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Query “What should you measure in your website analytics?” and you’ll net 190M search results. Pose the question to a dozen specialty web strategists and you will get a dozen different answers. The concepts of what a website can be are so fluid that your measurement approach could be tackled dozens of ways. Generally, these methods are neither completely wrong nor completely right, but you can achieve better results if clear on your website purpose.
The first question you need to ask yourself: “Why do I have a website?” Here are a few of the more common reasons for a website and Mansfield Inc.’s perspective on what you should be measuring for each
I want to sell physical things from my website.
If you have a website that is primarily an online store, user journey is the top thing to track. All the visitors in the world are meaningless if they never purchase. User drop off will be the first problem you will want to monitor and tackle as it may indicate users experiencing bottlenecks, which is a common cause to prohibiting the completion of sales. Tracking and identifying how far users get through the purchase process before dropping off can indicate that your products not being adopted by your audience or your site providing a poor user experience that they abandon the process. More importantly if you have a high drop off rate on product pages that don’t have inventory you have a successful product, but no products to sell. Those pieces of information can dictate your own vendor purchase agreements.
I want to sell services that I can invoice later.
For example, the gig economy has led to the explosion of services on demand, independents and entrepreneurs able to compete with large established companies for creative, marketing and consulting services. This type of website should include portfolios, case-studies and testimonials they believe represents their business. These sections of the website are the key drivers for website traffic, but page views alone are the not the main indicator of success.
For a successful portfolio website to work you must measure the amount of time on page. If users are generally skimming over the pieces presented on the site, they are not in line with their interests. However, if one page of your site is gaining a greater share of the time spent on site, it can indicate that that piece is more relevant or interesting to your audience. One solution is to move that more interesting content between the landing page and a call to action to sign up as a new customer and help convert passive scanning to lead generation.
I want to be a thought leader in a certain subject
Prior to the internet, people became thought leaders by publishing in books and journals that would lead to speaking engagements to grow their physical audience. Online publishing has not only greatly reduced the costs of sharing your ideas, but the lead time from concept to read content has dropped dramatically also. This content churn means that an optimized path to delivery and content topics is of the utmost importance.
To build out your website as a driver of content, some key metrics to track are pages per visitor and traffic from your newsletter. Treating your newsletter followers like an advertising campaign will allow you track which content is of interest to your current audience. Tracking the pages per visitor will give your perspective on whether all pieces of content are creating value for you or just a few select pages. Looking at which pages are getting the most views will help drive your content strategy in the right direction.
I want to sell a service that exists on my website
Understanding the difference between website and web application is critical. From a high level they both appear the same, both are viewed in a web browser and jumping between them is seamless with a good architecture. The big distinction is that web applications have processing done on a server level, driving information to a database and a code base that could be 20 times as big. A marketing website that supports these applications are used as landing pages or provide supporting documentation for new users.
A marketing website for a web application is useful to track inbound traffic to the application. Once you identify where the users are coming from you can target and remarket to turn them into customers. The most important metric to track is called the referrer source in the acquisition section of your analytics platform. These will be social media campaigns, organic search results or paid campaigns if you have implemented them.
Online business card
If none of the above apply to you, perhaps you are just using your website as your online business card. Business cards are primarily used to facilitate communications with you from someone you have shared the business card with. An online business card essentially shares that business card with the world.
The key indicator of this type of website being successful is contradictory to how many SEO campaigns work. If the user finds the contact information they need it will be automatically be considered a drop off as they will most likely leave the site after they send an email or call. If the find the information on the landing page, then the page will show an abnormally high bounce rate. These terms are typically seen as enemies to the website, but in the right circumstances they are key indicators of success.
Mansfield Inc understands the importance of tailoring analytics to the success of your website. We don’t believe in a one size fits all approach to website measurement, contact us to create a custom measurement plan that fits your needs.
Chief Financial Officers are always looking for the answer to “What is the Return on Investment?”. Often with digital and social media it is tough to produce a robust solid response if you lack the architecture to measure.
Mansfield Inc. has developed a Digital Audit Program that evaluates digital presence, generates a report card, and outlines next steps aimed at improving website experience.
Why does your organization need a digital audit now?
