Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 3

Did you miss the first parts?

Here is Defining Social Media Marketing,  Part 1

and Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 2

Long time friends Matt Bailey and Greg Jarboe are partnering on an upcoming book from Wiley, “Digital Marketing Fundamentals: OMCP’s Official Guide to OMCA Certification.” The core of the book is defining each area of digital marketing and outlining the critical skills and knowledge necessary to achieve the OMCA Certification.

As a major part of digital marketing, social media becomes the most difficult to define. Greg and Matt discuss the definitive practices in social media, and define the difference between core skills and changing tactics.

Here’s what you’ll hear in part 3 of “Defining Social Media Marketing”

• Social Commerce and China’s astounding numbers
• Single’s Day
• Reputation Management & Crisis Communications
• US Air Force and Social Media Response
• Elon and Twitter (again)
• Social Media Advertising
• YouTube ad campaigns
• Social Media audience targeting
• Social Media marketing analytics

Transcript

[00:00:00] Greg Jarboe: One of the things that you really, really, really need to think about long and hard is why are you doing this and how are you measuring your results? And if it is vanity, if it is ego, “I got to show big numbers because, you know, only big numbers are impressive,” that’s going to get you in trouble fast.

[00:00:31] Bumper Intro-Outro: Welcome to Endless Coffee Cup, a regular discussion of marketing news, culture, and media for our complex digital lifestyle. Join Matt Bailey as he engages in conversation to find insights beyond the latest headlines and deeper understanding for those involved in marketing. Grab a cup of coffee, have a seat, and thanks for joining.

[00:00:52] Matt Bailey: But I realize also the bigger picture of this also is, you know, when I’m driving audiences to a destination, such as a landing page, I’m also going across platforms because I’m going to retarget them. I’m going to drive them from social media to maybe a blog or a website or some other destination where I’m going to engage with them, I’m going to try to get them to convert. And if they don’t convert, well now I’m switching to another discipline. I’m doing more ad buying to reach them and drive them back.

So, any, really any campaign is going to involve multiple platforms. And I, I think about, especially from a LinkedIn standpoint, if I’m buying ads on LinkedIn, you absolutely must be doing retargeting because your first pass on ads on LinkedIn never works. You get lots of interest, but no one converts. And so, that retargeting is absolutely essential to maintain that contact and bring people back because they’re inundated with so many messages.

[00:02:04] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah. So, that then begs the question, is there a model for how social media works? And the answer is there are lots of models, and what you need to do is sort of abstract it because this is not a model of how Facebook works or model of how Twitter works or model of how YouTube works. It, it, it, it, it needs to be, uh, larger than that. And, and what you end up with is a much more convoluted picture that does include some old mainstream media.

You know, people may have watched the congressional hearings last night and now gone on social media to see if they can find more information, or people may watch the NBA finals tonight and then go interact with, you know, community that, that is passionate about either the Boston Celtics or the Golden State Warriors. I mean, the, the answer is old media still plays a role. Social media plays a role. And oh, and this is the one that always falls under the radar screen. Word of mouth still…

[00:03:23] Matt Bailey: Oh…

[00:03:23] Greg Jarboe: …plays a role.

[00:03:24] Matt Bailey: …absolutely. Absolutely.

[00:03:26] Greg Jarboe: So, anytime you come up with what I call an oversimplified picture of, “This is the process,” okay, you’re always going to be leaving something important out. And, and so, one of the things that, you know, I try to struggle with in, in, in working with multi-platform is that it’s, it’s really one of, is this an idea worth sharing? And if it is, people will share it and they may not necessarily share it where you think they should.

So, we did a, we did a campaign for a, a new website about a decade ago call recipe.com. And, and, you know, people share recipes, and we were hoping and, you know, planning for them to share the recipes on ‘Book and Twitter, and boy, if they would share the recipes on, on YouTube, that would be cool, too. And, you know, those were the usual suspects. Those were the big three back then. And a month after launching our campaign, we looked at our analytics and what we discovered was the second most productive source of visitors to the website to get a recipe was Pinterest.

[00:04:57] Matt Bailey: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:04:58] Greg Jarboe: And we hadn’t even targeted Pinterest. We, we weren’t doing pin, Pinterest. We didn’t even have a “pin it” button on our pages, but what we found was people were taking the photos of a recipe and we discovered the importance of the photo of the final, “Here’s my soufflé,” you know, “Here’s my,” you know, whatever it was, but, “Here’s the finished product.” And people were pinning it to their pin boards because it inspired them to say, “I got to go get those ingredients next time I’m shopping.” You got to, you got to remember, you know, this, that, and the other thing.

And so, you know, as, as a result, we changed our website and started adding, you know, “pin it” buttons. But we, we had to learn the hard way that, you know, users don’t necessarily follow the channels you think they will.

[00:05:54] Matt Bailey: No, not at all. And, and I, some of it’s generational, too. I, I know, you know, even with my daughters when we’re cooking, I’ll go to a search engine, go find the recipe, you know, I’ll, I’ll type in what it is and, and they were going to Pinterest. They wanted to see it before they would, would put it together, whereas I’m searching through…

One of the nice things, too, that, that eventually turned into is they were seeing less ads than I was on the recipe sites, as well as they weren’t reading someone’s biography in order to get to the recipe, which is what’s happening now with so many of these, the recipe sites have gotten to the point where they have forced me to go analog again. I’m back to the books because I don’t get ads and I don’t get life stories looking for just how to, how to do something real simple. I just want to know what the, what the ingredient is.

[00:06:40] Greg Jarboe: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, a, a, a, a, again, depending on the topic, you, you see this in quilting, you see this in a lot of “do it yourself” kind of categories. You know, just give me the five key steps, please. You know, that’s what I’m here for.

[00:07:00] Matt Bailey: Right. Well, and where Pinterest has gone is very interesting because a lot of other, I, I think Instagram’s been playing around with this, Zuck’s been doing it, but using now, when you go to Pinterest, it’s all about the sale. They’re moving you to buy products right from the social site. So, this is now leaving it, leading into social commerce, which is growing, but I, I like to caution people that social commerce has been called the next big thing for the past 12 years. So, every year…

[00:07:34] Greg Jarboe: Well…

[00:07:34] Matt Bailey: …there is a, “Watch out for social commerce. It’s going to explode.” And, and they’ve been saying that year after year after year after year. I, I think we’re getting to a point where it is growing faster, but it’s, there’s a, a level of caution to take there.

[00:07:48] Greg Jarboe: Well, well, there was a, an accelerant that nobody could have predicted called the global pandemic.

[00:07:55] Matt Bailey: Oh yeah. That, that happened.

[00:07:57] Greg Jarboe: So, so all, all of a sudden, a lot of people’s behavior changed, and a lot of people started doing things online that they hadn’t been doing as much online. So, the, the growth curve mutated quickly, almost as quickly as the virus. And, and yeah, more people are doing more things online. Now, again, you know, a word of caution, you’re right. You should be testing it. You should be trying to figure it out.

One of the things that I think a lot of social media marketers get wrong is they think that the process is push. You know, “I’m, I want to push you to buy my product. And if I can only tack on this social commerce thing at the end, then I can actually get you all the way to where the cash register rings.” I know, cash registers don’t ring anymore, but, you know, you, you, you know, pardon, pardon an old metaphor from, uh, an old marketer. But I don’t think it’s a push process. I think it’s a pull process.

[00:09:04] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:09:05] Greg Jarboe: So, again, one of the things that Pinterest harvested brilliantly was if I’m going to pin something to my board, it’s because I plan to come back and do something with this later. You know, it’s, it’s my wish list, it’s my planning tool, it’s my, you know, in, in other words, I’m the motivation here, not the marketer.

[00:09:28] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:09:28] Greg Jarboe: And when you tap into the fact that if you are aligned with your community or your audience’s or your buyer’s plans, and you’re providing them with useful information to get them to the next step in their plan, you know, that, that’s, that’s pull marketing. That’s not push marketing.

[00:09:53] Matt Bailey: Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and one of the things that I think is interesting is, is it’s also how it’s being promoted and, and, and Greg, we could probably do an entirely different podcast on how media reports on technology. An example of this is, as I said, every year for the past year, social commerce has been called the next thing. And especially through the pandemic, we’ve seen trends increase, but also now at the end of the pandemic, we’re seeing them ebb back a little bit into where they once were now that people are out.

[00:10:00] But specifically the, the headlines, I, I’m looking at one right here where they’re estimating that social commerce will triple to 1.2 trillion worldwide by 2025. Now, what’s interesting about that is every one of these articles that talk about how big social commerce is and how much it’s going to be big, you don’t get those numbers without including China.

