Did you know there are about 200 Facebook Ad metrics? That’s way too much to keep your eyes on. A smarter approach is to focus on a few metrics and ignore the rest until you need them. But how do you know which ones are really worth your constant attention? Let’s find out…

Every Facebook Advertiser Struggles with Metrics

You are not the only one who is lost in the maze of Facebook ad metrics. Every day, my team at MeasurementMarketing.io answers dozens of questions from business owners and agencies about this topic.

• I read somewhere that metric X is important but is that true?
• Why would I even track metric Y?
• Can I really ignore metric Z? 

These kinds of questions are important, but they are often asked at the wrong moment. 

The key to understanding which Facebook Ad metrics matter the most to you, is to see them as possible answers to questions you have about Facebook campaigns.

Let’s dive in…

Are my Facebook Campaigns Profitable?

Paid ads are like an investment. You pour money into ads and hope that you will get more money back. 

But like any other investment, there is a difference between hope and reality. 

One metric in Facebook Ads Manager will partially answer whether your ads are performing as you had hoped.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

This metric tells you how much money you get back from every dollar you spent on Facebook ads. 

It is calculated with the following formula:

Revenue / Ad spend

For example: (your revenue) $1,000 / $500 (spent on ads) = ROAS 2

That means that for every dollar you spent on Facebook ads, the platform  generated $2 revenue. 

All that sounds great, but keep the following in mind:

• Revenue and profit are different things. So, you will have to do your own calculations to find out if your Facebook ads are actually making profit for you.
• To calculate the real Return On Investment (ROI) of Facebook paid campaigns, you need to include costs for setting up and managing your ads. 
• This metric is especially useful to ecommerce stores because they sell directly and know for which price. For service providers, ROAS is harder to calculate because it is hard to assign a price for someone who, for example, signs up to a newsletter. 
• Facebook knows a lot about you, but you need to assign values to conversions. I cover that a bit further below. 

How Much do My Facebook Ads Cost?

Running ads costs money. To keep track of how much, you can use over 60 Facebook Ad metrics. Here are some interesting ones that can give you valuable insights.

Amount Spent

This metric tells you how much money you have already spent on a Facebook ad or campaign. 

Although you can set daily budgets to keep your budget under control, it is absolutely worth checking this metric regularly. If the amount is low, for example, that can mean nobody is seeing or clicking on your ads. 

Cost Per Mille (CPM)

This metric answers the question how much it costs to show your ad 1,000 times. If you run awareness campaigns, it is useful for two reasons:

• CPM is a metric that is used by other ad platforms or websites that sell advertising space. It makes it easy to compare the price to advertise on different platforms. On the other hand, it doesn’t tell anything about how profitable the ads are. 
• The CPM also lets advertisers easily compare the cost of different campaigns on the same platform. If, for example, the CPM for one Facebook campaign is $10 and $5 for another, it is worth diving deeper to understand what causes this price difference. Is it because of the timing? The copy of the ad? The audience? The frequency? Etc.

Cost Per Impression

This metric tells you how much every impression of an ad on Facebook costs you. It is not a very important one from the digital marketer’s helicopter point of view. 

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But I included it anyway to illustrate that Facebook has metrics that can give answers to more complicated questions you didn’t come up with before. 

Prices per unit also put things in a different perspective. Knowing that every bite you take from, let’s say a Philly Cheesesteak (Can you tell I’m from Philly?!?), costs you 0.25 cents, may either spoil or add more taste to your meal. 

Cost Per Click (CPC)

Facebook has two metrics for clicks. CPC links are more important than CPC All, because it tells you how much a link to your landing page costs. A click that is, for example, included in CPC All is when someone clicks to see more of your ad copy. 

CPCs fluctuate and the price Facebook charges you depends on factors such as timing, audience size, the services or products you promote, and so on. 

Yet, the CPC is a powerful metric that is worth keeping your eyes on:

• It gives you a clear idea of how cheap or expensive clicks to your site or web shop are.If, for example, you pay $10 per click to sell a $3 product, it may be time to rethink your paid advertising strategy completely. 
• A high CPC may also be a sign that your landing page has an issue. I will get back to that further below. 
• CPC is also a useful metric to compare the performance of campaigns over time, or to find out which ads are repeatable or need optimization. 

Cost Per Action (CPA)

Ideally, people take action when they see your Facebook ad. That can, for instance, be a click to your landing page, watching a video, sharing your page, and so on. 

The CPA metric shows you how much these actions cost. It is also good to:

• Use the CPA as an internal benchmark. Simply put: if you can decrease it, you will get more at a lower cost. 
• Compare the CPAs of different actions. If you  take the bigger picture into account, it may turn out that you have been running ads to trigger people to take actions that don’t boost your business.

Cost Per Conversion

Another metric that is definitely worth your attention is the Cost Per Conversion. If you know, for example, that your paid ads cost you $5 for someone to add a product to the shopping cart, that will give you a good idea whether the campaign is profitable or requires fine-tuning.  

Do My Facebook Ads Actually Contribute to My Goals?

The best way to find out if your Facebook ads help you actually achieve your campaign goals is to look at conversion metrics. 

