Eyeballs and Money

There is much hyperbole out there about the impact of various social media platforms on your sales. Many promises are made.

It’s ironic that platforms take all the data we give them for free and then do mysterious things with it (algorithms), repackage it, ration it, and charge us money to contact others who also freely gave their data.

But that’s business. They thought of it and you/I didn’t! 

Key ideas:

• In the old days (10+ years ago!) radio and newspaper advertisers would sell ad space on the basis of “impressions”. You would hear that in a certain market, your ad would yield “x” number of impressions. They sold yield management. 
• Many were (and still are) vague about what an “impression” is.
• It’s an estimate of how many will “see” your ad -- not who would read it or act on it. Not who would respond to it. Not the number of paid subscribers to that particular publication or radio or TV station.
• Conducting a “conversion study” to work backwards from the purchase decision to trace where that person first saw your ad and how long it took from the date that ad appeared (or was seen), to the date the purchase decision was made – what we call the “sales cycle”, was difficult. 
• Conversion studies were a thing. They still are.
• We also used to measure direct mail response rates. At first, the response rate was about 5%. It dropped to 1% and eventually it even required multiple “hits” (i.e. multiple mailings) to get that 1%. Now, there is still a belief that 1% is possible. But the cost per hit is very high (postage, envelopes, content, paper, printing).
• The current thing is “eyeballs”. Low-cost eyeballs. It’s not the same as subscribers or purchasers. It’s a bit like impressions; only there are more accurate measures of it – depending on the platform.  The idea is: engagement. 
• The idea of ”click through rates” is an even better metric because it can be measured. It suggests how many people abandon the email immediately, or open it, or click to gain more information, or go all the way to the check out.
• We monitor the “open rate” of our daily-ish Catholic CEO emails (even with the Apple email changes), and our posts (e.g. LinkedIn, etc.). The team and I can see every day what the open rate was on the first and subsequent days. It’s an endless discussion as to why some topics have a higher open rate than others. Equally mysterious is the open rate by day of week or time of day.  
• You also know that some of the above are stickier than others. You want “sticky”.

Why is this important today?

Well, you cannot avoid the use of social media, websites, podcasts, hash-tags, videos, automations, your contact manager (CRM), SEO, key word search, back-link analysis, your website scraper platforms, and all your other attempts to accelerate the buy decision.

To aimlessly, randomly send out emails or posts or to simply make available a website is insufficient.

Your business needs a fine tuned social media strategy and a set of daily tactics + content to get this right.

• Pay attention or we will never create a Catholic economic force to influence/change the culture.
• Use the secular tools wisely (innocent as doves and wise as serpents) to get the job done but act Catholic.

The time to start learning is now. 

The best way to grow your tribe is to capture emails. This list is the Holy Grail.

God bless you, your family, and your works. You can be Catholic and successful in business. Believe it.