[00:10:54] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[00:10:54] Matt Bailey: Because China is essentially built on social commerce, but I was, in studying and, and looking into this, social commerce still only has about 11% penetration into China. It’s still, there’s not…

[00:11:12] Greg Jarboe: Well…

[00:11:13] Matt Bailey: It’s not massive…

[00:11:13] Greg Jarboe: Well, when you have…

[00:11:14] Matt Bailey: …but when you…

[00:11:14] Greg Jarboe: …when you have an audience of 1.3 billion…

[00:11:18] Matt Bailey: Right. Right.

[00:11:19] Greg Jarboe: …people, then 11% becomes a really interesting number, but…

[00:11:23] Matt Bailey: It does.

[00:11:24] Greg Jarboe: …but, but, but you’re right. It’s, it lags in, you know, Western countries. So, in, in North America or Europe, I, I, I would say it’s, it’s booming a little more in Asia Pacific, uh, places like that. But a, again, different behaviors. One of the things that I try to caution people is the fact that someone can buy something online doesn’t mean they’re in the market for it right now.

[00:11:53] Matt Bailey: Right. Yeah.

[00:11:55] Greg Jarboe: So, you know, understand that there’s a seasonality, understand that the holidays can drive behavior. I, I did work around Valentine’s Day with one client. Well, that was great. They were trying to promote florists. You know, boy, is that an easy layup. But not so much at other times of the year.

You, you, you, you need to, again, tap into user motivation. People are going to do stuff around back to school. People are going to do stuff around Halloween. People are going to do stuff around the holidays. People are going to do stuff, you know, around, you know, in some parts of the world it’s Ramadan. In, in, in, in China, I think, what, what is the biggest holiday in China that drives social commerce?

[00:12:49] Matt Bailey: Singles Day. Singles Day is the biggest sales day. Okay. And, and just, just to, here’s a couple numbers, Greg, ready for this? Singles Day, they, they had their biggest record in, in November 2021. It’s, so it’s called Singles Day ’cause it’s November 11, which is 11/11. You know, it it…

[00:13:10] Greg Jarboe: I, I, I did not know that.

[00:13:12] Matt Bailey: Yes. And so, it, it’s you go out and you buy yourself a gift. It, it, it’s a reward for you. One day, $139 billion of sales. One day. And, and that is a lot of social commerce wrapped up in that one day, because it’s primarily done through Alibaba, which is huge in the Asian region for e-commerce, it’s, it’s basically the Amazon competitor over there. But they have focused it all on that one day. That, that’s bigger than our Black Friday.

[00:13:48] Greg Jarboe: Well, or, or Amazon Prime Day.

[00:13:50] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:13:51] Greg Jarboe: I, I think that may be the analog here. And people don’t think of Amazon as a social medium, but, you know, if you can get a lot of people to suddenly start purchasing stuff because you’ve invented a, you know, the equivalent of Black Friday, Black Friday was made up by the big box stores.

[00:14:11] Matt Bailey: Yeah, right.

[00:14:11] Greg Jarboe: Right? It’s like Cyber Monday, only a couple days earlier.

[00:14:15] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:14:15] Greg Jarboe: Or, you know, Small Business Saturday, another made up holiday. So, yeah. Yeah. One of the fun holidays that I’ve discovered that got made up was the one that 7-Eleven created where you can get a free slurpee. And, and, and guess which day of the year that is? It’s July 11, 7/11. Okay, cool. Whatever. So, yeah, marketers can make stuff up. That’s okay. And then end up motivating people to, you know, do something they might have done anyway, but if you gave them a, a, you know, free slurpy? Yeah, I think I’m going to try that out on, on July. I can, I can test that.

[00:15:07] Matt Bailey: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So, I, I, I always recommend take, take these numbers for social commerce very lightly and, and be aware, I, you know, how it compares to other channels. I, I just saw an article the other day, email is still the number one most persuasive channel. And when you look at how much revenue is generated by email, I, I think they were saying, HubSpot says it’s at 7.5 billion in 2020.

So, when you start stacking up some of these numbers and, and granted, they’re, they’re all coming from different organizations and it’s all going to depend on how you measure it, how it all comes out. But the key, as, as we just went through, you, you can’t throw it all on one campaign, one basket and expect it to be successful. It, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a strategic view of the entire market rather than just one distribution channel.

[00:16:01] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. So, know when your target audience interacts with which social medium, what kind of information they’re looking for, or do they just want to get entertained? That’s okay. Are, are, are they there to dig deeper into something that interests them? That’s okay. Are they there for, you know, product reviews? Well, they may need to look somewhere else.

You know, it, it’s, it’s, uh, it is a complex process and yes, you want to be providing different content at every touchpoint that you can, but again, you know, focus on the customer first, as opposed to, oh, some kind of narrow model of, “I’m going to push on the string here and of course things will move over there.”

[00:16:54] Matt Bailey: Well, a part of this is, is reputation management, and, and I think this is something we’ve talked about quite a bit, that even when we talk about people complaining online, it’s still a, a vast minority of users that are actively posting or complaining something. So, when it comes to reputation management and someone complaining about your company or a service or something like that, you know, that first level is just simply being aware that someone is saying something. They call that social listening.

But also realizing this is a, a minority, however, does tend to have a little bit of a snowball effect if other people feel the same way. That can very quickly turn into a tidal wave if you’re not paying attention or aware of what’s going on. So, maintaining those, you know, your, your social media program or setting up Google News alerts or something like that to have those triggers so that you know when someone is saying something about your company, maybe your, your CEO or leadership, or products itself, getting those keywords so that you know when they’re being talked about online and which channel the conversation is going on.

[00:18:08] Greg Jarboe: Oh yeah. And, and, and the most brilliant thing I think I’ve ever seen was posted, well, more than a decade ago by a friend of neighbor of mine, David Meerman Scott, and, and, and he did, did a blog post on the United States Air Force. And believe it or not, they have a posting response assessment chart so that if any member of the Air Force or any member of an Air Force family sees something in, in social media, there is a, you know, when to ignore it, when to respond, to report it to higher ups. It, it is a brilliant little chart. It is public domain, so I think I, I can send you a link and we can, we can, we can include it.

But, you know, here we are more than a decade later after this chart was created, it is still a brilliant thing that I would put on the wall of any social media marketer to say, you know, “Do not respond the same way to everyone.” Understand that…

[00:19:13] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:19:14] Greg Jarboe: …there are trolls and there are haters and sometimes, you know, “do not feed the trolls” is the right policy. But there are other times where if, you know, they’ve just alerted you to something that is, you know, a crisis, you better pass that on up the, uh, the chain, because this is one that you, you may need to respond to.

[00:19:36] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. And it always scares me when people say, and, and I think this used to be a joke. I, I, I pray it’s not the same way now where the in, you know, the youngest person on staff was the one in charge of social media. Typically, the intern runs the social media because that turns around, do you want an intern running your reputation management or your crisis response? And the answer is, of course, absolutely no. You don’t want that to happen.

[00:20:00] But that’s where having that policy, I, I love that example you gave there, having that policy is so key to how do you respond, when do you respond? Uh, and, and just some simple, you know, crisis management techniques of, of just a single voice for the company, a, bring in an expert when you need to.

But really even just on the, the small business level, what I have found is sometimes people simply want validation that their complaint, usually when it’s face to face or they get a phone call, they back down very quickly. They just want to be heard. And when they are heard, they’re validated and, and now, “Okay, we can have a conversation, let’s fix this.” So, usually, like you said, don’t feed the trolls, but engaging directly on social media and starting an argument, I don’t know when that’s ever turned out right.

[00:21:06] Greg Jarboe: Well, yeah, so, so that then means you, you, you need to have a policy and again, borrow the Air Force chart because it is really simple to say, you know, “Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no,” you know, “What should I do here?” But, but here, here, here’s, here’s what I got taught in crisis management, because reputation is one type of crisis. You know, it, it, it can tarnish your business image. Okay, fine. That’s, that, nobody will die, but your business will get hurt. Okay.

But that’s the second crisis that you have to worry about, which is, pardon me, people’s lives are at risk. And then all of a sudden you have an entirely different set of responses because if you say nothing, if you do not respond and oh, by the way, the flood waters are rising, the, the wildfire is, is threatening homes, the, you know, something unsafe is likely to cause people to be harmed and or killed, then, you know, you need to be a little more active. You need to be a little more prompt.