If your digital strategist and developer team is constantly upgrading your website, you may feel that your organization is safe, and the technology is up to date. However, if you do have a large team working feverishly, are they just supporting your current clients? If so the conversions that they are tracking for success may not be the same as the conversions that you need to track for client growth. While client retention may lead to increased margins or repeat sales, to grow your business new client acquisition should be a cornerstone strategy. Mansfield Inc’s Digital Audit can assess and determine how to extend impact to both nurture current clients and encourage new ones.
Here are a few questions to ask yourself to determine if your organization needs a digital report card:
- What conversions are being used to determine if your website is defined as a success? If the answers are only from your marketing department, you are likely missing valuable input, and opportunities for other parts of your organization – impacting your bottom line.
- Are you leveraging your website users to spread the brand message? If it takes more than one click for a user to share your messaging then you are losing out on unpaid advocates of your brand.
- How often are you reporting website traffic analytics and how are the changes in user behavior being tracked? If your stats are being reviewed once a year, a quarter, a month, a week then they are out of date in that same time period. The time frame of your content strategies should be at least twice a long as your reporting period to see if they are working.
- Are social shares optimized and displaying the content according to brand imagery and messaging? Social networks use the information in specialized tags to display links in their user’s feeds. If they are not optimized, your brand messaging could be out of line with what is being shared.
- Do you trust the information coming out of your data analytics team is accurate and in line with industry standards? If your data team is responsible for the success of your website as well as reporting on the analytics, then there is a conflict of interest. Verification of those numbers and where they appear with respect to your industry peers are key indicators of website health.
Why engagement on social media isn’t enough.
Engagement and the measurement of engaged audiences on social media is a good way of building your brand’s audience, but these elements are only the first steps to a highly functional digital presence. A large, captive audience with nothing to convert them to clients is a lost opportunity. Appropriate architecture offers fact-based stats on the potency of your audience. This dataset will measure the visitors from social media to your website and their behavior as they browse content. Tracking conversions for successful content and user drop-offs for pieces that are not succeeding will offer you the data fueled evidence to help evolve the direction of your content and make you more successful.
Why all organizations need a robust website, not just digital companies.
Defining conversions are not just for income generating line items for the organization – they are cost saving strategies as well. In fact, a highly optimized website will also help to minimize overheads. For example, a Deloitte study regarding Talent Acquisition, new hire cost $4,000USD each. That spending was focused on the cost of recruitment agencies that accounted for 18% of the money spent to acquire each new hire.
With recent updates to the Google search algorithm that has placed open positions for companies on the search engine results page, with one click access to apply to those positions, search engine optimization will pay for itself. Web pages optimized for social media will allow for personal networking on LinkedIn to drive traffic back to your organization with the same techniques used by media companies.
Contact Mansfield Inc. to set up a digital audit so we can give you a report card on your website for back to school.
Is your social media content engaging enough? What about your website—is it equipped with the right tools to track leads or measure campaigns? Regularly analyzing how well your social media content is performing, where your website ranks and what your competitors are doing will help ensure your digital strategy is working for you.
What content matters to your business and how do you measure it?
Before you go running to Google Analytics or Facebook Insights, it’s important to know what to measure. Determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) actually matter to your business. B2Cs, for example, often care about engagement and brand awareness. This means measuring social engagement such as likes, shares and comments. B2Bs, on the other hand, put more weight on the clicks, conversions and website traffic coming from social channels.
Analyze the numbers on your website to see where your leads are coming from, when and how they convert and what types of content produce the greatest returns. From there, you can determine what to fine-tune for the best possible performance, and what to discard or modify. You should consider both quantitative and qualitative metrics.
Quantitative factors easier to measure, such as optimal time of day and character count. Qualitative factors are more abstract, like subject matter and sentiment, and can be more difficult to measure. Once you’ve established your KPIs, start with the analysis. Try to find out what times work best for posting your social content. Many social media tools automatically determine this for you, but you can also check manually. For example, look at the top-performing posts based on clicks, and see if you can identify peak engagement by days and hours.
What are your competitors doing?
