The Monday Morning Marketing Podcast is brought to you byEsther of IPA Group, bringing premier online promotion to your business.
And Melanie of Stomp Social Media Training, who empowers as business owners to manage social media and marketing for themselves. And we're back with another episode of the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. Today we're talking to Amanda Webb, digital Marketing ROI mentor and consultant, helping medium sized businesses make more money from the time and energy and cash they spend on marketing. And we're talking about how to measure the ROI of social media. Welcome, Amanda.
Thank you for having me. We were just discussing, I think this is my second time because I accidentally missed an important one that I was supposed to be on. So I'm really privileged. You had me back after that, after messing up.
We don't hold grudges much.
We're not for long, anyway.
No. So, Amanda, ROI, first of all, what does it stand for?
It's return on investment. So that's why I say it's for the cash that you're spending, but it's also for the time and the energy that youput into your online marketing. Is it actually working? Are you actually making money as a result of that? Or actually are you losing money? Because once youstart calculating in your time, sometimes that can be the result. Which, of course, none of us would be in business if that's what happened all the time.
Does everybody measure ROI the same way?
Well, they should. As in they should be taking into accountall their business expenses. A lot of people just don't measure ROI at all, sothat's an issue. A lot of people might just measure the money that's coming inand the money that's going out and not think about the other expenses. So a lotof people might measure the exact ROI on part of their marketing, like socialmedia, and they might not be considering their overheads for their business,like their heating and their office expenses and their outsourcing. All of thatshould go into it. I think very particularly that happens with ads, becausesomething like Facebook ads will turn you, show you your return on ad spend,and you're going woohoo until you work out. That actually, if you add in allthe other costs, you're still not in profit. So that's the first thing to know.How much does it actually cost you to produce an hour of training, in yourcase, Melanie, or an hour of web development work, or in my case, an hour ofconsulting? How much does that actually cost me to deliver? And then I will beable to start understanding my return on investment.
So in some cases, it might work out cheaper to outsourcesocial media.
Yeah. You know what I say? Because people are terrible atcharging for their own time to their own company. So I don't mean by that likepaying yourself. I mean, how much is your time actually worth? And becauseyou're the boss of your business, it should actually be worth a lot. But peopledon't even consider it when they're working out their ROI, so they'll put in 40hours, 50 hours, 60 hours, and not calculate that as an expense. So, at thevery minimum, and this is like after our Kickstart event, somebody said youshould calculate it as this, but I say it's a bare minimum. Count your hoursevery hour at minimum wage, because without that, you're not in business.You're just having fun, basically, or you're not even having fun and you're notmaking money. So that's the first thing you need to be, considering that everyhour that you spend on a task is worth minimum wage or more, and preferablymore, then, of course, yes, if you can outsource stuff that you could bespending your time better on, actually high stuff that is actually going to getyou. So, like sales calls or making sales or doing a big marketing project, alot of the smaller tasks you could outsource because that's less important foryou to hands on do, and then the more time, obviously, you're spending on salesand big marketing tasks, you should be improving the amount of money that'scoming in.
And if not, maybe you need to look at what you're actually doing, which is the next thing.
So, as an ROI consultant, how would you go about helping a business person who's listening to this, bearing in mind our audience is welltravelled, so we've got a US audience, a UK audience, and obviously an Irish audience. So how could you help each of them?
Amanda well, I suppose that's a nice thing, because I work virtually, I can work with you anywhere in the world. So that's the first thingto say. It doesn't vary on your location, and there's a few things that I do.So, firstly, it's really important to have a baseline, where are you now? And to do that, you need to understand your analytics. You need to understand whereyour money is coming from. You need to understand your lifetime customer value.There's a whole bunch of stuff. And that's one of the products I offer kind ofdoes that for you. I delve into your analytics for your social media, I delvein to your analytics for Google, and we look at what's working already and look at the trail that you need to put in place. Because sometimes I'll get there and I'm not able to tell you because you don't have anything set up. So it all has to be guesswork. So that's called the ROI fixer. I almost forgot the name of my own product there, the ROI Fixer. That'd be producing a report for you, telling you you need to do this. Sometimes that report will be, you need to do this so that you know if it's working.