I got invited to speak to a white-water rafting association in Colorado. And they said, you know, “We have people sign waivers before they go on a white-water rafting trip.” And I said, “Oh yeah. Right. Legal liability. That’s not your only risk here.”

[00:22:39] Matt Bailey: No. Oh, wow.

[00:22:41] Greg Jarboe: You, you got, you got bigger problems than, “They’re going to sue me.” It’s, it’s like, you know, “Are, are you actually worried about their health and safety? What, what else have you done? How do you communicate that? How rapidly do you communicate it in, in a crisis?” So, yeah, reputation management and social media both move lightning fast, but it helps if you thought about it ahead of time and you recognize the patterns and say, “This is a crisis that threatens health and safety, this is a crisis that threatens my business reputation,” and you respond accordingly.

[00:23:21] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Yeah. That is probably one of the most critical things I think people underestimate about social media, especially businesses where they’re using social media, but the aspect of planning for a response and then having that hierarchy of response planning is, “This is life and limb. This is business reputation. This is a product. This is perception.” And understanding how to respond appropriately, having that plan up front, save you a lot of time and heartbreak down the road.

[00:23:55] Greg Jarboe: Yes. Yes.

[00:23:56] Matt Bailey: Alright, Greg, next on our agenda is social media advertising.

[00:24:02] Greg Jarboe: Oh no.

[00:24:03] Matt Bailey: Which only in the past…

[00:24:05] Greg Jarboe: Wait, wait…

[00:24:05] Matt Bailey: …few years has that been a, we’ve been forced into it.

[00:24:09] Greg Jarboe: No…

[00:24:10] Matt Bailey: I think about how many…

[00:24:11] Greg Jarboe: Wait…

[00:24:11] Matt Bailey: …years ago at the conferences…

[00:24:13] Greg Jarboe: So, so we…

[00:24:13] Matt Bailey: Yeah, go ahead.

[00:24:14] Greg Jarboe: We have to make them richer than they already are? Oh man.

[00:24:18] Matt Bailey: Oh, is it, yeah. That’s a great point. The conferences we attended years ago, I remember people talking about, “You have to be on Facebook. You have to be on these. You have to develop your organic presence.” And then one move by Facebook took away all that investment into creating an organic and, and creating an audience on the platform.

And I, I, you know, I was happy to see that because it’s, well, now this is what’s important to that platform, and, and if you didn’t see that coming, you were blissfully blind, my friend. They were going to monetize all of this because what they had was audience and data on the audience. And so, now your organic posting is maybe reaching 1-2% of your audience.

[00:25:06] Greg Jarboe: Well, well, actually it’s, it’s, the latest data which comes from Hootsuite is about 5.2% is the average reach on Facebook. Um…

[00:25:15] Matt Bailey: I think that’s still overestimating.

[00:25:18] Greg Jarboe: Well, let, let, let, let, let’s, let’s put it this way. You know, most of us would be delighted to have 5.2%. I think that includes a lot of people like Red Bull, who actually are above that and driving the number up.

[00:25:34] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:25:34] Greg Jarboe: But, you know, most of us are, are probably well under that. And, and that’s reach, that’s not an engagement rate. Engagement rates…

[00:25:42] Matt Bailey: Oh.

[00:25:42] Greg Jarboe: …have certainly dropped below 1%. But, but, you know, it’s, it’s almost as bad over on Twitter. One of the fun things that I just heard yesterday from an old friend of ours, you remember Rand Fishkin?

[00:25:57] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Oh yeah.

[00:25:58] Greg Jarboe: Well, Rand was doing a webinar and I was listening. I wasn’t participating. I was just, you know, you learn a lot by listening to these people. One of the things that he, he’s just done is create a new free tool called, oh, it was, it was a fake follower audit.

[00:26:15] Matt Bailey: Oh yes.

[00:26:17] Greg Jarboe: And he thought that with all the brouhaha being created by Elon Musk about fake followers on Twitter, you know, Twitter says it’s under 5%, Musk is not so sure. He wants to double check, you know, is it bigger. You know, Rand and put together a study. And what he discovered is, you know, “Houston, we have a problem.” It turns out that the percent of Twitter accounts that he found that were likely to be fake or spam was 19.4%, which is a lot bigger than the less than 5% number that Twitter announced. But here was the…

[00:27:01] Matt Bailey: Oh…

[00:27:01] Greg Jarboe: …fun…

[00:27:02] Matt Bailey: …of course. Yeah.

[00:27:03] Greg Jarboe: Here was the fun data point. He then took a look at Elon Musk’s Twitter account. And, you know, Musk has close to oh, a hundred million followers, which makes him the most followed CEO on Twitter.

[00:27:21] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:27:22] Greg Jarboe: And what Rand discovered was that 70.2% were fake or spam. Now, now…

[00:27:35] Matt Bailey: Not…

[00:27:36] Greg Jarboe: …uh, I under, I understand…

[00:27:37] Matt Bailey: Oh yeah.

[00:27:38] Greg Jarboe: …I understand this could be an issue, but the question is who, who would do these things?

[00:27:46] Matt Bailey: Well, it doesn’t take much. I, just creating a new account a few months ago, I, I started getting followers. I hadn’t even posted anything yet, but I’m getting followers and I’m getting followers who have less than three posts and, but they have thousands of followers. So, the, it, you know, I’m looking at this going, “Well, obvious bot activity.” I mean, that’s, that’s really what it comes down to.

And so, I know that the bots are so prevalent across every network. It was only a couple years ago it was reported that on YouTube there was so much bot activity that the engineers were afraid that humans would be marked as fraudulent because there was so much bot activity being picked up by their, their, their, their bot trackers. And they were afraid that it would, it would, humans would be the, marked as fake and start to be excluded from the system. But this leads into the whole concept of social media advertising, is this concept of ad fraud and how do my ads are being seen by fake accounts or fraudulent accounts?

[00:29:00] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[00:29:00] Matt Bailey: Um…

[00:29:00] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah. So…

[00:29:01] Matt Bailey: Especially when Facebook removes over a billion accounts a year.

[00:29:06] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah. So, one of the things that social media marketers need to focus on is metrics. And I know we’re going to spend a lot more time talking about measurement, you know, at the tail end of this, but let me just say, particularly whether you’re doing organic reach that isn’t reaching as a high a percentage as it used to, or you’re buying advertising to promote your posts because you’re trying to, you know, beef up your numbers, one of the things that you really, really, really need to think about long and hard is why are you doing this and how are you measuring your results?

[00:30:00] And if it is vanity, if it is ego, “I got to show big numbers because, you know, only big numbers are impressive,” that’s going to get you in trouble fast. And if you are only using the metrics that the social media platforms provide you, boy, do you get in trouble fast.

[00:30:14] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:30:14] Greg Jarboe: And, and, and do we want to dig deeper into advertising, or do we want to move right to metrics?

[00:30:21] Matt Bailey: That’s a good question. Let, let’s hit a little bit on the advertising. Let’s, let’s go to the positive side of, of, of advertising on social media and then, because it has to be connected to metrics. I think you’ve nailed it right there that if I’m just using the platform numbers, then all I’m doing is measuring “platform engagement.”

[00:30:43] Greg Jarboe: Well, no, no, no. What you’re doing is you’re getting sucked into, the platform wants you to buy more advertising.

[00:30:49] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:30:49] Greg Jarboe: Okay?

[00:30:50] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:30:50] Greg Jarboe: And so, the metrics are all built around, “Oh, you need more.”

[00:30:54] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:30:54] Greg Jarboe: “Oh, you got to spend more. Oh, oh…”

[00:30:57] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Well, it also means…

[00:30:59] Greg Jarboe: “Buy more today.”

[00:31:00] Matt Bailey: Right. And it also means you’re not driving to a destination, which…

[00:31:04] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[00:31:05] Matt Bailey: …and, and this is what I tell people, the whole purpose of social media if I am a marketer, I need to view social marketing as a way of building my audience. My audience, not on that platform, but driving them to a destination where they become mine. Getting their email address, signing up for something, joining, you know, joining, which, I’ll, I’ll plug this. Dear listener, we have a Slack channel, endlesscoffeecup.slack.

So, you know, building your own audience. So, using social media the way they use us, because they can’t survive without our content. And so, use that and I like to call it the, the judo method of using their momentum against them. “I’m going to put content on their network that will keep people there that will draw…”

[00:31:55] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[00:31:55] Matt Bailey: “…new people, and I’m going to draw those people to mine,” and advertising is a way to do that. And so, it is a way…

[00:32:02] Greg Jarboe: Yep. Yeah.

