John Hodge — August 11, 2017 — August 11, 2017
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I help a lot of small business owners set up their websites with lead intelligence and in most cases, this is the first time they’re able to see actual details of their visitors.
Up until this point, they were only using Google Analytics to get rough trends of what was happening on their website. So it’s great that they have a way of capturing information. Now they’re ready to take their SMB marketing efforts to the next level. There are exciting times ahead! Gathering information is the beginning of a new chapter in their digital marketing. Indeed, this is the point in time that separates the era of “information guessing” with “information gathering”. Hooray.
Gathering information is the beginning of a new chapter in their digital marketing. Indeed, this is the point in time that separates the era of “information guessing” with “information gathering”. Hooray.
Now, let’s not get carried away. This new high-performance strategy has a few disclaimers attached to it. Primarily in outreach methods and specifically in email and social media.
Let’s talk more about these two areas of digital marketing, where I see my small business clients dropping the ball, and how they can improve their strategy.
Caring Too Much About Vanity in Social Media
Everyone wants followers. I get it. But why is having followers such a good thing? Well, for starters it amplifies your posts. Consequently, the more people who see your posts the more potential traffic you can generate from them. Then, the more traffic you drive to your website the more conversions you’ll get.
Okay, that’s all very logical, but I have one problem with that logic. Post amplification doesn’t just rely on follower count. In fact, using follower count to get amplified only guarantees a conversation with a following who already knows who we are.
You could say that when we have more followers we’re more likely to get our posts shared. And when that happens our exposures magnifies substantially. That can be true, but not by design. All because there are more followers doesn’t mean the followers are going to share anything. Especially if their new followers who were purchased. Purchased followers might be pretty inactive or even fake profiles.
Quite frankly, follower count is a worthless vanity metric that’s completely meaningless. Remember when Justin Bieber lost 3.5 million followers on Instagram when fake accounts were removed? Yeah, don’t be that guy. Engage with those who are engaging with you, not mindless fake accounts whose sole purpose is to boost the ego of an insecure executive.
TL;DR stop measuring follower count, it’s a substance-less vanity metric that doesn’t mean jack.
Here’s What to Do Instead
Make sure you have a clean following comprised of real accounts. You can use a tool like SocialRank to report on your followers. I use it to pick apart my Twitter following.
I can look at it to see how often my followers are active, how many are verified, and my total reach. Even though my following is light (I only have about 375 followers) my total reach is pretty healthy at about 17.2M. I have a good follower base as 6.5% of them are verified, all but 2.5% of my followers have tweeted ever, and the overwhelming majority (70.1%) have tweeted recently.
In addition to making sure your following is clean you should engage with influencers in your space. This will increase your reach much, much more than just relying on your following. Here’s an example of a Tweet from a few weeks ago that got a little more than 2,000 impressions and 55 total engagements. It even directed people to my profile and resulted in a few views of it.
The key takeaway here is that engaging with influential accounts in my field gives me amplification that extends well beyond my follower count. Additionally, this engagement increases my Klout score, drives profile views, and supplies me with good positioning and exposure. All without freaking out over how to increase more followers. Phew.
Obsessing over follower count shows a lack of understanding in social KPIs.
Cutting Corners in Email Marketing
Now that we have lead intelligence gathering tools we should be using them!
This means organically building lists with form submissions. In other words, no buying lists. Don’t buy lists, just don’t do it. It’s a cheap trick that ensures a dirty database. Also, it’s hard (or impossible) to segment this list while staying true to the personas you’ve developed as this data point is unknown.
Email sends to these lists usually result in high bounce and SPAM rates. These indicate shotty list gathering practices because if we’re using our lead generation tools people should be supplying their email to us, and how likely is it that a significant amount of people are going to miswrite their email?
Long story short, buying lists is one of the best ways to ruin your email reputation and can result in your email account getting shut down.
Here’s What to Do Instead
Always use forms to gather emails! Don’t use any other method.
Now, if you have a database of emails that you did gather organically at one time but it’s been a while since you’ve emailed them, then you can use a tool to verify the emails in this list. I had a client in this situation recently and they used NeverBounce to clean their email list.
This approach seemed to work pretty well. Additionally, it helped them avoid sending an email to the whole list just to capture and remove emails that bounced or marked as SPAM.
Embrace a double opt-in process.
Double opt-in will make open and click rates sky rocket while SPAM and bounce rates fall off almost completely.
Consider adding a checkbox to the form giving consent for future email communication.
I especially recommend this if you’ve done everything right and you’re still seeing SPAM reports come through. You can start this with the checkbox checked by default. This should help keep database growth from falling off completely. Then, if you’re still having SPAM issues, unchecked by default for a more robust opt-in process. From there if you’re still running into SPAM complaints you’ll have more than enough of a process to justify your lead generation tactics if you’re account is reviewed.
From there if you’re still running into SPAM complaints you’ll have more than enough of a process to justify your lead generation tactics if you’re account is reviewed.
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