I tried a few online services before settling with one suggested by my sister in Texas – Elevation, based in North Carolina. Pastor Steven Furtick just connected with me, as he did many others. Their church actually grew during the shut down, and one sermon in particular caught national attention.

Like many people, I struggle with seeing myself and my true identity as I see my seemingly more successful, happier friends posting online. But I can’t put the blame on them – I am just as prone to post only positives on my social media channels.

And not just to make myself look better – sometimes you don’t speak your mind for professional reasons, or you share positives to maintain good relationships, or because of contract stipulations, or any number of reasons. I personally try, as much as I can, to not complain, and only post positive, uplifting things, in the hopes that it helps others.

As business owners, or when we represent a business online, we can be just as prone to curating only positive content. Only good news, only positive vibes, nothing that can make us look bad or diminish our apparent value.

Yet…

It’s a Trap!

I can point to hundreds of articles online that vouch for the necessity of being as authentic and genuine as possible online. And they’re not talking about people, but about businesses. As far back as 2013, credible marketing and business analysts have pointed out that authenticity is more important than ever. And I have to agree.

Now more than ever, your customers need to see that there are real people behind a business; that sometimes mistakes happen. That the best laid plans are sometimes not followed – and even if they are, often still go awry.

Sometimes, you have to be willing to admit that nobody’s perfect. That the cobbler’s children have no shoes. And as bad as that sounds – it actually helps build credibility. Disclosing these truths may be painful, but sometimes it’s exactly what is needed.

Lessons From the Trenches

One of my favorite examples is from the other industry I work in. Streaming giant Netflix reports their subscriber numbers, good or bad, every quarter. They could just report this information to their shareholders and it would inevitably leak anyways. But as much as Netflix guards certain information – like total viewers of any particular show or movie – they do share some stats freely with the media. Even if they are not in their favor. Most recently, they noted that growth was lower than they had projected.

Of course, the knowledgeable industry insiders did what they always do – proclaimed that the bubble had burst, that Disney+ or HBO Max were stealing viewers from Netflix, or that we had reached a market saturation point. I’m sure Netflix knew those headlines were coming. As I said, it’s not unexpected, cause every time numbers dip, that’s the anthem.

But can I tell you a secret? Netflix is okay with those headlines, and releasing the data that’s interpreted that way. Because even when their numbers are down, or under projections, they know they will bounce back. They have data that confirms it.

Just like the big money men in 1929 invested more when the stock market crashed, Netflix can point to their charts that show their numbers always increase – in the long term. For them, the streaming race is a marathon, not a sprint.

What’s more, Netflix is still controlling the story. By being transparent, even when the industry insiders try to knock them down a peg, they show confidence. They don’t pretend everything is perfect. Yes, numbers are down – but guess what, the company is still generating buzz.

That whole, P.T. Barnum ‘no bad publicity’ thing? It’s sometimes very true.

Blessings in Disguise

When you’re honest and embrace your failures as well as your successes, you are telling your story. Your authentic, real, and trustworthy story.

Every failure becomes part of the foundation, a stepping stone towards continued success. We all know the aphorism, “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” but we want everything to be perfect now. I know it sounds counterintuitive, so let me repeat it again. Being transparent about your failures builds credibility with your audience – your current and potential customers.

Because just like Netflix, we need to look at the long game. Minor setbacks are just that – minor. By ignoring missteps, or sweeping them under the rug, we betray some of the confidence our clients put in us.

Do your customers want to be the ones whose ball you dropped? Of course not. Nobody wants that. They prefer that your interactions with them – your products or services are as flawless as possible. Be open that you – like everyone – has fallen on your face a time or two. But, despite that, you got back up, and continued to work to deliver as promised. They won’t see the failure as much as they see the perseverance.

Perseverance has value. So does a track record. When you combine those with transparency and authenticity in your message – you’ve got an advantage over your competitors.

The Story Behind the Story

You may be wondering how I settled on the topic for this week’s blog. I’ve talked numerous times about drawing from your own experience when creating content. I just did a long series on content creation, leading to a push to an event that we at Grow the Dream were hosting on the first Saturday in June.

If you didn’t sign up, you might not have noticed – but many of our clients are already aware… That event, the Strategic Marketing Workshop for 2021, did not happen as planned. There’s no one reason, several factors, some within our control, some outside of it, collided, or coincided, and we had to postpone the event indefinitely.

I’m not happy to be telling you this. It wasn’t pleasant to inform the people who had signed up for the in-person event that we were forced to cancel. It was necessary. We’re shifting gears, recalculating, and looking at several options. And I feel comfortable telling you this, because our ideal clients are often in a similar position.

As entrepreneurs, we often have to adjust, reconsider, be very adaptable and agile in our approach to business. For some of us, that’s when we flourish. Heck, some small business owners repeatedly put themselves in troubling situations because that’s how they get the dopamine flowing. They love solving problems – even if they are of their own making.

We get it. And just like you, we aren’t stopping. We might be offering different services – maybe returning to our roots, maybe charting a new, less traveled path. We’ve done it before – so we know we can do it again. And just like our timeless marketing principles, we’ve thrived doing it in down times and good times.

The Road Goes Ever On

We hope you’ll take this journey with us. If you had signed up for the Strategic Marketing Workshop, we’ll keep you informed via email, in addition to what you see on this blog. But regardless of where you stand, we’re moving forward.

We’re going to keep serving our clients and finding new ones, just like we teach them to do. We will persevere. We will keep reaching for success. If you’d like to find out how you can be a part of that success, I hope you’ll reach out.

As I’m fond of saying every week, we built our business helping other small businesses succeed and expand. That continues to be our mantra and our commitment. Let’s Grow the Dream together!

Depending on who you talk to, the ending of Facebook Analytics is equivalent to the end of social media marketing as we know it – or about as important as Google+ going away. It’s probably somewhere in the middle, akin to the end of Adobe Flash. It was great while it lasted, but it ain’t as much fun anymore. Already some of the lesser-used features were stripped away.

Interestingly, the timing seems to imply that the dumping of Facebook Analytics is in the same vein as the Google algorithm change rolled out last week (with a second update coming in July). Both are predicated on Apple’s new iOS 14 uber-privacy settings.

If you’ve been using Facebook Analytics – and you really should have been, especially if you’re running paid ads on Facebook – you should take the time to download the data available. You have until the June 30^th termination date.

The Past is Prologue

Around the same time that Facebook purchased Instagram for $1-Billion and launched their IPO, they quietly began adding certain tools for better business use. Presumably, they hoped to offer business users similar – or even more complex data – than Google Analytics had been able to offer.

This worked – sort of. Unfortunately, it would eventually backfire. People started asking how exactly Facebook was gathering and could profit from, all that information. The short answer was that nobody read the Facebook digital disclosures and user agreement before they clicked approve. And the lawyers designed it to be understandable… barely.

As both Facebook and Google (and Amazon) jockeyed to prove that they weren’t taking advantage of their users, a lot of the more powerful pieces of information were yanked. Facebook Analytics became less powerful, and/or significantly more generic. The value that the data once had was waning. I’m simplifying a lot of this, of course. For a detailed description of the data being collected from your online presence every day, you can check out this article.

The crux of it is not enough businesses – regardless of size – were using the available Facebook Analytics for much. Some used it to confirm what they learned from Google Analytics and other third party apps. Some just never embraced it. Or were afraid to admit that they had.

Either way, the tools were less valuable for the end user, making them less valuable to maintain for Facebook. The Apple privacy changes are just the final shovel full of dirt piled on the casket of Facebook Analytics.