Conversions are important actions that people take, like adding a product to the basket, filling in a form, signing up for a trial account, and so on.

Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is the percentage of people who click on your ad and do what you want them to do. Let’s assume 100 people click on your product ad and 50 of them add the product to your cart, the conversion rate will be 50%.

That may sound exciting, but if none of them actually buys your product, the conversion rate for your sales goal will be 0%.

It is therefore important to think about your goals and conversions before you dive into metrics. 

How Much Value do My Facebook Ads Generate?

In Facebook Ads, you can assign a ton of conversion values for every goal you want to achieve.

Even if you don’t sell products or courses online, you may profit from assigning a value to conversions, like the Contact conversion value or Leads Conversion Value.

Total Conversion Value

The total conversion value is self-explanatory. But it can also be misleading. If you define, for example, a Content views conversion Value or App activations conversion value, you may get a total skewed version of what your conversions actually are worth. 

Is My Facebook Target Audience Even Interested in My Ads?

Although Facebook is a great advertising platform to reach your ideal audience, your ads may not be appealing to them. The following metrics can help you find that out quickly.

CTR (Click Through Rate)

The click through rate metrics is the calculated percentage of clicks compared to how many times your ad was displayed.

If, for example, your ad was shown 1,000 times and the link to your site was clicked 10 times, your CTR is 1%. 

The toughest part is to decide whether your CTR is good or bad. One way to know this is to run several ads simultaneously and see which one has the highest CTR. 

But this approach is risky too. A higher CTR may not result in higher conversions.

Relevance Score

Facebook assigns a relevance score between 1 and 10 to your ads. The higher the score, the more relevant the ad is for your audience, according to Facebook.

Ads can break or make your campaigns. A picture, the copy, but also how many times it is shown are all details that can make or break your campaign. The following metrics help you better understand how your ads are doing.

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Ad Frequency

This metric tells you how many times the ad has been displayed on average in the Facebook feed of your target audience. 

Mind that this metric can mean many different things depending on the type of campaign you are running.

• With brand awareness campaigns, you can show your ad more before people get tired of it.
• If you are running a lead gen campaign, people usually get annoyed when they see the same ad too many times in a short period of time. 

The list of metrics will help answer the important questions you, your business or customers have about paid marketing campaigns on Facebook

Alas, these metrics cannot give all the answers you need to run successful paid campaigns… 

The 4 Biggest Mistakes Facebook Advertisers can Make

The MeasurementMarketing.io team has taught and supported hundreds of businesses with measuring and optimizing their marketing campaigns for success. 

There are 4 mistakes that keep returning and I figured it’s worth dropping them here so you won’t need to make these mistakes yourself…

Mistake 1: Misunderstanding Metrics

Like any other industry, digital marketing is filled with jargon. It’s easy to misunderstand what something is and is not.

Metrics are often confused with: 

• Business goals 
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
• Dimensions
• Segments

Metrics are just the numbers you add, subtract, multiply, and divide.

Dimensions, on the other hand, are how you sort those numbers.

For example, you might have a “Dimension” that is the Traffic Source and then the “Metric” might be the number of users from that traffic source.

Always remember though, you’ll always first start with a question in mind and then you jump into the data to find the answer (never the other way around!).

Mistake 2: Ignoring Data from Facebook 

Most businesses understand that data is important. But in two situations, it is tough to make data-driven decisions.

Analysis Paralysis

Facebook Ad Manager contains a lot of data, but that is often overwhelming. Not all businesses have the know-how or resources to even look at numbers, charts, graphs and therefore simply ignore them.

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Focus on just ONE THING at a time.  I like to take the advice I learned from my buddy Jeff Sauer at DataDrivenU.com…

“Assign one KPI per team member.”

This keeps it really simple.  If it’s just you, focus on the ONE metric that needs the most improvement.  As your team grows, you can expand your focus (because you’ll have more people to help!).

No Access to Real-Time Data 

This happens, for example, when an external party is running ads and reports monthly. By the time decision makers know what’s going on, the monthly Facebook marketing budget is already gone. 

Businesses that ignore, or don’t have access to Facebook data, lose a lot more than money.

The target audience may, for example, have seen a Facebook ad too many times. It will be an expensive challenge to turn that around.

Mistake 3: Focus on the Wrong or too Many Metrics

Facebook, and other ad platforms, make it very easy to set up your first campaign. They promise you will get results without having to lift a finger. 

And then reality kicks in. 

At one point, you need to understand the true value of data. 

But as I said in the beginning of this article, it can feel overwhelming, confusing or for some, not enough. 

The opposite reaction of analysis paralysis is wanting to have even more data to make complete data-driven decisions. 

Facebook Ads has a ton of them available, like 

• Photo views
• Unique achievements unlocked
• Unique ratings submitted
• Cost per unique level completed
• Etc. 

The question is…

Do you really need all that data to drive your business forward?

In other words, ask yourself, “Is this useful?”

This brings us to the last mistake (which actually might sound contradictory)…

Mistake 4: Ignoring Data from Other Sources

Customers start their journey after they have clicked on your Facebook ad. But as you know, a lot can go wrong when the user lands on a site or web shop.

