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A major career change — like becoming your own boss, switching to a new industry, or taking on a completely different job — can be extremely rewarding.

But it’s also usually hard, stressful, and risky.

That’s why being all in is essential. After all, you don’t want to wake up in a cold sweat one month after quitting your job, wondering if you just made a terrible mistake.

How do you know whether you’re truly making the right decision?

Simple: Do your research.

These six ideas will let you test-drive your future career, so you can turn in your two weeks notice (or not) with confidence.

How to Figure Out If You’re Ready for a Career Change

1) Shadow someone with your “perfect” job.

It’s easy to assume you’ll love something when you’re on the sidelines, rather than in the game.

For example, you might get a kick out of shooting videos with your friends on the weekends — but when you decide to quit your current role and become a video producer, you discover writing, shooting, and editing five original videos every single week isn’t so much fun.

Or maybe you love planning parties — but not when you’re an event manager dealing with unreasonable requests and rude clients.

To avoid post-transition regret, shadow someone who has the job you’re considering. You can get an accurate, detailed look at how you’d be spending your time: The good, the bad, and the ugly. With this information in hand, you can confidently decide whether the career is a good fit.

If you already know someone who fits the bill, ask them if they’d let you follow them around on a typical day. However, if you don’t have any immediate contacts, you can use LinkedIn to find a second or third connection — then ask your mutual connection for an intro using this template.

Still no luck? Try attending a conference, meet up, or event for professionals with your potential job. You’re almost certain to meet a couple candidates for shadowing.

2) Create an MVP.

Tech companies test their assumptions by creating a “minimum viable product” (or, the most basic version of their idea possible) and releasing it to the public. If the MVP is a hit, the company builds the full version. If the MVP flops, the team pivots or moves on to something new.

When you’re thinking about switching careers or following your passion full-time, making your own MVP lets you gauge how successful you’ll be without risking it all.

To give you an idea, let’s say you wanted to be a freelance writer. Your MVP could be pitching 10 publications and tracking how many positive responses you get. If you only hear back from one editor, you might decide to keep your day job while working on your pitching skills — or you might decide the idea of freelancing doesn’t sound so appealing, after all.

On the other hand, if five editors love your pitch, that’s a good sign your freelance writing career would take off and you should pursue it full-time.

3) Take an online course.

When it comes to life-altering decisions, the more you know, the better. An online course that’s related to your potential new career won’t just boost your skills — it’ll also give you more insight into whether you’ll enjoy that career.

For example, someone who’s considering coding school might test the waters by enrolling in multiple programming courses. If she’s still enthusiastic after five months and four classes, she should probably sign up for a coding school. (Check out this list of handy coding resources here.)

Luckily, you’ve got no shortage of online classes to choose from. Coursera and EdX both offer hundreds of free courses from top universities on topics like data science, project management, and programming. Skillshare is a great resource for creative classes, such as graphic design or music production.

And of course, HubSpot offers a free marketing certification course that’ll teach you the fundamentals of inbound marketing. You’ll even get a spiffy certificate once you pass.

4) Go on an informational interview (with no ulterior motives).

Let’s be real: Informational interviews are often excuses to meet influential or important people disguised as opportunities to “learn more about X industry or role.”

But at this specific juncture of your life, learning more about an industry or role is exactly what you need.

After you’ve found a couple people with your potential job, ask them for a meeting like you normally would. However, spend twice as much time preparing — you want to show up with a carefully selected list of questions that’ll help you understand things like: What their day-to-day looks like, the tasks they like the most and the least, how they’d suggest transitioning in, which skills they use most frequently, and so on.

Having thoughtful, specific questions will show the other person you’re seriously interested in learning more, not just looking to network. As a result, they’ll probably be as helpful as they can.

5) Take this quiz.

Pondering a career change or transition is confusing, stressful, and scary — and it’s easy to get so caught up in the details that you can no longer see the bigger picture.

That’s where this career assessment comes in. After you answer a short series of questions about your strengths, interests, working style, and current satisfaction level, it’ll help you identify what your next step should be.

And because the quiz can surface patterns you may’ve missed, that step might surprise you. For example, you might be on the verge of quitting your job to become a full-time photographer — but when your suggested next step is to expand your skills, you realize your unhappiness comes from a lack of growth, not the job itself.

6) Make a “sacrifices” list.