The next step is to identify your competition and determine which platforms they use. Hopefully, you already have a good idea of your main competitors and their general strategy but with the right tools you can track what keywords they’re investing in, what percentage of the social conversation they claim and how engaging their content is. Identify the competitors with a robust digital marketing program, not only the ones in the same line of business as you.
If your company is looking to grow and gain a digital foothold in the marketplace, your social profiles and website must adapt over time. Evaluate whether your existing profiles are working, what your competitors are doing and whether your website is set up for optimal measurement. If your LinkedIn profile is getting lots of engagement, and your Twitter presence is an active conversation hub, you might not need to do much. But if any of your social accounts are starting to falter or your website is drifting lower in search rankings, it may be time to update your strategy.
Always Be Measuring!
Consistently measuring your social media content, website and competitors will enable you to determine what’s working, where you’re at in your industry in relation to your competition and discover the ways you can take advantage of the new tools in social media and digital communications.
Send us an email at info@mansfieldinc.com to talk about a digital consultation and find out where you’re at!
There is only so much sand in the hourglass and if you haven’t already figured out what your social media game plan is during a company crisis, please read on immediately.
In today’s age of communications having a social media crisis engagement strategy is critical to preserving your brand. Now more than ever, the public expects an immediate response on social media when a crisis hits. Every minute that passes by without a response is a slippery slope to disaster. According to a recent study on Hubspot 72 per cent of people who complain on Twitter expect a response within an hour. Moreover, 60 per cent of respondents in the survey felt negatively about the brand if they did not receive timely responses.
Here are a few steps to consider on how best to develop a minimal defence on social media when dealing with a crisis:
1. Social Media Monitoring
There are many different software platforms out there but if you do not have a full-time person involved in this process or a person who fully understands how to monitor and what alerts to establish you are far better off to engage the services of a firm that can manage this process for you. The cost of such a monitoring service can run you anywhere from $500+ per month depending on the size of your company. Though software platforms typically cost within this range, the advantage of having an agency manage this for your company is that you don’t carry the additional costs of an employee. At that rate, it makes much more economic sense to outsource.
2. Understanding the difference between and issue and a full-blown crisis
Having a clear understanding of the issue is your first step. You should develop a cascade of responses and protocol to ensure that you don’t escalate an issue like an ice cream spill in a retail store to a crisis like a bank robbery in progress.
Make sure the Crisis Communications Team (CCT) has assigned a senior member to be responsible for any communication approvals for rapid response requirements. It is very important that you don’t delay in responding to customer enquiries even if it means providing placeholder responses noting that you’re aware of the issues and you will get back to them promptly. If you have been in these turbulent waters before you understand how quickly a poorly managed issue can soon escalate into a crisis.
3. First Responders
Know what the program is once your issue has been detected. Every great crisis management plan has protocols and messaging created in advance. Everyone should know who is on the team and what previously crafted responses are ready to go or need to be quickly modified. Your social media responders have to be empowered with baseline responses and a priority sequence on response levels and messaging. Make sure you have a consistent message that can be adapted across all social media channels.
4. Get the message up
Do not waste time pursuing the perfect detailed response. Even if you do not have all the required details, at a bare minimum, you need to inform your audience. Tell them you are aware of the situation and expect to be addressing it more formally within the hour or whatever immediate timeframe possible. This conveys your understanding of the urgency and immediacy of the situation. Also, be sure to display the highest amount of empathy possible. Being abrupt and unsympathetic will only add fuel to the fire.
Make sure your team has a standing ‘if in doubt’ response so that no enquiry goes unanswered. Furthermore, once the correct, informed responses to your issue have been created, make sure your social media manager is able to respond expeditiously, and in the event of uncertainty, that the appropriate level of senior management is available to sign off on the post. Ultimately you will need to post an official response to a situation on your website which will be used by the media, blog writers and others who will be reporting on your issue.
5. Pause your scheduled posts
Nothing can be worse than seeing a light-hearted acknowledgement of an unrelated event magically appear during the heat of a crisis. Disable your scheduled posts immediately. Your customer base needs to know that your priority focus is on the issue at hand and nothing else.