Think, for example, of:

• The contact form may not be working. 
• The site might not be optimized for a specific device.
• The conversion tracking may not be set up correctly.
• The landing page may not be aligned with the message of the ad.
• Your actual revenue may differ from what Facebook or other platforms, like Google Analytics 4, shows. 

I am not claiming that Facebook Ad metrics are worthless, but you need to pick them carefully. 

Sometimes the best “source of truth” will definitely be Facebook Ads.  But sometimes (often!) it won’t be the best source for the answers you’re looking for.

To measure your actual revenue, for example, it is wiser to rely on data from your cart, or (even better!) your merchant processor (platforms, like PayPal, Stripe, Authorize.net, etc.).

Conclusion: 

Facebook Ad metrics are very powerful to 

• Measure the performance of your campaigns
• Get insights on how to improve your campaigns
• Control your paid ads budget on the biggest social media platform
• Reach the right audience with the right message at the right moment
• Achieve your business goals

But Facebook Ad metrics reveal only one part of the complicated customer journey. 

If you want to stay ahead of your competitors, as a business or marketing agency, then make sure you:

• Track only the most valuable Facebook Ad metrics
• Include metrics from other platforms and tools to make profound decisions
• Give your team access to the data they need to do their job
• Present everything in a shared dashboard that’s explains itself

This is the secret sauce of businesses that thrive in the complicated digital marketing landscape. 

I hope this information will help you become a better Facebook marketer or give your business a better understanding of Facebook Ad metrics and how they fit in the bigger picture of digital marketing.

The post 12 Facebook Ad Metrics Worth Your Attention appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Imagine this: You’re a marketer, and you’re constantly chasing the next big thing. You’re always on the lookout for the latest trend, the newest platform, the freshest idea. You’re running on a hamster wheel of “on-demand” marketing, and it’s exhausting. 

You’re always reacting, never planning. You’re always behind, never ahead. Sound familiar?

Now, what if I told you there’s a better way? A way to break free from the relentless cycle of on-demand marketing and step into a world where you’re in control. A world where you’re not just reacting to the latest trend, but setting the trend. 

A world where you’re not just keeping up, but leading the pack.

Welcome to the world of strategic marketing. A world where you set 90-day plans and watch as your marketing efforts become more efficient, more effective, and more freeing. A world where you’re not just a marketer, but a marketing revolutionary.

In this article, we’re going to explore five ways strategic marketing can set you free. We’re going to show you how to stop reacting and start planning. How to stop chasing and start leading. How to start your own marketing revolution. 

Ready to break free? Let’s dive in.

Meet Hazel & Hems

Hazel & Hems Boutique: the customer avatar is a woman in her mid-20s to early 40s that has an eclectic taste in fashion, wants to stay up to date with the latest trends, and is also sensitive to sustainability and local business support.

Their core product is a locally sourced, polished stone bracelet that is affordable and only sold for limited time periods.

Hazel & Hems was created as a case study for us to explore the process of creating a brand from the ground up and everything that is involved with it. This was a building block for creating our Social Media Mastery Certification and Social Media Bootcamp.

#1. Crystal Ball Marketing: Anticipating Trends and Behavior

Strategic marketing allows you to anticipate market trends and customer behavior, reducing the element of surprise in your campaigns. 

For example, Hazel & Hems, being a sustainable clothing boutique, could anticipate the rise in demand for sustainable fashion due to increasing environmental awareness.

By strategically planning their marketing around Earth Day, they could capitalize on this trend and drive more sales during this period.

#2. The Loyalty Loop: Keeping Customers Coming Back for More

By focusing on customer needs and satisfaction, strategic marketing can improve customer loyalty and retention. 

Hazel & Hems could implement a loyalty program that rewards repeat customers with discounts or exclusive access to new collections. 

They could also use email marketing to keep customers informed about new products, sales, and company news, keeping Hazel & Hems top of mind and encouraging repeat purchases.

#3. The Harmony of Branding: Consistent Messaging Across Platforms

A strategic plan ensures your marketing messages are consistent across all platforms, reinforcing your brand identity. 

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Hazel & Hems could ensure that their messaging about sustainability and boho-chic fashion is consistent across their website, social media, email newsletters, and in-store displays. 

This consistency would strengthen their brand identity and make them more recognizable to their target audience.

#4. Customer-Centric Conquests: Tailoring Marketing to Your Audience

By understanding your target audience, you can tailor your marketing efforts to their needs and preferences, improving customer satisfaction. 

Hazel & Hems, knowing their target audience is environmentally conscious professional women aged 25 to 35, could tailor their marketing messages to highlight their sustainable practices, quality materials, and versatile designs that are perfect for both work and leisure. 

They could also host events or workshops on sustainable living, further aligning with their customers’ values.

#5. Spotlight Strategies: Boosting Your Brand’s Visibility

A strategic plan can boost your brand’s visibility and recognition in the market. 

Hazel & Hems could partner with local eco-friendly events or influencers who align with their brand values to increase their visibility. 

They could also run a strategic social media campaign, using targeted ads and relevant hashtags to reach a wider audience and increase brand awareness.