Before you take the plunge, it’s important to recognize what you’ll be giving up. Professional pivots usually come with pay cuts — if you’re going into a brand-new career, you’ll probably be taking a more junior position with a smaller salary than your present role and salary, and if you’re becoming your own boss, making less money (at least in the beginning) is almost inevitable.  

First, estimate your future income; then, make a list of what you’ll need to cut.

Imagine you want to become a digital designer — which means taking an entry-level position with a 30% smaller paycheck. To live within your means, you might have to move into a cheaper neighborhood, say ‘no’ to trips with your friends, slash your monthly 401(k) contribution, or cut your monthly food and restaurant bill in half.

If you’re truly invested in a design career, these sacrifices still won’t be fun — but they’ll be tolerable. If, on the other hand, this lifestyle sounds like it would make you miserable, you should re-think the switch.

(Psst: If you’re in marketing, you can get an instant look into how much your peers are making with our free marketing salary grader.)

These experiments might validate your decision, or they might convince you to turn back. Either way, you’ll get the insights you need to be all in.

Have you ever made a major career change? How did you approach the decision? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

On Tuesday, Instagram introduced Instagram Stories, a new feature with remarkable similarities to Snapchat.

Stories provides Instagram users with a place to share posts at a higher frequency. While Instagram photos are typically reserved for perfectly composed shots, Stories allows you to share the little moments that may not be as picture-perfect.

Instagram is positioning this feature as a solution to overposting. Stories live in a separate space, and you can post as frequently as you want without worrying about over saturating your friends’ feeds or filling the grid on your profile page.

So how do you build a Story? And what does this mean for your strategy? Don’t worry. We’ve got you covered.

How to Build a Story on Instagram

Ready to get started? We’ll walk you through the basic steps for building your first Instagram Story, and fill you in on some cool features along the way.

1) Tap the plus sign in the upper left corner of your screen to get started.

Image Credit: Instagram

2) Take your photo by tapping the round button, or take a video by pressing down for up to 10 seconds.

The thunderbolt icon turns on the flash, and the two arrows allow you to switch between the front and forward facing cameras.

Image Credit: Instagram

Want to upload something from your camera roll? You can. Simply swipe down to chose your photo or video. This includes Boomerangs and Hyperlapses.

3) Select one of the three pen type options to doodle on your photo, add an emoji using your keyboard, or swipe right to select a simple color filter.

Image Credit: Instagram

Pro Tip: While it may seem like it at first glance, you’re not limited to the colors that appear at the bottom of the screen. To open up more advanced color options simply press and hold one of the colors to pull up this screen:

4) When you’re done, tap the checkmark icon to share.

Your Story will appear here, at the top of your friends’ feeds. It’ll also be visible on your profile page by tapping your profile picture.

Image Credit: Instagram

Once your Story is live, you can save your masterpiece by opening it and tapping the three dots on the bottom right, then selecting “Save Photo.”

6) Check out who saw your Story by swiping up when viewing the photo or video.

Realized someone’s seeing those photos who shouldn’t be? Tap the “X” next to their name to block them from seeing anything you add to your Story.

Image Credit: Instagram

Want to keep your stuff private? You can adjust your privacy settings by going to your profile and selecting the “Settings” icon in the upper right. From there, you can chose to hide your Story from certain users, and restrict who can reply to your messages.

Wait, Isn’t That the Same Thing as Snapchat?

One only needs to look as far as the name to realize Stories is a Snapchat competitor. Similarities include photo/video functionality, a 24-hour window before the content disappears, basic filters, and the doodle tool.

However, there are a few advantages Snapchat has right out of the gate. For one, Instagram Stories is lacking Snapchat’s new “memories” feature, and there’s no screenshot notification. Not to mention, there are no stickers in Stories, and the filters leave something to be desired. And facial recognition — one of the most addictive Snapchat features — is noticeably absent. (If you can’t turn yourself into a bee, why bother?)

However, Instagram Stories does have one big advantage over Snapchat: As part of the larger Facebook/Instagram umbrella, they have less of a hurdle to jump in regards to adoption. Snapchat’s 150 million daily active users look like chump change compared to Instagram’s 300 million. Snapchat has much more ground to cover, while Instagram already has a captive audience.

What Marketers Need to Know About Instagram Stories

If you have an active audience base on Instagram, you should jump on Stories quickly. You have the opportunity to create ephemeral, lighthearted, Snapchat-like content without the challenge of building up a Snapchat audience or launching a new channel.