[00:32:02] Matt Bailey: …it is a valid method of, and, and it’s an effective method when done correctly.

[00:32:09] Greg Jarboe: Right. So, let’s, let’s talk about “correctly” because one of the things that social media can teach us, whether it’s organic content or it’s ad content, is what works and what doesn’t. And if you are measuring results and, and that can be increasing brand awareness or consideration or purchase intent, those are, those are one set of objectives that a lot of marketers have that are perfectly valid, or it’s to generate traffic or leads or sales, which is a perfectly, you know, valid way for direct marketing or performance marketing to drive results. One of the things you learn quickly is boring doesn’t work. Okay. Perfectly obvious, right?

[00:32:58] Matt Bailey: What?

[00:32:59] Greg Jarboe: But I can’t tell you how many people are still creating bad, boring content…

[00:33:06] Matt Bailey: Oh…

[00:33:06] Greg Jarboe: …organically or in advertising. Why? Because they think it’s some simplistic formula. “If I mention my brand name seven times in six seconds, miracles occur.” It’s, it, no, no, no…

[00:33:19] Matt Bailey: No.

[00:33:19] Greg Jarboe: …no, no…

[00:33:20] Matt Bailey: No.

[00:33:20] Greg Jarboe: …no, no. Storytelling works. And stories…

[00:33:24] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:33:24] Greg Jarboe: …are not necessarily about mentioning your brand a certain number of times in a certain number of seconds. Start off with a hook, start off with a, “Wow. I,” you know, “I, I, I, I want to pay attention.” And then, you know, it’s okay to tell the ups and downs. The, the cliff hanger formula still works, you know? And then, and people remember your stories long after they’ve forgotten whatever statistic you dropped on them.

[00:33:55] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:33:55] Greg Jarboe: And at that point, then you’re ready to build a more interesting relationship to say, now, if you want more, go here.

[00:34:05] Matt Bailey: One of my first lessons on, on YouTube, we developed a, a video campaign on YouTube for a library levy, and it wasn’t too popular in the community. So, we decided, well, let’s go to YouTube. Let’s, let’s start informing people.

And, and this was like one of the earliest campaigns I did and so I learned, because we, we targeted, we, we were looking at the data and what we found is women with children were much more sympathetic to funding the library. Older people who don’t have children did not want their taxes to go up to fund a library that in their mind they don’t use.

So, we targeted a video program. We, we targeted women with children, these, this age group, and as the data starts coming in, one of the things I, I loved about YouTube advertising is I can see what video they were going to watch when the ad appeared.

And all of a sudden, I start seeing a lot of ABC songs, learning the alphabet, tubers, Minecraft walkthroughs, and immediately having children in that same age, I’m saying, “Oh no, the kids are watching the YouTube channel.” The, they’re, they’ve got the iPad in their lap, and they are being entertained and they are watching the, the, the videos that we wanted them to see. So, that was, that was like one of the first examples.

Another example is, I’ll never forget. I, I turned on the TV and immediately there, there was a commercial that, that grabbed my attention, and it was about pets and dogs specifically. And this was a three-minute ad. Went well past the, the skip button and I was hooked. And, wow. I mean, great story, great hook, made me stay past the skip button. And the only way they could have done that is targeting me, my behavior, what we search for, our interests. That showed me right there, that, you, you know, this legacy thirty second ad thing, throw it out the window.

[00:36:09] Greg Jarboe: Oh yeah. And, and by the way, believe it or not, before the legacy thirty second ad, there was the legacy sixty second ad.

[00:36:17] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:36:18] Greg Jarboe: The, the whole arbitrary, “You have to tell your story in sixty seconds. Oh wait. Nobody can afford that anymore? Well, you have to tell your story in thirty seconds. Oh wait. You can’t afford that anymore? Fifteen seconds is the new standard.”

It’s, it’s like, okay. When you’re selling television time, everything had to be arbitrary in order to fit into the hour long, you know, programming concept. Well, on social media, the story can be as long as it needs to be until it gets boring.

[00:36:50] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:36:51] Greg Jarboe: And people will watch it as long as it’s interesting, and as soon as it gets boring, they’re out of there, which is, you know, not television behavior, but it is social media video viewing behavior.

[00:37:04] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:37:05] Greg Jarboe: And it’s interesting that there were a lot of people who thought, “Well, you got to keep it short. Why? Because the attention span of a goldfish is only eight seconds.” Well, if you have an audience of goldfish, then fine. That’s great. But guess what? There, there are people who will binge watch, you know, episode upon episode of TV shows for hours if they’re interested…

[00:37:30] Matt Bailey: Right

[00:37:30] Greg Jarboe: …in the story. So, a, a, a, again, a whole lot of formula has to get junked on your way to being a, an effective producer of video content, whether it’s an ad or it’s organic. And if you need inspiration among the people that you can go look at are the people who are either the YouTube stars or the Instagram influencers, or, you know, the TikTok creators who are getting content on a regular basis, and by regular basis, it’s almost daily. I mean, seriously, they’re creating content far faster than any social media marketer I’ve ever seen, but they’re creating engaging content. They’re creating entertaining content. They’re creating inspiring content. They are creating content that is changing people’s hearts, minds, and behavior.

And if you can even come close to doing what they’re doing, then you can be successful. And if you can’t come close, guess what? Maybe you need to rethink your social media marketing strategy and adopt an influencer marketing strategy because sponsoring people who can create engaging interesting content may get you farther faster than creating more boring corporate propaganda that mentions the brand X times in five minutes. Give me a break.

[00:39:05] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:39:06] Greg Jarboe: Give me a break.

[00:39:07] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Well, and, and what I do like about social media advertising is the ability and, and this gets to, you know, my experience of targeting demographics versus targeting needs. And this is what I like about every single platform is number one, when I’m setting up my targeting, it starts regionally. Do I want to target a regional area? Do I want to target a national, do I, you know, how big do I want to target? And that is so vitally important, especially for local companies or, or anything like that.

[00:40:00] But then it, it naturally most of these platforms will get you into demographics and targeting demographically. One thing I absolutely love is, is Dr. Augustine Fou, he was on the show a couple months ago and his, I, I loved it when he said, “Why would you target men instead of women? You’ve already excluded half your audience.” And the more you target by age, you’re excluding more and more people. So, it’s not your targeting, you’re excluding people who might be needing and wanting to buy. So, I love that aspect.

And especially on Google, YouTube, it’s built in, the behavioral targeting because they know what people are looking for. They know what they’ve searched for in the past week. So, if I’m targeting based on need, if I’m targeting based on behavioral aspects, this is what grabs your audience much more than focusing on the, the, you know, gender, age, whatever, all that demographic stuff.

[00:40:45] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. And, and, and, and gender and age was the only data that television could provide marketers back in the 20th century and so that’s why most traditional marketing is focused on demographics and, and it’s like, wow, okay. If that’s the only data you have then, then what is it? In the land of the blind, the one eye is king.

But one of the more powerful ways to tap into what your audience is actually already interested in, it can be discovered for free with a free tool that YouTube offers. It’s called “Find My Audience.” Boy, how’s that for a cryptic name? And, and one of the things it does is it says, “Look, you can find audiences by people who are in the market, they’re actively researching or planning to purchase products or services like yours.”

How, how does YouTube know this? Like you said, they know what you’ve been searching for on Google, they know what you’ve been looking at on your Chrome browser, oh, by the way, they know which videos you’ve been watching on YouTube. They know that you’re in the market for a car.

[00:41:53] Matt Bailey: Yep.

[00:41:53] Greg Jarboe: They know you’re planning a vacation. They got a pretty good idea what you’re in the market for and oh, by the way, guess what? They can serve up that audience that you can advertise to. People who you’re not trying to take from zero to a hundred, by the way, they’re already at sixty and you just need to move, move them the rest of the way. The other way that you can target are people who are in particularly affinity segments. These are people whose interests or habits, you know, relate to something your business offers.

So, again, in the travel segment, you know, there are people who are always planning their next trip. Well, maybe not so much in the last two years during the global pandemic, but you know what? They were traveling a lot and oh, by the way, they’re already planning to travel again as soon as it’s safe. So, their behavior may have changed. You know, the planning process may be a, a little longer than it used to be, but guess what?

We’ve, we’ve shown to basically either whether you’re in the tourism business for, for particular location or, or something else, you know, you, you can find out, you know, the, the people who are the avid travelers and, you know, the nickname that YouTube gives them is “travel buffs.” You know, and, and guess what? You can see what videos they watch, which channels they visit, you can target those specifically with your advertising, you know, guess what? You, you, you, you now are leveraging what customers want to do anyway.