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Are you looking to get more sales? Clicks? Engagement? If you want to improve your digital marketing strategy, you need to understand the Customer Value Journey (CVJ). The Customer Value Journey is an 8-step path that people travel as they discover your brand, build a relationship with you, and become buyers and raving fans.

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To be competitive as a brand, it’s essential to constantly offer value to your customers. 

Customer value is what makes the wheels of commerce go around. It’s what makes your customers buy from you, engage with you, follow your accounts, give you positive reviews, and recommend you to their friends.

If you’re familiar with our Customer Value Journey framework, you’ll already know a lot about how to create and curate customer value. In this article, we’ll zoom in on what customer value is and some ways you can deploy it in your Customer Value Journey.

What Do We Mean By “Create Customer Value?”

“Customer value” is anything that makes your product and/or brand more appealing to customers. By adding value to your brand, product, and customer experience, you bring more decision-swaying benefits to your customer’s journey.

“Value” is anything your customer wants, needs, or enjoys. The most obvious “value” is monetary—getting a quality item for a low price is something every bargain hunter enjoys—but it’s far from the only “value” available. 

Value for your customers can include:

• Great product quality
• Fantastic customer service
• A positive brand presence 
• Ongoing customer support
• Relevant and personalized marketing
• A rewarding loyalty program
• A positive customer experience
• A trustworthy brand reputation
• A caring brand community

Let’s say, for example, that you are a Canadian telecoms brand. You produce the best business phone system in Calgary, but people still buy from your competitors. How can you bring them to you?

Adding value is the best way to turn the tide of customers toward you. You can do things like improve your customer service, add 24/7 support options, tailor your marketing in ways your customers prefer, produce engaging and educational content, add loyalty rewards, and more.

Why Is It Important To Create Value For Your Customers?

Creating value for your customers is crucial because the more value you can offer, the more likely customers are to buy your product, subscribe to your brand, and ultimately become loyal members of your customer community.

Think of every purchase decision in terms of a pair of scales. For a potential customer to purchase your product, its value has to outweigh its drawbacks.

The most obvious element of the purchase decision is the monetary cost. But there’s a lot more to it than that. Things like time, negative experience, and risk also add to the perceived “cost” of your product or service. 

For example, if your website does not look safe and professional, your customer may avoid buying your product because they fear credit card scams—even if they would find your product useful and can afford it.

Similarly, if your buying process is too complicated and lengthy, or your customer service could be better, the purchase-decision scales could tip in favor of taking custom elsewhere.

By creating extra value for your customers, you weigh the scale towards the decision to buy. And the more value you add, the better the benefits get. 

As well as buying your product, customers who get value from you will return again and again. They will also engage with your content, recommend you to their friends, and boost your brand reputation in general.

All in all, creating customer value is well worth doing. So, how do you go about it?

How To Create Customer Value

Use our Customer Value Journey

Our Customer Value journey is a framework that helps you to understand where and how you can add value to help your customers along their journey to conversion and beyond.

It consists of eight steps: Awareness, Engagement, Subscribe, Convert, Excite, Ascend, Advocate, Promote.

You can find plenty about our CVJ framework, but here’s a (very!) brief rundown:

• Aware: Get your target audience’s attention with content that is relevant and valuable for them. 
• Engage: Communicate with your customers/prospects. Let them know that you care about them.
• Subscribe: Try and persuade your burgeoning customers to subscribe to your emails and follow you on social media.
• Convert: This is the point at which your prospect becomes a customer. You can use various value-adding tactics to nudge them through this stage.
• Excite: Build on the excitement of a purchase by throwing in added extras.
• Ascend: Keep up communication and keep adding value to make your one-time buyer a repeat customer.
• Advocate: Ask your happy customer to write you positive reviews, share your content, or recommend you to their friends.
• Promote: Keep encouraging your customer community to promote your brand, and reward them for doing so.

Provide Stellar Customer Service

The quality of your customer service can make or break your customer experience. Great customer service adds a huge amount of value to your CVJ.

What does good customer service look like? Well, it ranges from things as simple as sending emails saying “Thanks for your order,” to more complex efforts, such as having a fully equipped and responsive customer support center staffed with patient, helpful, and friendly operatives.

Another way of offering great value and customer service is by having a product that will offer unique benefits. For example, offering online business cards with a QR code that automatically captures their information so that you can use analytics and metrics to measure your networking efforts.

Build Community

You can easily add value for your customer by making them feel valued. One way to do this is to focus on building relationships and community with your customers.

You can strengthen your customer relationships through things like sending emails on their birthdays, personalizing your marketing content so that it’s relevant for each customer, and generally showing that you are listening to them and you care for them.

You can expand on this by providing space for your customers to communicate with you and one another. Loyalty clubs, social media pages, events for loyal customers, and so on can all help to build a rewarding community that will add value for your customers.

Focus On Quality Over Price

It’s a common misconception that making an item cheaper adds value for the customer. While price is certainly an important consideration in purchase decisions, quality often trumps it.

However low your prices are, your customers won’t be impressed if your product is low quality. Most customers are happy to pay a bit more for a product that works well, looks good, and will last.

Most customers understand that true quality costs more. So, if you drop your prices too low, customers will automatically assume that your product is low quality.