Stayin’ Alive

But it’s not all gloom and doom for analytic information on the social media giant. While Facebook Analytics is going the way of the dodo, portions of it – some even improved upon – will live on in some of their other business-sided tools.

Creator Studio, Audience Insights, Business Manager, Events Manager, Ads Manager and Facebook Page Insights all still live on. They can be very useful tools in your arsenal for finding and tracking your customers’ interests and journeys. Even better, they can add valuable insights into the profile of the ideal customer you should be targeting. A lot of them are now better integrated with Instagram as well, adding cross-posting value.

And I would look for a significant update to Facebook Business Suite on or around June 30 – granting all businesses entrée to the “one-stop-shopping” account access small businesses have gotten a nice preview of for the past nine months.

The biggest loss we’ll see? The “accessory” data that Facebook probably wasn’t supposed to be gathering anyways. And some of that is still available on Google Analytics.

The More Things Change

The real story behind the death of Facebook Analytics is that we shouldn’t rely too much on any technology to assist us with our digital marketing needs. Yes, Facebook is a social media behemoth. One that we can’t afford to ignore or not have a presence on. But Facebook and social media marketing are simply tools within your digital marketing strategy. Likes aren’t sales.

Your strategy must be your guide. How much social media do you use? How much you engage with your customers – present and potential – on whatever platform? Everything must be factored out of your digital marketing strategy.

And you must have a strategy.

You also have to use it. Knowing who your ideal customers are does you no good unless you’re targeting them. Contacting them, updating them, sharing your business story. You have no one to blame but yourself if you know who your customers are, but don’t make an effort to connect with them.

While algorithms and platforms and tools may change, the principles of strategy don’t. In fact, we’ve seen over the past 20 years that the more those tools change, the more relevant and impactful our approach is.

The same philosophies and codes we taught entrepreneurs and small business owners back in 1998 are still valid. We helped hundreds of business owners through economic downturns – even recessions. The principles were so effective that Michael Pink, Zig Ziglar and his organization, and more, invited us to share our message with their teams and clients.

Now It’s Your Turn

We would love to help you too. Our website has plenty of articles on how business strategy and digital marketing work and can be used for your success. But some folks want a more hands on approach. If that’s you, I encourage you to reach out. We’ll give you 25 minutes of our time, free of charge, to look at your options.

We’ve built our business, educating and serving other small businesses and entrepreneurs and I know we can help you too. Let’s Grow the Dream together!

So this week, we’re going to dive into another aspect of successful content blog posts. And this is one many people may not have really considered – image size and use.

In 1929, the movie Blackmail was released in two formats. Alfred Hitchcock, at the behest of the studio, directed the film as both the original silent film he had devised, and as Great Britain’s first “talkie.” Hitchcock, even before he became an esteemed director, had earned notoriety for shooting silent films with as few title cards as possible.

Part of his signature style was to tell as much of the story with visuals as possible. What he called ‘pure cinema.’ Even after he came to Hollywood, he would often try to restrict dialogue in his films to saying things he could not convey with visuals – or statements that the visuals contradicted (i.e., showing a character lying)

I saw the two versions of Blackmail back to back a few years back at a theater – and the silent film told the story far better than the talkie version.

I share my experience with Blackmail to illustrate a point.

We’ve talked before about how images are important for blog posts. We all know the old adage that a picture is worth 1000 words. Scientists tell us that our brains have a profound attachment to visual information. We remember visual information longer and more accurately than written or spoken details.

Fast & Furious

Researchers have also proven that our brains process images some 60,000 times faster than text.

According to the theory of dual-coding, human memory has two main forms of retention: verbal and imaginal. Of these, concepts conveyed visually are almost literally cemented into our memory, whereas verbally or textually transmitted information is more abstract.

Great images convey information to the reader, complementing the written information, while breaking up the text and making it more inviting to read. Images can reinforce key points of your post, and our brains see articles with images as ‘more real,’ deepening the readers’ connection and building credibility.

From Instagram to Pinterest to Facebook and Twitter – posts with images are more sharable and more prone to be shared by readers. Images are also reposted/shared significantly more than static posts, even on less obviously visual platforms.

In 2017, Jeff Bullas discovered that posts with images on Facebook had at least 37% higher engagement than text-only posts. Blog posts with images get 94% more total views than articles without. And consumers were 60% more likely to do business – or even visit – a business site with images in local search.

Plus, even if you’re not properly utilizing titles, meta tags and alt text, images boost a post’s ranking on Google (and all the other search sites). If you are tweaking those things, it increases visibility (“see” what I did there?) even more.

But for some reason, many companies that embrace content blogs and periodic email blasts still resist using images.

Nobody Wants a Small Pizza

Now that we’ve established that you need graphics, how big should they be? Unfortunately, the answer is NOT one size fits all.

You can reuse some images in various settings without too much trouble. For example, a picture optimized for Pinterest can, in some instances, be repurposed on Instagram. Facebook already loves to use Insta-sized images. In fact, the almighty algorithm favors them when shared or even reposted from Insta to Facebook.

If you have the time and ability, your best practice is going to be designing a few images that are optimized for a few platforms. How do you know which to choose? You go back to your strategic work.

It’s not actually that hard. Even if you haven’t isolated your ideal customer down to the n-th specificity, you can use their general demographics to ‘estimate’ the right platforms. Instagram skews younger than Facebook. Tik Tok and Snap(chat) skew even younger still. ‘How to’s,’ wedding planning and DIY are the most popular areas of interest on Pinterest. Twitter tends to be slightly older, often tech-savvy people. You get the idea. You can click on the embedded links to get a clearer picture on audience and image optimization for each.

WordPress, which we highly recommend for your content blog, has specific parameters for the featured images on their pages –which may be truncated when shared on social sites. Because our ideal customers are people who utilize Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, I make three images for each of our content blog posts. One for WordPress that loads quickly and cleanly. Another of the same dimensions, but optimized for Facebook and Twitter for the social shares section of the post. And a third image for Instagram.

But on the Internet, size is more than just height by length.

Dimensions

The most obvious size issue for most graphics is just that – how tall by how wide. After all, web images are flat, right? Well, yes and no.

We don’t usually measure graphics on the Internet like you’d measure a physical object. You can’t put the tape measure down at one end and mark the width at so many inches. Well, in theory, you can, but that’s not how it’s done.

It all comes down to inconsistency. Digital images were first designed for very specific sizes. Everyone had the same screen, more or less, just like we all used to have the same 3-5 television screen sizes. But as things developed, screens got larger and smaller and the internet got more ubiquitous.

Photoshop, which started as a program to transfer graphics from Windows formats to Apple formats, as Adobe diversified its capabilities, started incorporating language and accepted norms from the print world. One of those elements was resolution.

For printers – the people, not the machines – everything was defined by how many DPI – Dots Per Inch. That could be anything from 22 DPI (low resolution) all the way up to 5000 DPI. Although most are somewhere between 150-600 DPI.

But with all those screen sizes, programmers had to find a flexible way to display consistent graphics, regardless if you were looking at the image on your 60” Led TV or your iPhone 2. So they transitioned into using pixels.

Pixels, or px, defines an image’s dimensions in a scalable way in CSS. In other words, an image 1200px by 628px on a website appears the same, regardless of how big the display was. An image that was 3in by 5in would always be the exact same size on every screen – tiny on your TV and giant on your smart phone.

