MackCollier.com

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 17: Customer Acquisition vs Customer Cultivation

TheCommunicationGap

This is a graph I drew to give you a visual representation of The Communication Gap between most companies and their customers.  The blue shading on the left represents the desired level of communication from the company’s side.  The company wants to communicate with almost all new and potential customers.  The number of existing customers the company wants to communicate with falls sharply, and the company makes little effort to communicate with its customers that have some brand affinity, and its brand advocates.

On the right side, the red shading represents that customers that do want to communicate with the company.  It’s almost all brand advocates, some customers with brand affinity, then a sliver of existing and new customers.

But note the purple sliver at the bottom.  This represents customers that want to communicate with the company, and that the company is communicating with them.  Also note that the company tries to communicate with its customers when they aren’t looking for communication (new and existing customers) then when they are wanting to connect (when they develop some affinity for the brand and become advocates), the company stops trying to talk to them.  It’s completely backwards and creates a huge communication gap in the middle of the customer’s journey from being a new customer to becoming an advocate.

When it comes to communication there’s a massive disconnect between what customers want and what companies are giving them.  The reason why is because companies are focused on customer acquisition when they should be focused on customer cultivation.

And that’s what I’ll be talking about during this episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show!

Show Notes:

0:40 – The disconnect between customer acquisition and customer cultivation.

1:00 – Companies focus on acquiring new customers, but do little to cultivate existing customers.

1:30 – An explanation of The Communication Gap graph, which is posted above.

4:15 – Most of us do not want to talk to brands that we have no affinity toward.  ‘Your brand is not my friend.’  But if I am an advocate for your brand, I do want to connect with you.

5:00 – There needs to be a balance between focusing solely on acquiring new customers, and cultivating existing ones.  Customer cultivation helps transition existing customers into advocates for your brand.

6:10 – Can your company connect with me on a bigger level than simply your product?

6:40 – Notice how the orange shaded area almost perfectly overlaps the customers that rock stars focus on.  Rock stars do the exact opposite of companies, they focus almost solely on marketing to current fans, vs new customers.

7:45 – The Communication Gap is basically a hole where customers leave you.

9:00 – The value of creating a communication plan that focuses on the differing communication needs of each type of customers, to help new customers transition to eventually becoming brand advocates.

11:00 – We trust fellow customers more than we do a brand we have no connection with.

 

Here’s where you can download the episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.  Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well! Thanks for listening!

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 16: Building Better Word of Mouth

Hey y’all! Welcome to another episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show.  This is the business podcast devoted to helping your company create and cultivate new fans, as well as helping you better connect with your existing fans.  Today’s episode talks about Word of Mouth, and the different types of WOM.  Did you think that all WOM, even all positive WOM is the same?  It definitely is not, and this episode talks about how WOM is different based on the customer and how to cultivate the best WOM among your fans.

Show notes:

1:00 – The business value of Word of Mouth

1:20 – Different types of Word of Mouth created by customers

1:45 – Better Word of Mouth is more effective WOM.  But what constitutes ‘better’ Word of Mouth?

3:00 – Customers that have more in-depth knowledge of your products can create better Word of Mouth about your products.

5:10 – Most companies leave their ‘high-level’ fans alone, but these fans create the best WOM, and should be encouraged.

6:10 – What can you do to improve the understanding and WOM generated by your customers that only have a basic understanding of your products and how to use them?

8:00 – There are levels to Word of Mouth. Fans that have a better understanding of your products create ‘better’ WOM.  Think of 101 level understanding creating 101 level WOM vs 401-level understanding creating 401-level WOM.

9:00 – What can you do to move the 101-level fans up to 201, then 301 then 401-level?

 

As always, #FanDamnShow’s amazing opener and closer is produced by the fantabulous Kerry O’Shea Gorgone.

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.  Also, #FanDamnShow is now available on Stitcher as well! Thanks for listening!

 

 

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For February

For every month in 2015, I’ve set specific goals for growing my blog readership, and podcast audience.  The end goal is that by December this blog will have at least 100,000 visitors for that month, and the podcast will be downloaded at least 10,000 times for December.  Every month I am going to write a post like this recapping how I did in the previous month, and share any lessons I have learned.  The goal is to help you learn how to build a blog readership and podcast audience as I do.

