Today’s SYS Challenge: Review Your Site #socialtranslator

Imagine this, if you will…

You’ve done it: achieved the pinnacle of social media success.

Your insightful commentary, careful curation and witty repartee has finally convinced your dream client that you’re The One!

They beat a hasty path to your front door website. They’re enthused and excited, eager to work with you, clutching a credit card in one sweaty hand…

Then they stop dead in their tracks.

This website… where’s the…? But how do I…? What the…? AARRGGHH!!!

Hear that? That’s the sound of your dream client clicking away to another website.

/imaginary time over.

Sigh. So close.

Bounce rate, and why it matters

In real life, this probably happens more often than you think.

In fact, you can get an idea of just how often by checking your bounce rate in your website’s analytics.

This represents the number of people who arrive at your site but then leave it again fairly quickly.

In other words, someone may have entered a question into a search box and your site was selected by the search engine gods as a likely candidate to answer their question (yes!! that thing we’re always trying to achieve with SEO!! It’s happened!!!). That someone then selected your site above all the other results that appeared, and when they got to your site…

… Nope. They left again.

Or, intrigued by your magnetic social presence, they clicked through to your website to check you out some more. Only…

… Nope. You’ve lost them again.

Now, there are many valid reasons why your site may not be what a searcher is looking for. (And you may need to consider your messaging if your site consistently attracts the wrong kind of visitors).

But there are many more reasons why your site COULD and SHOULD have been exactly that, with just a little tweaking.

All the social success in the world means nothing if your site sucks (and I’m not even talking about design).

How can we make sure this doesn’t (continue to) happen to you?

We’ve come a long way from the idea of your website being akin to an online shopfront.

These days, people equate their experience of a website as a seamless extension of their interactions with YOU.

We’re talking shop front, entrance, front desk, waiting area, consultation room, back office AND exit here.

This doesn’t necessarily mean you need a fancy website. It doesn’t even mean your site has to be the prettiest on the block.

What it does mean – for our purposes today, at least – is that your site content and basic structure needs to meet the expectations of your ideal potential client, regardless of which stage they are at in their buyer journey.

Think of it like this:

If your social media activities are tasty little bread crumbs you leave for your ideal clients, you need to make sure those bread crumbs lead up to, in to and right through your front door.

So how do you achieve this without a billion-dollar budget?

Here’s what I suggest (even with a billion-dollar budget):

• Make a list of all the questions your ideal potential client might have in mind when they visit your website. Draw on your own experience of online shopping or browsing for service providers to help you.

Is this person in my price range? How do I know she’s any good? How do I know she’s not just going to fleece me? Do I even really want to hire a translator? I like what I see but I don’t want to contact him until I’m ready to go ahead – how can I find out more without having to email him? – that sort of thing.

• Next, make a list of all the potential actions your  ideal buyer might take while engaging with your website.

For example, checking your About page to get a sense of who you are, finding your social media profiles to get more of a sense of who you are, signing up to your email newsletter to learn even more about who you are, and finally, maybe, eventually, sending you an email.

• Now, put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and see what you can do to make the process as simple, clear and streamlined as possible.

How easy is it to find answers to those questions, to take those key actions? How much text do they have to trawl through to get to what they need? How many clicks does it take to get to the most important (for them) information on your site? How can you streamline, polish or otherwise simplify their journey as buyers? What information can you add, remove, or otherwise improve?

• Make changes, edits, tweaks. Measure, finetune, watch your bounce rate go down.

There you have it. Imaginary tales, breadcrumb trails and brick-and-mortar analogies, all in one sweet, sweet blog post. Only here, my friends. Only here 🙂

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Today’s SYS Challenge: Set Your Metrics, Measure What Matters #socialtranslator

• How do you really know if your time on social media is well spent?
• How can you truly tell if your strategy is working for you?
• How do you decide when it’s worth spending your hard-earned cash on a software upgrade, assistant, or other forms of support for your online marketing?

The answer to all of these questions is the same:

Look to your metrics.

Metrics are meaningful data points that measure your progress towards your stated goals.

The beauty of online marketing these days is that you can find data relating to just about anything.

Hello, analysis paralysis 🙂

The trick with metrics is figuring out what you want to measure and why it is meaningful for you.

You do this by asking: What insight or action is it going to lead to? 

If the answer is a blank look or a shrug, then don’t bother tracking it. It’s probably just a vanity metric.

By the way, this explains why “naked” numbers, like a count of your followers, mentions, or shares, are meaningless. Because they don’t – on their own – tell you what to do next.

But which metrics matter?

Of course, the hard part is, no-one can really tell you what metrics you should track track with any certainty.

Only you can work out what matters, because only you know what you are aiming for.

If you know where you’re headed, you know what to track – Jay Baer @jaybaer (marketing consultant extraordinaire)

However, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here if I say that, for most translators, our aim is to have the work we do on social media lead to a paying client.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yay to paying clients 🙂

But bear in mind that there are quite a few steps between your social media account and your checkout process.

This is why it makes sense to think about a couple of other key measurements along your sales funnel. (See how this all fits together?!)

