How about this for a description of the world today?
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us"
In fact it's a quote from "A Tale of Two Cities" by Charles Dickens, written in 1859.
The Difference Between Digital Strategy and Execution
The interesting thing about transformation is that there’s a balance to be struck between the strategic bit - this is where we’re heading, and the tactical bit - these are the actions we need to take to get there.
Those tactical bits involve the changes that individuals need to make. Changes to both how they look and what they do.
Our Clients Want Change
We are engaged with a client on a transformation programme where we are working with 4 of the sales team and 6 of the more technical people. After a little over three months we have analysed when the benefits have been to the organisation and aside from pipeline generation (which is quite significant and the reason for doing this) there are other softer metrics.
On LinkedIn the 10 people on the programme have published a number of posts and articles and they have received 340,000 views and have stimulated in well in excess of 6000 clicks (by which I mean comments and likes) on those posts.
What Does That All Mean?
Let me put this in perspective. If this were a marketing campaign 340k impressions is okay and depending on the platform that may (or may not) have a cost to the business, but usually turning those views in to clicks will mean the payment of a fee to the platform.
Obviously that fee lands the visitor at your property (usually website) and then they need to take an action, usually add their details to access some valuable content.
Here's The Maths
Obviously once they do this you can then market to them as you know who they are…but for this reason most people don’t leave their details. How many of us have gone to a website, seen the content is gated and don't leave our details? All of us, I would think?
So if there’s a 25% download rate it means that you need to pay for 4x clicks to capture one person’s details and if a click costs $10 that’s $40 per name. Because this is LinkedIn we know exactly who those 6000+ clicks are from so we have effectively collected their details and, to use the example above, that’s a cost saving of $40 x 6000 = $240,000.
You Get Pipeline But Other Benefits Too
The strategic objective may have been to “increase pipeline and revenue” but in executing this objective the tactical activities have delivered a significant benefit to the organisation.
With another client, the strategic objective was “increase visibility” so we taught a team of salespeople how to blog.
The sales leader wrote a blog about what a great place it was to work…and more than 40 people messaged to say “can I come and work there too!” That saved them the recruitment fees on the 4 people they were planning to hire…which enabled them to hire an additional person for the same price! They have since saved $390,000 in recruitment fees. One of our clients has cut all their recruitment spend on recruiters and adverts as they do all their recruitment through social.
Once again, the tactical and rather tangential benefits to the organisation were different from the stated objectives (which were of course also achieved).
Strategy Vs Tactics
We (at DLAignite ) think that the tactical parts are vital because success won’t happen by accident and there needs to be predictability and repeatability to what you do, but the maximum benefit is leveraged from social when it is seen as a strategic and transformational programme delivering value in to every business function.
If you would like to talk about the business case and the return on investment (RoI) you would get by moving your business to social, then please contact me here
Everyone wants to know “what’s the performance of my digital marketing campaigns?” That’s a good question. The answer is NOT how much traffic, how many clicks, how many impressions did my agency buy for me and how low were the CPM prices? But sadly, these are the exact things most often reported as “performance” by media agencies in Excel spreadsheets sent to their clients. This is partly because these quantity metrics are easily measured and big numbers look better — the campaign got billions of ad impressions, millions of clicks, etc. Yay!
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