[00:43:33] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:43:34] Greg Jarboe: You’re, you’re just helping them complete that journey by providing them with information about your brand or your service.

[00:43:42] Matt Bailey: One thing I love showing people is, and, and I’m amazed how many people don’t know this is there. If you go to your Google account and go to adsettings.google.com, you will see how Google sees you as a consumer. There will be some basic demographic information there, but then what you’ll find is probably 30 to 40 behavioral, uh, categories. And this is based on what you watch on YouTube, what you browse, what you search for, even also if you log into other sites with your Google account, this all gets added in.

So, you know, especially like you said earlier, Greg, if, if you’re logging in to go see the results of the basketball game, you want to go see the highlights, you do that enough and all of a sudden basketball is going to show up as an affinity group. You’re going to see a number of things. Now, it’s not always completely accurate. It’s based on your activity.

But one thing I found, so it had me down as cat, which I don’t like cats. I can’t stand cats. And we were trying to find a home for a cat, and because I’m on cat adoption sites, the next thing I saw in my ad settings, and I started seeing ads for cats and cat stuff. It’s because I was visiting these sites. So, I go into ad settings, I say, “Ah-huh, they think I like cats,” and I can turn that off. But it is amazing sometimes that if you, based on your YouTube watching…

[00:45:11] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[00:45:11] Matt Bailey: …they’ll just assign you into a group. And then all of a sudden, I, I notice I started seeing ads for horror movies. And, and go, “Why am I see-,” oh, go into the ad settings, and it’s because I went and watched a clip from an old movie years ago that I was showing to someone. And because of that single activity, it said, “You love horror movies.” So, it’s not always accurate, but it might answer some questions.

[00:45:35] Greg Jarboe: Well, yeah. And, and, and by the way, I have looked at my Google ad settings and yes, basketball is, is one of them and I have no problem with that whatsoever. But one of the other interesting things is it told me that I’m 35 to 44 years old.

[00:45:51] Matt Bailey: Oh, well, that’s, I mean…

[00:45:54] Greg Jarboe: Now, I don’t, that’s a lot younger than I would’ve guessed. I, I, I, and I thought, “Well, how could they possibly…? Right.” And the answer is, I’m a lot older than that. I have kids who are that old who have kids. They’re a lot younger, and sometimes the grandkids come over and watch things, watch YouTube on my laptop. So, guess what? I have the behavior you were talking about earlier of, uh, parents letting their kids, well, I, I, I guess I let my grandkids watch a little too much stuff on YouTube because they think, “Oh, you must be an irresponsible parent letting your, your kids…” No, no, no. I’m a irresponsible grandparent who, who are letting my grandkids use my, my laptop.

[00:46:50] Matt Bailey: I, I think though, Greg, I, I’m just going to put that out here. I think the age is from when you signed up on Google you had to give your birthdate. So, either it’s an algorithmically produced based on the behavior, or you may have put the wrong date as a birthday.

[00:47:08] Greg Jarboe: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Here, here’s, here’s the other thing.

[00:47:13] Sponsor: Hey everyone, this is Matt, and thanks for listening. Just a quick break in the middle of the podcast here to let you know there’s a couple ways that you can connect with us. The first is learn.sitelogic.com. That’s the learning site where you can see courses on analytics, courses on digital marketing across paid search, SEO, multiple disciplines, and then also you can connect with us on Slack.

Go to Slack if you’re there and look for us at endlesscoffeecup.slack.com. Connect with us. I’d love to hear from you, hear what ails you in the realm of digital marketing. Are there courses you need, information that you’d like to hear, or maybe some past guest that you’d like to hear more from? Thanks again for being a listener of the Endless Coffee Cup, and I look forward to hearing from you.

[00:48:09] Greg Jarboe: When I created YouTube channels, I had people who worked for me who were younger who put their age in.

[00:48:19] Matt Bailey: Let’s go with that.

[00:48:21] Greg Jarboe: Okay.

[00:48:22] Matt Bailey: Let’s go with that.

[00:48:23] Greg Jarboe: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:48:25] Matt Bailey: Yeah, I, I, interestingly, I mean, there’s so many different ways we can go into with the advertising and I think we’ve covered more of the strategic, which I think is the safe thing to do because, I, you know, I subscribe to a daily newsletter and every day something is changing tactically on these channels, especially Instagram. There, there is new features, new measurements, new, new products, new audi(ence), new ad formats. Things are changing weekly, if not daily, when you look at the sum total of advertising that you can do on social platforms.

And so, tactically, I, I, I put this on you, dear listener, dear reader, this is on you to know the tactics, but from a strategic standpoint, it, it’s all about your objective, how are you going to reach that audience? How are you also, and, and this one thing we didn’t really go into, Greg, is you can’t just pick one ad. You really have to plan almost a series of ads to tell that story because one ad may, depending upon how often people see it, if they’re on that network a lot, like your average Facebook or Instagram user, how often are they going to see that one ad? Are, you know, so that’s where we get into progressions of ads. That’s really…

[00:49:52] Greg Jarboe: Well…

[00:49:53] Matt Bailey: …the more that, that strategic view.

[00:49:55] Greg Jarboe: Yes. And, and, and I, we’re, we’re walking around it and walking around it. I think we’re going to have to go right to measurement.

[00:50:00] Matt Bailey: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:50:04] Greg Jarboe: Because if you aren’t measuring what matters, then you never know, “Oh,” you know, “This old ad wore out,” or, “This particular message didn’t resonate.” So, here are a couple of the vanity metrics…

[00:50:21] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:50:22] Greg Jarboe: …that the platforms give you and they’ve been giving you for years and years and years that you need to question, or you get into trouble. Are, are, are, are we ready to get into trouble?

[00:50:37] Matt Bailey: Let’s, let’s do it. And I like that, I like that we’re starting with the vanity. Let, let’s start with what not to do…

[00:50:43] Greg Jarboe: Yes.

[00:50:43] Matt Bailey: …and then we’ll get into what to do.

[00:50:45] Greg Jarboe: Well, well, you got to start with what not to do because everyone’s doing it.

[00:50:48] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[00:50:49] Greg Jarboe: Well, not everyone, but most everyone is doing it. And so, one of the things that you’ve got to question fundamentally is one of the ways that people will measure their reach, “How many people did I reach?” is they’ll use a number that Facebook initially called fans and now calls page likes, YouTube calls subscribers, Twitter calls followers, you know, different people have different, different platforms have different names for it, but it’s like, “You’re reaching this many people.”

Well, in the early, early, early days, that actually was literally true. But as all of the social media platforms have adopted algorithms because they can’t show everybody everything that they liked once upon a time, they now show you some of them.

[00:51:40] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:51:41] Greg Jarboe: All of a sudden, those old numbers, like your page likes, you know, get devalued, you know, they, you know, 5% maybe if you’re lucky and you’re doing well. Twitter, you know, if 70% of Elon Musk’s, uh, followers are fake, you know, do you counting fake followers? So, so again, you, you, you, you got to question those numbers. It is a harder thing to do to get real metrics around how many people you reached, and it’s people you reached. What, what happens if the same person watches your video seven times? Is that seven people you reached or one person who, you know, was passionate or…

[00:52:24] Matt Bailey: They’re…

[00:52:24] Greg Jarboe: …psychotic?

[00:52:25] Matt Bailey: …they’re a big fan.

[00:52:26] Greg Jarboe: Yeah, yeah. Or, or, oh my God, it was a bot, um, you know, whatever. So, one, one, one of the numbers that you have to question is fans and followers.

[00:52:37] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:52:37] Greg Jarboe: The other one that I see people getting into trouble with again and again and again is views. “Look how many views my video got.” And the answer is, “Okay, well, how do you define a view?”

[00:52:53] Matt Bailey: Right.

[00:52:53] Greg Jarboe: Because YouTube will define it as up to 30 seconds long, Facebook and Instagram will define a view as anything over three seconds long, and Instagram, as soon as the video starts playing, that’s a view.

[00:53:08] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:53:10] Greg Jarboe: So, pardon me, a view is not a view is not a view. It depends on which platform you are on and, you know, beg, per, I, I got to ask the question. How much time does it take for your message to sink in? Does it sink in in the first three seconds? Seriously? Even if someone’s scrolling in their feed and they are actually trying to get past whatever it is that you’ve interrupted them with to get to the post below, but it took longer than three seconds, so of, of course they were, that was a view?

So, again, a couple vanity metrics to sit on the shelf, to say, look, you know, you, you’re going to need something a little more meaningful than that if you’re going to use these as way of measuring your success.

