Take a Marketing Inventory

General Assembly published my latest article on their blog today, How to Measure Social Media ROI. That post came from a seminar that we’re now teaching regularly at GA Atlanta, and is a great example of repurposing content from one media to many others. It’s not included in the blog post, but in the class, one of the thought provoking exercises is to take a marketing inventory. It reminds me of the scene in “The Princess Bride” after Inigo and Fezzik have rescued Westley from the pit of despair, fed him Miracle Max’s miracle pill, and Westley wakes up: “What are our assets?”

Before you begin your content marketing strategy, leading to measuring your social media ROI, take an inventory of the following items.

• CONTENT: what content do you already have or can you create on a regular, repeatable basis?
• CHANNELS: what social media or other marketing channels (like email) are already established or would be an obvious good fit?
• GOALS: do you have marketing or more specific social media goals in place? Some of you are shaking your heads right now, but you’d be shocked at how many business operate with no goals.
• TRACKING: are there any tracking mechanisms in place, such as UTM parameters in your call to action URLs?
• MEASURING: what analytics tools are you already using or could you use tomorrow, like Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc.?
• VALUE: have you established a value for each lead, each social media engagement? How much would it be worth if someone retweeted your best piece of content?
• REVENUE: what is your average sale amount? lifetime value of your customer? average conversion rate? Do you know any of these metrics?
• COSTS: what are your hard costs (personnel, software, etc.), soft costs, time costs, and sunk costs?

It’s not a contest to see how many of these you can answer perfectly. Rather, it’s an inventory of what you have, so you can make an intelligent decision on how to proceed. For example, if you have an opt-in email list with 10,000 email addresses, that’s a major asset, even if you have zero presence on social media.

It’s always good to know your assets and your liabilities, even if you don’t have a holocaust cloak or a wheelbarrow.