Conversations on Conversion interview with Jay Baer

Conversations on Conversion is an interview series featuring conversion optimization thought leaders. We started the podcast back in March of this year, and frequently release new interviews. You can download the podcast for free from iTunes.

If you are unable to download and listen to the podcast for whatever reason, we’ve decided to post the transcripts here in our blog for your reading pleasure—enjoy! This was our a great conversation on conversion with Jay Baer.

Anna:  Welcome back to another episode of Conversations on Conversion. Today with us we have a very special guest, Jay Baer. Jay is the president of Convince and Convert. He’s a social media strategist and speaker. I actually stumbled upon Jay’s blog, convinceandconvert.com about a month or so ago. I was stuck there all day reading through his blog and video archives. I just loved what Jay is saying. I love, of course, the name of his blog. Jay’s background is in usability and web development, so there’s not just a singular focus on social, he has a very holistic view of social media and conversion. I knew when I found his blog that he was somebody that you guys would want to talk to as well. So Jay, welcome. 

Jay:  Thanks very much. I am delighted to be here. 

Anna:  Very excited to be talking to you, for sure.  I want to go ahead and dive right in. I remember first hearing the term ‘social conversion’ last year. And I feel like everybody had a different definition of it, so I’d love to know what you think people mean when they use the term, and how you think it should actually be defined? 

Jay:  Well, if you asked 50 people what they meant by social conversion, you’d get 47 different answers. If you ask 50 people what they mean by social media, you’d probably get 50 different answers, so I’m not sure that you’re going to find a lot of consistency. What I think a lot of people are referring to when they say social conversion now is converting people to fans or followers. To say okay, this particular person has now signed up to read our blog, or follow us on Twitter, or become a fan on Facebook, and I guess that’s okay. 

You know, if you don’t have any other success metrics I guess that will work. But I really believe more and more in the notion of a conversion funnel for social media. I think you really need to have a defined set of objectives and a defined set of desired user actions in the same way you would on a website, right? 

I mean what’s the point of having a Facebook fan page if you don’t really have a plan for what to do with those people once they get there. So, I would certainly hope that we can get to the point where social conversion is really a funnel, and not just a single action. 

Anna:  Right, it’s like a step towards some ultimate goal.

Jay:  Towards something.  Because all you have to say is ‘I like this brand’, and you’re going to be tagged as a fan. So that bond is even less rigorous in the future than it has been in the past. That doesn’t really have any direct business objective correlation, right? We have 18,000 people who have clicked one button at some point in their life to say that they like this brand. That’s not exactly a blood oath. 

So hopefully people can say, “look, if we’re going to get involved in Facebook, or Twitter, or a blog, or YouTube, or any other sort of social outpost; why are we doing it? Are we trying to drive them back to the corporate website where they’ll fill out a lead form or purchase something? I mean what’s the point of this exercise?”

I really see most of the social outposts as sort of your advanced guard.

They’re the places where you are going to interact with individuals perhaps for the first time. But if you’re not doing a good job of moving them from those social outposts back to whatever is your social home base, the whole thing is really a colossal waste of time. 

Anna:  Yeah. And we’re not talking about that as much— bringing them back to the home base. I don’t see enough discussion around that. 

Jay:  A lot of companies are really in social scattershot mode. Where they have got a lot of stuff. They’re doing a lot of stuff. You know? They’re moving fast. And they’re building outposts. And they’re on Facebook, and Twitter, and LinkedIn, and YouTube. They’re doing all these things, but there’s really no efficiencies there— there’s really no methodology. It’s sort of like “well, we’ve showed up to the party so now we can check that off of our list” and that’s really not the way to go. 

Anna: So what sorts of opportunities are companies missing by neglecting the conversion piece of social? Not converting to a fan or a follower, but converting to something more meaningful than that. 

Jay:  Well I think certainly it helps answer this question that everybody wants to know, which is what is the actual business job of social media. I won’t go as far as to say that ROI is necessarily easy to calculate, because sometimes the trail goes cold at purchase. Certainly you can paint a much more compelling mathematical picture about why you should be involved in social media if you’re paying attention to how your social outpost activity drives people to your home base, and what happens there. Secondly, I think there’s a lot of content deficiencies that most companies are not capitalizing on. What you find today are people saying ‘all right, here’s what we do on Twitter and here’s what we do on Facebook, and here’s what we do on the blog, and here’s what we do on all these other places’. There’s really no unified content creation strategy, or content syndication strategy. They’re treating each of these places as sort of a self-contained silo. That costs a lot of wasted time and effort. 

Anna:  So how do companies transform their social marketing to be more conversion focused then? I mean, I think people will be nodding their heads saying “yes, we need to do that,” but then I don’t necessarily know that they know how to do that. How do companies transform themselves to be more conversion focused in their social marketing and social media? 

Jay:  I think the trick is to turn the whole thing upside down. Say “all right, ultimately, what do you want people to do?” When I do a lot of strategic planning and consulting in social, I say, “Look there’s really only three business imperatives to be active in social media. You’re either trying to drive awareness, you’re trying to drive sales, or you’re trying to drive loyalty.” 

You have to have a real clear-headed picture of which of those is your game, and which game you’re playing. Based on that, figure out whether it’s awareness, sales, or loyalty. Then define what specific precise user behavior is going to make that happen. If it’s sales, obviously it’s buying something. If it’s awareness, it’s people becoming more aware of you and consuming your content. If it’s loyalty, perhaps it’s your current customers telling their friends about you in social media. 

