June 25, 2019

You’re showing up. You’re doing the podcast interviews, you’re speaking at the summits, you’re showing up outside of your own business brand to spread the gospel that is your exclusive awesome sauce. Woot! Woot!Which is great and all. But what’s the pay-off? Like, literally. What is the return-on-investment – or what the cool kids call ROI – on the promotions and marketing campaigns that you collaborate on? Because yes, there is a very official analysis-on-auto-pilot way of tracking the return on all your visibility and I’ll show you how.

FIRST, WE CRACK THE CODE

While you do need some technical understanding, let’s glaze over what you “need to know” like a donut, shall we?UTMs are a simple code you use to give you insights on the people who click your links. They’re designed to help you better understand where your audience is coming from and how they engage with you. You can add them to any URL you direct traffic to.

TL;DR :: UTMs give you clairvoyant vision as to how your biz future will shape up. #tarotcardsnotincluded

Specifically, we’re going to crack the UTM code because that’s how you’re encoding everything you’re sharing in a way that tracks 1) exactly what they clicked; 2) where they came from; and 3) which marketing strategy or campaign got them there.

For instance, let’s say you’re promoting one of your offers and you’re trying some different approaches on Instagram Stories to see what people like about you to swipe up. Do they respond better to 15 second clips of Airtable in action? Or do they like your dad jokes? Maybe they don’t like you at all and it’s the testimonials that make them take action?

The five UTM parameters available to use are as follows:

We’re going to code the above scenario as ::

  • My medium is social;
  • The source will be instagram-stories;
  • I’m calling this campaign product-fall ; and

To test the response to these 3 specific types of content delivery, I’m going to need 3 UTM codes. They’ll look like this ::

  1. http://www.productname.com/?utm_source=instagram-stories&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=product-fall&utm_content=content-preview
  2. http://www.productname.com/?utm_source=instagram-stories&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=product-fall&utm_content=being-funny
  3. http://www.productname.com/?utm_source=instagram-stories&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=product-fall&utm_content=testimonial-showcase

THEN, MAKE THEM SHARE-ABLE

But these are obviously not what people are going to type, right? It’s way too difficult for anyone to remember or enter.

So here’s what you’ll do instead:

  1. You will create a redirect from a super-memorable domain name/link to the UTM you created above;
  2. That super-memorable domain is what you’re going to drop on all of your podcast appearances and you can ask the hosts to use it in their show notes. I also encourage you to emphasize that they’ll get something exclusive by using this link – either a discount or maybe extra free resources – but the goal is to provide listeners with enough incentive that they want to use the link you provided rather than going to your generic home page;
  3. Finally, when you’re looking at your goals, you can easily identify how many sales and how many leads you attracted from your podcast interviews.

You can use one link for all podcasts – which is a great starting point from a data-collection point of view – but you can get very granular here, too! For instance, if you’re a guest on Awesome Podcast, you could have “an exclusive offer for Awesome Podcast listeners” at yourdomain.com/awesome-podcast. You would then identify this campaign with the UTM ::

yourdomain.com/popular/?utm_source=offline&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=awesome-podcast

While you may be thinking that you could skip the extra step of using that UTM code and just re-direct your link to your opt-in page – you could! But you’re missing out on some key insights if you do.

For instance, you can compare how all of your OFFLINE campaigns compare to your ONLINE campaign performance. Or you can compare how podcasts perform for you versus Instagram take-overs. This would be difficult and messy to analyze when you’re doing it manually and from memory, whereas the report would be no more than 2-clicks to generate mad-insights on.

FINALLY, ABOUT THOSE INSIGHTS…

The report is your Mona Lisa and yes, it is my belief that your reports should be at least as beautiful. (After all, if reporting was “just” about the data, you’d log into your Google Analytics more than once a year.)

As a creative entrepreneur, I know that you appreciate the functionality of data and analytics… but it doesn’t exactly inspire you to seek them out unless you need them. Because I want you to want them – insert Cheap Trick karaoke here – I created a Key Performance Indicator report for your goals. 

So when I say that you can start seeing the ROI on your offline marketing campaigns? I mean it literally – in dollars deposited and in leads subscribed to your list! You can start attributing a number value to the time, effort and energy you’re putting into these offline strategies to see if they actually are paying off for you and by what amount.

Yes, this is a tedious process to put in place. What’s more tedious, though, is working on something that has no return for you or worse, not realizing how valuable one segment of your work actually is.

Constant outreach to put yourself in front of every audience who will have you isn’t a visibility strategy; it’s a formula for burn-out. By dedicating a degree of upfront focus into tracking what works for other audiences (so you don’t have to work quite so hard by spreading yourself thing among them all) positions you to constantly improve how you’re showing up. Which TL;DR is the best ROI you can have!