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As a marketer for a media company, the world is your oyster. From SnapChat to Instagram and even classics like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, you have a wealth of available options to bring into your distribution strategy. If you sit down and ask yourself which you’d like to pursue, you’d likely respond with ‘all of them’—each social media channel and social network brings a unique set of strengths and weaknesses to the table. Why not cast your net wide? The reality, however, is that your team has limited time in the day. And with so many social media channels available to pursue, you may risk spreading your efforts too thin. When it comes to distribution, ‘a little here and a little there’ just doesn’t cut it. You get more when you double down, learn the mechanics of each platform that you’re considering, and focus.

So how do you avoid platform overload and make sure that you’re focusing on the right channels? Here’s a simple framework to help you figure out where to prioritize your time and efforts:

Step 1: Revisit Your Distribution Goals

What are you looking to accomplish by being present on social media?

Maybe you’re looking to distribute your content to new audiences and promote more user-generated sharing. In this case, you’d turn to a channel like Pinterest where audiences are pinning and repinning interesting content to share with friends. Or maybe, you’re looking to create more brand visibility for some beautiful, inspiring photography that you’re publishing. In this case, you’d want to use a channel like Instagram that helps audiences discover interesting, bite-sized visuals. And if you’re looking to open more direct conversation channels with your audience? Turn to classics like Facebook and Twitter.

When building a social media strategy, it’s important to focus on the nuances. Ask yourself how audiences share content on these channels and how this user behavior maps to your content distribution goals? Your answers to these questions will help you identify and evaluate which social channels to pursue.

Step 2: Know Where Your Audiences Spend Time 

Social media platforms, at heart, are tools that enable conversations with audiences at scale. As a publisher, it’s up to you to find where pockets of readers are spending their time. Social media can help you provide an introduction to your media company and enable repeat engagement.

When building out your social media strategy, take time to conduct some channel by channel due diligence: understand each platform’s demographic composition so that you can ensure that you’re sharing your great content with the right audiences at the right time. Here are some resources that can help with your research: 

• This social media intelligence report, maintained by Business Insider, can shed insight into how specific platforms are growing and changing, pointing to overall trends related to gender, income, and education levels.
• This report covering the demographics of social media users, maintained by the Pew Center, to provide up-to-date fact sheets on how Americans are spending their time online.
• This comprehensive analysis of social media usage as of 2015, created by Sprout Social.

When analyzing the demographics of social media usage, make sure to cast your net wide and cite a few different reports, as data can vary between sources. Compare the information that you read in your reports with your own first-party data to uncover areas of opportunity to pursue. 

Step 3: Examine Your Resources

You probably have big dreams for your social media strategy. And you should—if you don’t ‘think big’ with your marketing strategy, you’ll risk missing out on valuable audience acquisition and engagement opportunities. Not to mention, you’ll get stuck with the everyday mechanics of tweeting, sharing, and posting interesting content without doing the work that you need to do to analyze and build upon your results.

In an ideal world, you’d have infinite resources to manage your social media strategy. You’d have everything you need to build out your team, test paid channels, and implement tools. You’d be able to run consistent experiments across every social media channel out there. 

But you don’t have time to just cast your net wide and explore. You need to double down on the channels that are right for your brand and in sync with your team’s bandwidth. If you have a $0 social media budget, you may want to focus on channels like Twitter, for instance, where you can build a presence without needing to invest any advertising spend. If you do have a small ad budget, you consider running campaigns on channels like Facebook, which has been increasing its attention to its paid media business.

The bottom line is that you need to invest in the marketing efforts that you can do well. Ask yourself—what can your social media team do better than any other company out there, given the resources that you have? Don’t just go through the motions. Audience attention spans are spread thin, so whatever you do—do it well. 

Step 4: Prioritize

Your due diligence may lead you to the conclusion that you need to be on multiple social channels. If you fall into this category, take a moment to reflect—don’t rush your launch process. Instead, take some time to step back and reflect. Which social media channels represent your lowest hanging fruit? Which marketing opportunities will drive the best results over time? Take some time to give each social media platform the nurturing it needs to perform for your media brand. So how do you identify your highest-yield opportunities? Here is a list of ideas to get you started:

• The social media channels with the highest concentration of people in your target audience
• Networks in which your content is already being shared
• Platforms that allow your existing audiences to engage with your content directly

Take a look at some of your marketing data, especially your referral traffic sources and sharing patterns around your most popular content. Survey your readers to see what social media networks they enjoy browsing. Craft your strategy from there.