And sometimes, if you're a bit more advanced, I can look andI can actually see what's working, what's not working, and how you can improve your processes to get more money from what you're already doing. So that's my first product. Also, I work with people, like on a six month basis where youcan sign up, you work with me for six months. We have calls every month, basically on implementing that plan. So the ROI fixer is kind of part of that,looking at what you're doing, and each month delving into an area, looking at how you can tweak stuff and improve stuff to get more money in return for whatyou're doing. And that really helps you get into a system and a process of working that after those six months that will continue on, you'll know exactlywhat you need to be doing on a regular basis.
So when you talk about having things in place before you ge tstarted with you, what are you talking there? Are you talking pixels? Are youtalking Google Analytics codes? What exactly should people have connected?
So the nice thing is, firstly, if you don't have itconnected, that's not a problem. We can do that for you. Nice thing aboutsocial media is that's all set up already, automatically. As soon as you starta Facebook business page, you've got analytics. The same with your Instagram,your TikTok, your Twitter, all that is there. But yes, Google Analytics issomething that you need to add in case you missed the news. Universal analyticsis going away, which is slightly annoying, which is the analytics you probablygot installed on your website and you've got used to using all those years. AndGoogle are making a switch over to Google Analytics for so there is a bit of alearning curve. There a lot of it's similar. Whereas in Universal Analytics,you had to set up goals. So you know, if people have completed processes onyour site, now you have to set up a thing called conversions. If you don't havethat set up, we will set it up for you. You're just starting at a differentpoint. That's the thing. So again, with the ROI fixer, that's fine, we can setthat up for you as part of the ROI fixer and look at what you need toimplement, or if you've got it set up already, we can take it to the nextphase.
So Google Analytics is essential. I know there's a lot ofpeople looking for alternatives because they look at Ga Four and they're like,it just looks so complicated. But I really think even if you never look at ituntil you talk to me, get it set up, that's very important.
And actually setting it up is actually quite easy, isn't it?It's only a couple of buttons once you go to Google Analytics. And if you'vealready got Google Analytics, that is, if you've already got UniversalAnalytics, it's very easy. Just push a button a couple of.
Times and it isn't because it does things like it says, doyou want us to transfer your goals over to Google Analytics? And you go, yes.And then the goals get converted over and they don't work. That's myexperience. So actually, installing the code on your website really easy,particularly depending on whichever service you're using. A lot of them haveintegrations there. That is very easy. And if not, it's not a big job for yourweb developer to do. But yeah, the configuring of all those conversions can bequite technical. I really recommend people use Tag Manager. Google Tag Manager.Again, if you don't know what that is, you don't need to know before you workwith me. That's fine. That's why you're working with me, right? But it's areally useful way to implement all your conversions and pieces like that.
See, this is what this podcast is all about, Amanda. It'sletting people understand the conversation that they need to know, because weonly fail when we don't know what we need to know to make a success of ourbusiness. And that's why you're definitely one of the best people to bring on,because you're so easy to talk to, such a great conversationalist, and you justgive it away. You just tell everybody you're just fantastic. And that's why Ienjoy your weekly sessions on a Friday morning. Tell us about the digitalcoffee. You may as well.
Yes, so every Friday I do, and this is actually a reallygood example of how what I call covert benefits. So I am talking about ROI andanalytics all the time, but what happens to all that stuff that analytics can'ttell you about? And that's the digital coffee. So it's a live show that I run,cross platform. Now, depending on how wear Twitter goes on LinkedIn, onFacebook, on YouTube, and on Twitter, it's a half hour news show about thelatest social media and digital marketing updates and how it applies to yourbusiness. So I'm not interested in the little things that come up. You know,that button has moved from here to here, unless it's going to have an effect onyour business. It's a half hour show. I've been running it for six years now,and I don't get millions of viewers. So people might go and they'll go, oh,look, there's only another five or six people online while I'm watching it. Ido repurpose it so it gets seen on all the channels afterwards and do a lot ofwork with that. But what I get from that doesn't show up in analytics.
If I looked at the number of people that visited my digitalcoffee page or the number of people that were signed up to my email list fromthat, it would look like a failure. But it's not a failure because every singlecustomer I get almost actually, I'm almost at the stage that if they haven'twatched the digital coffee, I'm not sure I'd take them as a customer. One willsay to me that they've seen either the digital coffee or one of the videos fromit, and they know me and feel like they know me and trust me because of that.That's not measurable in analytics, but that is measurable when I'm on callswith customers. So that's a perfect example of what I call a covert benefit,something that doesn't appear in your analytics.
