Friday, July 1, 2016
How to Tie Marketing Metrics to the Data that Boards, CxOs, and Investors Really Care About - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
SEOs and executives speak different languages. It's a simple fact, but it's one that often acts as a blocker for getting your ideas and investments approved. A simple change in how you communicate your marketing goals, triumphs, and challenges could be what's standing between you and getting the C-suite buy-in that's integral to your success. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps you translate your marketing jargon into financial metrics and data that the folks in charge will actually care about.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about tying marketing metrics that marketers use to the things that CEOs, CXOs, whatever the C-level titles that you've got are, investors, board members, to the metrics and data that they care about.
This is a problem that I've talked about with many marketers over the last few weeks, especially at some conferences and events where folks say, "Hey, we've got our metrics dialed in. We know what we're doing. But when we present it to the Board, or when we present it to our CMO, or our CEO, when we show it to our investors, not only do they not get it, it's like we're not speaking the same language, and therefore we're not able to have a conversation productively about where investment should and shouldn't be made, and they're not able to give input into whether they think our idea is a good one, or whether they think there's a good return on investment there." This can be tough.
Start with the metrics that marketers care about
So what happens is you're a marketer, you're presenting here to your Board of Directors or to your executive team, and you say, "Hey look, we've got traffic growing in every category. SEO is up. Social is up. We've grown our link profile, which is going to help us with search, all these great things." Fantastic, but the Board is sort of sitting there like, "Well, I don't really know how to contribute, and how does that tie in to higher lifetime value of customers, because that's the thing that I know and the thing that I care about, and I'm not sure this marketer person is really investing in the right kind of ways for the organization."
That sucks. As a marketer, that totally sucks, because it means that you are not communicating your message, and that means you're not going to get, you're unlikely to get buy-in from all these people that you really care about and need their permission and their acceptance in order to make the investments you need.
The thing is, marketers are very focused on the funnel.
We care about metrics that show top-of-funnel growth. We care about which channels send that top-of-funnel traffic. We care about how people are moving through the funnel. We want to see conversions and conversion rate, which is why we work so much on conversion rate optimization, and we care about marketing metrics that predict better retention or greater recidivism, meaning people are buying again or coming back and becoming customers again.
This is our world and we live in it. It does translate okay, decently to the Board level.
Translate marketing metrics to the financial ones that investors care about
But if you think about what folks care about at the highest levels of a company's strategic imperatives — that could be a Board of Directors, could be investors, could be C-level folks — they're really focused on things like market size, meaning: How big is our addressable market? Who could we potentially reach? What if we run out of those people — can we keep growing? Are more of them coming into the fold, or are people exiting this market and going somewhere else?
They care about cost of customer acquisition. How much does it cost us to get one new customer?
They care about customer revenue, the revenue that we actually get from those customers that we're bringing in, whether that's going up, and overall growth rate. Are we getting more customers over time? Is that rate of growth expanding, meaning acceleration?
They care about customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is something that pretty much every metric we calculate as marketers should tie back to that, especially when we're having conversations with these kinds of people. Essentially it is when a new customer comes in and they make any kind of purchase from us, they spend any type of dollars with us — a product, a service, a subscription, whatever it is — how much do we get over their customer lifetime? Meaning if it's an e-commerce play, it could be the case that they come and they buy five things from us over the course of two years on average, and that dollar total is $360, and 40% of that is gross margin for us. Essentially, the rest is cost of goods. Okay, that's customer lifetime value.
Or if you have a subscription business, like Moz is a subscription business, if you subscribe to our tools, we'll charge you $99 a month or $149 a month. I think on average our customer lifetime value is essentially $120 times the average customer lifetime span, which is somewhere around 11 months all in. So it's that number multiplied out. So $1200 or $1300, somewhere around there, that's customer lifetime value.
That doesn't actually count recidivism, people who quit and then come back again. We're trying to get to that metric, and we need it, because you want to be able to speak to true customer lifetime value. This is sort of the underpinning of all the rest of this.
But other things these folks are going to care about, comparison of cohorts. So it's not the case that all customers are exactly the same. You know this as a marketer, because you know that it costs you a different amount of money to acquire folks through one channel, and they perform differently than folks who are acquired through a different channel. You know that different cohorts of personas, for example, people let's say who work in an agency versus who work in-house, maybe those are two different kinds of people that you serve in a B2B model. Or you know that folks who are higher income versus lower income spend different amounts at your e-commerce shop, that type of stuff. That comparison is very interesting to these folks as well.
