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Converting Post Likes to Page Likes

OK, so you’ve run a Facebook campaign that involved experimenting with promoting your Facebook posts. You’ve put some budget behind a range of content approaches to see which content type and which copy style gives you the best engagement rate and you’ve gained some insights to use in your next campaign. You’ve got some pleasing engagement on your best performing posts – a lot of likes, some comments and even several shares. A percentage of people that engaged with your posts also followed your call to action and clicked through to your blog or website. What’s more, a proportion of them converted into new customers. Yes – mission accomplished! Your social strategy is winning you new business!

Next, you do all the nasty number crunching and you’re over the moon to report a positive ROI for your social campaign. You’ve also hit all your KPI’s so everyone’s happy right? But could your campaign be delivering you even more value for money? Are you leaving potential new Facebook page likes on the table? Unless you’ve been carrying out this simple secondary campaign activity, then there’s a good chance that you are!

It’s simple (and free) to gain additional page likes after your Facebook campaign has finished. Just scroll through your Facebook page and stop on the posts which you promoted in your campaign. Click on the small blue thumb-shaped ‘like’ icon sitting beneath your post. This will display all the names of the people who liked this post. At this point, you can see whether or not they already like your actual Facebook page and if they don’t then you can invite them to like your page! Simple!

If you go through and do this for all the many people who have liked your promoted posts but haven’t liked your page, the number of invites you’ll send out will soon mount up! Then it’s just a case of sitting back and letting the Facebook page likes stack up and of course to report your additional campaign success!

If you plan to carry out this activity, it’s worth keeping in mind that not everyone you invite will accept your invite – don’t take it personally! But if you carry out this activity shortly after your campaign finishes, then the conversion rate will be higher as people are more likely to remember that they engaged with your brand post. It’s also worth noting that you can use this approach for your organic posts too. You’ll find that most people who like your organic posts will already have liked your Facebook page, but for top performing organic posts, you’ll find a higher proportion of new people liking your post that haven’t already liked your page, so focus your energies on these posts. And if you want to create some top performing organic posts to harvest page likes from, then you could always try hosting a Facebook Live broadcast on your page – for free!

As always, we’d love to hear how you get on!

[thesunwill-risee-blog]

3 Surprising Ways to Drive Business Performance

Is artificial intelligence, digital marketing, predictive analytics, customer engagement, big data, or some other “shiny object” the key to driving business performance? Certainly all of these endeavors can make a difference in revenue growth. Yet there is a bigger picture. None of these is standalone in what’s required to sustain revenue growth, and they may or may not be big influencers of profit growth.

Research of 10,000 companies across 25 years proved that a strong customer culture drives business performance in over 35 performance measures, including ROI, growth, customer retention, market share and sales.

When you think about it, that makes a lot of sense:

40-70% of customers switch loyalty due to a perceived attitude of indifference

91% of companies claim to be customer-focused, yet only 10% of customers agree

Surely you’re asking: how can something like strong customer culture be quantified? Answer: the 35 performance measures mentioned above can be distilled into 3 pivotal factors — (1) Customer Insight & Foresight, (2) Competitor Insight & Foresight, (3) Peripheral Vision.

As you explore the following descriptions of these 3 monumental factors, consider the degree to which they are embraced in your organization’s strategy.

1) Customer Insight & Foresight

The extent to which employees — at any and every level and in any and every function — monitor, understand, and act on (a) current customer needs and satisfaction and (b) potential customer needs and opportunities.

As the ultimate source of salaries, budgets and dividends, customers make the world go ’round. So it makes sense that being attuned to customers, through and through, is a massive driver of business performance.

Bad habits in organizations of any kind excuse certain roles from paying attention to the ripple-effect they have on customers, or at least, to their impact on those who serve customers. Poor traditions allow weak accountability for acting on customer needs. Inside-out thinking creates silos of many kinds that get in the way of maturity in this factor, and of business performance overall.

2) Competitor Insight & Foresight

The extent to which employees — at any and every level and in any and every function — monitor, understand, and respond to (a) competitor strengths and weaknesses and (b) new market entrants and potential competitors.

As the contextual realities of customers’ spending choices, your competitors (along with you) shape customers’ expectations. So it’s logical that being astute about competitors, in all you do, is a substantial driver of business performance.

Silo-ization of competitor insight to functions such as strategic planning, business intelligence, product marketing and research and development hamper your organizational mojo competitively. Standing in your customers’ shoes to gain their perspective of your competitors can influence every job level and functional area in setting appropriate performance standards for themselves. It’s especially effective to see competitors from the standpoint of different customer segments/personas. This can be instrumental in driving business performance overall.

3) Peripheral Vision

The extent to which employees — at any and every level and in any and every function — monitor, understand, and respond to trends in the larger environment (political, economic, social and technical).

Context is essential for the success of most things in life. In some countries, it’s more natural for employees at all levels to be ever aware of context, while in other countries we need to train ourselves to think about the “concentric circles” around what we do. Being in-tune — or out of tune — with the larger environment in our thinking and doing is an obvious driver of business performance.

Peripheral vision is hampered by silos — organization silos, process silos, data silos, etc. It is weak when any of us take our job for granted, as an end in itself, rather than as a cog in a bigger wheel. Adaptability of the organization (i.e. agility) in the context of evolving external forces is certainly fundamental to driving business performance overall.

