Understand Your Content Marketing Math with Jay Baer

This the second installment of my interview with Jay Baer, Convince & Convert, on Content Marketing 360 Radio Show. In my previous post, Jay shared '4 Metrics Every Content Marketer Needs To Measure' to kick-start the content marketing measurement process. We take the conversation one step further, as Jay shows us how simple numbers can yield big results.
Below is an excerpt from my interview with Jay where he shares:

• Why empowering your sales team is vital to your content strategy
• The importance of understanding the math at every part of the sales process
• A real-world example of a small Mexican restaurant in Baltimore tracking social media conversions

You can also listen to my full interview with Jay in a couple of ways:

• Subscribe to Next Stage Online Radio via iTunes. [Note: This feed includes additional topics beyond content marketing.]
• Download the MP3 from Content Marketing 360's Facebook page.

Pamela: A silo exists between sales and marketing silo. Sales people are doing their thing, and marketing people are doing their thing. I personally worked for a couple of Fortune 100 companies where that was very much the case back in the day. I think sales people need to become marketers again. How are you getting clients to see the need for merging and how do you suggest it happen?

Jay: There's two ways that we address it. The first is on the measurement side. Using measurement as a fulcrum, you say, 'Okay, we are being tasked by the C-suite to provide a unified view of the success of content marketing. We can't do that unless we know whether the person who downloaded this eBook actually became a customer. Therefore, we need to, at least, work with sales enough to get that data from them, to have a centralized data store that tells us yes, this person converted and this is what the customer value is of that program. ' We use numbers as the tip of the spear.

The second way is a little bit more on the social side. The reality is everybody in your company is in marketing now because everybody knows where you work. You tell everybody who your employer is in your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles and everything else. So, if somebody needs to get ahold of somebody in the company, chances are they're not going to call your main phone number. Call centers are for suckers. I'm not going to call your 800 number and sit on hold for 45 minutes. I'm going to go to Twitter and say, 'Does anybody know anybody at X?'

Somebody will say, 'Sure, I know a person,' and it doesn't matter whether they're in marketing or sales or customer service, it just matters that they work there. I'll get ahold of that person, and, bingo, now your lawyer is first point of contact. That's the reality of the modern age, and so we use that fact ' the idea that sales people are marketers whether they want to be or not ' as a way to initiate training and social media and content policies and procedures, to make sure that people don't go off the reservation to the degree that is a detriment to the brand.

We use the real time nature of the social web as a way to get sales to the table with marketing and say, 'Look, we're all in this together. That's just the way this works now, and we want to make sure that you have the knowledge, the expertise, the tools, the guidelines to do this well.' Most companies on the sales side are enlightened enough to realize that if their field staff, whether it's inbound or outbound sales, if their field staff can be competent at social it's going to ultimately yield dollars.

Pamela: I think that's such an important piece. Who would be the better marketing person than the sales people? They're on the front lines and, if they are a good sales person, they're actually a better educator. It really comes down to what content and what the world of content really revolves around, which is providing the information that your audience is seeking. I think that's fantastic and, of course, all the silos are down online whether they are inside the organization or not.

Jay: I think this idea of content being only used to generate new business is a real mistake. The smart companies create a bigger piece of content. In my organization, we call it bricks and feathers. Feathers are things that are lightweight, ephemeral, here today gone tomorrow. Something like a blog post is a content feather. A brick is something that has some additional weight to it, it has some permanence to it so that's webinar, eBook, infographics, something along those lines.

So, smart companies take their bricks and give them to their sales team before they're launched publicly and have the sales team send them out to existing customers to say, 'We really love you and we want to make sure, because you've already participated with us, that you got a first crack at this great piece of content we created.' So, you're using content not only as a top of the funnel program but also as a loyalty and retention piece. And I think that's a way to maximize the efficiencies of your content program.

Pamela: That's a great analogy of looking at the leverage of content. We tend to talk a lot in terms of leverage on how to repurpose content, to re-imagine it in different ways, but what you're really talking about is leveraging content internally. How can we use it as a retention tool? How can we use it as a conversion-of-new-client tool? It really looks at the concept of leverage ' just a slightly different format ' and it puts a little more empowerment in the sales person's hands as well. They get an excuse per se to stay engaged with a current client or the current database.