Another comparison that matters is a competitive comparison. How big are we, how big are they? How fast are they growing, how fast are we growing? What's their customer lifetime value, what's ours? What's their retention and recidivism rate, what's ours? Those things, massively interesting to this group as well.
Then there's a bunch of other stuff that they care about, like cost of goods and teams and market dynamics, etc. Marketers generally don't touch that stuff and don't usually need to worry about it.
But the solution to our problem here is to speak this language.
So let's go back to our initial story.
Instead of saying, "Here's traffic growth from all these different channels, and here's how we're investing in search, versus social, versus paid ads, versus trade shows," all this kind of stuff, what we want to say is something like, "Hey, here's the traffic from SEO, and here's the traffic from social, and as those have been growing, our cost to acquire a new customer has been falling, because those channels are organic, and that means we don't pay each time we get a new customer from them. We only pay for the upfront investment in sweat equity, creativity, engineering needs, web engineering needs, and whatever we're doing. But then it keeps paying dividends, and because of that you can see this CAC falling as our search traffic has risen."
Now you have the attention of these folks. Now you've engaged them in a way that they care about, because they say, "Aha, more organic search, lower cost to acquire a customer," — which is great because CLTV to CAC ratio, the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, this ratio right here, is something that every investor, every Board of Directors member, every CXO cares deeply about. It's the underpinnings of the company. That's what makes a profitable company work and what gives it the ability to grow. When you speak their language, you get this type of response.
So what I'm going to urge you to do as a marketer is to take any metric, any data point, any story you're trying to tell around return on investment, around a project you have, and turn it into something that makes sense to the group of people that you're talking to, especially if that's strategic-level. You want to tie those to tangible improvements or to issues. It could be problems. It may not be just positive things. It could be negative things too, in the areas your CXO or Board or investor cares about.
So let's imagine — and this is a conversation that many, many folks have — they say to me, "Rand, we want to hire an SEO consultant, or we want to bring an SEO in-house full-time, but we've been having trouble getting buy-off from our CEO or our CMO or our Board."
Well, let's change the conversation. Instead of, "We need to hire an SEO consultant because SEO is really important, search engines send a lot of traffic, and search traffic is something we're not competing in well right now," to, "CAC is high. CAC is too high. Our cost to acquire a new customer right now is too high, and our CLTV is too low for customers that we buy via paid search. So we're spending a lot of money on paid ads right now, and the customers we get via that have this high customer acquisition cost, because we have to spend money to get them, and the CLTV isn't as high because customers who come through paid, on average, usually tend to underperform compared to those who come through organic. It's just a fact of who clicks on ads versus who clicks on organic results. But, if we ranked organically for more of these keywords, and we could get more SEO traffic compared to our PPC traffic, we could stop (a) losing those searches to our competitors, who are outranking us now, and (b) we would bump up the CLTV and we'd be lowering cost of customer acquisition."
Boom. You have changed the conversation to something that this group of folks really gets, and you've made it much more likely that they are going to say yes to your proposal.
Same thing here. Let's say you say, "Hey, we're going to do something crazy. We want to actually spend more on trade shows, on events, on speaking, on going places physically in-person. It's expensive. We don't reach as many people as we do over web channels or over traditional ad channels, but we've been getting good customers via events."
That's a real tough sell unless you do this. "Dear Board, here's a comparison of customers acquired via our five major marketing channels. Here's SEO, here's PPC, here's our Facebook ads, here's organic social, and this is events. You can see cost to acquire, you can see lifetime value, you can see the ratio, and you can see the numbers of folks that we've gotten via each of those channels and the revenue they bring in."
Awesome. Now, repeat buyers and referrals are so much stronger from events, from this group over here, that even though it costs much more, the math works out that it is the best investment we can make over the next couple of quarters. We want to bring this up by two or threefold, and if we keep seeing continued investment or continued metrics in the same way we have the last few months, we're going to have the highest positive ROI from that investment versus any of these other channels.
Awesome. Change the conversation, made it something these folks understand. Speak their language, and you get the buy-in you want.
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and thoughts, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/299DW11
via IFTTT
How to Tie Marketing Metrics to the Data that Boards, CxOs, and Investors Really Care About - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
SEOs and executives speak different languages. It's a simple fact, but it's one that often acts as a blocker for getting your ideas and investments approved. A simple change in how you communicate your marketing goals, triumphs, and challenges could be what's standing between you and getting the C-suite buy-in that's integral to your success. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps you translate your marketing jargon into financial metrics and data that the folks in charge will actually care about.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about tying marketing metrics that marketers use to the things that CEOs, CXOs, whatever the C-level titles that you've got are, investors, board members, to the metrics and data that they care about.
