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Hello and welcome to episode 10 of Conversations with a Digital Strategist! This week I’m covering part two of our discussion around website measurement. In this episode I’ll be outlining the pieces that make up your measurement strategy. I’ll define each piece and explain how they help you make business decisions. Buzz Word of the Week But before we get into that, let’s start with our buzz word of the week. This week’s buzz word is: lifetime value. This is a predictive marketing metric. It predicts the value of a customer to your business, over the course of the relationship. Use lifetime value of a customer when determining your marketing budget. You can also use lifetime value to calculate the maximum acquisition cost of a new customer. You can calculate lifetime value or LTV for different segments of your customer base, as well. Google Analytics offers a great lifetime value report in the audience section. KissMetrics posted a case study with Starbucks. They calculated the lifetime value of their customers using three equations. The one that would best fit the needs of small businesses would be the simple LTV equation. I have posted an infographic explaining all three equations, on my website at level360.co. Look under Podcast and click on episode 10. And if you didn’t know, now you know. Cool Tool Let’s move on to our cool tool. This week’s cool tool is a Chrome Extension called Form Filler. Use Form Filler when you are testing out forms on your website. After installing this extension, navigate to the form you’d like to test and click the button. The form will automatically fill with dummy text and you can click submit to see if the form works as expected. The options that come with this extension are quite robust. It allows you to either rand

Welcome back to episode 9 of Conversations with a Digital Strategist! In this week’s episode I’m starting a three part series on measuring your website traffic. Emphasis is often placed on marketing, building a sales funnel, and conversions. But, none of that is possible without a proper measurement plan. The first part in this series will explain the purpose of a measurement plan. Part two will describe the pieces of a measurement strategy. And part three will focus on how to create a measurement plan for your web presence. Let’s begin! Buzz Word of the Week As always, we start with a buzz word of the week. This week’s buzz word is: attribution. I love this word! It’s a term used in website analytics. It’s the ability to track something back to an action taken. If you see an uptick in sales, you will want to know what caused this increase. That’s attribution. If you find a high bounce rate on one of your pages, you’d want to understand what was driving that increase. That’s attribution. If you suddenly see a spike in new client calls, you’ll wonder how these people are hearing about you. That’s attribution. As we move through this series on measuring website traffic, you’ll hear me use the term often. So if you didn’t know, now you know. Cool Tool If you’re doing any kind of social media marketing, I’m sure you’ve found a need for graphics. When it comes to creating any type of graphic for social media, Canva has been on top of many people’s lists for a while. But, there’s a new player on the market and his name is Pablo. Pablo is a free tool created by the makers of Buffer, the social media sharing tool. Pablo works in the same was as Canva, in that you’re able to create beautiful social media images with text. Images are available in three sizes, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter/Facebook. The beauty of Pablo is its simplicity. Unlike Canva, which has all the bells and whistles. Pablo is very simple. Pick your image size. Add your photo, add a logo if you’d like. Add your text and download. That’s it. I still use Canva when I need more detailed images. But Pablo is great when I need an image created in a pinch. Next time you’re looking to create an image for Instagram or Pinterest, check out Pablo. The website address is pablo.buffer.com. Enjoy! Measuring Website Traf

Welcome to this week’s episode of Conversations with a Digital Strategist. I’m so glad you decided to join me this week. On this week’s episode I’m going to discuss the past, present and future fate of content. They used to say “content is king”, but is it still king? Let’s get into it! Buzz Word of the Week Every week we start with a buzz word of the week. This week’s buzz word is content strategy. While it is a buzz word, it is still very important to your digital strategy. If you don’t have a content strategy for your business, you’re cutting off your nose, despite your face. So, what is a content strategy? It’s simple really, a content strategy is how you plan to develop and manage digital content. Digital content comes in many mediums including text, video, and audio. Your content strategy ensures you are strategically creating uniform content. The content created under this strategy should be beneficial to your company. It should move you closer to your bottom line. Everything should be strategic and your content is no different. All month, I’ll be discussing the topic of content. Keep listening to learn more about building and implementing a content strategy. And if you didn’t know, now you do. Cool Tool: Get Emoji So the cool tool this week, is less of a tool and more of a website. The GetEmoji.com website allows you to copy and past emojis into anything. Need to add an emoji to a document? Copy and paste. Want to add an emoji into your tweet from your desktop? Copy and paste from GetEmoji.com. I’ve found this useful when scheduling social media posts each morning. I can do everything from my desktop, which is very convenient. It’s a little tool, but saves so much time. Next time you need to add an emoji into an email, remember GetEmoji.com. Is Content Still King? Gurus have been saying for years that content was the most important thing you could do for your company. Content drives traffic they said. It drives engagements they said. But times changes. Customer expectations and tastes change. So what do you think? Is content still king? It’s a simple but good question to ask; especially since so many companies have bet the mortgage on it. The answer, on the other hand, is not so cut and dry. The good news is, content IS still king. The bad news, is only certain content is king. You