First, here were my goals for February:

Blog – At least 54,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 850 downloads

Now right off the bat I have to admit that I forgot when setting both goal amounts that there were only 28 days in February.  Oops!  My goals for last month should have been about the same as January.

Which is part of the reason why I didn’t hit either goal.

Let’s start by looking at how the blog did in February:

My total blog traffic for February was 50,225 visitors, averaging 1,794 visitors a day.  My average daily traffic in January was 1,735 visitors a day, so traffic increased slightly last month.

Here’s where my traffic came from in February:

Organic Search – 81.3%

Direct – 11.3%

Referral – 4.1%

Social – 3%

Email – 0.3%

 

Organic Search traffic went down slightly, and everything else went up slightly.  I am hoping that trend continues in March.

Posts written in February – 10.  My goal was to have at least 2 posts a week, so I hit that goal.  For March, I’m going to bump that goal up to at least 12 posts and 3 a week.

One of the things I’ve noticed about having goals for the blog for this year is that it’s forcing me to pay more attention to all the details.  Also, it’s prompting me to always look for ways to improve the experience here, which will improve the numbers.  One of the nagging issues on this blog has been slow load times. Up until a couple of weeks ago, it typically took over 6 seconds to load a page on this blog.  I’ve known for a long time that such a high load time was creating a subpar experience for many visitors, and a lot of people were probably leaving before the blog even loaded.

There were two main reasons for the slow load times:

1 – I was using Godaddy’s ‘Economy’ hosting.  The economy hosting is shared, meaning that it’s stuck on a server with hundreds if not thousands of other sites, which creates longer load times for all those sites.  A big reason why I never switched to a faster hosting method was because I was scared to death of the migration process.  I was afraid it would break my blog.

2 – The 2nd reason for the long load times were all the plugins I had.  Plugins do two things for your blog: They add functionality, and add load time.  So every plugin is a tradeoff between increased functionality for you and your readers, and increased load time.  I had always focused on the increased functionality, and ignored the increased load times.

 

So a couple of weeks ago I put my foot down and decided that it was time to get the load times for this blog down drastically.  When I started checking with a site called Pingdom, the blog was loading in a range of 5.5 to 6.5 seconds.  So an average of about 6 seconds to load.  Insanely high.  Here’s what I did to lower load times:

1 – I switched from Godaddy’s Economy Hosting to Managed WordPress Hosting.  This immediately shaved 1 to 1.5 seconds off the load times.

2 – I disabled any unnecessary or redundant plugins.  This saved 0.5 to 1 second of load time.

3 – I added the WP Smush.It plugin.  This plugin optimizes the images used on your blog.  More images means more time to load, and this plugin strips out any uncessary bits and bytes to make the images smaller and quicker to load.  This lowered the load time by about half a second.

4 – I turned off pingbacks.  This saved another 0.5 to 1 second off load times.

5 – I disabled the Jetpack plugin.  This saved another 0.5 to 1 second off load times.  This one was a big tradeoff.  The Jetpack plugin had a lot of functionality I needed, but that load time of an extra second or so was a lot.

6 – I changed the frontpage option to only display 3 posts instead of 7.  7 posts means more stuff to load, and longer load times.  This saved 0.5 to 1 second.

 

So at this point when the smoke had cleared, here’s how fast my blog was loading:

SIteSpeed4My blog had gone from loading in over 6 seconds, to loading in 3 tenths of a second!  That is freaking FAST.  Now that was with almost no plugins other than the bare essentials activated.  I wanted to strip out all of the fat, and get the blog loading as fast as possible.  I also wanted to give myself some leeway, because I would need to add a few plugins back, and those would bump the load times back up a bit.

The first problem I noticed was, I had no sharing buttons here.  Gotta have sharing buttons.  So I started researching sharing plugins, I specifically wanted a plugin that would add sharing buttons before the post, but also I wanted a plugin that wouldn’t add much load time.  I quickly discovered the Premium plugin Social Warfare.  The plugin got very good reviews, and I noticed that the developers promised ‘virtually instant load times’.  So I went with it and am using it on the blog now.  I really like it so far, and I’ve noticed it added about 3 to 7 tenths of a second of load time to my blog.  Which is pretty low.