This is a problem that I've talked about with many marketers over the last few weeks, especially at some conferences and events where folks say, "Hey, we've got our metrics dialed in. We know what we're doing. But when we present it to the Board, or when we present it to our CMO, or our CEO, when we show it to our investors, not only do they not get it, it's like we're not speaking the same language, and therefore we're not able to have a conversation productively about where investment should and shouldn't be made, and they're not able to give input into whether they think our idea is a good one, or whether they think there's a good return on investment there." This can be tough.
Start with the metrics that marketers care about
So what happens is you're a marketer, you're presenting here to your Board of Directors or to your executive team, and you say, "Hey look, we've got traffic growing in every category. SEO is up. Social is up. We've grown our link profile, which is going to help us with search, all these great things." Fantastic, but the Board is sort of sitting there like, "Well, I don't really know how to contribute, and how does that tie in to higher lifetime value of customers, because that's the thing that I know and the thing that I care about, and I'm not sure this marketer person is really investing in the right kind of ways for the organization."
That sucks. As a marketer, that totally sucks, because it means that you are not communicating your message, and that means you're not going to get, you're unlikely to get buy-in from all these people that you really care about and need their permission and their acceptance in order to make the investments you need.
The thing is, marketers are very focused on the funnel.
We care about metrics that show top-of-funnel growth. We care about which channels send that top-of-funnel traffic. We care about how people are moving through the funnel. We want to see conversions and conversion rate, which is why we work so much on conversion rate optimization, and we care about marketing metrics that predict better retention or greater recidivism, meaning people are buying again or coming back and becoming customers again.
This is our world and we live in it. It does translate okay, decently to the Board level.
Translate marketing metrics to the financial ones that investors care about
But if you think about what folks care about at the highest levels of a company's strategic imperatives — that could be a Board of Directors, could be investors, could be C-level folks — they're really focused on things like market size, meaning: How big is our addressable market? Who could we potentially reach? What if we run out of those people — can we keep growing? Are more of them coming into the fold, or are people exiting this market and going somewhere else?
They care about cost of customer acquisition. How much does it cost us to get one new customer?
They care about customer revenue, the revenue that we actually get from those customers that we're bringing in, whether that's going up, and overall growth rate. Are we getting more customers over time? Is that rate of growth expanding, meaning acceleration?
They care about customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is something that pretty much every metric we calculate as marketers should tie back to that, especially when we're having conversations with these kinds of people. Essentially it is when a new customer comes in and they make any kind of purchase from us, they spend any type of dollars with us — a product, a service, a subscription, whatever it is — how much do we get over their customer lifetime? Meaning if it's an e-commerce play, it could be the case that they come and they buy five things from us over the course of two years on average, and that dollar total is $360, and 40% of that is gross margin for us. Essentially, the rest is cost of goods. Okay, that's customer lifetime value.
Or if you have a subscription business, like Moz is a subscription business, if you subscribe to our tools, we'll charge you $99 a month or $149 a month. I think on average our customer lifetime value is essentially $120 times the average customer lifetime span, which is somewhere around 11 months all in. So it's that number multiplied out. So $1200 or $1300, somewhere around there, that's customer lifetime value.
That doesn't actually count recidivism, people who quit and then come back again. We're trying to get to that metric, and we need it, because you want to be able to speak to true customer lifetime value. This is sort of the underpinning of all the rest of this.
But other things these folks are going to care about, comparison of cohorts. So it's not the case that all customers are exactly the same. You know this as a marketer, because you know that it costs you a different amount of money to acquire folks through one channel, and they perform differently than folks who are acquired through a different channel. You know that different cohorts of personas, for example, people let's say who work in an agency versus who work in-house, maybe those are two different kinds of people that you serve in a B2B model. Or you know that folks who are higher income versus lower income spend different amounts at your e-commerce shop, that type of stuff. That comparison is very interesting to these folks as well.
Another comparison that matters is a competitive comparison. How big are we, how big are they? How fast are they growing, how fast are we growing? What's their customer lifetime value, what's ours? What's their retention and recidivism rate, what's ours? Those things, massively interesting to this group as well.
Then there's a bunch of other stuff that they care about, like cost of goods and teams and market dynamics, etc. Marketers generally don't touch that stuff and don't usually need to worry about it.
But the solution to our problem here is to speak this language.
So let's go back to our initial story.