So how can other people measure those things in their ROI?Is it just a matter of asking, how did you find me? Asking who referred you?Are there sets of questions that we should be asking people when they contactus?
Yes, those questions are important. So where did you hearabout me? But often you just pick it up in the conversation. It's somethingpeople will say to you. So, yes, absolutely. If somebody's come out of theblue, usually customers don't come to me that way. It's either me proactivelycontacting them, or somebody would pass it on to me, and they'd mention thatthat's where most of the people or their existing customers that keep comingback, I know where I know them from. It's very rarely that I would get astranger. But of course, not all businesses are like that. You might getsomebody ringing you or getting in touch, or filling in a form on your websiteand you've no clue your analytics aren't showing you. Maybe they're showing youdirect. So definitely when you get on your first call with them, ask them thosequestions, where did you hear about me? Or, you know, how did you hear aboutme? Those things are really important. It's never going to be 100% accurate,though, because people will go, oh, the Internet or a website. They might seethe website and it was actually Facebook, or they might say Facebook, and itwas actually Twitter or LinkedIn, because don't they all look the same now?
But you'll get a rough idea that what you're doing online isworking versus that word of mouth, which there's nothing wrong with that, butit's just nice if you can gather people through your online marketing as well.
I've recently come to know and well say, no, that's notfair. I'm still learning, but starting the journey of understanding HubSpot.And I've noticed that there is some really awesome analytics in there as well.It tells you which pages people looked at, where they signed up from, and thatsort of links. So can you get access to that as well, and glean informationfrom that as well? Is that useful?
So what is wonderful about HubSpot is it is giving you thatdata. It's giving you the stuff you want to know up front. So, yes, you canfind that out. That's part of what we do with the ROI fixer. All right, we gointo your analytics and find that information. But yeah, stuff like HubSpot isdesigned to give you that information up front rather than Google Analytics.That kind of hides it away and you have to go and discover it, you have to goand dig it out. But of course you have to pay for HubSpot.
That is a paid for option. The one I'm talking about there,there is a free part to HubSpot, but it doesn't show you that. So it soundslike you've got a lot of fingers in lots of different pies to build up thisfull picture. So I assume there must be reporting. So what kind of reporting doyou provide?
I don't do the reporting. Everything I do is teaching andconsulting and mentoring. Apart from the ROI fixer, that is the first piece ofit's. Either you do it independently and if you do it independently, you getmoney off my six month programme or it's part of the six month programme. Andso that gets done once. The idea is that we can look at those analytics at thebeginning, we look at the analytics at the end and we see what's changed. Sothat is part of the programme, rather than something I would do independently,so I wouldn't come along and set up reporting for you. I do it as part of theprogramme. So there's no point. I think it's like planning, because isn'teveryone planning this time of year? We go off and we do our plans and then weput them in a draw and that's it. Right, that's the problem. I don't do thereporting unless it's part of the main product, because unless you can act onit, there's no point doing it.
So you show people how to do the reporting?
Yeah, we set it up at the beginning so that they're able tosee what they need to look at. So we set up the reports that they need and thenthey can quickly go in and see those. But it's more you do this, we take actionon it and at the end, look, there's the results. Does that make sense?
Yeah, definitely. But what about for the people who arescared of numbers, scared of their analytics, scared of breaking something whenthey go and look at their insights on Facebook, it was still called that. Theymight have changed the name by now.
There is a real fear, I know there are people that numbersjust fly over their heads. And so the idea is that you're not looking at toomany numbers once you know what it is you need to focus on. So obviously themoney is important. Like anyone that tells you the money isn't important isn'tin business, because that is important. So looking at rather than having tolook at 20 or 30 different statistics is really focusing on the ones thatreally matter. I know there's a lot I know myself. Sometimes I'll avoid lookingat my analytics, particularly for Facebook, which I'm not using very much now,because you go oh, but that's because I'm looking at something like Reach,right? I'm looking at Reach on Facebook and it makes me go whereas in fact,yeah, if I looked at my Google Analytics and saw how many people were visitingmy website from Facebook, that's a whole different story. Or how many peopleconverting into customers, maybe not directly from my Facebook page, butFacebook in general is actually doing lots of work for me without me having todo much in return, which is nice.