The old “quality vs. quantity” debate is, to an extent, false—but it is still important that your customers have a good experience with your product. And that means creating something of acceptable quality.

So, we recommend focusing on the quality of your product first and foremost, and deciding the price once you are aware of your profit margins. A quality product that costs a little more will gain you more repeat customers than a poor-quality product at a low price.

Play To Your Strengths

Your strengths are where your true value lies. Maybe you have an excellent customer service team, the best quality product on the market, or a fantastic social media following. Whatever it is that you do best, play to it.

Your strengths form your USP (or, at least, part of it). Your strengths are where your value exceeds that of your competitors. So, make the most of them!

Educate, Entertain, & Engage

Producing great content is a quick and easy way to add a lot of value and boost your brand’s presence and reputation.

Blog posts, videos, newsletters, social media posts, competitions, games, and webinars—all of these are great for entertaining, educating, and engaging your customers.

Anything you can put out there that your customers will enjoy or find interesting adds value to your product, no matter what your product is.

Let’s say, for example, that you provide online fax services in Canada. On the face of it, this may not seem like a promising topic, but the right content can bring a huge amount of interest to your brand.

You could produce how-to videos, talk about the history of faxing, run case studies, and more. All of it will add value for your audience and bring in new customers.

Reward Loyalty

A loyalty scheme adds value for your customer and directly encourages repeat purchases. 

You can use your loyalty scheme to add value in a variety of ways. Many retail businesses use point schemes, in which customers get a certain number of points per purchase which they can then use to offset the cost of later purchases.

Other examples of loyalty rewards can include:

• Exclusive content
• Free gifts
• First looks at new product lines
• Discounts
• Privileged access to events, products, and services
• Enhanced customer service

Boost Your Business & Add Customer Value with A Customer Value Journey

By designing a Customer Value Journey, you will give yourself a head start when adding value.

A Customer Value Journey will show you exactly where in your customer journey to add value and the form it should take.

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For example, a speedy and safe website adds value at the point of sale. It encourages people to convert quickly and with confidence.

After a sale, a loyalty scheme and follow-up emails reinforce your customer’s positive experience and help strengthen your brand/customer relationships.

At all points, a positive brand presence, rewarding content, and a quality product are brilliant for adding value for your customers.

So, to give your customers the value that they deserve, sit down and plot your Customer Value Journey.

The post How to Effortlessly Create Customer Value appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

There are two core metrics that should drive a lot of the decisions you have in your organization; churn & sales. A great agency is constantly studying these two numbers diagnosing them from every angle learning specific areas of opportunity. 

The more you are able to understand these numbers and what they are composed of the better you’ll be equipped to making the right decisions for your business.

In this report, we want to look at churn, which is something we’ve been studying for about 10 years across two different agencies. The first one was scaled to over 1,000 clients and the second one we’ve scaled to over 200 full time employees in just 5 years. 

When you’re a young agency, churn is so important because 1-2 clients can represent a large portion of your income, however as you scale, the same is true. Imagine you’re an agency like Hite and you’re doing $500,000 per month in MRR.

If you have 10% churn monthly, you’ll need to do $50k in new sales just to break even. If you can create an environment where you’re more likely to have 5% churn, if you do $50,000 in sales you’ll grow by 5%.

Understanding why clients leave and acting on it, isn’t only the key to scaling. Agencies with lower churn, partake in other benefits such as receiving more referrals & a much higher evaluation when it comes to selling the business. 

Hite is constantly focused on understanding the why behind our growth & this is essential for your business if you want to scale in 2023.

Churn is critical, especially as you scale for churn is a representation of the quality of your product, service, & customers.

Every agency is constantly battling both the increase of sales and the decrease of churn.

Defining Churn? 

Churn can be broken down in a lot a ways, but for agencies, the most common two churn metrics you’ll see is Client Churn & Financial Churn. These two churn types can be define these two churns as followed: 

For Client Churn we will look at the monthly turnover of clients regardless of financial impact.

For example, If in January you had 10 clients pay you then in February only 8 of them paid you, that would be a turnover of 2 clients and equal 20% churn. In this example it would not matter how much each client represented financially. 

For Financial Churn, we look at the monthly turnover of revenue regardless of clients.

For example, if in January you had $20,000 in recurring collected MRR and in February you only collected 18,000 of that $20,000, it would represent a 10% churn rate. 

Understanding the difference between these two numbers is crucial, let’s look at the following list of clients. 

MRR

Client A $1,000

Client B $5,000

Client C $2,000

Client D $3,000

If we were to lose Client B, you would have 25% client churn, however you’d have 50% financial churn. There could be a very large difference in these numbers especially as you scale. 

The Problem With Researching Churn

Doing research on churn for agencies doesn’t come easily. First off, about 80% of agencies that exist today would be defined as micro agencies, doing less than $15,000 in monthly revenue of which the vast majority do not keep up with, nor have any data on their numbers, especially when it comes to churn. 

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If you take into consideration those that do keep great track of their numbers, between those they may manage and report back churn in many different ways, even beyond the above numbers.