Instead of saying, "Here's traffic growth from all these different channels, and here's how we're investing in search, versus social, versus paid ads, versus trade shows," all this kind of stuff, what we want to say is something like, "Hey, here's the traffic from SEO, and here's the traffic from social, and as those have been growing, our cost to acquire a new customer has been falling, because those channels are organic, and that means we don't pay each time we get a new customer from them. We only pay for the upfront investment in sweat equity, creativity, engineering needs, web engineering needs, and whatever we're doing. But then it keeps paying dividends, and because of that you can see this CAC falling as our search traffic has risen."
Now you have the attention of these folks. Now you've engaged them in a way that they care about, because they say, "Aha, more organic search, lower cost to acquire a customer," — which is great because CLTV to CAC ratio, the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, this ratio right here, is something that every investor, every Board of Directors member, every CXO cares deeply about. It's the underpinnings of the company. That's what makes a profitable company work and what gives it the ability to grow. When you speak their language, you get this type of response.
So what I'm going to urge you to do as a marketer is to take any metric, any data point, any story you're trying to tell around return on investment, around a project you have, and turn it into something that makes sense to the group of people that you're talking to, especially if that's strategic-level. You want to tie those to tangible improvements or to issues. It could be problems. It may not be just positive things. It could be negative things too, in the areas your CXO or Board or investor cares about.
So let's imagine — and this is a conversation that many, many folks have — they say to me, "Rand, we want to hire an SEO consultant, or we want to bring an SEO in-house full-time, but we've been having trouble getting buy-off from our CEO or our CMO or our Board."
Well, let's change the conversation. Instead of, "We need to hire an SEO consultant because SEO is really important, search engines send a lot of traffic, and search traffic is something we're not competing in well right now," to, "CAC is high. CAC is too high. Our cost to acquire a new customer right now is too high, and our CLTV is too low for customers that we buy via paid search. So we're spending a lot of money on paid ads right now, and the customers we get via that have this high customer acquisition cost, because we have to spend money to get them, and the CLTV isn't as high because customers who come through paid, on average, usually tend to underperform compared to those who come through organic. It's just a fact of who clicks on ads versus who clicks on organic results. But, if we ranked organically for more of these keywords, and we could get more SEO traffic compared to our PPC traffic, we could stop (a) losing those searches to our competitors, who are outranking us now, and (b) we would bump up the CLTV and we'd be lowering cost of customer acquisition."
Boom. You have changed the conversation to something that this group of folks really gets, and you've made it much more likely that they are going to say yes to your proposal.
Same thing here. Let's say you say, "Hey, we're going to do something crazy. We want to actually spend more on trade shows, on events, on speaking, on going places physically in-person. It's expensive. We don't reach as many people as we do over web channels or over traditional ad channels, but we've been getting good customers via events."
That's a real tough sell unless you do this. "Dear Board, here's a comparison of customers acquired via our five major marketing channels. Here's SEO, here's PPC, here's our Facebook ads, here's organic social, and this is events. You can see cost to acquire, you can see lifetime value, you can see the ratio, and you can see the numbers of folks that we've gotten via each of those channels and the revenue they bring in."
Awesome. Now, repeat buyers and referrals are so much stronger from events, from this group over here, that even though it costs much more, the math works out that it is the best investment we can make over the next couple of quarters. We want to bring this up by two or threefold, and if we keep seeing continued investment or continued metrics in the same way we have the last few months, we're going to have the highest positive ROI from that investment versus any of these other channels.
Awesome. Change the conversation, made it something these folks understand. Speak their language, and you get the buy-in you want.
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and thoughts, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/299DW11
via IFTTT
The 15 B2B copywriters I don’t want to be
Every time I walk past Tim (our Head of Operations)’s desk, he gives me a look that says, “We need more copywriters, Doug”. He doesn’t say it (well, sometimes he says it) but I know he’s thinking it.
And I’m thinking it, too.
We need more goddamn copywriters and we need them now.
But, while it’s really, really hard to find great account people and designers and developers and data analysts and marketing automationists (we’re hiring all of these) it’s ridiculously hard to find great B2B copywriters.
Why so hard? Because they don’t grow on trees. If they did grow on trees, we would have planted an orchard by now.
Yes, there are lots of copywriters out there. You can tell because there’s so much content. But most of that content is not very good and that’s either because the writers aren’t very good, or they’re not being asked to write great content, or both.
So we end up looking at maybe a hundred writing portfolios before we ask one writer to come in for a cuppa. And we might ask a handful in for a cuppa before we offer one a job. Do the math: a handful times a hundred is, like, a shitload. So our copywriter hiring ratio is a shitload-to-one.