File Size

The other reason to move away from inches to pixels was because digital images are not strictly flat. They have height, length, and depth. It’s just that depth in internet terms is more of a relation between resolution and file size.

As technology got faster and smaller, Google started giving more and more preference to sites that loaded quickly because more and more people were using tablets or smart phones. The faster a page loaded, especially over a cellular connection, the happier the searcher and the better Google looked for recommending it.

That’s not the only reason we started looking at streamlining loading times, but it is a significant factor. As a result, anything that bogged sites down becomes an issue that needed to be resolved. And still is in the process of being resolved, especially as Google rolls out their latest algorithm.

So pictures, images, graphics very quickly needed to be a good depth. Too deep and the site would get ‘dinged’ by Google. Not deep enough and the image is worthless. Suddenly DPI is important again. But not the exact same way.

Even though we switched from inches to pixels, we still express resolution in terms of parts per inch. Instead of dots, we were now using pixels. Most internet graphics are around 72ppi. You can raise those numbers, but increasing anything makes the file size bigger.

We measure file size data, based on a three way ration – height, width and resolution. Increase any measurement, either the others must decrease to match, or the file size expands. So the three graphics I built for this post are a medium resolution jpg for WordPress, a higher resolution social media png, and a high resolution square for Instagram.

Oranges and Apples

I could do a whole complicated post on the different image file formats. Photoshop has 36 different file formats it can import or export. All for very specific purposes. The main two I worry about are jpg and png.

JPG stands for Joint Photographic Group. It is the most common file format saved by digital cameras. It was first introduced to the public in 1992, although it was first proposed as far back as 1972. Not to get too technical, but jpg was built to save the most essential data of an electronic image in the smallest form it could. So when the data is transmitted, the downloaded image was “close enough” to the original, although something was always lost.

PNG stands for “Portable Graphics Format.” Png was built to be an even better version of one of the earliest digital image designators – GIF. When I mentioned the early days of Photoshop, GIF was the format used to allow Apple computers to open Windows graphics and vice versa. In 1986, Png was introduced, becoming a popular standard by 2004. Png graphics are larger than Jpg’s because they store ALL of the information in chunks – nothing is lost.

Jpg and Png are the most used digital graphic formats you will encounter. We still have GIF’s and BMP’s, but those are less prevalent because they require so much stored information. Even in our world of ‘unlimited data,’ practicality wins out.

If you’d like to get started on your small business’ digital marketing strategy, or to talk to us about options for help – from training your team to handling your weekly content blog, please reach out. We’re happy to give you 25 minutes of our time with no obligations. We’ve built our business helping entrepreneurs build theirs.

Let’s Grow the Dream together!

And Facebook users are paying the price. Unclaimed domains are used daily on the site to promote fake shops, surplus providers and going out of business sales. The practice has increased dramatically since the pandemic lockdowns, costing users countless dollars when items don’t show up on their front porches. And no way to contact to the now non-existent seller.

In 2017, in an effort to curb fake news claims from both major political parties, Facebook introduced domain verification, and outlets claimed their sites were verified and designated by the tiny “i” on the preview Facebook posted. Clicking the “i” offered users a history of the site, the article and a few other details.

They quickly expanded the process to offer it for all websites. Those who claimed their site gained the exclusive ability to manage the image and information offered in a preview post. Now only the verified website owner could make changes to the thumbnail image, article title, and link description when sharing the link to their own Facebook page.

With the impending Apple upgrade to iOs 14, Facebook will utilize Domain Verification to adapt to Apple’s new AppTracking Transparency policy.

Framing the Argument

According to Facebook, iOs 14 will “impact how it receives and processes conversion events from tools like the Facebook pixel. Businesses that advertise mobile apps, as well as those that optimize, target, and report on web conversion events from any of our business tools will be affected.”

In other words, the new AppTracking Transparency will restrict Facebook’s ability to process certain analytics. This data allows Facebook ads to function at the level so many small businesses have taken advantage of. As disastrous as Facebook wants their business users to think the problems will be, it’s really just the latest in an ongoing shift towards privacy and away from data mining.

I talked earlier this month about similar changes that Google is implementing. And the writing’s been on the wall since Europe passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California followed suit with their Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).

As much as we’d all like short cuts and an easier flow, you can no longer rely on the data from the silicon valley giants to make finding & selling to customers easier. The only reliable solution? Have your own website and use content posts to answer questions, establish authority, target and convert your ideal customers. You need to develop a strategic digital marketing approach.

However, social media cannot be ignored. It remains a viable portion of most strategic marketing approaches. This is especially true if Facebook ads figures into your approach – or may in the future. Once the changes go into effect, anyone who advertises on Facebook will need to have verified their domain.

Trust, But Verify

There are three different methods to implement domain verification on Facebook.

1. Add a DNS TXT entry to your DNS record to confirm that you own the domain.
2. Upload an HTML file provided by Facebook to your web directory and confirm domain ownership in Business Manager.
3. Add a meta tag to the <head> section of your domain home page.

Start in Facebook Business Manager. You’ll want to hit the Business Settings button in the upper right corner. Click the Brand Safety tab (right below Data Sources), and select Domains from the expanded left side navigation list.

Click the blue “ADD” button in the middle of the page. In the pop-up add the domain you want to associate to your business. If you have more than one domain listed, select the domain for which you desire to confirm ownership. Choose the method you wish to use to verify your domain: DNS Verification, Meta Tags or the HTML File Upload. Again, you only have to select one.

For DNS Verification:

You’ll need to log in to whatever service you use for hosting. Under the DNS Verification tab on Facebook, you’ll see a unique text record that needs to be copied and pasted into your DNS configuration. Each hosting platform has a slightly different approach, so check if you’re not sure. Once the changes have propagated across your site’s domain servers, you can click the green “Verify” button at the bottom of the DNS Verification area. Tis can take anywhere from 5 minutes to 72 hours. Facebook recommends leaving the DNS TXT entry in place, as verification will be checked periodically.

To Upload an HTML File:

To the right of the DNS Verification tab is the HTML File Upload tab. Click it, then download the HTML Verification file. You’ll need to upload this file to the root directory of your website. Once the upload is complete, you can click the green “Verify” button at the bottom of this section. Just like DNS, Facebook recommends leaving the file in place for future verification checks.

Meta Tag Verification:

Navigate to the Meta Tag Verification tab. Copy the meta tag with your verification code, then paste it into the <head> section of the HTML of your domain home page. Confirm that the meta tag is visible by visiting your domain home page and viewing the HTML source. Once confirmed, click the green Verify button at the bottom of the Meta Tag Verification tab for the selected domain. And, you guessed it, leave it there. Facebook will be checking.

Now you’re all set to keep creating Facebook ads. There are some other restrictions, like number of conversions you’re able to track and new limits to discriminatory data, but once you familiarize yourself with them, you’re good to go.

I cannot stress this enough – Facebook is not an end all and be all for digital marketing. You need a solid strategy to find and attract your best customers. If you’d like help building that strategy, training your team to develop and enhance it, or just ongoing periodic posts to stay on top of the Google algorithm, please reach out.

We built our business helping small businesses build theirs. Let’s Grow The Dream together!

Back in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that Facebook would be mostly video by 2021. This was four years after purchasing Instagram for $1-billion and then seeing the platform dip as Snapchat took the lead. And of course, all of this was long before Tik Tok launched in the US, rapidly becoming the most downloaded app for nearly 2 years.