6. Create a crisis FAQ web page
Having a web page that addresses the most frequent questions around the issue gives you the ability to link to answers more efficiently. Details of the occurrence, contacts at the crisis site, lists of products impacted, geographic regions in question, etc., should all be aggregated in one place that can be easily referenced and shared throughout your social media posts.
7. Engage
Once the message is up, make sure you immediately engage with your audience responses. Make sure that you are consistent with your messaging and responding in a polite and caring manner. If you have positive responses, make sure and thank those supporters immediately. There will be individuals that cannot be pleased no matter what the effort and you need to understand this going in.
One tactic you should consider in your response is offering to take the conversation ‘offline’. While you may get a few people accepting this offer, at the very least, you are indicating to the broader audience at large your willingness to address heated and repeated comments directly. Remember, if you are satisfying the majority you have preserved your brand and supporting community.
8. Internal Employees
Your employees need to be made immediately alert to any social media crisis response campaign. It is critical that company employees do not randomly respond or engage in conversations on social. This protocol should be addressed in your employee handbook to protect the company/brand from rogue engagement. Make sure that all employees are aware of the situation when it breaks and to refer to the section in their handbook for references regarding proper behaviour. Also, make sure you keep your employees up to date on all developments and conclusions as they are reached.
9. Document Everything
Make sure you create a log of engagement. Tweets, status updates, blogs, comments on social media—everything needs to be saved in a central repository for future references. Make sure copies of all your emails are recorded. Also, review your campaign. Understand what worked, did not work and your social media activity as it relates to the time series of the event. Review web site traffic patterns and understand where visitors were engaged. Reviewing what happened will only make your campaign stronger the next time it happens.
10. Continue to monitor
One of the most common mistakes to crisis management is thinking it’s over and having it rear its ugly head again four days later. Keep a close eye and adjust your monitoring to key in on higher influencers. As well, make sure you are monitoring key date milestones. In other words, expect that someone will trot out “it was one year ago today…” these are common occurrences, and you need to be prepared.
These are but a few ideas that should help you better prepare. Until your next crisis…
HM
Since its adoption by brands and business, social media has evolved beyond a broadcast platform to a tool that enables you to gather insights about your customers, industry, products and competitors. With the right tools, a social listening strategy can help you earn valuable business intelligence by tracking, analyzing and responding to targeted conversations and keywords.
If you think of the information you can gain from market research, you can implement the same approach to learn from people on social who are already engaging with your brand and your industry. If you approach social media as a giant focus group, ask yourself as a brand, “what problems are you trying to solve, and what data do you need to solve it?”
We can define social listening as the act of monitoring social media platforms for conversation around your brand, clients, competitors, keywords and any other ideas or themes that are relevant to your business. The next step is where we find the real value of social listening: analyzing the information for actionable insights. Those actions can enable you to engage customers, determine consumer behaviour models or shift your overall product or brand positioning strategy.
Social listening is different from social media monitoring by looking beyond social metrics like engagement rate, mentions and followers to learning what the feelings are behind the posts—how people actually feel about you, your competitors and the industry overall.
Make it part of your business strategy
Social media listening should automatically be part of your business strategy—even if you’re already engaging in market research studies, social listening will provide you with scores of actionable data from real people who are actively discussing the subjects you’re monitoring. Last month, Mansfield attended a seminar in Toronto from NetBase, a leading social listening platform. Guest speaker Ravi Imam from 113 Industries spoke about “finding David in your data.” Michelangelo’s David was sculpted from a single block of discarded marble, and just as Michelangelo saw something beautiful in an unwanted piece of marble, there could be a masterpiece waiting in your data—it’s just a question of listening to what it’s telling you and taking action.
There’s a ‘David’ in your data somewhere
On their blog, Hootsuite has a useful list of what to track when starting your social listening monitors:
- Your brand name and handles
- Your product names
- Industry buzzwords
- Campaign names or keywords
- Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles
Because your social listening monitors will pick up what people are you saying about you and your competitors, you’ll be able to determine how your brand fits within the industry, relative to customer perspectives. You’ll see the types of content your audiences are most engaged with and higher level insights around customer behaviour.