Why so picky?
Because we think writing is the very heart of the content artichoke. And we know that a well-written piece will out-perform an averagely-written piece by 16 to1600 times. If you’re in the ROI biz (who isn’t?), that’s the biggest-ass of big-ass returns.
The weird thing is that I’m a crap writer too. We all are. Every writer at Velocity is capable of being exactly the kind of writer we reject. We all fall back on bad habits. We all cut corners under pressure. And we do it with alarming frequency.
The key is to be alert to the many different kinds of hack writers within us and to take away their keyboards before they can do any serious damage. To catch our own inner yadda-yadda merchants and prevent their effluent from reaching innocent readers.
Who are these inner hacks? I’ve discovered 15 distinct types hiding under my desk and inside my shirt:
The wordsmith
Writing isn’t about making pretty sentences. Yes, great writers spend a lot of time crafting every line, but a fine sentence is just the veneer on the credenza.
Under the veneer is a lot of carpentry, with dovetail joints and, like, nails and shit. Harry captured this in his excellent post called “B2B writing: it ain’t just writing”.
If you build the credenza well, applying the veneer is the easy part. It’s rewarding as hell but it’s not the whole job.
The clever wordsmith
I do hate this guy — mainly because he hijacks my work so often. The clever wordsmith is the writer who is so proud of his newborn pun or metaphor that he fails to see how distracting it is from the story he’s being paid to tell.
I love a good pun and have beaten some sweet metaphors to death (see credenza, above). But clever ain’t copywriting. It’s showing off. As a card-carrying show-off, I exhaust myself trying to suppress my inner diva-demon.
The press release writer
Press releases aren’t writing. They’re typing.
Almost anyone can fill in the blanks of this highly constrained corporate template (“We’re thrilled to welcome Atilla to our growing Hun team.”) but no one will ever read a press release even though lots of places publish them.
So, writers, if you’re briefed to write a press release (or any other over-templatised format), ask about the goal of the exercise and recommend one of the dozen-or-so better ways to achieve it.
The clunky
A good copywriter needs at least one ear. And that ear should be able to notice if a sentence curls up its own ass and dies. Or stumbles off to nowhere, groping for support that is never going to arrive. Or is so grammatically correct that it’s virtually unreadable.
I’ve written some shockingly clunky paragraphs. That’s part of the work. The key is to read your own stuff before you send it. If you’re at or above your minimum allocation of ears, you’ll catch the things that go ‘clunk’.
But if you don’t re-read your own stuff as a new reader would… you won’t.
The shallow
B2B copywriting isn’t pituitary gland surgery – but sometimes it’s about pituitary gland surgery. That means the writer is going to have to learn things. Technical things.
Good copywriters love learning things. Good B2B copywriters love learning technical things. Things they can never share at dinner parties (but far too often do).
In the mean streets of B2B, shallow doesn’t cut it. If I’m about to write something that I haven’t learned enough about, I can feel it in my gut. I’m faking it. And I will be caught out. It’s time to pause to learn more about my subject.
The stiff
Bad writers sit up straight when they write. This is so they can bear the weight of their Writing Hat.
Good writers recline and slouch and cross their legs and make those snow angels. Because they don’t own a Writing Hat. They just speak, using a keyboard.
Some of my early English teachers (and one or two of my early bosses) were convinced that writing had to be stiff and formal to be effective. An awful lot of marketers still feel that way. Which sucks.
The lazy
If Shallow is a species, then Lazy is the genus (or maybe the kingdom, given its prevalence).
Lazy writers can’t be bothered to pick up the phone and talk to a member of the target audience. Or to spend a few hours doing desk research so that they’re not talking utter shite. Or to Google ‘genus’ so they don’t use it when they meant to use ‘kingdom’. (Sue me).
Copywriting may not be coal mining but it is a form of work. The better writers recognise this. Of course, we all deserve the occasional lazy day. Just don’t make it the day before the deadline.
The precious
Every once in a while a lost poet wanders into an agency that left the door open and tries to make a living there.
When a colleague or client tries to point out that “ere” is an archaic way of saying “before” or that “e’er” is an odd way to say “ever” and that neither are viable options for a blog post about oscilloscopes, they get the stink-eye.
Alas, ere long, the poet will be compelled to wander on. And those left behind will make the wank gesture whene’er their name is spoken.
(I house-trained my inner poet early in my career but sometimes he pops up with a too-interesting metaphor and looks all hurt when The Better Me deletes it.)