[00:54:02] Matt Bailey: And I’m going to add one more on that and that is impressions. And on…

[00:54:07] Greg Jarboe: Yes.

[00:54:07] Matt Bailey: …a lot of platforms, sometimes it’s views, sometimes it’s impressions. It, it’s, it’s used almost interchangeably. But when I am doing my training and, and teaching analytics to marketing teams, I will give them a multiple choice option, “Define an impression,” and I give them five options. And it’s really interesting to see that I get a pretty consistent distribution of responses.

And what that tells me that as a team, they don’t have a single definition of what an impression is. And the problem is when I point out, “Okay, this is,” and, and I’ll walk through that. “What, what was it that made you answer this? What was it made you that?” And I point out that as a, as a human, we are thinking of an impression or view in a human term, which is, I physically saw it. That’s what it means.

Now, let’s go to Facebook and Facebook defines an ad impression as anything that is larger than zero pixels and seen for more than zero seconds. For Spotify, an ad on their network is anything that is listened to more than zero milliseconds. Right? So, now what happens is we have to change our definition that if I’m buying advertising on this network, and this is how they define it, then my team needs to adopt that definition, or at least understand that our definition doesn’t fit that definition.

And then when I’m reporting up the ladder, when I say a view or impression, what are they thinking? They’re thinking less and less in digital terms and more and more in human terms. And so, understanding the vocabulary and having an organizational definition that we all know what it is that we are buying, reporting, and making decisions on. And so, that’s the, the importance of understanding, you know, “Is my internal definition different than the, than who I’m buying from?” Because you could, you, you, you know, you could be buying something that you don’t really know.

[00:56:20] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and those are things that you do not want to take for granted and just use because they’re convenient and available. You, you really need to think about and adopt metrics that matter. So, maybe we, we, we should begin to segue to, “How do I get out of this?”

[00:56:42] Matt Bailey: “What do, what do I measure?”

[00:56:44] Greg Jarboe: “What do I measure?” So, so let me tell you there is an organization out there. The acronym is GVMA and that’s the Global Video Measurement Association, whatever. They were formed in about 2019. And they are trying to tackle the, the views problem by coming up with a standard definition of what is a view, and they’ve decided to call their metric a quality view as, as opposed to the garbage that we normally get. And their definition of a quality view is people watched it at least 30 seconds long. That’s a quality view.

[00:57:25] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[00:57:25] Greg Jarboe: Or if, if the video was shorter than that, then they watched it all the way to the end. So, that’s, that’s one definition. Another definition that GVMA is also working on, uh, is one to tackle the problem of reach. And what they’ve come up with is, particularly because they’re video oriented, is a definition of unique viewers and, you know, they have to go through a, a, a lot of data in order to get this, but one of the useful things about this data is it is cross-platform. So, if somebody watches some of your videos on YouTube and then they watch some of your videos on Facebook, it’s the same person, even though they’re on different platforms and those different platforms don’t share information.

And a, again, different concepts, different definitions, they have not been adopted as industry standards yet, but I would certainly encourage social media marketers who are serious about solving the problem, as opposed to, you know, just shrugging your shoulder and saying, “Well, that’s the way of the world,” is, is, you know, find out…

[00:58:45] Matt Bailey: Oh no. There we are.

[00:59:37] Greg Jarboe: Are we back?

[00:59:38] Matt Bailey: There we are. Okay.

[00:59:40] Greg Jarboe: Whoa. I must have said the bad word.

[00:59:45] Matt Bailey: You just ramping right up into you recommend…

[00:59:48] Greg Jarboe: Well, and…

[00:59:48] Matt Bailey: …marketers and then psh…

[01:00:00] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Pay, pay, yeah, exactly. Pay attention to the Global Video Measurement Alliance, GVMA. They are tackling the gnarly problems of if you do not know what a view is, how can you measure them? If you do not know what unique viewers are, how do you know how many you got? Those are not easy problems to solve, but they are an industry association, includes, you know, publishers as well as creators as well as, you know, measurement vendors. And, and they are in the position to be the most likely to solve this soonest, and oh, by the way, this is good, they just announced in, in, in the past month that they are now going to be tackling the social commerce measurement…

[01:00:41] Matt Bailey: Wow. Oh.

[01:00:43] Greg Jarboe: …and begin to identify what kind of content were people watching before they went off to buy something. So, it, it, it, it, you know, this is a group that is, again, it hasn’t been adopted as industry standard yet, but they are tackling the right problems.

[01:01:02] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. Because there is no industry standard. Every…

[01:01:05] Greg Jarboe: Right.

[01:01:06] Matt Bailey: …platform has their own definitions, their own metrics, their own, and, and the same, the same word is applied differently and defined differently…

[01:01:14] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[01:01:14] Matt Bailey: …on different platforms. So, I’m amazed that we are this far into this industry, and we have no standardized, even definitions start with, so I…

[01:01:23] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:01:23] Matt Bailey: …I’m really excited about that. I think that’s going to be great. One of the things that you and I have both been training marketers to do is based on our, our good friend Avinash Kaushik, who, who came up with these. And I absolutely love that he came up with these methods of measuring “engagement,” because typically people lump all of this stuff together, they add it up, and call it an engagement rate. Which completely, in my opinion, strips out all meaning because you have just lumped together very different actions and activities into one measurement, which now leaves you with the inability to take any action.

[01:02:11] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:02:11] Matt Bailey: Because it’s, it’s, it’s a useless measurement. So, let’s break down “engagement.” And I love to say engagement used to mean commitment. And now it means that someone saw something. That…

[01:02:23] Greg Jarboe: Well, it, it, let’s, let’s, let’s put it this way. It, it can, it can mean different things to different people as, and as you mentioned earlier, you know, that will get you in trouble faster than anything else. So, what, what, what Avinash did way back in 2011…

[01:02:39] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[01:02:41] Greg Jarboe: …he, he, and he used a blog post to define this term, God bless him. What he did is he coined three new terms that you should learn. And by you, I mean our listeners or our readers or whatever. It, it, it’s conversation, it’s amplification, and it’s applause. And if you haven’t heard them, that’s good because now you can begin applying definitions to them without stumbling over everyone thinks they think they know what an engagement is. So, an amplification is simple.

[01:03:16] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[01:03:17] Greg Jarboe: It’s, did they share it? You know, and it’s, it’s, it’s, oh, okay. Well, some people call it a share, some might call it a retweet, but at the end of the day, after reading your post or watching your video, did they take advantage of what virtually all social media provide, which is the ability to say, “I’m going to show this to everybody I know?”

[01:03:43] Matt Bailey: What I love about these metrics is it does, it, it, it examines that specific behavior. And so, to, to give an example, I would look at my past month or my past 3 months or depending upon how often you post, take, take your past, you know, I, take, look at the past quarter, 3 months. If I made 40 posts on that specific channel over the past 3 months, I would add up all of the comments, all of the shares, all of the likes, and then I would divide that by the number of posts.

So, now I have a conversion or conversation rate of all the comments, amplification rate of all of the shares or retweets, and the applause rate of all the likes or reactions. Now, what this gives me, and, and here’s where we turn this into action. What this gives me is an average, a baseline, and I can now go back. So, if I got an average of 5 shares per post, I’m going to go back and look at all those 40 posts and I’m going to look at, “Well, wait a minute. I got, 10 of my posts got 20 or more shares. What was the consistent factor? Was it a specific news story? Was it, you know, an event? What, what was going on here and can I tie a thread through that?” And then also look at, “Well, what, what got no shares? What were the consistent factors there?”

So, now I can do this to comments. I can do this to likes. I can group them and find the consistent factors because now I have a baseline to compare to. And now for the next quarter, I use that baseline and the average, and as I adjust my creative and adjust my messaging, do I see results in these 3 metrics that show that I am improving in my “engagement” with my audience?

That’s why I love let’s, let’s measure what it does and, and also the additional thing about amplification with shares, I can put a, a, a value on that, Greg. That’s why I love it. ‘Cause if I’m paying a CPM, cost per mille, to advertise on that channel, I can go look and see, “Well, people who shared or retweeted, how many people did that reach?” And then I apply my CPM and now I’ve got a value to, and, and I can show a value to that, that share, and I’m bringing it into an economic impact, which is ultimately where we need to drive all measurement.

[01:06:34] Greg Jarboe: Yes. And, and it turns out not only do we need to adopt these metrics and distinguish among them, it, it turns out even the, the platforms are doing the same thing. So, Facebook freaked everybody out in January of 2018 when they announced what the industry calls the “Facebook Feed Apocalypse.”

