Get High at Work!

Take a Marketing Inventory

Written by

Kevin Sandlin

in

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.

Comments

Leave a comment

More from Kevin

  • 6 Best Practices for Social Media Marketing Newbies

    This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. You’re just starting out actually marketing a business or non-profit organization using various social media channels and tools. You’re not a social media marketing expert yet, but you will be very soon. What’s your next step? It’s wise to start off with some boundaries…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Social and Search Paid Advertising

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. This post is the fifth in a series of six posts we’re calling “Digital Marketing 101,” in which we have broken up the General Assembly Digital Marketing class into six bite-sized chunks for those who are considering entering the digital marketing space, or who…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Owned Content Marketing

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.   In the first three parts of this DGM 101 series, we established that your marketing must start with your brand, and your brand is “everything you do.” Then you set up your web property and marketing plans so that you can measure everything…

  • Digital Marketing 101: Measuring Your Digital Marketing Efforts

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog. “You can manage only what you measure.” There are many different versions of that mantra, and all of them hold true. Just as in fitness and weight loss, if you don’t start with a baseline, take regular measurements, and see what’s working, you can’t…

  • Old marketing vs. new marketing: the only difference is data

    I love finding old ads for products we used to own in our childhood or teen years, like this 1983 Jeep Grand Wagoneer. Classic! I also am a huge fan of the series “Mad Men”, which is the essence of old school marketing, better known as advertising. Back then, it was similar to the old…

  • It’s not you. It’s me.

    I led an all day seminar this past Saturday at General Assembly in Atlanta. This class was a 6-hour event in which we compressed the 60 hours of the GA Digital Marketing class down to 6 hours, lunch from Chipotle included. Here’s a good description of the class and here’s a follow up to the…

  • 3 things that make it hard to tell your story

    It is my business to help entrepreneurs and small businesses tell their stories. Telling your story with great, compelling, consistent content builds trust among your audience, and helps them know that you have a solution to the problems they face every day. Most entrepreneurs don’t think they can tell their story, and they also don’t think…

  • Why to Tell Your Story

    I’ve written recently about telling your story and how to keep telling your story ad how some stories write themselves, but haven’t really delved into some deeper reasons to tell your story, so here’s the “why” of telling your story, both your personal story and the story of your business. I spent the day today on…

  • The Seven Things You Must Do to Win at SEO

    This post originally appeared on the General Assembly blog. Most non-developers are completely ignorant of, if not intimidated by SEO. Even some software developers won’t go near it. SEO has been called “black magic,” “dark art”and “pseudoscience,” most likely because if you happen to get it right, you win all the Googles! And everybody wants…