Still, after all these years, facebook tends to drive afterGoogle, the most traffic to my website, most conversions.
Yeah, I have found that especially on pages that I manageand things it could tell you zero people reached, but there are 14 comments and23 likes. So I'm sort of looking at it going, something's broken. So don'talways trust the numbers that.
They tell you break your Facebook analytics. But they can.
They can. But yeah, it's one of those things that people cango, oh, well, I spent five minutes making that image. Wasn't really fiveminutes, was it? How do you measure time that you've spent?
I'm totally addicted to this tool called Toggle, which Idon't know if you're using. It was actually it was designed for like, likecontractors and stuff to measure how much time you're spending on client work.And that's not what I use it for. I use it to measure the tasks that I do everyday. So I can tell you that basically you go to Toggle, you start a project,you switch it on, and then when you go and look at Facebook, you switch it off.This is why it's really good though, because it stops you going andprocrastinating looking at other stuff. So that measures your time exactly foreach project that you're doing. So I can see, for example, the digital coffeetakes me roughly 6 hours a week. Sometimes a little bit less, sometimes alittle bit more, but average 6 hours a week, which is a lot of time. Right. Soevery time better be telling me.
Yeah, because it's not. I mean, digital coffee is 30minutes. Yes, but those 30 minutes live, but it's actually five and a halfhours in the background as well.
Exactly.
And did it take you a long time to get into the routine ofturning on and off toggle when you're flicking it like that?
Yes, sometimes you forget.
That would be me.
I use it on my browser, so I can see it ticking away rightnow. So that's good. I think if you use it on your phone, it's very easy toforget because it's not obvious in front of you. So I use it on my browser andit does take me time, and sometimes I allocate time to the wrong things. Butthe first thing I noticed, and this is actually really good for anyone that'sinto productivity, was how little time I was working in a day. I was sitting atmy desk from 08:00 A.m. Till 06:00 p.m. In the evening, but I wasn't workingmost of that time. I was procrastinating. I was looking at social media toomuch. There was a whole lot of stuff that wasn't, and I was shocked. So it'sactually really helped my productivity because I've gone up at least 2 hours aday more actually doing productive work because of toggle. Guilty.
Wow.
Apart from the ROI, just measuring your ROI has been greatfor productivity. It does. Totally guilty.
I also remember you telling me, I think it was in personabout an app or something that you use that makes that you only be able to seeFacebook for like 15 minutes.
Yeah, it's a browser extension for Chrome. So if I do findmyself looking at social media too much, I can click it's like a little tomatoon the top of my browser. So it's based on that tomato, tomato in a foreignlanguage, that sort of thing. It blocks any website that you put in there. Soit doesn't just have to be social media. You can put in other websites. I thinkit's like 20 minutes at a time, and then you get five minutes where you'reallowed to browse those websites. Which one? That's really good because itbreaks that habit of going around. I hide my phone from me also, so my phoneisn't on my desk or anyone in my desk. So that helps. It helps you get into theflow and breaking the habit. And it's a bit of a pain when you're designingcourses like Melanie, you might be, because you go look at Facebook and see howthat works, but actually you store that up in your head. You go, when thattimer goes off, then I can go and look and see what it is that I need to go andget a screenshot of or whatever.
So I found after the first couple of goes going through it,I've broken the habit, so I don't need to even click the button anymore.
Brilliant. And what's it called again?
It's called strict workflow.
That's exactly what it says on the tin.
Brilliant.
Because there are so many tips and little tip bits in therethat we can, you know, we don't think about when it comes to our ROI. So one ofthe things that you said was energy. So we've talked about our time andmanaging our time. We talked about our cash and everything. But the energy, howdo you measure that?
It's more knowing your own energy and where it works duringthe week. So, for example, on a Monday morning, I am actually full of energy. Iknow that's odd. Everyone will have a different time. So I know once I finishthe digital coffee on a Friday, I am pretty much depleted of energy for theweek. I don't have any creativity left in me. I do try and write things, butthey're very bad. First draughts always. If I've got important jobs to do, it'susually the mornings that first thing in the morning is good for me to actuallystart on a project, and usually at the beginning of the week, because towardsthe end, that is my energy gone. So knowing never start a project on a Fridayafternoon would be funny, but I mean, that's different for everyone and everyoneworks different hours and different times of the week as well. Some people workweekends and take off weekdays during the week. It's really finding your ownenergy and knowing when you are most productive and just planning your daysaround that and planning that with clients as well are the particular dates.There's no point me doing training with a client on a Friday because I'm goingto be useless.