Foundational Levers

The 3 pivotal factors of business performance outlined above are internally enabled (or thwarted) by 3 foundational levers:

(A) Cross-Functional Collaboration: The extent to which employees interact, share information, work with, and assist colleagues from other work groups.

The necessity of this foundational lever is clear when you consider the horizontal flow of the customer life cycle and the end-to-end customer experience journey. It’s underscored when you consider the multi-faceted dynamics of competitor and peripheral vision forces. Nothing is an island, so employee/leader behaviors at odds with cross-functional collaboration are a detriment to business performance impact of the 3 key customer culture factors.

(B) Strategic Alignment: The extent to which employees understand and enact the vision, mission, objectives, and strategic direction of the company.

The need for this foundational lever is readily seen in mis-matches between strategy and execution. This has historically been a thorn for every employee level, and is also of keen interest to investors. Lack of alignment across functions, and/or at successive group levels, is a deterrent to business performance impact of the 3 key customer culture factors.

(C) Empowerment: The extent to which employees are able to make decisions that are best for the customer without the explicit approval of senior leaders.

The indispensibility of this foundational lever is undeniable, especially when seen from the point of view of customer-facing employees and customers themselves. Freedom to make sensible decisions is essential for numerous special circumstances. Lack of freedom (read: trust) is a severe source of frustration and churn for employees and customers alike, and hence, a stumbling block to business performance impact of the 3 key customer culture factors.

Business Performance Leadership

Mastery of these customer culture factors and levers is not as hard as you think. As Linden and Chris Brown describe in their book, The Customer Culture Imperative, a database of more than 200 companies makes it possible to benchmark your organization to growth success standards. The database is diverse across geographies and industries, and the benchmark findings provide a practical roadmap for your organization’s progress in strengthening its customer culture.

Statistical validation outranks measures such as SAT scores and college GPA by far — the correlation of benchmark findings and business performance is nearly at par with the correlation of a location’s temperature and its nearness to the equator.

Executives at Vodafone, PWC, Hitachi, Westpac, Telstra, HP, Ergon, Bell Canada, and dozens of other companies have attested to the eye-opening and unifying power of benchmarking the customer culture factors and levers described above. As a direct result of the benchmarking and its roadmap, “Speedo’s performance was turned around from one in decline to one of growth in market share, profit margins and the development of new market segments” said Tim Lees, Marketing Director. Kristin Gates, Worldwide Corporate Marketing Account Manager at HP said this benchmarking work “is the best thing we have done to increase our marketing capability at HP”.

Silver bullet for business performance? Yes, customer culture is it! Customer culture strength significantly enhances all the shiny objects’ potency. Alone, none of the buzzword techniques can do the whole job. In harmony with customer culture strength, your organization can take on a firm leadership role in driving sustained growth in all business performance measures.

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How to Promote Your Social Media Pages Within Your Business

So, you have a great company. You have amazing products and services, tons of experience in your industry, and awesome employees. You were smart enough to realize you need a presence on social media, so you set up a Facebook business page. Fantastic! But…after three weeks you only have eleven likes, three comments, and one share. Now what? Clearly, your best brand evangelists (other than happy clients) are your wonderful employees, so enlist their help to spread the word about your company.

Here are some ideas to get you started.

1. Create Excitement

Explain to employees why this benefits them individually as well as the brand as a whole. Effective posts on their own social media profiles can showcase them as an expert in their field, plus, they can enjoy greater connections to their coworkers and the overall company culture. For your company, current and relevant posts can improve some aspects of SEO, validate to current clients that they made the right choice, and get the attention of potential new clients. Employee buy-in is key!

2. Have a Plan

Know your strategy and guidelines before you pull the trigger on this cool, new idea. Ideally, you can partner with a company that’s skilled in employee engagement, so workers can share curated content on all or some of their social networks with just a few clicks. Next, create a #hashtag that’s distinctive but also easy to remember. In short, make it as quick and easy as possible for your employees to become advocates for your business.

3. Realize You Can’t Control Everything (But Still Put Some Guidelines in Place)

As our work and personal lives increasingly overlap online, there can be both positive and negative consequences. You can urge employees to make wise choices, and remind them that they are potentially a reflection of your business, but ultimately, you have to rely on their good judgment. One personal suggestion is a question I ask myself before every post: Would I want my mom or my CEO to see this? It’s a humorous way to get your people to think before hitting that post button.

Many companies create social media policies for their employees. If you think it’s necessary, you can draft a short document outlining what employees should consider when posting if they are representing your business online. For example, if they list that they’re an employee of your business in their Twitter bio, they’re acting as a company representative, and you probably don’t want them posting NSFW pictures or links to vulgar stories. Think about what’s best for your brand and talk to your employees about what they think is acceptable. You want them to feel comfortable representing your business online, and setting up some loose guidelines can help with that.

4. Make it Fun!

Use your imagination! Have contests for the number of posts shared, and post pictures of events that demonstrate your awesome company culture. Holiday parties and contests are perfect for this, so reward participation. Brag on the increased exposure that’s helping your company’s online presence. And for those that show interest in a larger role, encourage them to share or write articles on things they’re passionate about.

Employee engagement on social media can be a highly effective way to demonstrate why people should work with or for your company. Do it the right way, and the benefits will be substantial and long-lasting.