So at this point, my blog is consistently loading in 0.7 to 1 second.  Very fast.  So what’s an ideal load time?  It really depends and you’ll hear a lot of different answers.  Personally, I think your goal should be to get your load time down to 2 seconds.  If it only takes 2 seconds to load your blog, most visitors probably won’t even notice that.  But if it takes you 3 seconds or longer, that can quickly become an irritant.  You can use Pingdom to check your site’s load time.  Don’t fret if your load time is over 3 seconds, the odds are you can make some very simple and quick changes to your blog to get that load time down by at least a second.

Podcast Numbers and Overview for February      

I made the same mistake in setting my podcast goal for February as I did with my blog: I forgot that there were only 28 days in February.

Goal for February – At least 850 downloads.

Actual number of downloads for February – 574

Oops.  This wasn’t even close.

Here’s the podcast daily downloads over the last 6 months:

PodcastNumbersFeb

Now, there’s an explanation for why the numbers were down in February for podcast downloads.  In January I started to notice that my laptop’s keyboard was acting funky.  By early February it had gotten really bad, so I decided it was time to get a new laptop.  I found a Dell laptop that had all the bells and whistles I needed, but the problem is that it was a brand new model, and as such it wasn’t available at retailers yet.  The only option was to have Dell build me one, which would take 2-3 weeks to build and ship to me.  Ok fine, I ordered it.  And sure enough, a couple of days after I ordered it, my old Dell laptop officially kicked the bucket.  Which meant I couldn’t publish new podcast episodes until I got the new laptop.  So I was only able to publish two new podcast episodes in February.  I have the new laptop now so starting this week I’ll have regular episodes up again.  But this taught me a valuable lesson: Have a few episodes of the podcast recorded ahead of time to avoid a problem like this in the future.

So that’s how my February went here on the blog and with my podcast, The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show. My goals for March are:

Blog – At least 58,000 visitors

Podcast – At least 1,100 downloads.

I’ll share my results with you in one month!

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Google is Now Indexing Tweets in Search Results, What it Means For You

Google’s love affair with Twitter is back on.  Previously, Google had indexed tweets from Twitter in its search results, but that deal ended in 2011.  Here’s a post I wrote back in 2011 that examined how this process worked.  Earlier this month it was reported that Google would begin adding tweets back to search results sometime in the first half of 2015, but it looks like it’s already underway.

Here’s a screenshot from a google search I did for the name of my marketing podcast.  Note the 6th and 7th results on the first page are tweets I left:

FanDamnTweetsGoogleThis means that content you create on Twitter (tweets) is now being indexed into search results alongside posts that appear on your blog or white papers on your website.

It also means that you now have another channel to seed your content into Google search results.  One of the issues that many blogging businesses face is a difficulty in getting content to rank high in Google results.  It typically can take years to build a business blog to the point where content ranks well in search results.

But if you have a large following on Twitter, that could mean that your tweets rank higher in search results than blog posts you write on the same topics.  You can leverage your following on Twitter to help build your audience for your blog.

Another way to use Twitter to help your blog (and this has nothing to do with Google indexing tweets) is to leverage your business discussions on Twitter as potential topics for your business blog.  I am constantly doing this, I will use Twitter as sort of a ‘sounding board’ to see which topics are important and interesting to others.  Participating and even lurking in Twitter chats is a great way to do this.  By following a Twitter chat that’s focused on topics that are relevant to your blog, you can get a better sense for which topics interest potential readers of your blog.  Which can lead to more content ideas for your blog, which will make it easier to hit your content creation goals.

Have you noticed that tweets are showing up in Google results?  Has it impacted any search terms your blog has ranked for in the past?

 

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 15: Sometimes the Customer is Wrong

Hey y’all!  Welcome to the 15th episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show! In this episode we will delve into the idea that ‘The Customer is Always Right’, and look at two examples when this might not be the case.    If you enjoy this episode then please subscribe on iTunes!