Final Thoughts

There’s a subtle trick that can help you avoid platform overload: just focus on the channels where your audiences are already browsing and having conversations. Then, build out a presence on the platforms where you expect your audience to be devoting their attention in the coming years. Remember that social media, as a channel, is still in its infancy, with plenty of room to grow. Especially when it comes to publishing and digital media, it’s not ‘first to market’ who will always come out ahead. Be sure to take a step back to create a strategy that’s thoughtful and high-impact for your unique audience.

We’ve already covered what retention marketing is, and why today’s elite ecommerce stores have already started on a retention-focused strategy. But where should you begin with your own retention strategy? Read on to learn what to do before you get started, how to allocate your marketing budget, and when you can expect to see results. Let’s get started!

Where Do You Start?

Every tall building started with a solid framework, and every tall tree started with the roots. Retention marketing is the same. You can create something amazing, but you need to lay down a strong framework.

“If you don’t know where you are now, you will never know how far you have gone.”

The framework you need is an understanding of your current metrics. Measuring your current ecommerce stats will show you where you are, so you can measure the effectiveness of your retention marketing strategy. 

You should have a benchmark of all the standard ecommerce metrics like conversion rate, average order value, abandoned cart rate, etc… But besides those metrics, you should also benchmark KRMs (key retention metrics) before starting your retention marketing plan. For consistency, you should use data from a one year period for the following calculations.

Repeat Customer Rate (RCR)

Your store’s repeat customer rate is the percentage of your customer base that is coming back to purchase again. Remember, it is more expensive to acquire a new customer (seven times more expensive!) than retain an existing one.

To measure your current RCR, take the number of repeat customers and divide it by the total number of unique customers. Be sure you are dividing by unique customers and NOT orders.

Customers With More Than One Purchase / Unique Customers = Repeat Customer Rate

As you focus more on retention marketing, you will notice that your revenue from repeat customers will start to climb.

Purchase Frequency

When you make getting return business a focus, your customers will start to shop with you more often. This metric is known as your store’s purchase frequency. It is the average number of times a customer will shop with you in a given time period.

Total Orders / Unique Customers = Purchase Frequency

Total number of orders divided by the number of unique customers you have, will give you purchase frequency. Even a slight increase in purchase frequency can lead to a huge increase in revenue.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

This is the holy grail metric of customer retention. It tells you what each customer is worth to your store over their entire shopping life. 

Average Order Value x Purchase Frequency x Average Lifespan = Lifetime Value

The above equation is your average order value multiplied by your purchase frequency (see above) multiplied by your average customer lifespan. If you don’t know your average lifespan, you can use three years as a rough estimate.

Set Benchmarks

Now that you have calculated these KRM benchmarks, make sure you note them somewhere. If you use an analytics or CRM tool, you can store it there. Whatever you decide to do you will want to look back on these numbers to see how your strategy is performing.

How Much Retention Marketing Do You Need?

Now that we have laid a solid framework to build our retention strategy on, we need to decide how much of a focus to put on retention. You would not expect acquisition to just happen, so you should not expect retention to just happen.

You invest marketing dollars into a content strategy, email marketing, social media, search engine optimization, and retargeting (to name a few places) for your acquisition strategy. If you want your retention marketing efforts to be a success you need to do the same.

Let’s look at the breakdown of a typical ecommerce store’s traffic:

As you can see 92% have not purchased before, or have made a single purchase. This traffic would be attributed to acquisition efforts. The remaining 8% are customers who have purchased from you 2 or more times. This traffic can be attributed to your retention efforts.

When you look at the traffic numbers you may ask why you should allocate more than 8% of your marketing budget to retention, when it only represents a small portion of your traffic. On the surface it may seem counterintuitive, but you need to dig deeper.

Let’s look at the average revenue breakdown from each of those segments:

That small percentage of your traffic is actually generating a substantial portion of your revenue. The average ecommerce store sees over 40% of their revenue come from that small but mighty 8%. This is because a repeat customer is more profitable than a first time buyer.

If this is the case, why do the majority of stores allocate almost all their budget to customer acquisition? The average store allocates 81% of marketing dollars to acquisition, which represents 59% of revenue, and 19% of marketing dollars to retention, which represents 41% of revenue. This budget allocation doesn’t seem to make sense! 

What Should Your Store Do?

Every store is different, but some stores will benefit more from retention marketing than others. The effectiveness of retention marketing is determined by two main factors. The first is the life-stage of your store, and the second is the nature of the products you sell.

Your Store’s Life-Stage

If you have a brand new ecommerce site, you will have very small customer base. Obviously it does not make much sense to be spending marketing on retaining customer you don’t have yet! As you grow, you’ll want to shift more marketing dollars to to retention marketing.