For example, there is a well known agency that is doing several $100m in annual revenue that keeps track of their financial churn, but in their own way focusing more on net growth vs. churn.

In their model, they look at how much was lost, and measure that against what was upsold in order to come up with a net churn. 

With that said, we believe that this report takes all those data points into consideration arriving to tangible and definitive results.

The post How to Reduce Churn appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

Today, consumers have an increasing number of options for how to interact with your brand. These include virtual channels like social media and influencer marketing.

While it’s great that technology has provided us with plenty of new methods and marketing tactics, it also means you need to up your game. As a result, customers are placing a higher value on the overall shopping experience than ever before. 

The way your brand presents itself at various touch points is a major factor in conversions. Customer journey optimization works to raise overall customer satisfaction (CSAT) and promotes growth in your business. 

What is customer journey optimization?

Optimizing the customer journey involves mapping out and analyzing every touchpoint in the buying process. You can then improve the buyer’s journey by eliminating friction at each of these.

This encompasses all available touchpoints, including digital advertising, content and social media marketing. Customer journey optimization improves processes behind the camera, so to speak, so your brand, team, and products can be the stars of the show. 

Benefits of customer journey optimization

When you optimize the customer journey, you stand to gain several benefits.

Save money

Mapping out the customer journey paints a clear picture of your current marketing and sales strategies. You can easily identify redundancies and remove these by analyzing them from an outside viewpoint. Long story short is that you’ll save money on operational costs and labor. 

For example, simple customer actions like order tracking might be better and more efficiently managed by a virtual receptionist, freeing your team up to work on tasks that are more obviously profitable, such as sales.  

Increase productivity

Customer journey optimization helps you cut out the fat. A well-trimmed buying process is much more efficient when it comes to how your team members’ time is used. By focusing their efforts on the most valuable touchpoints and prospect interactions, they’ll be able to generate more leads and conversions in less time. 

Part of this optimization might mean investing in software that gives the customer more control over their journey. For example, if you offer co-working spaces, you may wish to invest in coworking space management software that empowers users to book and pay for rooms without having to speak to a team member in person or over the phone. 

Better teamwork and collaboration

The results of the 2021 Statista survey shown above found that inter-departmental siloing is the biggest challenge when optimizing the customer journey. This is where customer journey mapping rises to the challenge.

With a big-picture view, those working at the top of the funnel will better understand where their prospects are heading, meaning they’re more able to prepare them for their next interaction. Likewise, salespeople working in the middle of the funnel can give feedback on the quality of leads and help prospecting teams adjust their strategies accordingly. 

How does optimization increase customer satisfaction?

Many business benefits arise from customer journey optimization. 

Reduces Friction

Customers may encounter friction at every step of their journey. We’re not talking about Newtonian physics that explain how your car grips a road; we’re talking about obstacles to conversion that are built into your buying processes.

Customer friction is something you must overcome for the consumer to take the next step. Common causes include:

• Lack of empowerment. Do customers have their preferred channels available to them e.g. live chat and self-service options?
• Unreasonable/uncertain duration. Are wait times reasonable, and are they communicated to the customer?
• Lack of identity. Is the customer known and recognized at each touchpoint, or do they have to repeat themselves along the way?
• Lack of transparency. Do customers know what step they’re at in the process?
• Lack of consistency. Does each interaction fit with your brand and provide a positive overall experience?

Let’s take friction caused by duration as an example. You could utilize a service that enables call forwarding or queue callbacks to help lower customer wait times. This would optimize the buyer journey and make it less arduous for the customer. 

An often overlooked tactic is to focus on the obstacle causing the friction rather than the nudge itself. For example, you can make conversions easier so your prospects can sprint their way down the sales funnel.

In the early part of the journey, this might include optimization by way of marketing and communication channels. If your target audience is Gen Z and Millenials, for example, forgo traditional channels and build brand awareness on the social media platforms they use instead. 

There are many eCommerce marketing strategies that can help you optimize interactions and reduce friction.

Focuses on pain points

An optimized customer journey gives consumers a more streamlined experience. Rather than being distracted by unnecessary steps, it ensures just the right amount of interactions and information. 

This type of focused effort from your sales and marketing team means you can spend more time singing the benefits of your products or services. More importantly, it ensures each experience focuses on the specific pain points of your buyer personas. 

Personalizes the customer experience

Part of the optimization process is building customary journey maps that achieve a high level of success. Each one should focus on a different buyer persona. These custom journeys are just one way that optimization personalizes the customer experience (CX).

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Building interactions for each segment’s preferred channels increases customer satisfaction. You can also use CRM solutions, customer journey management platforms, and marketing automation to hyper-personalize every interaction. This might range from having live agents and chatbots with access to customer account information to suggesting products your buyers will be interested in. 

How to optimize the customer journey map

1. Define your business goals

Optimizing the customer journey can help you achieve various objectives, but it’s best to set your sights on a few specific goals for your business. This will help to guide you.

The following are some examples of business goals:

• To stamp out weaknesses or redundancies in the customer journey
• To gain more insight through increased customer feedback
• To increase conversions at bottlenecks in the sales funnel

2. Define your buyer personas

Buyer personas help you segment your audience according to their attitudes, values, behaviors, and demographic information. The first step is to identify your best buyers and your least valuable customer types.