The bolshy
Good copywriters defend their choices, sometimes stubbornly.
Bad copywriters fight for every word even when they’re wrong.
It always amazes me how precisely inverse the relationship can be between prickliness and talent. (Note to self, to be read in these hot-headed moments: get over yourself.)
The voice-less
Writing that simplifies and clarifies a complex, technical subject is hard to achieve and should be applauded.
But writing that does that with a voice – a distinctive sound, energy and attitude – is rare. And writing that creates and maintains momentum – so that the reader can stop but would really prefer not to – is even rarer.
We don’t want to see voice crammed in every noun-based nook and copy cranny. It has to be right for the piece and natural for the context. But a good copywriter can summon a strong, compelling voice when needed.
When my inner drone-writer takes over it’s always because I don’t actually find the subject I’m writing about very interesting. That’s my fault not the subject’s. I need to find the flicker of interest and fan that sucker or my writing will be dull, dull, dull.
The one-voice pony
The voice needed for a rant against the forces of evil is not the voice needed for a data sheet. Some writers only have one voice. That’s better than no voice, but only marginally.
I have been guilty of over-voicing my copy. It tends to be when I’m in show-off mode. Fun but distracting as hell. Edit.
The blatherer
Good copywriters are storytellers (Duncan wrote a post about this) and good stories are always well-structured (Harry wrote another about that).
Some writers have a strong voice and a clear head — but they can’t structure a story or build an argument. So they just start writing and meander around the subject for a while and then write the word ‘Conclusion’ and stop.
A lot of B2B copywriting is long form (we’ve written pieces that were over 120 pages). You get in serious trouble by page twelve if your structure is weak. Been there. Don’t want to go back.
The formulaic
When you’ve written your fiftieth iteration of any kind of piece, it’s tempting to paint by numbers. Like making every case study go “The Company/ The Challenge/The Solution/The Result”.
But formulas are as boring to read as they are to write. (Irene did a great post on why so many B2B case studies suck and this is one of the reasons.)
When I find myself writing to a formula, it helps to examine that formula, tease out its hidden conventions, and break a few. Way more fun.
The ink-head
A lot of writers are essentially print writers. They can write linear stories with beginnings, middles and ends but they can’t adapt their writing to the new generation of weird and wonderful digital formats. Formats that encourage the reader to branch and browse and swipe and scroll
As B2B marketing becomes almost entirely digital, copywriters need to craft copy for all kinds of experiences, not just the ‘Once-upon-a-time’ kind. (Adam showcases one of these in a post about an online quiz tool).
This continues to be the hardest battle for me. I am essentially an ink-head. But I love learning new tricks, so I’m in the right job.
The search slut
I hate the whole idea of an ‘SEO copywriter’ almost as much as I hate the idea that Donald Trump could be a viable candidate for any party on any planet in any universe.
SEO copywriters are writers who understand search spiders better than they understand the people they’re writing to. And it shows.
About eight years ago, when SEO got hot, we had to make a choice: get good at ‘writing for search engines’ so we could out-smart Sergey Brin; or stick to writing for humans and wager than Sergey would get better and better at delivering relevance and quality in his SERPS. We chose the latter, and we’re pretty sure we won.
But the inner search-slut is very hard to suppress. It’s so tempting to insert that keyphrase into that intro, just this once…
Fighting the hack writer inside of you
Every copywriter makes all of the above mistakes, all the time.
We all fall in love with our clever wordsmithing.
We all go through clunky, lazy, shallow, stiff, voiceless or over-voiced spells. In any given week.
And we can all be bolshy and precious when we’re caught out by anyone other than our own inner reader.
The difference is this: really good B2B copywriters recognise these potholes, pitfalls and buzz kills – and work hard to fix them. That’s the job.
None of us have even come close to the mythical end of the learning curve. And the writers who say they have are the ones to watch out for.
—————–
[Hey really good copywriter: Get in touch. This whole rant was just a glorified recruitment ad in thin disguise.]
——————
Hey everybody else: Get Ann Handley’s book Everybody Writes and follow her advice as if she were sitting right next to you, watching you type and poking you in the ribs every time you started a sentence with, “In these competitive times.”
The post The 15 B2B copywriters I don’t want to be appeared first on Velocity Partners.
from Velocity Partners http://ift.tt/299QTvr
via IFTTT
How to Tie Marketing Metrics to the Data that Boards, CxOs, and Investors Really Care About - Whiteboard Friday
Posted by randfish
SEOs and executives speak different languages. It's a simple fact, but it's one that often acts as a blocker for getting your ideas and investments approved. A simple change in how you communicate your marketing goals, triumphs, and challenges could be what's standing between you and getting the C-suite buy-in that's integral to your success. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand helps you translate your marketing jargon into financial metrics and data that the folks in charge will actually care about.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about tying marketing metrics that marketers use to the things that CEOs, CXOs, whatever the C-level titles that you've got are, investors, board members, to the metrics and data that they care about.