Show Notes:

1:00 – Why we say ‘The Customer is Always Right’

1:45 – There are certain cases where the individual customer can be wrong

2:05 – Sometimes a customer may demand a free product or service and threatens to complain online if you don’t give them what they are asking for

3:00 – How to handle this situation correctly

6:30 – Your fans view themselves as owners of your company and brand

7:15 – Some fans demand that you not only listen to them but act on their suggestions, even if they aren’t feasible or possible

10:00 – How to respond to fans that believe you have to do what they are suggesting, ‘my way or the highway’

 

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.

 

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My Blog Traffic and Podcast Audience Results For January

Hey y’all!  So last month I mentioned that I had set specific monthly goals for growing both my traffic here, and the number of downloads to my podcast.  What I’m going to do is every month this year I will give you an update letting you know if I hit my goals for the previous month, and also letting you know what my goals are for the current month.  I’ll also share with you the most important lessons I learned over the past month. I want to do this to hold myself accountable to the goals I’ve set, but to also give you a way to learn from I’m doing.  So many people and companies want to know how to grow its blog readership, and podcast audience.  This year we’ll look at my efforts to do both.

First, here were my goals for January:

Blog – Traffic of at least 50,000 visitors.

Podcast – At least 750 downloads.

 

Breakdown of My Blog Traffic

My blog traffic for January was 53,783!  So I comfortably hit my blogging goal for January!  Pretty excited about that.

Posts written – 12 (At least 2 every week, which was my goal)

Most popular post written in January (based on views) – The Most Boring Answer to the ‘How Do I Build More Traffic to My Blog?’ Question

Detailed Analysis of Traffic Sources

Here’s where my traffic came from in January:

Organic Search – 83.46%

Direct – 9.15%

Referral – 4.19%

Social – 2.93%

Email – 0.19%

Other – 0.08%

Two things jump out to me from these numbers:  For me, organic search is way too high, and social is way too low.  I would like to see search fall to around 70% and Social rise to 10-15%.  I just worry when my traffic is that dependent on one source.

Something else that’s interesting, check out the numbers for time spent on site:

Average time a visitor spends on this blog – 47 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from search spends on this blog – 41 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from social spends on this blog – 71 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from Twitter spends on this blog – 74 seconds

Average time a visitor coming from Facebook spends on this blog – 73 seconds

Interesting, huh?  A visitor coming from a social media site spends about 80% more time on the site versus a visitor coming from search.  This suggests that the search visitor is just coming to get something and leave, while the social visitor is more likely to look around a bit.

Also, I’m noticing that the engagement numbers I am seeing on Twitter are surprisingly low.  According to Twitter, even though I have over 50,000 followers, most of my tweets are seen by less than 1,000 people.  Yikes!  I’ll probably be spending a bit more time on Google Plus to see if I can raise social traffic and engagement there, since I have a much larger network there versus Facebook or LinkedIn.

Now my goal for February is to hit 54,000 visitors.  This looks like it should be easy since I almost did that in January, but don’t forget that this month only has 28 days.  In fact I am currently on pace to only hit 50,000 visitors for the month.  So even if I miss my goal for this month I’m not too worried due to it being a short month.  However,  I am going to try to get back to writing 3 posts a week starting next week.  Just in case!

Podcast Numbers and Overview 

If you listened to this week’s episode of #FanDamnShow you know I already did a breakdown of how the podcast did in Jan, and my key takeaways.  Please check out that episode if the podcast stuff is what you are interested in.

Goal for January – At least 750 downloads

Actual number of downloads for January – 737

I missed my goal by 13 freaking downloads!  Ugh!  But still very close and my goals for the podcast growth was really aggressive.  For reference, the podcast had 133 downloads for all of December, and 737 in January.  Still, a massive jump.

Here’s daily downloads for August 1st, 2014 through January 31st, 2015:

PodcastTraffic

As you can see, very low daily downloads, typically less than 10 a day, until the end of December and through January on the right.  That’s when I started putting out new episodes on a weekly basis.  From August 1st through December 29th, I put out 3 new episodes of the podcast.  From December 30th through January 31st, I put out five new episodes of the podcast, one every week.  If you are wanting to build an audience for your podcast, consistency is key.  Putting up a new episode on a regular schedule is vital to your show’s success, as this graph proves.