They're probably going to be tired as well. So thinkingabout that as well now.
Return on investment, we always think, like, immediatelywhen we discussed bringing you onto this, my first thoughts went to customersand clients and that sort of stuff, but it's also got to be a return oninvestment with suppliers and people that you collaborate with as well. So isthere any sort of knowledge bombs that you want to drop that can help peoplebetter look at their ROI for that kind of relationship and not just their ownclient as well?
So do you mean spending on those?
Yes, spending or researching or finding funding, that sortof thing.
So finding funding. Funding I can't help with. I know everytime I do subcontract something, it all goes into my calculations. So I'mlooking at possibly getting someone to do some of the work on the digitalcoffee, right? But that's a tough one because that's not directly attributingcash. I already have an editor, so I'm already paying out for that. I'm alreadypaying out for ECAM, I'm already paying out for a few things I use specificallyfor the digital coffee. So anything I put on top of that, I'm kind of going,well, if I do this, what's that going to do? Is that going to free up time forme to do something else? So every time I think of taking the editing, becausevideo editing is easy for me, but it takes time, every time I think of takingthat back off the editor, I go, no, because now I invest that time in this andthis instead of editing my thing. So that's what I need to think, how much timeis it going to save me? And then I'm not going for a cheap contractor, that'snot me. I want to go for somebody who's really good.
So the current work that I'm looking at, outsourcing, it'snot going to be cheap, but it's going to free up a lot of time, it's going tomake the product better at the end of the day, is it going to attract morecustomers. That's the third thing that I need to look at.
Right.
Is that improvement going to make a difference to the numberof people that come to me, or is that just me being frivolous and wantingsomething a little bit better than what I can produce in the time that I've gotallocated? So that's where I am at the moment. And then I'm looking at mybudgets for next year and can I actually afford to outsource that thing?Because I need to make sure if I outsource that, that I'm spending that time onsales, which will always get me more money, if that makes sense.
Yeah, no, it was perfect.
That's it. Are they tasks or actually going to improve thenumber of sales and amount of cash? It's all about money at the end of the day.
It is, yeah.
If you spend it on the digital coffee, though, because it'sproven to be my top of funnel thing, it's almost better to spend it there thansomewhere else. Or then, yeah, I could go on for ages. I won't.
If you want more, you know where to find Amanda. So where dowe find you, Amanda?
So, actually, I've made a page especially for anyonelistening to this show, which is idealworking.com Monday morning, and on thatpage, you will find a link to a free digital marketing audit worksheet. Andwhat that does, it will help you go through it will ask you questions, go stepby step through what you're doing and give you some sort of guidance on whatyou should do next, where you should be focusing your time. I've also got afree training on that page, free 1 hour training. Or by the time you get it, itmight be split into segments because that's something I'm working on, which iscalled the ROI Primer that takes you step by step on through the whole processof measuring your ROI. Also got a strategy, template and workbook that you candownload all on that page. Monday morning, Spiderworking.com. Monday morning,if you want to connect with me, the best place is LinkedIn, so we'll make sureI leave a link to that on that page as well.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Amanda. I will be checking thatout as well. And, yeah, all this information you can find on our show notes aswell, and on the social media posts that we send out to you guys. So thank youvery much for joining us once again, Amanda, and I'm sure at some point in thefuture, we'll have you on again because you're just such a fantastic guest.
Thanks for having me. So much fun.
That's it for today, guys. We're back next week with moreMonday morning marketing. Until then, bye bye.
Bye.
You wave as well.
Yeah, it's not just me, see, it's.
An English thing.
On camera. So I didn't when I was half waving, I was going,we're. Not on camera, but I'm just waving at you two.
That's fine. We'll accept your wiz.
I feel slightly lessened normal now.
Less normal? Are you less normal?
Yeah. We both have normal together now. I just thought Iwas, like, a problem against a matrix.