The common denominator is video. Snapchat, within a year of launching, created video “Stories,” prompting Insta to try and follow suit and catch up. That eventually slid over to the mother app. Now Tik Tok has forced another seismic shift at Facebook, bringing “Reels” to life on Instagram.

In the midst of millions of businesses shuttering, or at least shifting to work from home, there have been three sectors of the economy that have consistently grown:

• Video Conferencing (Zoom, Discord, Google misc.)
• Streaming Services (Netflix, Amazon, HULU, all the +’s)
• Social Media (Tik Tok, Facebook, Twitter)

Once again, the common denominator – video.

If you’re asking – and you should be – how does this affect business accounts and ads on Facebook, you’re in the right mindset.

The Good News

1. Video Ads are More Cost Effective

Video costs average around 10% of the cost of carousel or single image ads. While the holy grail of Facebook ads might be out of reach these days, you can run ten times as many video ads as image ads. That alone seems like a really good deal – but it gets even better…

2. Video is More Engaging

Users spend FIVE times more time on a Facebook post or Ad that contains a video than a static post. Twitter estimates about the same. And TL:DR is real – images on all platforms are still 2-3 times more engaging than text.

And yes, animated GIF’s count! While they aren’t as engaging as a video, anything more than a static image is generating more engagement. And that includes EMOJI’s. Whether you like or understand them or not, they are becoming increasingly more popular in posts and ads, regardless of a target customer’s age. And if you’re aiming for millennials or younger, you kinda need them.

3. Much Higher ROI & Conversions

In a study done last year, businesses who experimented with video ads saw nearly 70% more conversions than for static images or text.

People like viewing products and services from the point of view of the customer. Videos that feel like POV of the user; whether the buying process, the experience of using the product – or best of all, the emotion gained by using the product – outperform anything else.

Nothing provides social proof more than actual social proof. BUT, staged videos shot as representative of the customer experience rank almost as highly in ROI and conversions.

4. Don’t Require High Production Value

Facebook allows you to post videos that are studio-shot or mobile-shot. Studio is obvious – these are the commercials we’re used to, with high production values. Mobile-shot can still be well done and tell a good story, but… they resemble organic Stories content, similar to the effect of using a mobile phone camera, or ‘selfie-mode.’

According to Facebook, mobile-shot is:

• 84% better at getting users to view content
• 80% better at driving intent
• 78% better at driving ad recall, and
• 63% better at driving purchases, app installs and checkouts

Some companies are even shooting professionally, but simulating mobile-shot, just to get the benefits. But all you need is your camera and decent light.

In the past, I would have said great audio is a must too, but 85% of people watch videos with the sound off. Facebook even added an option to turn off sound automatically on EVERY video. Meanwhile, a recent study showed that 41% of videos on social media are meaningless without sound.

Instead of spending money on the camera and sound gear, spend time on the best visual story you can tell. It’s said that Hitchcock was such a great director because he started in silent films, as a story card artist. He strove, with every film he made, to make fewer and fewer cards. He passionately sought to make stories that worked, even if no one ever said a word, and often complained that dialogue repeated information already present on the screen.

Like Hitchcock, you want to try and create a video that captures attention and conveys purpose, even with the sound off. Add subtitles if you need to. And be liberal with your use of logos, products, and words splashed across the screen.

5. They Don’t Need to be Too Long

Embrace the minute or less. In keeping with the theme of user-generated content, don’t blast out a video that last 20-30 minutes, just because you can. Hey, if you can make something you can cross post on Insta, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and Tik Tok, why wouldn’t you?

Sure the audiences are somewhat different, but you have to start somewhere. Having a short video will play better, be watched more, and can be cross-purposed. You can then tailor it more to the specific platform you want it to be on. Plus, shorter videos are cheaper to make and as a result allow considerable experimentation. You’re not spending a million dollars making a single ad for the Super Bowl that may or may not connect with people. You’re making dozens, maybe hundreds of short ads. It’s not a huge deal if a few of them underperform.

And several social media experts have pointed to Reel-type ads in Instagram as the next big trend in paid social media marketing for 2021.

6. More Formats Available

At the time I’m writing this, Facebook has 16 ad types:

• image ads
• video ads
• page likes ads
• branded content ads
• lead generation ads
• carousel ads
• post engagement ads
• slideshow ads
• dynamic ads
• messenger ads
• stories ads
• collection ads
• playable ads
• augmented reality ads
• instant experience ads (previously called Canvas)
• app installs
• search ads

You can also add polls to video ads and use ads to launch conversations in Messenger.

The Bad News

7. COVID-19 Restrictions are Still in Place

This may not affect you or a majority of small businesses, but everyone should review the latest Facebook guidelines to make sure you’re not offering a product or service that is prohibited in these trying times.

8. Costs are Liable to Fluctuate – a Lot

In all areas, of Facebook at least, cost of pay-per-click ads is down, and has been down since March of 2020. That means all of the ad formats are currently cheaper, not just video. But as it takes longer to reach some sense of normality with the global pandemic, the prices will almost surely rise.

Amazon has done stellar business because they were already in place to take advantage of the online buying experience and delivery, well, trend. Trend isn’t quite the right word, but hopefully you get what I mean. As we sit longer and shift to more delivery and pick up, as well as more digital versus traditional advertising, the rates are bound to go up.

9. Reduced Targeting Options

As our society becomes more stratified, Facebook has had to adapt. Not just in political scenarios, but rejiggering how we think and speak, and how things are addressed. They have also dealt with numerous privacy concerns, both in house and forced to be addressed by government and lawsuits.

As a result, the extreme narrowness of Facebook ad targeting has lessened considerably. There’s little chance these days of one roommate punking another with ads, as happened back in 2014. And that’s probably a good thing. Free speech is fine, but Facebook has a responsibility, both to users and their shareholders.

So several categories of targeting have been eliminated from the Facebook ad options for all the reasons mentioned above, as well as eliminating duplicate and redundant targeting options. All added up, Facebook has eliminated between 7-10,000 different targeting options. Which sounds like a lot – most people probably aren’t even aware there were that many options, let alone that many have been eliminated.

Which makes their assertion that there are more than enough targeting options to reach nearly every type of audience seem reasonable.

10.Tighter User Experience Parameters

Blame this one on the scammers. Far too many Facebook ads played fast and loose with the truth in previous years, and it reached epic proportions during the pandemic. You may remember, it got so bad, their AI was preventing posts and ads from struggling businesses because they tried to yank the reins too hard.

So Facebook implemented a Customer Feedback Score system for advertisers.

And while it feels like they’re spanking everyone for some criminals actions, there are a few easy tips to keep your score above the 1-2 that will get you booted.

1. Be transparent. Make it extremely clear what users can expect from your products. Yes, that includes images, colors, materials, and sizes. Don’t use stock images or descriptions pulled from other sites unless your item is exactly the same, including the brand name.
2. Make shipping expectations clear. Highlight expected shipping times at several points of checkout on your website. And always provide a tracking number.
3. Make your return policy extremely clear. Spell out every detail, including potential return shipping costs, possibility of refund or replacement, and timeframes permitted.

11. Strategy is as Important as Ever

If you’re a frequent reader of this blog, you might think I harp on this too much. But, truly, the one thing that sets successful small business marketing apart from being unsuccessful is the approach. The major companies all use strategies – sometimes even apparently conflicting ones.

Did you know that Coke and Diet Coke are marketed completely differently? They even employ different strategists and different advertising agencies because they have two different audiences, two different types of targeted ideal consumers.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by not having a strategic business plan in place – for your business and for your marketing. If you need help developing one – I know a guy… Please reach out and we’ll be happy to sit down with you over Zoom and work out a way to get started. We won’t even charge you for the first 20 minutes.

