we’ve run. $2.33 to $1.68, not bad.

AJ Wilcox, a LinkedIn ads expert said this,

“LinkedIn Ads is, by far, the most scalable way to reach high-value professionals. If you want to reach CTOs in enterprise-sized tech companies in North America, there are distinct ways of doing that. Would you like to reach CEOs of SMBs instead? There are many ways I can think of for doing this on LinkedIn. You do pay a steep price for this level of targeting and scalability, though–I generally see between $6-8 cost per click, depending on the audience.”

So is running ads on LinkedIn worth it?

We weighed more pro’s and con’s.

THE MAIN POINT

Micro-targeting can reduce cost, but without it you may end up paying $6-10 a click, even if you have a killer CTR, since the average CPMs are north of $200. But if you have a high-end B2B target, it could be worth it. Facebook still has more volume by job title and company workplace target.

IN MORE DEPTH

There are 3 million LinkedIn business pages (hat tip to Jason Miller of LinkedIn for sharing stats). Compare that with the over 50 million Facebook pages, of which only a portion are business pages.

With Facebook, you can target down to the zip code, while LinkedIn lets you go down only to the city level.

Facebook has sponsored stories (targeting based on who you’re connected to). LinkedIn had this two years ago, but pulled it quickly.

The CTRs on Facebook and LinkedIn are similar– perhaps slightly higher on LinkedIn.  But if you isolate Facebook mobile newsfeed, then Facebook wins. You can’t choose mobile placements on LinkedIn yet.

Neither network offers frequency capping or dayparting, but Facebook does offer negation targeting and custom audiences.

Facebook has the ads API and insights API. LinkedIn ads API and analytics API are closed.

LinkedIn can show summary stats by seniority and company size– Facebook doesn’t have this.

Here are the number of folks you can target on Facebook by job title. Clearly a lot more blue-collar types– a larger audience than Facebook by a factor of five.

And as you’d expect, if you’re hitting executive positions or HR, LinkedIn is the way to go.

Our Takeaway

LinkedIn is inconvenient to work on due to budget restrictions and lack of optimization; however,with specific content and targeting, driving “low cost” results is possible.

This is especially true if you’re micro-targeting, which we do frequently as part of what we call inception.

Have you tried your hand at LinkedIn ads yet?

How to determine your goals and build your personal brand.

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We talk a lot about the importance of personal branding- so much that we’ve made it into a guide. But we get this question a lot: What IS personal branding?

In a nutshell, your personal brand is your journey to complete your goals, and has your WHY at the nucleus. That is your personal brand– the thing people will go “YOU are the person we should ask about…”, which comes naturally for you when you are passionate about it.

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But how do you determine these goals? Easily. Ask yourself: what drives you? What are your dreams? What is the thing that pushes you forward and makes you wake up excited and ready to leap out of bed in the morning? What defines you and what do you wish to contribute to the world?

Check out these articles as part of our CTO Dennis Yu’s own personal brand / goal in life, and you’ll understand what drives him:
http://www.dennis-yu.com/cold-hearted-people-cannot-be-effective-content-marketers/
http://www.business2community.com/branding/mentor-said-died-01117914
http://www.dennis-yu.com/do-you-want-to-really-understand-dennis-yu/

Once you find your WHY, your goals will come naturally to you.
Then, everything you do adds to your own personal brand, and people will begin to recognize you as an authority.

As you learn more and continue to improve, you can then elevate others by teaching them. We call this “Learn-Do-Teach“, or “LDT”. You can learn more about it here.

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Let us know in the comments what your goals are, and what drives you forward– we’d love to hear them!

 

Want to read more by Dennis Yu? For more content follow him here:

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/author/dennis

https://www.facebook.com/dennisyu

https://twitter.com/dennisyu