And what, what, what they acknowledged was is that their engagement metrics were a little whacked. They needed to readjust them. And what they did was they downgraded the likes and reactions. There were too many people who were liking it, and that really didn’t mean that much.

[01:07:14] Matt Bailey: Right.

[01:07:15] Greg Jarboe: And they upgraded comments ’cause they thought that was actually more important and, and, and had been undervalued in the past and they maintained the shares, which were, continued to be important, but they just didn’t adjust that much. So, so again, you know, even the Facebook was using these kind of metrics to recognize that we need to make adjustments in the algorithm of what we show to users.

So, guess what? You, too, should distinguish between them and oh, by the way, if Facebook changes their algorithm, those are the levers they’re pulling. They may tweak the algorithm differently, but those are the levers that they can focus on. So, guess what? You, you, you can focus on them and, and make adjustments going forward.

[01:08:08] Matt Bailey: Yep, absolutely. And I noticed that on, on all the channels, LinkedIn especially, YouTube, they are adding interactive elements. I would love to know, for example, how many people save a post in LinkedIn? That is a great, great measure. There is, they’re adding more and more ways that you can interact with a post or an ad, and I, I see that coming, that there’s going to be some more measurements. They’re obviously using them in the algorithm to determine who gets the visibility. But I would like to see a little bit more coming from that and, and, because that’s the only way these platforms can really justify what they provide in terms of service to an advertiser or to a user.

[01:08:47] Greg Jarboe: Well, and, and increasingly they’re moving beyond CPM or cost per thousand to CPC, to cost per click, to CPA, cost per action. And that then gets to the economic value, why, why that is such an important metric. Increasingly, it will become more important and social media marketers are going to have to struggle with this ugly transition between now and then, but guess what? You’re struggling in the right area, because this is where the money is. Or, or as Willie Sutton, a famous bank robber from the 1930s, when he was arrested and said, “Willie, why do you rob banks?” He said, “Because that’s where the money is.”

So, if you are not measuring economic value, learn to. And one of the things that that may require you to do is to, again, connect the dots as, as Matt said eloquently at the beginning of this podcast. You need to think beyond your social media platforms.

[01:10:00] And if people need to come to your website before they can buy your product or generate a lead for your sales force, or, you know, doing something that can be monetized, you know, buy your t-shirt, whatever it is, then figure out how to create that conversion event and add a, an associated monetary value to it, and then associate that with, “Okay, which social media video, which social media post generated that economic value? And oh, by the way, how much did I generate this month, this quarter? And, oh, by the way, is that more or less than the last year?” And now, now when the so-called social eCommerce trend takes off, you’re in a position to measure what matters.

[01:10:50] Matt Bailey: Yeah. In my training, I do an informal poll asking people what their frustrations are about analytics. And especially when I’m, I get a lot of social media brand managers coming in, their number one frustration or their number one need is to justify what they do in social media. And the problem is, as we go through what they’re doing in analytics is they’re bringing platform metrics. They’re not connecting these plat-, all this activity, they’re, I think we talked this, they’re reporting on their activity.

[01:11:23] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:11:23] Matt Bailey: “Here’s how busy I am.”

[01:11:25] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:11:25] Matt Bailey: “Here’s how many posts I made. Here’s,” and, and, and, and if you want to be dismissed out of a, an important meeting, talk about engagement.

[01:11:34] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:11:34] Matt Bailey: Um, no one wants that.

[01:11:36] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:11:36] Matt Bailey: And until you’re translating all of this into dollar signs…

[01:11:41] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:11:41] Matt Bailey: …nobody cares.

[01:11:43] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Here’s, here’s the terminology I use, ’cause guess what? I, I ran into exactly the same phenomena. So, too many people are measuring inputs. You know, “How many, how many hours I spend on this project.”

[01:11:56] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[01:11:56] Greg Jarboe: More people need to spend more time measuring outputs, that’s then where the amplification or, you know, conversation or, you know, applause rates fit in. But ultimately, what they want to do is begin measuring outcomes, and that’s where the economic value comes in. So, inputs, eh, who cares. Outputs, interesting because it tells you what you need to do to be more effective, but outcomes? That’s what people are paying your salary for, that’s what people are paying the budget for your social media marketing program, you know, assuming, and so, you know, move from inputs to outputs and then move from outputs to outcomes.

[01:12:40] Matt Bailey: Well, and that necessarily requires better KPIs. Now, I don’t know if you saw, Greg, last year the ANA the, the Association of National Advertisers published a report called “KPIs that Matter.” Number one most important KPI that was listed by ANA members was return on ad spend, ROI, customer lifetime value, and I’m going through that list of most important saying, “Yes, yes. That’s great.” Then they get, then they ask the question, “What KPIs do you use the most?” You ready for this? Num…

[01:13:15] Greg Jarboe: None of the above. None of the above.

[01:13:17] Matt Bailey: Number one KPI, used the most, CPM. And I said, now here’s where my nerdiness comes out because CPM is not a KPI. And after that alphabet soup, let’s get down to it because that was listed as the 21st most important KPI, but it’s the most used. Second was cost per click. Site visits is in the top five. So, you know, it, it blows my mind that we need to get better on KPIs and understanding what is the true purpose of a KPI.

[01:13:47] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Yeah. And I have a story to share on this that comes from my father. My father was a director of marketing at Oldsmobile. Now, some of you are too young to remember what an Oldsmobile was. It was a car. Okay? It had been around for more than a hundred years. And he became the, uh, director of marketing back in the 1980s when many of you hadn’t been born yet.

So, one of the things that he did is he launched a TV campaign, the theme of which was, “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile.” And it was really ironic for me because it was my father’s Oldsmobile, but we won’t go into that. It won awards at the time, it became a meme before memes were a term that people bandied about, you know, anybody and everybody from Ringo Starr to William Shatner had to have, you know, they and one of their children in a, you know, “It’s not your father’s Oldsmobile” commercial because it was the place to be seen.

Great. Terrific. Sales went down. In fact, for 3 years, the campaign kept winning awards and sales went down and went down and went down. By the end of 3 years, Oldsmobile was selling half the number of cars per year that they had been selling before the campaign had launched. And my father asked his ad agency, Leo Burnett, you know, big name, you know, great reputation, “How are we measuring success?”

And their answer was, “CPs. Gross rating points.” And my dad said, “How many GRPs do we need to sell a car?” And the agency couldn’t answer the question because there is no correlation between how you buy media, which is a gross rating point so you know how much you’re going to pay, and theoretically the reach and frequency that that TV commercial will be shown. And oh, by the way, the impact of that commercial on awareness, on preference, on sales, no correlation. No correlation whatsoever.

And as a result, I learned the hard way from my father, you need to measure the right things. Not GRPs, not impressions, not, you know, any number of angels that can dance on a pin. What, what, what you need is, you know, this move the needle in a way that ultimately generates revenue and profit for my organization.

[01:16:46] Matt Bailey: That, well, and I think you hit the key on the head that generates revenue and profit for my organization, because I think that story is so good at showing how sometimes the industry is completely disconnected from the average consumer. That this, this campaign got awards. It did amazing things, and it was so well known, but it didn’t do what it was supposed to do for…

[01:17:11] Greg Jarboe: Well…

[01:17:12] Matt Bailey: …the customer, for the agency…

[01:17:14] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:17:14] Matt Bailey: …for Oldsmobile.

[01:17:15] Greg Jarboe: It, it, it, it actually ended up doing two things they shouldn’t have done, one of which is remind young people that Oldsmobile was their, you know, father’s car and they didn’t want, want to be caught dead in an old fogey mobile. And, and, and it told older loyal Oldsmobile customers, “Oh, they’re making changes, I guess this isn’t for us anymore.”

[01:17:38] Matt Bailey: Ohh. Wow.

[01:17:39] Greg Jarboe: And, and, and so, they were unselling and again, nobody will tell you that advertising can unsell your prospects as fast as it can sell them. Nobody, nobody likes to discuss that part of the proposition, but that’s why you need to measure what matters.

Not impressions, you know, not GRPs, you know, not views, you know, not whatevers, but you know, again, if it’s awareness building, there are ways that both Facebook and YouTube and Twitter will offer brand lift studies that says, “Okay, here was the awareness of your product before your campaign. Here was the awareness of your product after your campaign.” Okay. Now you know that you increased or lifted, oh, brand awareness or consideration because everyone already knew about your brand, but they just weren’t thinking about it at, at, you know, in this particular context.

[01:18:41] Matt Bailey: Yeah.