We’ve built our business by teaching and helping entrepreneurs build their business. We’d love to help you too. Let’s Grow The Dream together!

Of course, the paragraph I just typed, both in my word processing software and in the website server, takes about 140K of memory. You’ve probably seen the vintage pictures of a dozen men and a forklift loading 5-Megabyte IBM drives the size of a freight elevator. Or the Univac computers that helped us get to the moon that literally took up rooms of space – and still could do less than the simplest iPhone.

Somebody Has to Be First

It’s always interesting to be on the front end of a new technology or business approach and then watch to see if and how long it takes for the rest of world to catch up. For every Facebook and Twitter, there’s a MySpace or Yahoo Groups that has to adapt or die. And you’re never guaranteed that newer and better will survive. Just look at the much higher quality Beta vs VHS recording and playback decks.

But sometimes you do get to be ahead of the game, succeed and wait for the rest of your industry or niche to catch up. And while I don’t often do posts that pat ourselves on the back, I get to do that today.

You see, more than 20 years ago, David G. Johnson started this company, as Epiphany Marketing, teaching people about content marketing and beating the ever-changing Google algorithm with strategy, not keywords. Maybe it was the pandemic and people looking for new answers to keep afloat. Maybe it was Google announcing the latest huge algorithm changes. Maybe it was the various new privacy legislations and the death of cookies. Or…

Maybe it was just time.

Whatever it was, some of the top Google searches for marketers and businesses last year were phrases involving “Content Marketing Strategy.” Almost 10,000 a month! With another 34-thousand searches for related phrases like “Content marketing examples,” “B2B content marketing,” and “content marketing plan.” Clearly, there is now a growing interest.

And while job postings and chatter on the Internet still include phrases like “SEO Performance” and “keyword management”, they’re being defined more clearly – and more often – with both content and strategy. In fact the top three job skills looked for are Social Media, SEO, and ability to take a strategic approach.

Digging Deeper

A recent study, commissioned by SEMRush, gives us more insight into what people want when they’re searching online. Clarity, relevance, and detail are all at the top of the list – and in one place.

While many of our clients focus on 300-900 word content blog posts, we know in many instances 1200-3000 word posts do better. But now we’re seeing that 7000+ word posts trump even the previous long length standards, with three times more views and 43% more shares. Clearly people are looking for one place to get all their answers.

Adding headline structures and lists can also increase visibility. And it helps you gain that coveted top spot on Google where they share your list, even if someone doesn’t click your link. You might think that’s a bad thing, but it adds credibility and usefulness, both with the reader and Google.

When you look at Twitter, strategy is, by a large margin, the most discussed marketing topic, especially when you add the additional parameter of content marketing. People want to know how to strategically market, how to measure, how it works best, and what their competitors are doing.

The old adage about a picture being worth a thousand words is true too. Or in this case 240 characters or the 2000 on Insta. Images and video convey so much more information than a simple tweet or Facebook update. And that leaves more room for whatever #hashtags you’re using. Pinterest is also growing past wedding planning and arts and crafts. You can check out my deeper analysis of that platform, if you’d like.

Another top concern for approaching effective online marketing is analytics and measurements. We’ve done several posts about this in the past, but next week, we’ll do a deep dive into how to best leverage Google Analytics.

Past Performance; Future Results

I don’t often advocate looking backwards. The past is the past, and usually it should stay there. But there’s a Lewis B Smedes quote that seems appropriate here. “We change the memory of our past into a hope for our future.” 2020 was rough. 2021 isn’t getting any better – not quickly enough, anyway. But we can use the lessons we’ve learned from the past and use them to chart a better future.

Take the time now to learn how content marketing works best. We have literally years of posts and millions of words that go in depth right here on the website you’re already on. We will be launching our free online training sessions, #StrategyStreams again shortly. And we’re here for you. We built our business teaching and assisting other small businesses succeed at strategic content marketing. We’d love to help you too. Please reach out.

Regardless of how the industry got to where we are, we’re here now. Make the most of it and together we’ll Grow the Dream.

Then in March of 2020, the global pandemic struck our shores and guess what..? No, there’s no M. Night Shyamalan twist here. The answer is exactly what you think it is – all that rapidly accelerated. Most stores and other retail outlets shuttered or severely cut back hours and the majority of Americans sheltered at home. Amazon’s value shot through the roof – even when their supply chains got cut short. And then they accelerated their latest delivery system – sidestepping traditional shipping companies and offering jobs to thousands of people.

As I’ve said before – having an Internet presence is no longer optional – it’s necessary. The balance of power had already started to shift – now it’s inevitable.

A social media presence is also needed, but those can no longer be relied upon to be your sole point of online contact. The platforms make the algorithms and the rules, and they can and DO change them at a moment’s notice. Whether you primarily service Business to Consumer (B2C) or Business to Business (B2B) customers, the time will come very soon where you cannot function, let alone survive, without a website and a digital marketing strategy.

There is Only Zuul

Earlier this week, Ad Week published an article that talked about Amazon’s 37% leap in year-to-year sales in the third quarter – still growing after most retail shops reopened. A large part of that is attributed to Amazon Prime sales and convenience. And why not? If I have the option of Amazon sending me my over the counter heartburn medication or herbal supplements for the same price – or often considerably cheaper – on a regular schedule, for free why wouldn’t I save a trip to the store in a last minute panic ‘cause I’ve just run out?

The same article cited a statistic that people looking to buy in 2019, were nearly three times as likely to start their searches on Amazon than Google. Amazon recently released new tools for their advanced third party sellers to track the touchpoints of the funnel leading to an Amazon sale.

And I’m guessing within the next 10 years, Amazon will shift even further – still selling everything, but bifurcated into a virtual online mall. You’ll be able to shop at Amazon retail, like a colossal WalMart in the cloud, AND at your favorite side retailers. And companies like Simon and Westfield will be struggling to survive.

Your Own Personal Vinz Clortho

So how do you, as a single company or entrepreneur, stand out amongst the new giants of commerce? A properly executed digital marketing strategy gives you a whole ring of keys to open those proverbial gates.

Maybe it’s easier to notice with the rise of virtual assistants and voice search, among other things? But it’s amazing to me that people are still just now noticing, recognizing or admitting what we’ve been teaching small business owners for nearly 20 years now. I guess that gave our clients an unfair? advantage. One that you can now get for free – the only cost is time. I’ll explain more at the end of the article.

Regardless, I’m seeing more and more people talk about using keywords the right way. Not the game-the-system attempts of yesteryear, where keywords were splattered across a seemingly blank page, or blogs and social posts littered with apparently random keywords or #hashtags.

No, as we’ve been telling people for decades, and people like Neil Patel chime in on every few years – long tail keywords are, well, key. And I know it may seem counterintuitive on its face. Yes, using specific, targeted long tail keywords and phrases generates less search traffic. But that traffic is at least twice as likely to convert – often within just one or two visits.

Specificity is the key. As I mentioned earlier (or you can check out this article for an in-depth examination), voice search has changed, or rather honed the way we search. More than a third of all Google searches contain four words or more – and are often phrased in the form of a question.

How We Do Things Downtown

The easiest and simplest way to bring ready-to-buy clients and consumers to your website is to create content that answers the questions they are asking. Sure, in 1999, someone might have searched Google for “dog obedience schools.” But they were – and still are – more likely to search for “how to stop my dog from barking all night.” Or “how to housetrain my poodle.” Or “What can I do to stop my dog from romancing my boyfriend’s leg?”