Once your store has an established customer base, it becomes more beneficial to focus on retention over acquisition. Growing revenue via acquisition can eventually slow, but retention can help you continue to grow.

What You Sell

A returning customer is worth more to your business, so every store should be striving to boost retention. If you have a product that has high likelihood of repeat purchases, you will benefit immensely from retention marketing. Examples of these types of products would be cosmetics, coffee, supplements, and even clothing.

If you do sell high ticket items, retention strategies can still work for you. Imagine if you could sell three fridges to a customer over their lifetime rather than just one. That would be a huge boost! Alternatively, you can cross-sell complementary products to your customers. 

When Can You Expect to See Results?

Retention marketing doesn’t provide overnight results or instant gratification. But, if you stick to it you will start to see some phenomenal results. How long do you need to wait? That depends. Six months to a year is a common timeframe. Retention marketing is like rolling a snowball, once your get it started it becomes easy. 

As marketers, we’re always thinking about the most optimal way to target our potential customers. Trouble is, mastering Google AdWords is really tricky. With so many metrics to keep tabs on, figuring out whether or not you’re getting it right is often easier said than done.

To help shed some light on the situation, the folks at WordStream released a detailed new study on AdWords industry metrics. The study reveals a ton of helpful industry-specific benchmarks for both search and display ads, including average clickthrough rate (CTR), average cost-per-click (CPC), average conversion rate (CVR), and average cost-per-action (CPA).

This information can be used to inform your AdWords strategy, and ultimately help you improve your overall ad performance. (HubSpot Marketing customers: We recently launched a Google AdWords integration via HubSpot Ads to help you better measure and optimize your ad campaigns.)

To help you get the most out of WordSteam’s findings, we’ve outlined the highlights from their study below.

Search vs. Display Ads: What’s the Difference?

Before we dive into the metrics, it’s good to clarify what exactly we’re trying to measure within Google AdWords. The most common types of advertising done by marketers are search and display ads. Although both are included in AdWords, they have completely different implications and uses for marketers.

Search ads are those that appear when a potential customer searches for your product (or related item) on Google. You’ve likely noticed them right above all the organic results on a SERP:

Display ads appear on a website while browsing. They are typically located either on the top or side of the page, and often contain attention-grabbing images:

Google AdWords Industry Benchmarks

Now that we’ve gone over the basics, let’s dive right into the data. Here is an outline of the recent benchmarking data released by WordStream, followed by a few suggestions to help you improve your own performance. 

Average Clickthrough Rate (CTR)

Clickthrough rate reveals how often people who view your ad end up actually clicking it. CTR can be used to help you determine the quality of your imagery, positioning, and keywords. Across all industries, the average CTR for a search ad is 1.91%, and 0.35% for a display ad.

Here’s a look at the average CTR by industry:

Pro Tip: The more relevant your keywords are to your business or offer, the more likely users will be to clickthrough: 54% of respondents said they prefer relevant ads to irrelevant ones, according to research from Qriously.

Average Cost-per-Click (CPC)

Cost-per-click is the amount you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. While the most that you’ll be charged per click is reflected by your maximum cost-per-click bid, you’ll often be charged less. According to AdWords, “Actual CPC is often less than maximum CPC because with the AdWords auction, the most you’ll pay is what’s minimally required to hold your ad position and any ad formats shown with your ad, such as sitelinks.” The average CPC across all industries is $2.32 for search ads, and $0.58 for display ads.

Here’s a look at the average CPC by industry:

Pro Tip: Looking at your lowest or highest CPC doesn’t always tell the full story. Instead, focus on how the ads are converting, and be sure to turn off those ads that aren’t seeing a great conversion rate. 

(HubSpot Marketing customers: You can keep track of your conversions using the AdWords integration for HubSpot Ads. Check out this page for more information.)

Average Conversion Rate (CVR)

Average conversion rate tracks the amount of conversions you get from a certain ad. If you’re seeing a lot of traffic from your ads, but not a ton of conversions, this could be a red flag. To put things into perspective, the average CVR across all industries is 2.70% for search ads and 0.89% for display ads.

Here’s a look at the average CVR by industry: 

Pro Tip: If you’re looking to improve your CVR, try leveraging negative keywords. Negative keywords are used to prevent your ad from being shown to anyone searching for a specific word or phrase. For example, if you don’t want to attract people looking for free tools or resources, you may want to use “free” as a negative keyword. Want more tips? Check out this resource. 