Once you’ve defined those user behaviors, then you can start to build a conversion funnel that says okay, “if ultimately what we want people to do is buy stuff from us online, well first we have to get them to the website.” Well if we have got to get them to the website, how are we going to do that? Well, maybe we can try and find some people on Facebook. Well if we’re going to find them on Facebook, how do we get them to go from Facebook to the website.

So, if you start from an objective and work backwards, it’s much easier to put this together than if you start with “Okay, we have got to do the social media stuff now. Let’s figure out why. “

Anna:  Okay, so then we maybe sort of answered this, but let me just ask it direct: How do you objectively measure social conversions? I think the whole measurement piece of social and social conversion is still vague to a lot of people. 

Jay:  Yeah it is because there are so many different ways to do it. There’s not one answer. I just did a two-hour webinar earlier today on the mass of social media, and it breaks down probably 20 different things that you could measure as key social media metrics, and how to get at each of those data points. For example, one of the things that I talk about is a lot of companies don’t have e-commerce per say. Right? So the transaction occurs offline. I’m a good example. 

You can’t come to my website convinceandconvert.com, and add social media consulting to a cart. You know? Pay now with PayPal, right? It doesn’t really work like that. But there are certainly behaviors on my blog that are indicative of an interest in purchase.  I set up goals in my Google Analytics, things like people visiting my speaking page. People visiting my consulting page. People spending an extraordinary amount of time on my site. Then I track to see how many people who engage in those goal behaviors came from social outposts. 

I run a report every week that says how many people came from what I’m doing on Twitter and looked at my speaking page, or looked at my consulting page, and I use that type of data to understand what my social conversion funnel is, and how to modify my personal behavior on Twitter, and Facebook, and other blogs, etc.

Anna:  It’s almost like the micro-conversion. Looking at those things that lead up to the ultimate action. 

Jay:  Yeah. We’ve got to get past this notion that the only action that matters is a sale. 

Anna:  Right. 

Jay:  That’s ridiculous because there’s a lot of other behaviors that are basically markers for intent to purchase. You’ve got to measure those and then see what social media’s impact is on those behaviors. Because if you only measure sales, you know lead form, fill-outs, that kind of thing, that’s a pretty blunt object. 

Anna:  YSo you mentioned tracking things that are happening on the site. People getting to a certain page, or spending a certain amount of time. Should companies be tracking engagement in terms of the number of followers that are re-Tweeting them, or talking to them in social channels? Are there other sorts of things that happen off-site that we should be measuring outside of just the number of followers we have, the number of fans we have? 

Jay:  Definitely. I think if you were looking at awareness and maybe even loyalty as your core business objective, there’s things like content engagements. How much are people passing your content along via re-Tweets and diggs, and bookmarks. All that kind of data I think is important. I use PostRank for that type of calculation. I think theirs is a really good company and great software. That’s certainly one to look at. 

I think things like share of conversation, which is a report that I’ve been running a lot for clients now that I like. That takes the notion of share of voice, which is how many times somebody talks about your brand versus your competitive brands in social media. It takes that report and adds some depth to it. It says how many people talk about our brand in the context of a key word that’s important to us versus our competitors. For example, if you are a university, you would run a report that says how many people talk about the university’s name and at the same time in their blog posts or their Tweets or what have you. You can sort of run those share of conversation reports to get an understanding of how well your brand is doing versus your competitors in terms of being the thing that people talk about when they’re trying to answer a particular question or a particular user need. 

Anna:  Got youit Well, I know our time’s running short. But let me just ask you one other thing before we end. If there was, and I hate these kind of questions, but I’ve got to do it because everybody wants to know. If there was one thing that somebody should go and do today within their social program to make it more conversion focused, or more measurable, what would that be?

Jay:  I would literally take a piece of paper and a pen, and create a diagram which shows how optimally a user would move through your social media presences to get to whatever action you want them to do. Take a marker and say here’s a circle for Facebook. Here’s a circle for the blog, YouTube, et cetera. Now let’s draw a little line that shows people moving between these different outposts. Ultimately at the end of the machine, it spits out revenue for you. Draw it out.

It’s so much easier to understand how social media inter-relates between social outposts, and from social outposts to the other things you’re doing in online marketing and traditional marketing when you actually look at it visually. I really recommend people go through that process. It will take you two minutes, and it will help you a ton. 

Anna:  Fantastic. Well, good, now everybody listening has an action item to go do right now. 

Jay:  Go. Go do it, and you know what? Post them up. Do it for yourself and then upload them. 

Anna:  Yeah. 

Jay:  We’ll take a look at them and we’ll talk about it. 

Anna:  That’s great. And since you gave a shout-out to PostRank, I’ve got to tell you that we have been using them too. We love their service. PostRank is fantastic for sure, and let me remind everybody who’s listening, convinceandconvert.com, Jay’s blog is awesome. So much fantastic content there. Take a quick peek over there, and you’re going to quickly become a fan yourself. I’m a loyal reader now. Jay, I am so appreciative for you taking the time out of your day to share your thoughts on social conversion. Thanks for joining us. 

Jay:  You bet. Sincerely my pleasure. Happy to do it again whenever, and thanks everybody for listening. 

Don’t forget you can download all of the podcast episodes for free from iTunes.

So far we’ve spoken to amazing conversion thought leaders like Anne Holland, Chris Goward, Bryan Eisenberg, Jonathan Mendez, Lance Loveday, and more! Stay tuned.