When building your customer avatars, you should find common factors or indicators to help with optimizing customer journeys and areas like lead qualification. 

3. Pick your target personas

To get started, pick the buyer persona that most closely fits your business goals. If this is your first time refreshing the customer journey, you’ll likely want to focus on the personas that represent the best lifetime value. 

4. Start drafting a customer journey map

Now you have a better understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to start visualizing the purchasing journey. You need to map out every customer touchpoint or interaction from beginning to end. 

This includes every channel that’s used to create brand awareness, from Instagram and Facebook marketing to email newsletters and word-of-mouth referrals. It also includes third-party channels like affiliate marketing and other partner programs.

From here, you can start optimizing and connecting actions to build a customer journey that’s robust and efficient. 

5. Start optimizing

With a rough draft of the customer journey in place, you can begin to make alterations and improvements. Eliminate redundant or friction-building interactions, and map out pathways that allow for a seamless transition from one touchpoint to another. Ensure these make sense for the buyer persona involved. 

For instance, when nudging Gen Zers from the brand awareness to the subscription stage, you could focus on social media only. This means eliminating CTAs that involve newsletter subscriptions or inbound calling campaigns for this particular journey. 

6. Use the right tools

By now, you should have a close to ideal journey for each buyer persona. These are optimized when friction is reduced and your team is set up for success. The only problem is that nothing is ideal.

No matter how much you prepare, there will always be room for improvement, so you’ll need to arm yourself with the best tools for the job. Customer relationship management software is crucial. Other marketing tools can also help you automate and track each customer’s journey.

While you’re at it, don’t forget about the wealth of digital marketing resources available online. 

7. Optimize, rinse, and repeat

Completing your optimized customer journey map is only the beginning. You’ll need to take this process and repeat it for each business goal and buyer persona. Of course, you can use existing maps as templates for building new customer journeys.

Using marketing tools, you should be able to track the success of your freshly optimized touchpoints and overall conversion rates. Use analytics tools and trusty A/B testing to hone in on what’s working and what isn’t. 

Continue the process ad infinitum and reap the rewards of providing a seamless, frictionless customer experience. 

Optimize the customer journey today!

Businesses like yours desire their operations to run as smoothly as possible. Your customers will hold you to these same standards during the buying cycle. Now, at least, you should have the tools and team to identify what your customers want. 

This is the time to map out and optimize your customer journeys. That is, unless you’d rather wait around while they flock to competitors that offer a painless purchase process. Why not start improving your customer satisfaction levels today?

The post Creating a Journey to Customer Satisfaction appeared first on DigitalMarketer.

In modern business, standing out from the crowd isn’t easy. A strong brand-customer relationship is vital, as it drives customer loyalty and engagement. This can be the deciding factor in your business’s long-term success. 

This article will explore the importance of your brand-customer relationship. We’ll explain how the four principles of brand management can help you build and maintain that relationship.

What is a Brand-Customer Relationship?

Your brand-customer relationship is the connection between your business and its customers. It’s influenced by various factors, but is essentially formed through the perception and reputation of your brand. You build this relationship on trust, loyalty, and engagement. 

As well as the quality of the products or services you offer, your company’s reputation is also important. So is the customer’s overall experience with your brand. To put it simply, there are both tangible and intangible aspects to your brand-consumer relationship.  

The tangible aspects include the quality of your products and services, as well as your sales, customer service, and support. We measure and affect the intangible parts of the brand-customer relationship with brand management. 

Why is Brand-Customer Relationship Important?

It’s well-known that customer experience is one of the most critical factors in customer loyalty – and your brand-customer relationship is central to this. A good relationship encourages customer loyalty through engagement. 

Customers who have a positive experience with your brand, and thus a strong brand-customer relationship, are more likely to recommend your company to others and make repeat purchases. This drives higher customer lifetime values and can grow your revenue through word-of-mouth and social sharing. 

In addition, a solid brand-customer relationship helps to differentiate your business from its competitors. Positive associations with your brand make it easier for customers to identify and choose it over others.

The 4 Principles of Brand Management

So, now you know what we mean by a brand-customer relationship. But it probably still seems like a vague concept. Yet, whether you’re aware of it or not, you’re affecting it with everyday business decisions, advertising, and communications. 

That’s why many established businesses have dedicated brand management teams to build consistency across your brand. These four overlapping principles guide brand management strategy. Measuring them will show you the state of your brand-customer relationship.  

1. Awareness

This is how aware your target audience is of your brand versus others in your market. Think of synonymous brands such as Coke for soft drinks or Hoover for vacuums. These are the brands with the highest level of awareness in their respective areas.  

Most businesses won’t become household names, but there are other ways to measure brand awareness. Analyzing organic searches for your brand name, as well as social media mentions, content shares, and so on, can give you a good idea of your audience’s awareness level.

That said, raising brand awareness isn’t just about getting your brand name in front of people. Increasing and maintaining awareness means you must also stand out in the customer’s memory. For brand managers, this means creating a unique brand personality for your business. 