Welcome to episode 7 of Conversations with a Digital Strategist! I was gone for a week, did you miss me? In this episode, I’m going to discuss the steps you need to take to prepare for a catastrophe. From hurricanes to wild fires, riots to the looming threat of nuclear war, anything could happen. As a business owner, you must have a plan for what to do in case of emergency. The purpose of this plan is to ensure that you can quickly ramp down when a catastrophe hits and immediately ramp back up when you’re ready. Let’s get started. Buzz Word of the Week: Bounce Rate We begin each episode with the buzz word of the week. This week’s buzz word is bounce rate. Bounce rate is a web metric used to measure how many people abandon your website without further exploration. Of all the metrics available in analytics tools like Google Analytics, this is the metric that causes the most confusion. A visit is considered a bounce if the visitor began their visit on Page A, looked around and left without exploring further into the website. Bounce rate is calculated by dividing the number of visits with one page view by all visits to the website. If your website has 10 visits and 5 people only viewed one page, your bounce rate is 50%. Bounce rate sometimes gets a bad name because most people expect visitors to browse their website. However a high bounce rate could be a good thing, if the purpose of a page is to get visitors to click a link taking them away from your website. For example, if your page promotes your webinar and the link to register for the webinar is on Eventbrite, that page will have a high bounce rate, and that’s what you want. In this case, you will also want to measure exit events, to ensure visitors are clicking through to Eventbrite and not just exiting or clicking their browser’s back button. One thing to remember, while bounce rate can be measured for an entire site, avoid considering site-wide bounce rates. Pay attention to the bounce rate for key pages on your website, that will really tell you how well your content is performing. And if you didn’t know, now you know! Cool Tool: Biteable Next up, our cool tool! This week I’m featuring a tool called Biteable. I strongly believe in the power of video. The fact of the matter is, people don’t read. That’s just the honest t

Is anyone else exhausted from 2017? I mean I feel like I’ve run a marathon, while working three jobs, cleaning every house in America and tending to four hundred puppies. I’m tired! There has been so much drama between January 1st and now, I just don’t know how much more I can take. And it’s only September. In addition to all the drama, today marks the 17th anniversary of 9/11, which is always a sobering day for me. I’m sure you all feel the heaviness of the times as well. But what happens when something big and controversial occurs that either directly affects or relates to your and, or your business? Do you say nothing and keep it professional? Should you make a public statement on behalf of your company? Yourself? How do you handle controversial topics on social media, as a business owner? Let’s talk about it. Buzz Word of the Week As you know, I begin each podcast with a buzz word of the week. This week’s buzz word is business intelligence or BI. Business intelligence is the output from processes and systems that analyze sets of data. Business intelligence is what comes from all your metrics, data points, and key performance indicators. The gurus will have you thinking business intelligence is for large companies and their huge data sets, but that’s not true. Business intelligence can be used by companies of all sizes to improve every aspect of a business. The intelligence you receive from customer surveys, website analytics, social media analytics and everything else that you’re measuring, can be used to adjust and enhance marketing tactics, products, services, sales funnels, customer engagement and support, employee retention and everything else under the sun. Stay tuned to this podcast. I’m going to release an entire episode on business intelligence and how to use data to make actionable business decisions. Cool Tool of the Week Next up, the cool tool of the week. This week’s cool tool is Sniply. Sniply is a great add-on to your social media strategy. The gurus will tell you, it is imperative that you share other people’s content. Sharing other people’s content is a great way to engage with influencers and provide valuable content to your followers. The only problem with this is that by sending people to other websites, you are losing their attention. Once they arrive at the link you’ve sent them to, they are no longer on you

[addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_tfjc”] Where to subscribe: Apple iTunes | Google Play | Soundcloud | Android | YouTube | RSS You looked at the title of this week’s podcast and thought, “Jessica, it’s too early to be thinking about prepping for the holidays!” But that’s not true. In fact, this is the perfect time to start getting ready for the busiest e-Commerce time of the year. In this episode, I’m going to go through the five things you need to do over the next few months to prepare for the holiday shopping season. So ready or not, here we go! We begin every episode with a buzz word of the week. This week’s word is ROI or return on investment. Over the next several months as you prepare for the holiday shopping season, you will be engaging in many different types of marketing and advertising tactics. When you run a marketing campaign you will want to keep a close eye on your ROI or return on investment. ROI is what you get in exchange for your investment. Investment doesn’t have to be money, it can also be time, effort, product, etc. The idea is that you will invest something and get something else in return. If you’re running a paid search campaign you invest money and get clicks and hopefully sales. If you’re launching a social media campaign, you’re investing the time necessary to set the campaign up, in return for clicks and hopefully sales. Everything you do is done with the expectation that you will get something in return and therefore you have a return on investment. If you didn’t know, now you know! Next up, our cool tool of the week. This w