Two important lessons I learned from doing the podcast in January:

1 – It’s very important to script out the flow of each episode before recording it.  I didn’t do this for the first couple of episodes in January, and I noticed my thoughts were kinda all over the map.  When I started writing down a script, just the key points I wanted to talk about and in the order I wanted to talk about them, it really helped the flow of the episodes, and it made it much easier for me to keep my thoughts organized.

2 – It’s very important to thank the people that are promoting your show.  What I noticed was that each week people were promoting the show for me, especially on Twitter and Facebook.  So I made a point of doing a shoutout to them on each show, then I let them know I did so after the episode went up.  Just a small way to say ‘Thank You’, but everyone loves to be appreciated, right?

So that’s how my January went, and what I learned.  Again my goals for February are:

Blog – At least 54,000 visitors.

Podcast – At least 850 downloads.

I’ll be back here in a month to let you know how I did!

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 14: Segmenting Your Fans to Better Engage Them

Welcome to the 14th episode of #FanDamnShow! Today’s episode is how to stabilize or build your social media engagement by segmenting your fans online to better engage with them. If you enjoy this episode then please subscribe on iTunes!

Show Notes

0:50 How engagement around social media content seems to be falling

3:00 Our behavior has shifted from engaging with content to simply creating and sharing content

3:50 If your engagement is falling, then most engagement will come from the people that know you and have an existing relationship with you

6:00 How to segment your fans and easily stay engaged with them on Twitter and Google Plus

12:45 Results of my January goal for total downloads and whether I hit that number

14:05 The two things I learned from doing #FanDamnShow in January

 

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 13: How to Start a Brand Ambassador Program

Welcome to the 13th episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show!  Today’s episode is about the ideal starting point for your brand ambassador program.  If you enjoy the show please consider leaving a review on iTunes, it really helps!

Show Notes:

0:45 – Thank you to Patricia Oliver, Todd Burgess and Jenny Schmitt for listening and promoting #FanDamnShow

1:25 – The starting point for building a brand ambassador program

1:45 – The two questions your company must ask (and answer) before launching a brand ambassador program

3:00 – Why it’s so important to ask and answer these two questions early to help structure your brand ambassador program moving forward, and to help keep it focused

4:55 – An example of how this works for a company

7:15 – The secret to why this works

10:20 – 10 Things to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program

 

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.  And if you can, please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 12: Saying ‘Thank You’ As a Marketing Strategy

Welcome to the 12th episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show!  BTW before I get to the Show Notes for this episode, thank y’all for making last Tuesday the best day for downloads of the show at 66 downloads!  That’s the best in the history of the show since it was launched last May!  Thanks to everyone for listening.  I mentioned my audience goals for the show earlier this month, and while January is now the best month ever for downloads, there’s still some work to do to reach January’s goal of 750 downloads.  So any help you can give me by telling others about The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show would be greatly appreciated!  In fact if you enjoy the show please consider leaving a review on iTunes, it really helps!

Show Notes:

0:45 – Thank you to Amy Robles, Sarah Seado and Kary Delaria

1:00 – The role of saying ‘Thank you’ in building an audience

2:25 – Appreciating your customers is the great marketing equalizer

3:10 – Too many companies focus on acquiring new customers vs showing appreciation for their existing customers

4:00 – Why would you not say ‘Thank you’ to the people that are helping you reach your goals?

4:45 – The bar has been set so low that when a company appreciates us, it surprises us

 

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.  And if you can,please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.

Here’s this week’s episode:

And here’s all the episodes so far:

 

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The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show Episode 11: Three Ways to Create Content Your Customers Will Love

Hey y’all, welcome to the 11th episode of The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show! Today I discuss three simple ways to create more customer-centric content!  I hope you enjoy it!

Show Notes:

0:45 – Special thank-you to Robyn Wright, Kelly Hungerford and Kerry O’Shea Gorgone.

2:00 – Three simple ways you can create content your customers will love.

2:12 – Focus on questions that your customers have

3:30 – Focus on addressing complaints from your customers

8:00 – Involve your customers in the content-creation process

 

Here’s where you can download this episode directly.  And if you can,please subscribe to The Fan-Damn-Tastic Marketing Show on iTunes, and I would *love* it if you could review the podcast on iTunes as well.