With a properly implemented social listening strategy, you will gain a deeper understanding of your brand and industry with insights on how to improve in all areas of your business. Sales teams will learn more about how customers really feel about products and services, marketing personnel will see what content is most valuable to audiences and R&D teams will have direct access to real-time customer perspectives on your products those of your competitors.
With the right tools and keywords, you’ll have the infrastructure in place to mold a David of your own. Read through Mansfield’s entire digital offering here and let us know when you’re ready to put social listening to work for your band.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018, Toronto — Kanetix Ltd. announced today Mansfield Inc. as their PR Agency of Record. Kanetix Ltd. drives digital growth for the insurance and financial services industry by integrating data insights and technology to create best-in-class customer experiences. Their trusted suite of insurance and personal finance comparison websites are used by more than 8 million Canadians every year: Kanetix.ca, InsuranceHotline.com, RateSupermarket.ca, Rates.ca and ComparaSave.com.
Mansfield Inc. will lead the national PR strategy, including media relations and influencer campaigns for Kanetix Ltd., focused on brand building and raising awareness.
“We are looking forward to working with the Mansfield team to further build our brands under the Kanetix Ltd umbrella. Their creativity and demonstrated expertise in consumer and corporate PR, strong media relations network and experience with new technologies made them the right agency for us as we continue to develop offerings to help Canadians make better money decisions,” said Leonie Tait, vice-president marketing, Kanetix Ltd.
“We are excited to be AOR for Kanetix Ltd. and its family of brands. We look forward to working together creatively to bring their value proposition to the forefront and raise awareness of their extensive offerings. Their prominence in the InsureTech vertical presents a wonderful opportunity to reinforce their leadership position,” said Mansfield Inc. president and CEO, Hugh Mansfield.
Mansfield Inc. was selected following a competitive bid process earlier this year.
Follow Mansfield on Twitter at twitter.com/MansfieldInc and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/mansfieldinc. Follow Kanetix Ltd. on Twitter at twitter.com/KanetixLtd and on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/company/kanetixltd.
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Over the past year, the demand for our crisis communications services has been on a considerable rise. Not surprisingly either. With the advances in technology and associated ability to convey issues of consequence through social media, the court of public opinion has become both a ruthless judge and jury within minutes of many issues, grievances and disasters both real and perceived.
If left unattended, perception will always outflank reality and most companies have very little time to respond to a crisis. Every day that passes by without acting to resolve a crisis will negatively impact your brand and often results in significant losses. More often than not the public trust is weakened and, in some cases, irreparable. Sadly, we are seeing these situations in social and earned media on a regular basis.
Most glaring is the amount of time required for companies to respond to a perceived crisis. It is inexcusable. There is no longer room for “no comment” or “next day” strategies. Today, the public expects an immediate response. Failure to do so is usually dealt with a swift blow to the company’s brand.
Given this regular occurrence, more companies are now beginning to evaluate their crisis management plan preparedness for such an event. Moreover, shareholders of publicly traded companies are asking management and board members alike if such plans exist. And yet in a recent Nasdaq poll close to 50% of organizations do not have a crisis communications plan and only 50% felt their companies were “adequately prepared to manage crises effectively” exposing them to serious risk.
While this number is staggering, risk exposure rises even further when one considers the last time many of these companies with a plan in place have had it updated, including vulnerability audits and stress tests to ensure crises readiness.
The harsh reality is that if your company hasn’t updated their plan annually or are not regularly practicing scenarios they are invariably exposed to a wide variety of issues. If you are completely lacking a comprehensive crisis communication management strategy, your level of risk has grown exponentially.
Recently, newer issues have appeared more frequently in the media and public domain and it is probably worthwhile to re-examine the issues that you may be up against. Some of the more frequent issues include:
- Data breach, identity theft, privacy and security
- Sexual misconduct
- Violations of public trust within government
- Offensive social media transmissions by employees
What can you do to avoid these potential problems?
To begin with, I recommend having an internal team meeting to determine whether or not your company has a current plan in place, and if you do, to carefully evaluate if the plan is sufficient. If there is even the slightest hesitation, bring in an outside expert to review and augment. You may find yourself in the middle of an exercise that requires considerable renovations to your existing plan. If your organization is completely without a strategy you should move quickly to have one built. This is not an exercise that should be taken lightly or handed to someone inexperienced. Each crisis communications management strategy is unique to each company and while many follow fundamentals, the end strategy can often take between two and three months to assemble.