  [addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_tfjc”] Where to subscribe: Apple iTunes | Google Play | Soundcloud | Android | YouTube | RSS Welcome to episode four of Conversations with a Digital Strategist. In this episode, I’m going to address a common misunderstanding in the digital world. Marketing gurus tend to use digital marketing and digital strategy interchangeably, however, they are not the same thing. As a business owner, it is important for you to know the difference, because you will need both to be successful online. Enough talk, let’s get into the episode. Buzz Word of the Week Every week we begin with the buzz word of the week. I’m aware of how much bravado takes place online, and I want to ensure you understand the terms being used. This week’s buzz word is conversion rate. A conversion rate is a calculated ratio of website visitors to website visitors who took a specific action. The beauty of a conversion rate is that the action you select can be any action. The caveat is that a conversion must map back to your website objectives. An Example For example, one of the objectives for my company is to create brand awareness. I’m a new company and most people don’t know about me yet. So, I want to create brand awareness. In order to do this, I must increase the number of eyes and ears on my podcast. Watching the video version of my podcast on my website is considered a conversion. The person watching the video has converted from a generic website visitor to a video watcher. This action brings me closer to my overall

Every time a social media site launches, it never fails, there’s a mass migration over to the newest platform. Even the gurus will get in on the action and start creating content telling you why you need to be up on the latest and greatest social media website. On this week’s episode, I’m going to talk about how to analyze your social platforms and ensure you’re only on the sites where your customers live. Buzz Word of the Week We begin every episode with a buzz word of the week. I do this because people can talk all day and give you the secrets to life and if you don’t understand the words coming out of their mouth, you’ll learn nothing. So this week’s word is: influence. Influence in terms of your digital strategy is a type of currency. With influence you can get customers to make purchases, support a specific topic, donate to a charity, and a whole bunch more. But in order to yield any level of influence, you must first gain influence with your audience. In other words, you gotta get followers. Influence can be purchased through the hard work of providing consistent, high quality deposits into the emotional bank accounts of your audience. This can include posting useful content, responding within a reasonable amount of time to questions and requests, being personable and offering amazing customer service, providing superior products and services, and essentially going above and beyond the expectations of your audience. Once you’re gained influence with your audience it is imperative that you use it responsibly. It can takes months sometimes even years to gain strong influence with your audience, but you can squander it away in a matter of minutes. Be careful! So, if you didn’t know, now you know. Cool Tool of the Week Time now for the cool tool! This week I’m going to tell you about RoundTeam. RoundTeam is a freemium service that connects to your Twitter account and will retweet content for you based on certain criteria. It is a sort of set it and forget it, retweeting bot, per se. Features The system is easy to setup, in that all you need to do is visit their website and login with your Twitter account. RoundTeam does not have access to your Twitter credentials, so you don’t have to worry about that. Next, you head over to their configuration screen and setup a retweet scenario. Next you tell RoundTeam the type of content you’d like them to retweet. This can be a h

  [addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_tfjc”] Where to subscribe: Apple iTunes | Google Play | Soundcloud | Android | YouTube | RSS We all know how limited time, energy and money are, especially for a business owner. Trying to nurture a relationship with an unmotivated audience, just seems like an utter waste of life, wouldn’t you agree? Welcome to episode 2 of Conversations with a Digital Strategist. In this episode, I’m going to explain how to build an authentic audience, I’ll discuss who should be included in this illustrious group and what communication with them looks like. Let’s get started… Buzz Word of the Week We begin every episode with a buzz word of the week. I do this because someone could walk up to you and tell you the secret to life, but if you don’t understand the words coming out of their mouth, you won’t learn anything. So this week’s word is: audience. Yes, yes, I know you already know what the word audience means, but do you know who your audience is? When I ask who is your audience, you may say its your customer base or target market. And that’s true, but, not a complete answer. Your audience is whoever consumes your content. Blog posts, articles, videos, tweets, its all content being consumed by your audience. Now, your audience can be segmented into smaller groups or sub-sectors, and we’ll discuss that later in this podcast. Your audience is whoever consumes your content.

  [addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_tfjc”] Where to subscribe: Apple iTunes | Google Play | Soundcloud | Android | YouTube | RSS Welcome to episode 1 of the Conversations with a Digital Strategist podcast. I’m so glad you’re here. In this week’s episode, I’m going to tell you a secret. I’m going to tell you the one thing the marketing gurus aren’t telling you. This is big, so you will want to listen closely! Have a seat, let’s chat! So, before I get into the juicy bits of this podcast, please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Jessica Davis and I’m a Digital Strategist, not to be mistaken with a Digital Marketing Strategist. Those are two different things. Any who, this is my new podcast and I’m super excited to get this bad boy started. I’ve wanted to do this for such a long time. People always ask me, Jessica, do you mind if I pick your brain and I think to myself, I should be sharing this information with the world. I’ve got almost 20 years of experience in the Internet industry and I need to use my knowledge to help other people…so here I is! Now we can get into the juicy bits! Buzz Word of the Week We’re going to begin every episode with a buzz word of the week. I’m doing this because people can talk all day and give you the secrets to life and if you don’t understand the words coming out of their mouth, you’ll learn nothing. So this week’s buzz word is: marketing mix. A marketing mix is defined on Google as “a combination of factors that can be controlled by a company to influence consumers to purch