People don’t look on Google for information anymore. Which is probably a good thing because we’re in overload right now. But they do ask Google for solutions to their problems. And if you’ve got a dog obedience school, the best way to help your customers find you is to answer those questions.

You do that in a blog post – you may even tell them how to do it without you. And guess what, that means some people who come to your site aren’t going to buy your product or service. But they were never going to. And the ones who are ready to buy, will. And some of the first group may come back after they find themselves overwhelmed by the DIY solution. After all, they already found you and you offered them a solution that didn’t require paying you – that added value is priceless. This is why we say content is king.

Now, not everyone has a dog obedience school, with obvious problems and pain points to address. But every company has a niche audience they serve…a narrow grouping of ideal customers, who they serve perfectly. You aim for those bullseye customers, and you’ll attract additional potential buyers on the outskirts. Either way, you’re literally in business.

Crossing the Streams

I’m not going to go into every aspect of developing a digital marketing strategy in one article. But here’s something to keep in mind – we follow the same timeless principles that we teach. A quick site search and you’ll find all the pieces – everything to develop a marketing strategy on your own.

But we didn’t stop there. As our way of giving back to the small business community that helped us Grow our Dream, we’re giving back during these troubling times. You don’t have to wait to go back to the office – or even quit your nine to five – remote or not – position. You just need to sacrifice one lunch hour a week.

Every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, we host what we call #StrategyStream. Our chief educator David G. Johnson, walks you through the strategic marketing process that he taught the Ziglar Corporation and Michael Pink’s clients among many others. We’ve legitimately charged thousands of dollars for this training in the past – even without our help implementing it. Now you can get it for free. And if you need implementation help, well, we can talk about that too.

Don’t let your entrepreneurial dreams die because of time, money or the global pandemic. Grow the Dream with us.

• iPhones launched
• T-Mobile followed up with the first Android phone
• MySpace was being seriously challenged by spunky upstart Facebook
• Twitter, a new, micro-blogging platform was launched and grew rapidly
• A video sharing service called YouTube was starting to gain notoriety as more homes switched to broadband internet from dial up.
• Google, who acquired YouTube in 2006, owned the #1 and #2 search engines – at least 80% of search traffic as the wild west of search settled down and became centralized

So it was clear that to dominate the online market, you had to have a significant, findable presence on Google. But despite all of the changes, most businesses were still using old tricks to try and game the system. Things like pages of individual keywords. Backgrounds made up of hundreds of keywords in white text. Submitting and linking multiple dummy sites to “control” keywords…and countless other black hat SEO tricks.

Meanwhile, Google was rolling out update after update of their search algorithms, working to improve the average user’s results and to quietly cripple the SEO shenanigans.  When we taught our clients that the best way to rank highly on Google search was to create consistent, periodic content, it was a revolutionary approach.

Consistent is the Crown of Content

Today, you can’t throw a rock without people saying you need to create consistent, periodic content. That’s how you stand out on Tik Tok, YouTube, Instagram and more – it’s no longer a question – it’s a rule.

Strangely enough, some 12 years later, some companies are still making money off bamboozling uninformed business clients with outdated SEO approaches.

In 2020, even more than in the past, only one proven approach allows you to consistently rank highly on Google. You need to know who your customers are and what problems or pains they’re searching for solutions to. And then you produce consistent, periodic content that answers those questions.

In literally just a few month’s time, you can go from being unknown to the top of the Google results for the problems you solve. Not a few random keywords, but strategically answering the questions your customers are asking.

Of course, to do that, you need a few things.

You need to do the strategic work. That’s identifying your ideal customers – their demographics, psychographics and what problems they need solved. This is not necessarily an easy task and you should give yourself/your company sufficient time to find and fully analyze the data.

The last step is creating that consistent content – blog articles, social media posts, emails, etc. It needs to be catchy/relevant enough to grab your targets’ attention. It needs to build credibility, answer questions and offer value to them. And it needs to be in a language and communication style that they relate and respond to. They need to understand it, even if the information feels basic or simplistic to someone within the company.

What We Have Here is…

And that last factor is the one so many companies struggle with. Many entrepreneurs understand that they need to communicate in terms and ideas that their customer understands. But they’re entrepreneurs, not journalists or English majors or filmmakers. They may understand advertising and the power of storytelling. But understanding is a far cry from careful, powerful execution.

That’s where people like me come in. I’ve literally written more than 1000 blog posts. I might even be approaching 2000 at this point, for dozens of different clients and customer bases. That’s just blog posts – it doesn’t count when I was writing news stories and promos for MSNBC, local ABC, NBC and CBS affiliates. Or my social media work. Or the creative writing I do. And I’m not even close to the most impressive member of the Grow the Dream team.

Betsy Dane has an MBA, and has written for hundreds of clients and non-profits. She works on websites, blog posts and social media. She writes grant applications for non-profits, as well as maintaining her own personal projects.

I understand that this sounds a little sales-pitchy at the moment – but that’s okay. There are people reading this who want to – need to – hire us to ghostwrite their content. They’re concerned about our credibility, skills and track record. Some of those reading just want to know what they need to do to curate their online marketing presence. Our clients are both. And it’s a gamble, but I’m willing to wager that a couple paragraphs that help others decide isn’t going to void the value of the rest of the article for you.

Besides, those paragraphs lead naturally to this…

Credibility Killers

Even if you start out creating your own content, there’s a good chance you run out of ideas. First, let me say that repeating yourself a little bit is okay. Every few months to a year, you can revisit the biggest questions and solutions you offer. No one’s going to be offended and it reinforces your brand and client approach.

I’ll tell you what you don’t do – you don’t buy content from a company that’s selling the exact same words, pictures and ideas to some 5-300 clients. At one point, while freelancing with another company, I wrote blog articles and emails for 3 different skin care companies. In many ways, their products and clients were similar, even overlapped a bit. But every article I wrote was solely written for one client. For their customers. Not once did I write an article for one that was published to another site – even though thousands of miles separated them. The closest I ever got was multiple Thanksgiving posts. There are only so many ways to say we’re thankful for you and happy Thanksgiving. But still, each one was distinct.

Sure, buying content “in bulk” from a company might seem cheaper, a better deal. But as I explained last week, it can actually cost you more in the long run.

A Last Note

What it boils down to is this. Like Southwest Air says at the end of each of their flights – “We know you have a choice.” You don’t have to fly the best. You don’t have to hire the most talented or experienced copywriters. You don’t even have to do the strategic work.

But if you want to rank on Google, to stand out amongst your competitors, to truly succeed – even in the midst of a global pandemic… I hope you’ll consider taking a look at our work and our approach.

And no, we don’t charge for everything. If you’d like a good taste of what we teach and implement for our clients, and have for almost 20 years, you can check out our weekly free #StrategyStreams. Every Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, we spend an hour giving free training on the timeless principles of strategic marketing. We won’t even ask for your email.

And if you would like to get started – with one on one strategic work, aligning your company with your vision and purpose, or partnering with us to get your content needs covered, please reach out.

While I don’t think anyone’s throwing around the term now, there’s no denying that the global pandemic has led and will lead to many more economic struggles. Where I live in Hollywood, we’re seeing things triple-fold. The day to day entertainment industry is on hold. The films & TV shows that were finished are being held or eked out, despite complaints from Amazon customers. And because our rates of infection and death are so high, the government is gun shy about reopening theme parks and theaters.