Jay: Yeah, you said it perfectly. It is a rationale for them to make that call, that email, that's not, 'Hey, I'm just here to bug you.' It's, 'Hey, I've got this amazing piece of content. I want to make sure that you have it.'

Pamela: Every company goes through a point where they get so focused on new that they lose sight of what they already have in the funnel or with their current customers. I love that example of being able to empower your sales staff, and subsequently you get marketing to work with sales to do some of that, which is the money is usually sitting right in front of you, right?

Let me ask just a little bit on this data. We've chatted about going backwards and making sure the tools we use and the expectations we set make sense. How do you set expectations with data with your clients knowing that some of them want that big hit right out of the gate? How do we analyze this data to really understand what it means, especially when it is intangible like getting people to read your blog? How do we start to measure that and convert it to actual dollars?

Jay: Ideally, we'd look at average. Let's say, historically, for every 2,000 people that come to the website, one person fills out our lead form, and one out of every 10 of those becomes a customer. So, if you know your conversion percentages historically, then you can use your content program to get more people into the top of the funnel which will equal dollars at the bottom of the funnel. That's the way that process works.

We have to understand what the math is in every step of that process, otherwise we could just be adding eyeballs that don't actually create dollars, which is a classic mistake. The problem that most marketers have is that they don't know those numbers. They don't know conversion rates, average lifetime customer value, profit margin on a new customer. As marketers we have always been so driven by 'creating eyeballs,' but now, if we're going to be doing content, we also have to say, 'Okay, do those eyeballs create dollars?' That is a different set of data points you have to have at your disposal.

If you don't know that number, if you don't have any way to get at that number, any metrics that you put forth with regard to your content program are going to be incomplete.

Pamela: You're absolutely right. I was in marketing, and we didn't have the conversion conversations. We just drew the pretty pictures and put the copy together and made sure the guys got the information by certain deadline. When you're dealing with a client who does not know their conversion rates and such, how do we start to put in place? I know it seems like a vague question but I think the reason it's not being tracked is because people think it's harder than it is. Does that make sense?

Jay: Yeah, and it depends. B2B companies have it easier because there is always some sort of 'fill out this form' or 'have a conversation with a real person' before you actually make your purchase. So, B2B almost always has this ability into the point of purchase. Whether they track it or not, it's a different story, but they have the ability to track it. If you're Pringles, it's a little tougher story. You know that a bunch of cans of potato chips left the shelf, but you don't know whose hand was around each can, so it's a little harder to close the loop on that mathematically.

What do we do if we can't close that loop? If we can't get access to the actual sales data, look at are behaviors on the website that are indicative of intent to purchase. Every website has pages on them that are really only of interest to people who are considering making a purchase. So, in my case, if you go to ConvinceandConvert.com, there isn't a button that says 'content marketing strategy. Add to cart. Pay with PayPal.' It doesn't work like that.

So, for us, we track are things like, among people who come to our website to read our amazing blog, how many of those people actually look at our consulting page, our speaking page or other things that tend to yield dollars down the road? If you're going to come and read a blog post, you're not inherently going to look at the consulting page unless you're interested in what we have to say about consulting. So, we set those up as goals in Google Analytics, and then we pay attention to what types of content, what subjects, what modalities of content create more people who come to the blog who subsequently look at the consulting page.

So, it's not actual dollars, because I can't track actual dollars, but it is a behavior that is more than likely to lead to dollars than just something like website visits.

Pamela: Of course, once you do that and you get face to face with a client, now you know the return on that investment if they sign on the dotted line, right?

Jay: Absolutely.

Pamela: Yeah, and it is a little tougher with the B2Cs, especially if they have a low-level product like you mentioned, such as Pringles or restaurants. But at the end of the day, you can still track traffic whether it's traffic to web or traffic in your store, field traffic. What gets me excited is that we have all this software, Internet tools and even Excel and manual tracking.

Jay: Exactly. My favorite example that I use in presentations all the time is for California Tortilla. They're a chain of Mexican food restaurants, ironically, with no locations in California, which I think is fraud on some level. They're based in Baltimore. They do a great job of this kind of tracking. In Facebook, for example, they'll have a Facebook status update that says something like, 'Today's secret password is 'fresh.' Come in to any location, say the word 'fresh,' and you get a free chips and queso with any burrito purchase.'