What does it cost to hire an outside expert?
No two plans are alike and therefore careful consideration should be given to the experience and size of undertaking you may be embarking upon. There is no set cost equation or template plan but consider the following to be some numbers to give you a barometer of costs likely to be incurred.
- Plan creation – involves multiple meetings with key stakeholders including senior management, legal, tech, frontline staff, etc. Largely depends on size and structure of organization. $25,000 to $50,000+
- Training – this will include spokesperson training, media training, and mock interview drills to ensure everyone is on the same page and understands the routing when a crisis occurs. $3,500 to $15,000+
- Stress/vulnerability tests to examine potential problems and create routine response mechanisms. Depends on the size and nature of the company. $10,000 to $25,000+
Keep in mind the scope of your costs will be largely dependent upon the size of your organization, the amount of training involved, and the vulnerability audits and program adjustments required. At the end of the process you should have a manual, a crisis ready communications team and a good understanding of the possible scenarios you may experience and what to do when they happen.
Facebook (FB) stock plunge on Cambridge Analytica data breach
The cost of not having a plan and reacting poorly to a situation can cost you millions and even billions of dollars within hours. At the end of the day, the money you spend now will be considerably less than the money you will have to spend without one.
The likelihood of a company crisis today is not a matter of “if” vs. “when”. Having a crisis communications management strategy in place will undoubtedly help you mitigate your losses and protect your brand.
Hugh Mansfield (hugh@mansfieldinc.com) has over 25 years of crisis communications management experience. Hugh has handled some landmark cases including data theft, privacy, FDA, FTC and State Attorney investigations, Auditor General enquiries, filing issues with SEC, NASDAQ and TSX, along with major labor disputes, public health and safety, consumer product recalls, and numerous environmental disasters.
Welcome to another Mansfield Thought Leadership post. Our posts our designed to help the C-Suite with Public Relations and Social Media Management.
Should your company’s C-Suite executives be using social media? Even if they should be, chances are they’re not—according to research published in 2016 from CEO.com and Domo, 60 per cent of Fortune 500 CEOs have no social media presence whatsoever.
Whether or not the company brass should be publicly active on social networks depends largely on who they are as a person and how they want to be perceived within the company and the industry. Do they want to appear more relatable and connect more genuinely with employees and colleagues? Conversely, executives may harm the brand if their social media is done poorly. Just look at United Airline’s Oscar Munoz’ response to the controversy around their forced removal of a passenger earlier this year.
To give you an idea of the pros and the cons, we broke down the simple reasons for and against your company’s leaders engaging on social media.
Reasons for getting your company leaders on social:
• Shaping brand views: any executives on social media will serve as an extension of the company and their social media posts coming from the top will support the larger marketing activities. This can help the brand appear more accessible to a larger audience.
• Being approachable to employees: any efforts to be more accessible to outside audiences are applicable within the company itself. When employees are engaged on social media with their leaders they’re likely more satisfied in their job which will lead to less turnover.
• Improving relationships with customers and stakeholders: active execs help show the public and future customers how much the organization values customer experience. CEOs engaging with real people on social media can enhance brand opinions and loyalty.
• Talent recruitment: being adept on social emphasizes a CEO’s know-how with technology. Organizations searching for recruits who are invested in tech-friendly companies may value a CEO who keeps a strong social media presence.
• Keeping abreast of company or industry issues: social media allows CEOs to proactively monitor and participate in the relevant discussions that arise in regards to their company or industry. This can help company leadership react quickly to key industry developments.
On the other side, basic arguments against CEOs embracing social include:
• It may be too time consuming: sometimes time is a CEO’s most valuable commodity and forcing social media on them can take their attention away from more relevant pieces of business.
• It could be inauthentic: it’s not uncommon for executives to let their PR or communications teams run their accounts. While they’re most likely approving the posts, the words may not feel genuine which largely defeats the purpose of a personal social media account.
• The risk factor: if they are running their own accounts, giving a CEO free rein of their can be risky if they’re known for contentious or provocative commentary.