Who knows what the final impact will be on the Southern portion of California. There’s a ripple effect even on industries not tied to entertainment. We’re not waiting for just the other shoe to fall, but the rest of the Nike store.

Can’t Stop; Won’t Stop

When things get tight, it makes sense for you to look for expenses to trim. We go down to the bare bones, the basic essentials. And, in part, the isolation – forced or not – has helped with that. You can’t run to the salon and get your hair done every week, ‘cause they’re not open. I’m not a big hat guy, but after 25 weeks with no haircut…

But the one thing you simply cannot cut back on if you want to have a good chance of emerging from this pandemic with a business intact, is marketing. And it’s not just me saying this. Forbes, Deloitte, Gartner and more are all preaching not scaling back, but accelerating.

We actually proposed a similar strategy in 2008/9, when digital marketing was still learning and growing. Now, thanks to high speed Internet and companies like Zoom, Amazon, Facebook, and of course, old standbys like WebEx and GoToMeeting, few would deny the power of online business. Online is what’s saving our businesses, and sometimes our sanity.

And it’s not just the typical sites or the Amazons that are benefitting. Reports say online sales are almost as high – and in some cases much higher – than what we see on Black Friday weekend through Cyber Monday.

Now is not the time to lose momentum, but to start building it back up.

What Should You Focus On?

1. Maximize Organic Search

This doesn’t mean paid ads, or likes or bots to prop up your search results. You can’t fake or manipulate organic. You can only grow it. And that takes a well-crafted website that echoes your strategic work. I’m not going to spend a lot of time rehashing the last 2 months of posts (you can find them here), but there are two things to consider.

Is your site showing up when the people who need and want to buy from you are looking for just that item or service on Google (and maybe Bing)? You know who your ideal customer is and what you’re selling them – when they search for that, are you on the front page of the results? If not… The second important factor is conversion – do they drop in and leave? Or do they stay and explore, maybe download a lead magnet, read a few articles. If your site isn’t building relationships with potential customers, then it’s just wasting virtual space. You have some extra “free” time now – even if it’s just the saved commute.

Oh, and keep up with your content blog – it’s more important now than ever that helpful information is generated that draws people to your site.

2. Build Community

Even before the pandemic thrust us into the very weird world of 2020, community building was the buzzword that was driving marketing, both online and in person. Here’s a hint – being online makes it easier, if you are truly committed to it. Continue to build and strengthen relationships with your past customers. Give them an opportunity to partner with you to both your advantages. Write an e-book, start a podcast, get the word out about you, your company and what you stand for. Gathering like minds and encouraging them to help and support one another makes you a hero – and builds loyalty and engagement with your brand.

3. Get in Alignment

There are two ways this one works…

A. Make sure everyone knows your mission, your message, your ideal customer, and goals. This is NOT the time to compartmentalize. You want everyone on the same page – especially if they’re spread out and/or working from home. Transparency is your friend. Share the knowledge and responsibility with all the members of your team, and you’ll likely notice them find new ways to elevate it.

B. If you’re talking to or emailing an actual person and not an annoying AI or chatbot, you don’t want to have to explain yourself 2 to 10 times. Yet, you almost always have to. Make sure everyone has the same information. You don’t want your employees transferring an upset customer to make it someone else’s problem, so make sure the customer’s information travels with them.

4.  Engage on Social Media

Social media, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat or Twitter is growing. It’s never stopped and now people have more time to waste spend on the platforms than ever before. Will you have to work harder to stand out amongst the political and pandemic related posts – yes, of course. That’s where the above points fit in. Your strategy and ideal customer profiles will tell you how and when to engage. Having an aligned message and growing community will give you a clear area to emphasize and the specificity to emerge to the people looking for what you offer.

Now looking back at the list I just made, you may notice something. Very little of it costs money. Some aspects are more time consuming than others, but they’re all do-able and affordable, even if you need to outsource some of it.

And even if you don’t see an immediate bump in ROI, remember, this is a process. Things have slowed down due to a global issue. But when the world starts coming back to life and everyone’s rushing to get back in the game – you’ll already be ahead of them.

Right where you want to be.

I don’t recall exactly how they picked the place they go to now, I think I was in college at the time. But my parents have been Christmas tree shopping at the same location for more than 30 years. Every year, the company sends them a postcard, reminding them of the location – or letting them know they’ve moved. It’s a small cost – with a big revenue.

Think about it. While my parents only spend maybe $75-100 a year at that location, they’ve spent that amount for decades. That means they’ve spent– so far – around $2500-3000. For a postcard. And that’s not counting the fact that my sister and her family buy their tree from the same location and have for 15 years. Yes, I know there’s also the cost of growing the trees, cutting them, trucking them from Wisconsin to Southwest Florida. I don’t know those specific costs, but Bob Heath does.

He also knows the best way to encourage repeat business is to lean into his branding and marketing. Each customer also takes home a free jar of pickles from the Heath family farm with their tree.

A Measure Beyond Words

Welcome to the next step in building a truly strategic marketing system for your small business. Over the last five weeks, we’ve looked at several questions you need to answer for your company to determine the best, most effective marketing approach. Next week, we’ll tackle the hardest question most entrepreneurs must face, not only early on, but throughout the life of their business.

We got the customers to us. We looked at where they come from and how they find us. We examined how often a transaction resulted from finding us, and tracking where each yes happens that leads to the ultimate goal – a sale. Except that’s not always the ultimate goal.

We pivoted on the question of what types of solutions your potential clients need – long term, short term, or some hybrid of the two. The next step was counting the cost to acquire the customer. The expense of the solution, in basic terms, plus the overhead involved in marketing – online, in person, signs, cards, buildings.

But today, we’re going to take a deeper look at the long-term numbers to consider. Individual cost is one thing. But even businesses that rely almost exclusively on short-term solutions must consider the value over the life of a client. Especially when the statistics tell us it costs approximately five to seven times more to get a new customer than to retain an existing one.

So let’s dive in.  

A Tale of Two Clients

For starters, let’s unpack that new to existing customer cost ratio.

Every year, as everything gets noisier and our time and money are stretched further and further, it becomes that much harder to get people’s attention. You may have heard about the proverbial 5,000 ads a day Americans are exposed to. I’m sorry to say, it’s likely a LOT worse. The farthest back I can find that number quoted is in 2006. It’s in an article that points out that we’ve escalated from 50-100 ads a day in the 70’s to 5,000 a day today. But again, that was almost 15 years ago.

Now, what am about to do is by no means the proper way to make these calculations. Just letting you know up front, I’m using the same inaccurate causal relationship that the article posits. Using that math – 100 in the70’s to 5000 in 2005/6 to today… means that the average American sees between 10,000 and 20,000 ads in a day. But I’m exaggerating to make a point. A little.

Regardless of the actual number of ads the average person sees in a day, the numbers do show that costs to acquire new customers are significantly higher than to retain an existing customer. Yet studies show that nearly half of all businesses spend a more significant portion of their budget to bring in new customers. At the same time, spending pennies trying to reduce churn – and are more often successful in the latter than the former.

That’s, of course, for the few that actually track it.

A Matter of Perspective

Let me throw a few more numbers your way

• 60-70% – the probability of selling something to an existing customer
• 5-20% – the likelihood of selling to a new customer (it drops to zero if you don’t get at least get some contact info before they click away)
• Previous customers spend 5-10% more money on subsequent visits (real or online)
• Just retaining 25% of past customers can increase revenues 30-125%  
• In 2014, Neil Patel calculated that returning customers spend on average 67% more than first-time customers
• In 2016, only 40% of businesses of any size tracked customer retention and loyalty in detail.