In addition to the built-in audience, you also have the opportunity for increased discoverability. The content you produce on Snapchat needs to be promoted regularly across other channels or else no one will see it. On Instagram, there are hashtags, geotags, and the Discover section to increase your chances of being found. Snapchat content can disappear into the void unless someone knows exactly what to look for.

If you’ve wanted to experiment with Snapchat-style content without making the leap, this is your chance.

But will it stick?

It’s worth noting that Stories is the complete opposite of Instagram’s current value proposition. Each social network has its differentiating factor, and Instagram has always been a place to showcase the most beautiful, curated version of your life. Stories is at the other end of that spectrum: ephemeral, unpolished, and silly.

And the way we see it, Stories is part of a larger shift we’re seeing towards ephemeral content — a format that Snapchat has seen a ton of success with thus far. Now, rather than painstakingly adjusting the colors and shadow on each picture, Instagram users have the opportunity to embrace and create content that’s transient. As a result, the stakes aren’t as high — especially considering Stories can’t even be “Liked.”

Between the lack of public feedback and the time limitations, Instagram Stories take the pressure out of sharing content on the platform. So regardless of which platform ends up leading the pack, the popularity of ephemeral content won’t be slowing down anytime soon.

So can these two conflicting ideals live in harmony within one platform? And if so, will users adopt Stories and abandon Snapchat?

Chances of Stories catching on is much higher because it’s housed within the Instagram platform, and not the Facebook platform. The demographic overlap between Snapchat and Instagram makes it much more likely users will simply migrate their goofy stories to the other platform. But only if Instagram gets on the facial recognition game, and quickly. Millennials love that puppy filter.

Are you experimenting with Instagram Stories? What do you like? What don’t you like? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

According to CUNA’s First Quarter 2016 Economics and Statistics report, credit union memberships is continuing its climb upwards. Are you getting your share? Of course, the quarterly report also finds that asset growth is slightly down. 

This means the pressure is on not only to find new members, but to find the right new members and to keep your current membership engaged.

Inbound marketing strategies are the perfect opportunity for you to identify, attract, and educate high-value prospects. And throughout the inbound process, you’ll keep learning more about your members and prospects, which you can use to improve your marketing and products.

So how does an inbound marketing strategy work for a credit union? Here’s an overview: 

Get Found

Any digital marketing process starts with getting found. It’s a crowded internet out there. To get found by the people you’re looking for – you need to provide the information they’re looking for.­

Keywords remain an important part of getting found online, but you want to get more precise than that. What are the most common questions your potential members have about planning their finances? These aren’t the questions they have about your credit union, or the products and services you offer. You’ll get to that stuff later on. 

To attract the right prospects to you, you need to answer the questions they have — for instance — how much should they be saving for a comfortable retirement, or to save for their children’s college education. Make a list of the top questions each of your personas has. When you publish good content online that provides informative, engaging answers to those questions, you’re positioning your credit union as a subject matter expert.  A subject matter expert they’ll return to for more answers to their individual financial questions.

Learning About your People

Through membership and customer service teams, you already know a fair amount about what issues and questions occupy your members. As you publish content through blogs, checklists, and special reports, you start to learn more about your members and prospects.

Say your blog posts on “how to identify credit card scams” and “how to weigh which credit card perks make the most sense for you” show high traffic numbers. But your posts on “how to save money while traveling” get barely a look. Prospects indicate their interest with their eyes, time, and with their comments. 

Analyze your content that has high traction – that’s readers, comments, downloads – any actions you can track that indicate interest in a piece of content. By looking closely at the topics, challenges, and pain points they touch on, you’ll be constantly learning what’s most important to your prospects right now. That’s intel you can use to develop more content, shape marketing messages for current products, and even develop new ones.

Your Prospects Learn to Trust You

As you become a resource of valuable information, you’re building trust with your prospects. That’s why any successful inbound marketing strategy starts with educating people, not selling to them. If you start with the sales talk, they’ll tune you out.

When you offer content that helps them, they’ll be willing to share their email address with you to get it. Once you get prospects into your database, you can use automated email workflows to push out content most relevant to them. Since the digital world enables you to collect a wide range of behavioral data about your prospects, you can segment prospects into different lists based on interest.