• It could harm internal productivity: if company leadership is seen as proactively social it may encourage employees to spend more time than necessary socializing online leading to decreased productivity.
However, if your company execs see the value in social media, launching them on it is a multi-step process. Approach it like any other social media campaign—establish goals and objectives, set benchmarks and most importantly, figure out the personality they want to project to the world.
Above all the brand humanizing, thought leadership and company updates from the top, their personal brands should shine through on whatever they put out.
If you need help navigating the Social Media landscape, we can work with you in confidence to improve your online presence.
This Tuesday November 21, 2017 Hugh Mansfield, CEO of Mansfield Inc will be speaking on the points of social media measurement/marketing law firms in Canada. Information for the conference can be found on the Legal Marketing Association’s website. The conference is at the Sheraton Center Toronto Hotel and panel discussion goes from 3:45 to 4:30. Join the conversation: #LMAEC17
The panel is hosted by:
Melanie Trudeau - @Melanie_Trudeau
The panel consists of:
Hugh Mansfield - @hughmansfield1
Farzana Crocco – @fjsyed
David Perry - @SocialDave
Welcome to another blog post on Influencer Marketing. Be sure to check out our other posts in this series.
Are you one of the 84% of marketers that said they were planning on launching an influencer campaign in 2016? Were you one of the 81% that said that influencer marketing was effective? If you are not one of the aforementioned but you’re planning your first influencer campaign, is your website ready for it? It might be the last thing on your mind after searching the social channels for the voice that best fits your brand and putting the final touches on the creative, but your calls to action have to lead somewhere, and that somewhere is your website.
Hardware: Load Balanced or Cloud Based?
Hopefully all your homework and research pays off, you have the quiet little influencer that has a ravenous following. The campaign goes out and you start to worry when you can’t access your website at the same time that your influencer’s tens of thousands followers do. You are caught in the worst situation possible, your web server that runs your website is overrun with request and you can’t get it to load.
This isn’t a new issue, when email marketing was in it’s early days, an email deployment without a staggered delivery schedule would suck your hardware resources dry. Today the same is with influencers once they share their link in their social channel, it hits everyone at the same time. Sure there are longtail stats for the content that gets revisited, but if you want to stay relevant, make sure you content is ready to go live and expand on demand.
Content: Deep Linked or Hide and Seek?
So you have the influencer, you have the hardware, now where are you going to send the users that want to give you money? If your site has gone through a user experience (UX) audit and had a face lift on your chassis, you may have missed one important feature, the deep link to your content.
If you don’t understand the concept of a deep link I try to explain it best like this: if you need to describe to someone over email how to sign up for a service, order a product or reserve a table using more than a URL, you’re going to lose conversions. Javascript has created the ability to float overlays on your content for conversions for those who are just browsing, but if you’re only using that technology to send people to you’re going to have drop off.
Conversions: Calls to Action or Bounce Rate Bait?
If people have made the decision to click through from your influencer, you need to believe they are just as excited to pay or reserve as you hoped your influencer would make them. Always be closing was from the Glengarry Glenn Ross, you have the leads, they have come to you. Make sure your information architecture is set up so you can close with as little effort as possible from the user. One of the first things that your new users should see is an unobtrusive, yet obvious way to let them convert at the click of a link. If you are driving them to take part in your content strategy, have a link to convert when they are done reading it. If your stats are showing that the average video watch time is much less than the total play time, capture them before they disappear and add to your bounce rate.
Analytics: Analyze This or Analyze What?
If I were to make a movie about influencer marketing, my ABC would be “Always Be Checking”. Don’t rely on just one source of your metrics, especially if that only source is your influencer. They can report out of Twitter Analytics and Facebook Insights about the clicks from their audience to your site, but are you set up with Google Analytics or your social server to see what your audience is doing after they get to your site? High rates of click throughs from your influencer that don’t correspond to your site’s analytics could be the first indication that your influencer isn’t as authentic as you’d like.
At Mansfield, we don’t want to be the all or nothing agency, we want to do they best for your brand. Our results are data driven, but if you need an audit on your site before you launch your campaign contact us. We are more than willing to help out with one part or all parts of your influencer campaign.