This is a problem that I've talked about with many marketers over the last few weeks, especially at some conferences and events where folks say, "Hey, we've got our metrics dialed in. We know what we're doing. But when we present it to the Board, or when we present it to our CMO, or our CEO, when we show it to our investors, not only do they not get it, it's like we're not speaking the same language, and therefore we're not able to have a conversation productively about where investment should and shouldn't be made, and they're not able to give input into whether they think our idea is a good one, or whether they think there's a good return on investment there." This can be tough.
Start with the metrics that marketers care about
So what happens is you're a marketer, you're presenting here to your Board of Directors or to your executive team, and you say, "Hey look, we've got traffic growing in every category. SEO is up. Social is up. We've grown our link profile, which is going to help us with search, all these great things." Fantastic, but the Board is sort of sitting there like, "Well, I don't really know how to contribute, and how does that tie in to higher lifetime value of customers, because that's the thing that I know and the thing that I care about, and I'm not sure this marketer person is really investing in the right kind of ways for the organization."
That sucks. As a marketer, that totally sucks, because it means that you are not communicating your message, and that means you're not going to get, you're unlikely to get buy-in from all these people that you really care about and need their permission and their acceptance in order to make the investments you need.
The thing is, marketers are very focused on the funnel.
We care about metrics that show top-of-funnel growth. We care about which channels send that top-of-funnel traffic. We care about how people are moving through the funnel. We want to see conversions and conversion rate, which is why we work so much on conversion rate optimization, and we care about marketing metrics that predict better retention or greater recidivism, meaning people are buying again or coming back and becoming customers again.
This is our world and we live in it. It does translate okay, decently to the Board level.
Translate marketing metrics to the financial ones that investors care about
But if you think about what folks care about at the highest levels of a company's strategic imperatives — that could be a Board of Directors, could be investors, could be C-level folks — they're really focused on things like market size, meaning: How big is our addressable market? Who could we potentially reach? What if we run out of those people — can we keep growing? Are more of them coming into the fold, or are people exiting this market and going somewhere else?
They care about cost of customer acquisition. How much does it cost us to get one new customer?
They care about customer revenue, the revenue that we actually get from those customers that we're bringing in, whether that's going up, and overall growth rate. Are we getting more customers over time? Is that rate of growth expanding, meaning acceleration?
They care about customer lifetime value. Customer lifetime value is something that pretty much every metric we calculate as marketers should tie back to that, especially when we're having conversations with these kinds of people. Essentially it is when a new customer comes in and they make any kind of purchase from us, they spend any type of dollars with us — a product, a service, a subscription, whatever it is — how much do we get over their customer lifetime? Meaning if it's an e-commerce play, it could be the case that they come and they buy five things from us over the course of two years on average, and that dollar total is $360, and 40% of that is gross margin for us. Essentially, the rest is cost of goods. Okay, that's customer lifetime value.
Or if you have a subscription business, like Moz is a subscription business, if you subscribe to our tools, we'll charge you $99 a month or $149 a month. I think on average our customer lifetime value is essentially $120 times the average customer lifetime span, which is somewhere around 11 months all in. So it's that number multiplied out. So $1200 or $1300, somewhere around there, that's customer lifetime value.
That doesn't actually count recidivism, people who quit and then come back again. We're trying to get to that metric, and we need it, because you want to be able to speak to true customer lifetime value. This is sort of the underpinning of all the rest of this.
But other things these folks are going to care about, comparison of cohorts. So it's not the case that all customers are exactly the same. You know this as a marketer, because you know that it costs you a different amount of money to acquire folks through one channel, and they perform differently than folks who are acquired through a different channel. You know that different cohorts of personas, for example, people let's say who work in an agency versus who work in-house, maybe those are two different kinds of people that you serve in a B2B model. Or you know that folks who are higher income versus lower income spend different amounts at your e-commerce shop, that type of stuff. That comparison is very interesting to these folks as well.
Another comparison that matters is a competitive comparison. How big are we, how big are they? How fast are they growing, how fast are we growing? What's their customer lifetime value, what's ours? What's their retention and recidivism rate, what's ours? Those things, massively interesting to this group as well.