You can segment them by product line they’ve shown interest in, e.g. loans or credit cards. You could also segment them by persona. For instance, you know parents have different financial interests than singles. You might also want to segment them by the potential lifetime value they represent, e.g. by annual income or education level. Or you could segment them based on the type of investment instruments they’ve been reading about on your blog posts.

Gathering the data about what content they’ve downloaded, what pages on your blog and website they spend time on — all this intel tells you what additional content will speak to them.

Your prospects were already showing increased confidence in your credit union by continuing to seek out your content. Now you’re anticipating their needs. That deepens your relationship and heightens your credibility, not just as a subject matter expert, but as partner in their financial health. 

For more information on marketing automation, check out our ebook Growing and Engaging Your Membership Base >> 

Motivating Action

When you reach the point where a prospect shows increasing interest and you’ve solidified your credit union’s position as their go-to source for financial information, you can start to pivot towards more sales-oriented content.

When a prospect starts clicking on some of your service or product pages, or your membership page, that’s a flag that they’ve moved on to the consideration phase of the buying journey. The time is ripe to push out emails that help them clarify their options 

You don’t need to wait for a prospect to show behavior that indicates they’re starting to think about joining your credit union. If a prospect is active on your site and engaging with your content, you can push out calls-to-action (CTAs) that aren’t sales CTAs. Invite them to sign up for your newsletter. Send them content from your Facebook page and ask them to comment or like it. 

You’ve successfully built credibility and trust through your content. Now see what sort of direct engagement you can get back from them. Align the CTAs you send any prospect with what you know about their concerns and where they are in their buyer’s journey.

As they start to say “yes” to some of your content and engagement CTAs, you continue to learn more about your prospects – particularly when you’ve determined someone is ready to get an email invitation to join your credit union. Using what you’ve learned about a prospect, you can send an individualized invitation letter touting the specific membership benefits that will resonate most loudly with her based on what she’s read, watched (webinars) and heard (podcasts anyone?).

Retaining and Re-engaging

While influencing action is a critical stage, don’t stop educating and delighting. Whether someone is a member, or still a prospect in your database, you want to keep your channel of communication open by sustaining your position as their most reliable resource. 

In addition to the regular stream of educational content, you can vary the CTAs here as well. Do you have members who haven’t done a thing since opening their checking account a few years ago? Start sending them educational content, first about how to get the most out of the checking account they have. Then you can move on to upsell opportunities.

Get these dormant members digitally engaged to learn about what other products and services might interest them. When a member starts clicking on posts about loans, that’s a good trigger to start sending them loan content and CTAs. By opening this channel with members, you can roll out campaigns to support both your retention and your upsell efforts.

Inbound Marketing is a Journey

Inbound marketing is a never-ending journey where you steadily forge new paths to reach out to prospects and members. As their needs and concerns change, you have more opportunities to show why your credit union is the natural, reliable choice.

New business is everything, right? Wrong!

While new business is obviously important, there’s something else you should be laser-focused on to drive more long-term revenue: retention.

One of the most important (and often overlooked) things to concentrate on when growing an agency is retention. An obsession with bringing in new business is understandable — and to a degree necessary — especially when you’re just starting out. But you need to consider lifetime value right from the start to make sure your growth is sustainable.

So what can you do to build and maintain your retention rate?

Below are some of the things we do at Flaunt Digital to make sure it’s a priority in our day-to-day, as well as some bonus tips that you can implement that will put your agency on track to better client retention.

10 Useful Tips for Improving Client Retention

Learn how to measure retention.

Get into the habit of tracking your retention rate. This will help you stay on top of your efforts and see how your agency is performing. Measuring progress doesn’t have to be overly complicated. You just need a system in place to indicate and benchmark your client retention rate.

Here’s a simple way to calculate your agency’s client retention rate:

((Total number of clients at month beginning - Net new clients)/Total number of clients at month end) = Client retention rate

This simple formula will give you a good overview of your progress and allow you to quickly identify any issues. Taking this to the next level, you could include individual clients and billings to show growth across each account. It’s a good practice to begin measuring these things as early as possible. Measurement is what makes you take notice.

Keep everyone on the same page with project management tools.

A lot of elements go into managing a marketing campaign, and a lot of people are responsible for making it a success. Too often failure to pull this process into one place occurs, and instead the project is managed by email, Slack, phone calls, WhatsApp messages (yeah, that has happened), Facebook messenger, LinkedIn messenger, and even bumping into clients and having an impromptu half an hour meeting.