So, they put that on Facebook. They put a different password on Twitter and in their email newsletter. Before that goes out, they email all the store managers so they know what's going on. The store managers tell the high school kids working the cash registers, so everybody knows what the deal is. You walk into the store, you say 'fresh,' you buy a burrito, and they key it into the register like a coupon because it is, in fact, an audio coupon. They have a unified point of sales system, so they can run it back to the corporate office and say, 'Here's how many coupons we got from Facebook versus Twitter versus the email newsletter by location,' and you can put real value on that quite easily.

But to your point, I was on a board of directors for a local theater company when I lived in Arizona, and we used to do this all the time. If we had extra tickets, we would just put on our Facebook page or on our blog or in our email newsletter, 'Hey, come on down to the box office and tell them 'Julie sent you,' and whatever the word was, whoever was the lead character in that play, so Julie or whatever, and we'll give you two-for-one tickets.'

So, literally as you said, the way we tracked it was a pencil and a post-it note. So, if somebody came in and said 'Julie,' we took the pencil and went, 'One.' Then, the next person who came in and said 'Julie,' we said, 'Two.' Sometimes, it doesn't have to be any harder than that.

Pamela: That's fantastic. I love that because we get so caught up in the technology that we forget that basic pencil and paper can be our friend and show us if we're making a return. What struck me with the restaurant example, is one of the challenges that folks have, especially if they're giving something away, a coupon like in a B2C platform and it's okay I'll give you a free drink with x or I just give you something for free. It's all about the up-sell at that point. It's traffic and up-sell.

So, if you're doing it correctly, you can also be tracking if someone's up-selling because I think that's one of the conversions or the numbers that sometimes gets lost. It's great to get people in the door, but are they actually buying something other than getting the free 'X', right?

Jay: Absolutely. But even if you're going to track it basically, just like paper and pencil as you said, the key to that is the whole wizard and the wand concept. The key is not what you use to write it down, the key is that you had a traceable action. A lot of people say, 'Well, I want to measure the effectiveness of my content or my whatever,' but they have no traceable action. They have no 'come in and say 'Julie.'' So, I don't know what to tell you now. If you don't have some sort of traceable action, the metrics trail gets real cold real fast.

Pamela: Yeah, so you've got to set it up for success. I love that idea of a specific password for each of your platforms because that makes it so much easier.

Jay: Yeah, it's a pretty simple concept at that point.

Pamela: I know this measurement conversation is one that has a lot of different loops and turns, and we could probably dissect it 100 different ways, but we just have our short time today. It's a great little teaser, of course, because you're one of our speakers at Content Marketing World, which is coming up here September 2012. Before we wrap it up, any last tips?

Jay: Sure. Thank you for the opportunity. I'm looking forward to seeing everybody again at Content Marketing World. Feel free to check out the blog, ConvinceandConvert.com. The book is 'The Now Revolution,' and the podcast is Social Pros. We talk to real people who are content marketing managers, social media managers, at real companies and have conversations like these.

I think that the parting gift would be this ' we have to remember that the goal is not to be good at content. The goal is to be good at business because of content. So, make sure when you're measuring, you're measuring things that have inherent business value.

Pamela: And, of course, that goes to a lot of what we talked about today, is understanding your process so that you can actually see how it affects your bottom line.

Jay: You got it.

Pamela: Exactly. Jay, it's been such a treat to talk with you. I look forward to seeing you live again at Content Marketing World. I love that you're a fellow podcaster now.

Jay: Yeah, we just did episode 10 this week but we are nascent but enjoying it.

Pamela: It's a good time. I like to say marketing, we could be rock stars again. So, it's kind of fun. I appreciate you taking time.

Jay: Thank you.

Pamela: My best to you and your business as you move through the rest of 2012, and of course folks, Jay Baer, ConvinceandConvert.com is the place to go. Check out his blog. Check out The Now Revolution, great resource and now, of course, the podcast. What's the name of the podcast again?

Jay: Social Pros.

Pamela: Social Pros. Excellent. Thanks so much, Jay. Appreciate your time.

Jay: Thanks a lot. Take care.

Jay is co-author of The NOW Revolution: 7 Shifts to make Your Company Faster, Smarter and More Social and the co-host of the Social Pros podcast.

See more from Jay Baer when you attend Content Marketing World on September 4 ' 6 in Columbus, Ohio.