An example

One way to give context to your numbers is to cross-reference your traffic with your conversions to see which activities result in the most potential growth for your business.

So, for example, a post to your Facebook page might have a low number of views (traffic), but a high number of those viewers click through to your website (conversion).

This would make it a lot more valuable than a tweet which might have a high number of views or retweets (traffic), but end up with a low number of people clicking through to your website (conversion).

I’ve picked a website view as a conversion here as for most of us, our websites are a key driver of leads into our sales funnel.

(Kevan Lee explains this example in more detail in his post on goal setting strategies: see #7).

Give it a whirl: choose one or two meaningful metrics, and see how it goes.

Further reading

• Which Stats Matter: The Definitive Guide To Tracking Social Media Metrics, by Kevan Lee at Buffer. An unbeatable resource on this topic for small businesses. Has an extremely useful section on how to set up social referral tracking to your website in Google Analytics.

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

SYS Day 4: How to truly understand your buyers – and find more of them!

We’re still on ideal buyers today, translators, but I promise a change of topic tomorrow!

The reason our buyers warrant so much time and energy is because if you’re clear on who they are, I believe your social media planning will be a walk in the park.

My experience

Once I’d found my first translation client, I found it very easy to find more. I just found out all I could about them and their business (in as non-stalkerish a way as possible), and used that as a springboard to finding more clients just like them. It was like it had a strange snowball effect.

Over time, I was able to gradually change my client base in an intentional way by playing around with the variables of my “prototype client”. Sometimes it took longer than I wanted, but in the end, it almost always worked.

In hindsight, I realise that what I was actually doing was creating and working from buyer personas.

The great news is, buyer personas are an actual marketing Thing that anyone can use to great effect!

Personas for Translation Buyers

Personas are a very useful sales and marketing tool that can help you truly understand your ideal buyer and be clear on exactly where and how to use social to speak to them.

The way they work is this:

1. You draw from fact, fiction, or a little bit of both, to come up with a detailed description of a well-rounded character – in this instance, your ideal buyer. You can give this character a name, photo or whatever you need to make it as real to you as you possibly can.
2. Each time you tweet, blog or address your target audience in any way, you imagine addressing this one individual and let that guide all subsequent decisions.
3. Voilà. You’ve got yourself a full book of clients.

The result of targeting this one specific persona is you’re more likely to craft a message that resonates with the very many real people who have some of the same characteristics as your persona.

It’s also a lot easier to sit down and write when you have one specific person in mind, rather than a vague amorphous crowd of maybe clients.

So how do I create a persona?

There are myriad templates online that you could use as a basis for creating your persona. I’ll include links to some below that might be particularly useful for translators.

Bear in mind that in an ideal world, you’d create a separate persona to represent each of the roles involved in your buying process. This is a situation often faced by translators, which can make it particularly tricky to define our ideal buyers in the first place.

But none of us live in an ideal world, so I recommend starting with baby steps and creating just one to begin.

For example, if you know that typically, a marketing assistant usually conducts the initial search for a translator and then presents a shortlist to their marketing manager for final approval, then that’s two personas right there.

These two individuals enter the buying process at different stages and have different needs and concerns, so you need to engage with them in different ways to address that.

(Hint: this is where you may find that social media is a better way to reach out to some personas more than others. That’s fine too – at least you know you’re not wasting your time).

Finally, here are a few ideas on how you can use social media to gather information from your existing, favourite and/or ideal clients to flesh out your personas:

• Use the free tool Followerwonk to analyse the Twitter accounts of your ideal buyers. Look at the results to draw conclusions, such as the following:
  • Lots of @replies? They’re chatty, at least in social terms.
  • RTs?  They’re listeners. Who are they listening to?
  • Do many people share their content? They have an engaged community of followers, if so. Who are their followers?
  • When are they most frequently online?

… And so on. Add these deets into your buyer persona.

• Facebook Custom Audiences has a tool called a Lookalike Audiences. Basically, it generates a list of people who are similar to a list of people that you define. There are lots of ways you could use this, some creepy, some less so. (Remember, this is all based on publicly available information.) Here’s a non-creepy example:
  • Start with a list of some of your existing or ideal clients. Ask Facebook to generate a list of similar people for you. Check out these people’s publicly available Facebook profiles, and use the information you glean as inspiration when you’re fleshing out your Buyer Personas.
• Use Rapportive, the email tool I described yesterday, to find out more about your existing buyers and again, use this as inspiration for your Buyer Personas.

So, Buyer Personas – worth a shot, no?

Further Reading

• How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business, by Pamela Vaughn at Hubspot Blogs. A solid article with a free template – more information than most translators will ever need but still some nuggets, so pull out a couple of things that interest you then move on. Don’t get bogged down! 🙂
• 4 Questions Answered About Buyer Personas, by Barbra Bago at the Content Marketing Institute. Nice list of characteristics here.
• MakeMyPersona.com by Hubspot. A handy dandy tool that will take you through some questions and spit out a persona for you at the end 🙂

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.