Then there's a bunch of other stuff that they care about, like cost of goods and teams and market dynamics, etc. Marketers generally don't touch that stuff and don't usually need to worry about it.
But the solution to our problem here is to speak this language.
So let's go back to our initial story.
Instead of saying, "Here's traffic growth from all these different channels, and here's how we're investing in search, versus social, versus paid ads, versus trade shows," all this kind of stuff, what we want to say is something like, "Hey, here's the traffic from SEO, and here's the traffic from social, and as those have been growing, our cost to acquire a new customer has been falling, because those channels are organic, and that means we don't pay each time we get a new customer from them. We only pay for the upfront investment in sweat equity, creativity, engineering needs, web engineering needs, and whatever we're doing. But then it keeps paying dividends, and because of that you can see this CAC falling as our search traffic has risen."
Now you have the attention of these folks. Now you've engaged them in a way that they care about, because they say, "Aha, more organic search, lower cost to acquire a customer," — which is great because CLTV to CAC ratio, the ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, this ratio right here, is something that every investor, every Board of Directors member, every CXO cares deeply about. It's the underpinnings of the company. That's what makes a profitable company work and what gives it the ability to grow. When you speak their language, you get this type of response.
So what I'm going to urge you to do as a marketer is to take any metric, any data point, any story you're trying to tell around return on investment, around a project you have, and turn it into something that makes sense to the group of people that you're talking to, especially if that's strategic-level. You want to tie those to tangible improvements or to issues. It could be problems. It may not be just positive things. It could be negative things too, in the areas your CXO or Board or investor cares about.
So let's imagine — and this is a conversation that many, many folks have — they say to me, "Rand, we want to hire an SEO consultant, or we want to bring an SEO in-house full-time, but we've been having trouble getting buy-off from our CEO or our CMO or our Board."
Well, let's change the conversation. Instead of, "We need to hire an SEO consultant because SEO is really important, search engines send a lot of traffic, and search traffic is something we're not competing in well right now," to, "CAC is high. CAC is too high. Our cost to acquire a new customer right now is too high, and our CLTV is too low for customers that we buy via paid search. So we're spending a lot of money on paid ads right now, and the customers we get via that have this high customer acquisition cost, because we have to spend money to get them, and the CLTV isn't as high because customers who come through paid, on average, usually tend to underperform compared to those who come through organic. It's just a fact of who clicks on ads versus who clicks on organic results. But, if we ranked organically for more of these keywords, and we could get more SEO traffic compared to our PPC traffic, we could stop (a) losing those searches to our competitors, who are outranking us now, and (b) we would bump up the CLTV and we'd be lowering cost of customer acquisition."
Boom. You have changed the conversation to something that this group of folks really gets, and you've made it much more likely that they are going to say yes to your proposal.
Same thing here. Let's say you say, "Hey, we're going to do something crazy. We want to actually spend more on trade shows, on events, on speaking, on going places physically in-person. It's expensive. We don't reach as many people as we do over web channels or over traditional ad channels, but we've been getting good customers via events."
That's a real tough sell unless you do this. "Dear Board, here's a comparison of customers acquired via our five major marketing channels. Here's SEO, here's PPC, here's our Facebook ads, here's organic social, and this is events. You can see cost to acquire, you can see lifetime value, you can see the ratio, and you can see the numbers of folks that we've gotten via each of those channels and the revenue they bring in."
Awesome. Now, repeat buyers and referrals are so much stronger from events, from this group over here, that even though it costs much more, the math works out that it is the best investment we can make over the next couple of quarters. We want to bring this up by two or threefold, and if we keep seeing continued investment or continued metrics in the same way we have the last few months, we're going to have the highest positive ROI from that investment versus any of these other channels.
Awesome. Change the conversation, made it something these folks understand. Speak their language, and you get the buy-in you want.
All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and thoughts, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Video transcription by Speechpad.com
Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!
from Moz Blog http://ift.tt/299DW11
via IFTTT
Thursday, June 30, 2016
Facebook’s new algorithm sucks — here’s how to beat it and see whatever you want
News of Facebook’s algorithmic shift to favor friends and family over publishers sent a bit of panic through the online community earlier this week, and rightfully so. The same people that liked or followed your Facebook account are now being told that they should care more about the content their friends and family produce rather than the sites they signed on to follow. For some, this is going to be great news. For others, the decision being made for them — even when they might prefer to see content from publishers they’ve subscribed to — has them up in arms over…
This story continues at The Next Web
from Social Media – The Next Web http://ift.tt/298kly9
via IFTTT