2. Reputation

Your reputation is what customers think about when they see your brand. This might be certain words or emotions they associate with your brand or product or a generally positive or negative sentiment.  

This has a significant overlap with your brand awareness. If you’re not working on maintaining your brand reputation while growing awareness, you can spread negative sentiments and do more harm than good for your brand. 

Building a positive reputation takes time. You can affect it through your communication, service, recruitment, and community projects. Your company culture, mission statement, and guiding principles can also tell external stakeholders about your reputation and values. 

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3. Loyalty

Research shows that loyal customers are five times more likely to make repeat purchases and four times more likely to recommend your business. That’s why customer loyalty is the goal of your efforts to improve your brand awareness and reputation.

Easier said than done? Perhaps. Customer loyalty can be challenging to build, partly because many customers look for different things to get their best experience out of a business. Some customers value convenience and price, while others want on-demand support. 

For example, customers who come to your brand for value might appreciate your customer service measures such as a toll-free number or online text chat for inquiries. On the other hand, those looking for convenience might appreciate a premium-rate line that guarantees instant access to support. 

That means that to increase customer loyalty, brand managers must analyze customer behavior and feedback. Personalization is a major driver of customer loyalty. When you listen to a customer’s needs and make changes based on feedback, you show that you value their contribution to your business.

4. Equity

Brand equity represents your brand’s perceived value. Think of it as the premium customers are willing to pay to access your brand over cheaper competitors. This leads to higher ROI on both new and developed products, as you can incorporate this into your pricing. 

In his book, “Strategic Brand Management: Building, Measuring, and Managing Brand Equity”, author Kevin Lane Keller describes four key steps to building your brand equity:

• Establish your brand identity by identifying your target audience. Then, create your brand assets and stories around it. 
• Define what your brand means. You do this by clearly stating your company values and through the projects you choose to support. 
• Analyze how customers respond to your brand. What feelings and emotions does your brand evoke? Direct feedback and sentiment analysis are two good ways to judge this. 
• Build your brand resonance by developing your existing customer relationships. Use your brand management to form deeper emotional connections with your customer base. 

High customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are key indicators that your brand equity is rising.  

How to Use Brand Management to Improve Customer Relations

Now you understand the principles of brand management, let’s look at how to use this in an everyday business setting to improve your customer relations.  

Start With Brand Basics

If you’re new to brand management, the first step to improving customer relations is establishing a clear and consistent brand identity. This means developing a brand strategy, mission statement, and brand identity that aligns with your business’s values and goals.

You’ll also need to make key decisions about core brand assets like your logo design. Simple assets or slogans can be crucial in reinforcing the emotions and values you want customers to associate with your brand. Give these decisions the time and thought they deserve. 

Share Your Stories

Whether we’re talking about your brand’s origin story, mission, or even employee journeys and customer testimonials, sharing these stories will help you make deeper emotional connections with your customers. 

For example, many companies make support content like video tutorials for their products. But one way to make your customers feel more connected to this process is to share user-generated content with success tips and product guides.  

Optimize Your Online Visibility

In today’s digital age, your business needs to have a strong online presence. Optimizing your online visibility can increase brand awareness and reach more customers. 

This includes developing a website and creating social media profiles, as well as covering other basics like listing your brand in online directories and review sites.

Create an Internal Branding Guide

A strong brand identity is not just built by communicating with customers. You also need to ensure that employees understand and align with the company’s branding efforts. You can achieve this by creating an internal branding guide. 

Use this as a reference for all employees to ensure consistency in tone of voice and other branding markers for all departments.

Focus on Your Customer Journey

It’s vital to understand how customers interact with your brand, from the awareness stage to post-purchase. By understanding the customer value journey, you can identify areas for improvement and tailor your branding efforts to meet the needs of your customers at each stage.

Engage Your Customers on Their Terms

Engaging with your customers on the channels they prefer is crucial to building a strong brand-customer relationship. Whether it’s social media, email, phone, or in-person interactions your audience prefers, make sure they can access your brand on those channels.

Personalize the Customer Experience

While we can fit customers into groups and demographics, each one is also unique. By analyzing a customer’s preferences as they interact with your business, you can give them a customer experience that meets their needs every time. 

This can be small, simple, gestures. For example, give your priority customers access to a separate business phone number to speed up their support experience.  

Analyze and Improve

Finally, to truly optimize your brand-customer relationship, you need to analyze your performance and make adjustments as you go. This includes tracking website traffic, monitoring social media engagement and sentiments, and analyzing customer feedback. 

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By using analytics, you can make data-driven decisions to improve customer relations and drive growth. 

Final Thoughts: It’s all in the Details

Your brand-customer relationship goes deeper than your surface interactions with your customers. When we’re talking about subjective factors like emotion and engagement, the little details can make the biggest difference. 

Even seemingly unrelated decisions like your choice of website hosting providers can have a knock-on effect. Does your domain name reflect your brand? Is it instantly recognizable to customers? When we think about it in these terms, it’s easy to see why a choice like this can have repercussions for your brand. 

Effective brand management means you don’t have to fret about the small details of every decision. Having a clear brand strategy and documents like an internal branding guide help ensure consistency, even up to the decision-making level.  

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