[01:18:41] Greg Jarboe: Or more importantly, here is your purchase intent. People have decided, “You know, it’s really time to get a new car.” So, those are the measures that matter, but guess what? They require, require you to conduct a survey or multiple surveys before and after to, to, to get those metrics.

Or if you’re in a performance marketing campaign, then it’s not just traffic to your website. It’s, you know, how many leads did you generate and what percentage of those leads converted to sales? How long did that take? Oh, by the way, how much did that cost? And if you can calculate it, are you going to hang onto that customer for any length of time? Will they rebuy from you? Therefore, what is your lifetime, you know, value? There’s a whole ‘nother set of metrics down there, but that’s the stuff to focus on.

[01:19:38] Matt Bailey: Absolutely. And, and I’m so surprised. Now, a, a lot of people, they’ll, they’ll debate if the funnel is dead, but I still like the funnel because it’s a process. We’re, we’re asking people to do something, to take an action. And that’s where I like KPIs that focus on what’s, what are we asking them to do and how many people did it? And where I see a disconnect with marketers is they’re great at copying and pasting data. We’re great at logging in, “Let’s copy this data table, put it in another, a PowerPoint and let’s send it on,” and that, that is great if, if your skillset is copying and pasting.

[01:20:00] But what managers want to know is why did this happen and what do you recommend? And this is where marketing fails to get that seat at the table, because it is so conceptual and we’re, we’re talking about likes and engagement rather than, “I made this many people do something and here’s the economic value of it.”

And so, it, it gets to the, the, you know, we talk about the, the, the action dashboard versus the crappy dashboard. The, the action dashboard is when I understand how a KPI works. And by that, I mean, let’s take our engagement metrics of, of conversation and amplification. If I am making posts and I see that there is very little engagement, very few comments, very few shares, very few likes, my first step is to say, “Okay, well, why? Why does no one, why is no one engaging with this? What are the influencing factors that create comments, shares, and likes?” And really it, it comes down to, I, I, I like, two factors. It, it’s your, it’s your picture and your headline. It’s, or as you said, it’s boring.

[01:21:39] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:21:39] Matt Bailey: Nobody cares.

[01:21:41] Greg Jarboe: Or, or worse than boring, it’s corporate propaganda.

[01:21:45] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[01:21:46] Greg Jarboe: And if you think that your job is to push corporate propaganda into more channels, then that will make you more successful, you’re working on an old model that’s leftover from the 20th century of how mass media was supposed to work, and, you know, it, it’s basically treating your prospects and customers the way Pavlov treated his dogs, you know? “If, if, if I can get you to salivate, I’m going to sell more dog food. Yay.”

[01:22:21] Matt Bailey: Right, right. Yeah. So, now if I know those influencing factors and I’m not getting an engagement, so what I have to do is I have to change my, change my headline, change my image. And, now by identifying those influencing factors, I now know what to target if I want to change this. And so, I can test it. I can bring in more creative. I can try a couple of different things. And if, once I start to move that needle, great, fantastic. Well, the next thing…

[01:22:50] Greg Jarboe: Yep.

[01:22:50] Matt Bailey: …that I’m asking people to do is click. If I’m not getting a good click-through rate, and this is where I need to have something to compare to, need to have a benchmark, a comparison, if I’m not getting a click-through rate, well, that means my offer isn’t clear. My call to action may not be effective. And so, understanding what those influencing factors are enable me to manage a campaign because I have the KPI and I know what influence, well, it’s called a key performance indicator, so I need to know what does it indicate and how does it affect performance? If you don’t know those, then it’s not a KPI. It’s a metric. It’s, it’s, it’s just a number.

[01:23:33] Greg Jarboe: Yeah.

[01:23:33] Matt Bailey: You’ve got to know what influences each measurement at every stage so that you can affect that measurement.

[01:23:40] Greg Jarboe: Otherwise, you end up trying to measure a fish by its ability to climb a tree.

[01:23:48] Matt Bailey: I like that.

[01:23:48] Greg Jarboe: And guess what?

[01:23:49] Matt Bailey: I like that metaphor.

[01:23:50] Greg Jarboe: Yeah. Well, it’s actually, I think it, it’s attributed to Albert Einstein of all people, but one of the things that you need to understand and whether you use the funnel or you use the buyer’s journey, there’s, there’s a lot of different models out there, but all of them are based on this understanding that, that it is a process. It’s not a one-time event and if you try to move people too rapidly, they feel pushed. What you can do is gradually encourage them to take whatever the next step is in their journey. And their journey may take longer than you think.

I’ve, I’ve seen some data from Google and, and think with Google that says that one woman who is planning a vacation took 110 days and 2,000 different digital touchpoints before she decided to go to Niagara Falls. You know, and, and even after she got to Niagara Falls, she continued doing searches because then she started looking for, “Things to do Near Me.”

[01:24:56] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[01:24:56] Greg Jarboe: So, so the process may be longer and more convoluted and have more steps in it and your ability to interact with people as, as they return again and again for different information or related information, you know, building that relationship is really where social media can shine. And it doesn’t, if again, you see it only as a push medium.

[01:25:25] Matt Bailey: The final stage in, in reporting is, well, I would say it’s the reporting. It, it’s, it’s who are you reporting to? You see, if I’m, if I’m reporting information to a product manager, they typically will have access to as much data as I have and so, I can be more technical. I can share more data graphs, data tables, because they know how to read it. They’ll understand and they can respond to it.

But if I am reporting up to the sea level, I do not use dozens of platform metrics. I don’t use dozens of data tables. I get down specifically to economic impact. I have less data and more explanation, more recommendation, more economic impact because what they want at that sea level, they want you to be quick, concise, to the point, and if you can speak in dollar signs, you’ve made them happy.

[01:26:28] Greg Jarboe: Or it doesn’t have to be dollar signs. There are parts like world where dirhams work or…

[01:26:33] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[01:26:33] Greg Jarboe: …euros work, or, you know, you, you, pick the currency of your choice.

[01:26:37] Matt Bailey: Absolutely.

[01:26:38] Greg Jarboe: But at the, but the end of the day, you know, top management needs to understand if I’m a publicly traded company, I got to report revenues and earnings…

[01:26:48] Matt Bailey: Yes.

[01:26:48] Greg Jarboe: …in 90 days, are we going to, are we going to make it or do we need to lay people off and cut budgets and oh, by the way, is your budget the first one we should cut? So, one of the things that you will want to learn absolutely is to the extent that you can get beyond the outputs that the product managers will love, because that, they, as, as Matt says, they love to dive into the, those details. It turns out that top management is all focused on outcomes. Show me the money.

[01:27:26] Matt Bailey: That’s a great way to end this social media marketing segment, Greg, because I don’t think enough people focus on that end outcome. And so, thank you again for your time and this has been, Greg, this has been probably one of the more fun, you know, it turned into a series. Hopefully we are still relevant in 3 days or 3 weeks and, this is, uh…

[01:27:46] Greg Jarboe: Well, you, you, you could stamp us with a “Best if Used By” date.

[01:27:51] Matt Bailey: Well, I think the key is we, we stayed focused on strategy and the tactics are going to change tomorrow, but understanding the strategy of how to use social media in your organization is going to be the key. What channels, how you use the channels, that is all things that are going to change weekly, monthly, you know, again, just, but the more strategically you use social media, the more you’ll find that your skills are in date more often.

[01:28:21] Greg Jarboe: Well, or they’re never out of date. I mean, yeah. But yes, we’ll, we’ll stamp the date here, best if used by today.

[01:28:32] Matt Bailey: Yes. Absolutely. Alright. Greg, hey, thanks for joining me. It’s been a great conversation as always. And dear listener, thank you so much for joining us here on the Endless Coffee Cup. I hope you enjoyed the conversation and I look forward to seeing you again on another edition of the Endless Coffee Cup.

[01:28:52] Bumper Intro-Outro: This podcast is heard along the Marketing Podcast Network. For more great marketing podcasts, visit marketingpodcasts.net.

Featured Guest:

Greg Jarboe

CEO & Co-Founder, SEO-PR

LinkedIn: Greg Jarboe | LinkedIn

Twitter: Greg Jarboe | Twitter

Greg Jarboe is featured in other episodes:

Endless Coffee Cup: “Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 1”

Endless Coffee Cup, “Defining Social Media Marketing, Part 2”

Endless Coffee Cup: “Why is SEO so Undervalued?”

Endless Coffee Cup: “How to Create Amazing Content on YouTube”

Endless Coffee Cup: “YouTube’s Secret Sauce”

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