But what does that all mean for your small business?

Running the Numbers

Customer Lifetime Value is a projection, based on past sales and experiences, that estimates the average customer’s monetary worth to a business. It’s that simple and that difficult.

The fact is, most companies that think about doing the math are confused in their approach. Here at Grow the Dream, we take a more holistic approach to marketing strategy. One that takes into account as many factors as possible – and filters them through your ideal customer profiles to create a specific, measurable, active marketing strategy. One that can be effectively implemented.

The ideal customer profiles are what makes these strategies so effective. I haven’t gone into much detail on them in these articles so far, in large part because they are proprietary. But they are key to our approach for several reasons.

It’s Only a Model…

Think of a ideal customer profile as a model. It’s a picture of the perfect consumer for your product or service. And I’m talking about a detailed model. If the strokes are too broad, the model is ineffective. You want to be as specific as possible about the demo- and psycho-graphics of the customer.

If you have existing customer data, this is extremely helpful. But the initial strategic work can be done with estimates and reasonable assumptions as well. Usually our clients who come to us in the very early stages of their business startup work hands-on with us for a longer period of time. That way the initial assumptions can be tested and refined by actual results.

One of the hardest things for most entrepreneurs to realize is that their customers don’t see the business the way the business owner does. You’re selling dog obedience training – they’re just looking to get Fido to stop barking when they’re not home. Ideal customer profiles allow the business owner to shift perspective appropriately.

The word cohort refers to the smaller Roman military subsets. Six people were in a cohort. Ten cohorts formed a Legion. Our current military framework of officers’ ranks is based on that approach. In the marketing world, we redefine cohort as a segmented group of customers. The advantage of this approach is that it allows us to see how groups of people that are similar behave.

The ideal customer profiles take that data, allowing us to discover the best clients – the ones that your business serves best for the lowest outlay of resources.

Piece by Piece

The cohort approach is also valuable when defining the sales funnel. Remember, what we don’t measure, we cannot manage or improve. So we note, measure and track each stage as a typical customer goes through the sales funnel.

The idea is that at every stage of the buying process, you have a group of people – a cohort at that level. Because we’re tracking and measuring what’s happening to each of these groups of people, we can do several things.

We know what the customer is usually seeking at this point and we can offer a lead magnet or some similar small agreement to move them further down the funnel. The timing of each decision they’re making becomes clearer. We can figure out why there’s a logjam. We can even determine if an offer we’re making is too big or small for the level the potential client is at.

The ladder of yesses that guides potential customers down the sales funnel isn’t usually something that can be assigned a monetary value.  But it both reflects our larger model and gives us plenty of insight into the lifetime value of a customer. Even if the client is returning to buy again, they may need to be guided down the funnel again, although it’s usually a compressed time frame.

By knowing the steps and stops and needs of the clients at each stage, you can manage both expectations and their journey. And the more precisely you know each step and stage, the easier it is to automate some or most of the process, freeing up personnel resources for other tasks and projects.

Of course, we are going to refine that model as we get more data from our ideal customers.

Reaction Time is a Factor Here

Another way to look at the lifetime value of a customer is their total worth to the business over the whole period of their relationship. And that requires a relationship.

As much as automation can help, its real resource is handling the mundane, allowing the humans to focus on and serve each other. Even if your business is solely online, and you don’t ever physically meet or exchange tangible money, relationships are key.  

Poor handling of relationships is also the number one reason for customer attrition. Just because it’s easier and cheaper to retain an existing customer, doesn’t mean you should ignore them.

There are several approaches to help build and foster customer relationships, adding to their value to your business, and your business’ value to them.

Say “Thank You”

Gratitude goes a long way in business. Especially in today’s world. A simple thank you email after a purchase is an easy (and automatable) way to bolster an early relationship. You might also include a coupon code, or save it for a reconnecting email later.

It will cost a little more, but the added cache of an actual mailed thank you card or postcard may be worth it. With so few of these being sent today, it’s a very easy and real way to stand out.

Like & Share

There are two ways to do social media as a business. One is to post regularly, so that your brand and offers are always out there, easy to find. Even off-brand posts, or humorous memes, like the ones we post on Facebook and Instagram help build name awareness. Humor can also be part of humanizing your brand. The more on-brand you can do, the better, of course. And keep in mind social posts from business pages don’t travel as well as they used to.

The other aspect of business social media is using the platforms to communicate with your customers. Asking them to Like, Subscribe and Share is pretty standard these days. Most customers will at least “Like” your page and some posts. Subscribing is a bigger commitment. And sharing is the holy grail of social media. Posts shared by just one human account can catapult your material about ten to twenty times as far as your business post’s standard reach.

And the better quality and usefulness of the content, the more likely it is to be shared. Again, the ideal customer profiles are extremely helpful in selecting material to create or share. In a perfect world, a social media post will be useful to your clients, their friends and general social media users – and reinforce your brand, building business as well as relationship with a wider audience.

You can also use social media and Google ads to retarget existing and potential clients who have discovered you or shared your posts. Just try not to be too creepy about it.

Pledging Allegiance

Another fun tool that many businesses have implemented to drive repeat business is a loyalty program. Customers carry a card, or can access the program online, that rewards them for being faithful. Everyone from hotels and resorts to grocery stores and fast food restaurants now offer benefits for repeat customers.

And not just repeat customers – signing up for a loyalty rewards program can be a rung on the ladder of yesses to build a relationship even before the sale.

One thing to always keep in mind, though. The loyalty must run both ways. That means the incentives you offer cannot just be a way to encourage customers to put more money in your pocket. The offers and deals must legitimately be of benefit to the customer. Even better – try and tailor the offers to help clients self-select as ideal customers.

A Mouth is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Also take into account referrals … They are a non-monetary source of customer value, and often hard to calculate, but potentially invaluable. Numbers prove the age old anecdote – word of mouth is your most powerful marketing tool. And customers who fall inside your bullseye are more likely to have friends, colleagues and associates who are also in your ideal frame…or close to it.

Not taking advantage of referrals is leaving money on the table that is rightfully yours. Just be mindful of not being too aggressive or sales-y when encouraging existing customers to offer referrals or testimonials.

“Do what makes people feel good and they will continue to buy from you and to refer others to you who will also continue to buy from you.”

As you can imagine, the lifetime value of your ideal customer is going to chart higher than the outliers. Since lifetime customer value is such a crucial calculation for your business’ success, ideal client profiles can make or break your marketing strategy.

In some rare instances, your perfect bullseye client is going to look different from 10,000 feet than it does at ground level. That’s one reason for our focus on short term vs long term solutions. I don’t know what the answer is for you – it’s all dependent on what you are marketing. That’s why we do custom solutions for our clients.

If you’d like to learn more about how we construct our exclusive customized ideal customer profiles or want to jump in with building a strategic marketing program to help your business grow, please reach out. We love helping businesses build, and we can’t wait to get started on yours!

If you missed any of the other articles in this series, the links to them are included below.

7 Questions Your Small Business Should Ask to Focus & Track Key Performance Indicators in Your Marketing Strategy

Where Are Your Customers Coming From?

How Are Your Customers Finding You?

How Often Does Finding You Lead to a Transaction?

Are Your Customers Looking for Long Term Solutions or Quick Fixes?

What’s The Cost to Get a Customer?