Average Cost-per-Action (CPA)

Average cost-per-action (also known as cost-per-acquisition) refers to the amount you pay every time an action is performed involving your ad. Some examples include impressions, form submission, or event registration. According to AdWords, Target CPA bidding leverages historical information about your campaign to “automatically find an optimal CPC bid for your ad each time it’s eligible to appear. AdWords sets these bids to achieve an average CPA equal to your target across all ad groups and campaigns using this strategy.” The average CPA for search ads is $59.18, and $60.76 for display ads.

Here’s a look the average CPA by industry:

Pro Tip: Want to lower your CPA? Start by optimizing for Quality Score. According to WordStream, there’s a strong correlation between high Quality Scores and low CPAs. Click here to learn more about Quality Score.

Did you find these benchmarks helpful? Share you thoughts in the comment section below.

People often joke about coming down with “a case of the Mondays,” but for science writer Bahar Gholipour, Tuesday is the real worst day of the week.

As Gholipour noted in a story for New York Magazine, “Why Does Time Seem to Slow Down on Tuesdays?”, Tuesday is the day when “last weekend feels like it was ages ago,” while next weekend still feels “ages away.” As a result, time can feel like it’s passing more slowly on Tuesdays compared to other days of the week.

It might sound like science fiction, but studies — including this one on how emotions can subconsciously affect our perceptions of time — demonstrate that the phenomenon has a foothold in reality. In certain situations, time does seem to move at different speeds.

Why Tuesday Feels Like the Longest Day of The Week

To quote Gholipour:

The brain, studies on time perception have shown, has a strange way of stretching and squishing time depending on the drugs you may be on, the emotions you are experiencing, and even the amount of attention you pay to the moment.”

One of the most well-known examples of when this stretching or squishing of time occurs is during life-or-death situations, like car accidents. People often remember such events as lasting longer than they actually did, and even describe time as having moved in slow-motion.

However, research shows that in such cases, the perceived change in time’s speed is a function of memory, not perception (i.e., you remember time having moved more slowly, but you didn’t actually perceive it that way). What’s more, this life-or-death situation research doesn’t apply to Tuesdays.

For most of us, we don’t encounter life-or-death situations on Tuesdays. In the words of Gholipour, Tuesdays are “dull and unemotional.” So, why is it that Tuesdays seem to throw us into some sort of strange time warp?

Gholipour uncovered two promising hypotheses …

1) The Time Gap

Research shows that the brain “time stamps” events using contextual clues. And things that happen in the same context (e.g., while you’re at a party) get grouped together in your memory — separate from things that happen in other contexts (e.g., while you’re in a cab going home). The end result is that we tend to remember like-moments as having occurred more closely together in time.

When applied to Tuesdays, the hypothesis works like this: Going into the office on Monday is such a jolt, such a change from your weekend routine, that by Tuesday the previous weekend feels further away than it actually is.

You see, on Monday, you can still easily tap into your weekend memories because you’re still in the process of making that contextual shift from “weekend mode” to “weekday mode.” By Tuesday, however, the shift is complete, and you now have your Monday memories — the beginning of your weekday memories — blocking the way back to your weekend memories. And this could explain, as Gholipour wrote, why we feel “a vague sensation of a time gap” on Tuesday mornings.

2) Memory Overload

A second hypothesis explaining why time seems to move more slowly on Tuesdays: Our brains simply have more stuff to process during the workweek than on the weekend, and all that processing uses up a disproportionate amount of space in our memories.

During the weekend, we tend to engage in relaxing, predictable behavior (e.g., watching TV, going out to dinner, and so on). During the work week, on the other hand, our schedules tend to become more complex and less predictable. We have emails to read. Emails to write. Assignments to complete. Meetings to attend. On Mondays, we’re just getting caught up. On Tuesdays, we’re in the thick of it.

Hence, it’s possible that our brains generate more discreet memories on Tuesdays, making Tuesdays seem as though they’re longer than other days.

As cognitive neuroscientist Virginie van Wassenhove of France’s INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit explained:

Considering the amount of stuff that you’ve been engaged with during workdays, your recollections of these days are encoded with high granularity, taking a lot of space, so to speak, in memory.”

So there you have it: Two possible explanations for why Tuesday feels like the longest day of the week. What’s a marketer to do with this information? Well, knowledge is power. And while we can’t offer you an insta-cure for the Tuesday blues, the hope is that this insight will help you focus less on the passing of time, and more on the work that needs to get done. 

Happy Tuesday!

Have any suggestions for how we can make Tuesdays feel shorter? Sound off in the comments section below!