The best way to manage campaigns and projects for clients is to use a project management tool, which allows you to have a centralized view of all the tasks and deliverables surrounding a project. Having a single place where both the client and your agency’s team can easily monitor a project’s tasks and deliverables is invaluable, and it’s also an audit trail for progress, comments, and notes.

We use Active Collab, but others such as Basecamp, Zoho, Wrike, or even something as simple as Trello will vastly improve the way you manage projects.

Maintain detailed client records for instances of staff turnover.

No matter how hard you try to hang onto your best staff members, some people will inevitably leave the agency. For the sake of client happiness and ultimately retention, it’s in your best interest to prepare for staff departures.

Implement a CRM to track clients and keep up-to-date profiles, including notes on meetings and calls. This way when a member of your staff leaves, you have a detailed history of their clients to refer the new account manager to.

These client records are important for two reasons:

• In the event that a new account manager has to take over, they can get to know the account before they even speak to the client for the first time.
• The client team will recognize that making a smooth transition was a priority for your team, which will reassure them that you value their business.

Keeping up-to-date records might seem like a simple practice, but your agency will seriously benefit in the long run.

Create multiple relationships between the client team and the agency team.

Typically a client will only deal with their account manager. This can be fine, but remember that limiting communication to a single point person locks down a valuable relationship to just one team member — not your agency as a whole.

Encourage other team members working on the account to build a relationship with the client. Don’t force it, but try to create an environment where the client speaks to operational team members as well as their account manager. This will make your client feel a little more loved, and if their account manager leaves, the relationship is less likely to leave with them.

Report on metrics relevant to the client’s business.

This might seem like a no-brainer, but agree to a reporting structure for clients based on metrics that are actually important to their business. This makes it easy for the client to report back to their leadership team and show the direct value of your services. 

Providing your client with the right ammo to make them look like a rockstar to their board members is something that will cement your relationship, never underestimate the power of consistently strong reporting.

Prove you’re genuinely interested in the big picture.

Agency professionals accustomed to a high client turnover rate or those who rely on project-based work know in the back of their minds that a client will only be with them for a certain amount of time. This can prevent them from developing meaningful client relationships. The client starts to get treated like a process — as long as all the boxes are ticked on a project, the account manager and operational staff believe they’re doing their job.

This is the wrong approach. When you get your team to prioritize long-term retention instead of just the project at hand, something wonderful naturally occurs — your team will begin to care about each and every single client.

But it’s not enough to care about a client from a business perspective. You should focus on developing a relationship on a personal level as well. If you genuinely care about a client’s overall performance beyond individual campaign objectives, they will take notice and be more likely to stick around.

Don’t shy away from socializing.

This is quite uncommon in the agency world, but it’s still important to note as a retention tactic. Interacting with your clients on a social level is great for building relationships. It doesn’t have to be a huge event — maybe just grab a coffee or lunch every so often.

Building a relationship on a personal level will not only strengthen your business relationship, it will make interactions at the conference table more natural and comfortable.

Show clients you’re grateful for their business.

Weaving gratitude into everything you do is something that will go along way for your client retention, as well as staff retention.

This is something I am quite bullish on at Flaunt Digital, and I believe it is one of the single most important elements of an agency’s culture. You have to be grateful that your clients chose you above any other agency and continue to do so. Don’t be shy about showing your gratitude.

Here are a few ideas to show your clients that you’re thankful for their business:

• Treat their office to coffee or lunch.
• Send them a holiday present — even just a card is nice.
• Give them swag, e.g., T-shirts, mugs, pens, notebooks. Clients love getting little gifts.
• Say it. Don’t pour your heart out in desperation, but every so often, remind them that the relationship is important to you and your agency.

You can’t go wrong if you show gratitude, and it comes from a genuine place.

Solicit feedback, and act on it.

You cannot evolve as a company if you don’t gather feedback from your clients. Use a tool like Survey Monkey or Google Forms to put together a client feedback survey, and share the results across your agency.

Most importantly, don’t be scared of implementing change. If a client survey reveals that something needs to be improved, then find a solution and fix it. Tell your client that you found their feedback highly valuable, and you are putting changes in place to improve your service. The client will be impressed that you valued their opinion enough to actually implement changes.

What techniques does your agency use to increase client retention? Let us know in the comments below!