Welcome to My Blog

Have you ever sat in a meeting and been asked, “Well, how much is that [insert necessary marketing tool or program to grow business] going to cost?”

Those who run the budget at companies must ensure return on investment from every activity that they put dollars behind — otherwise you wouldn’t have resources to do your job. Trouble is, solidifying those resources and proving they’ll be worth the investment can definitely be a challenge.

Whether you’re tasked with managing advertising spend or budgeting for events, this handy list of free calculator tools will help you prove the return on investment (ROI) of the programs and budget you need to grow your business and scale over time.

9 Handy Business Calculators That’ll Make Your Life Easier

1) Attend.com’s Event ROI Calculator

Event marketers know how challenging it can be to attribute leads, pipeline, and revenue from events. Luckily, Attend.com created an event ROI calculator to help your events team determine the cost of the event, the benefits — both quantitative and qualitative — from the event, and how those factors translate into revenue generated. In short: This calculator will arm you with the numbers your executives will be looking for after running any event for your business.

2) HubSpot’s Advertising ROI Calculator

Paying for ads can be risky if budget is tight — who knows if it’ll pay off? But using the HubSpot Ad Spend ROI Calculator will help you break down your budget, set a price for how much you’re willing to spend per click, target your conversion rate, set a value for how much your customers are worth from ads, and turn around with a value for the return on your ad spend based on your starting budget.

3) Kissmetrics’ A/B Test Significance Calculator

Growth marketers know that conversion rate optimization is critical to an inbound marketing strategy — thus the need to prove all A/B tests pass with statistical significance. Kissmetrics created this A/B test significance calculator to help determine whether or not your conversion experiments are passing a significance test, ultimately to help you determine if changing that email subject line really did increase the open rate.

4) HubSpot’s Leads Goal (SLA) Calculator

Has anyone at your company ever asked, “How many leads per month does our sales team ACTUALLY need to hit their pipeline goals?” If not, this Leads Calculator (also known as a Service Level Agreement, or SLA calculator) will be your handy monthly tool to answer that question. This calculator will help you measure current sales close rates, assign dollar values to each of your major lead sources, track monthly lead generation by channel, and commit to a monthly lead goal.

5) Web Strategies’ Digital Marketing Budget Calculator

Web Strategies created a handy Excel template calculator to help marketers determine monthly or annual budgets based on revenue each year. This calculator will help your team and executives understand roughly how much budget to request for certain marketing initiatives such as PPC spend, SEO, email marketing, social media ads, and more.

6) Entreprenuer.com’s Email Marketing ROI Calculator

Entrepreneur.com created this online calculator tool to determine the return on investment from email marketing, specifically the cost, revenue, and profit from one email send to the criteria you set (audience size, response rate, campaign costs, etc.). This calculator will help your team understand the value of sending an email campaign and the opportunity to generate revenue on each person that clicks through to close a deal from that email.

7) HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing ROI Calculator

This calculator helps determine the rough estimate of ROI when onboarding to HubSpot. After inputting average monthly visits, leads, and sales price per customer, this calculator outputs an estimated dollar amount increase after using HubSpot for one year. This one will specifically come in handy when proving to execs that inbound marketing and HubSpot is worth the investment.

8) % Percent-Change Calculator

Calculating month over month, year over year, or any type of percentage change to report on requires zero math skills with this easy percent-change calculator. This free tool calculates percentage declines or increases based on the input of two values, so you can easily determine growth numbers in your next executive meeting.

9) RenegadeWork’s Customer Acquisition Cost Calculator

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a well-known and critical metric to study in business. The cost to acquire a customer is essential to understanding the finances of scaling your business, but doesn’t always have to fall under finance’s wheelhouse every month. As marketers, use this calculator to determine how your budget paid off in reporting to execs. Did they give you that extra $10K for paid campaigns last month? Input how many extra customers you saw from that bump in the budget and allow your entire team to see what the cost of each customer is according to your marketing budget.

What are your favorite business calculators? Share them in the comments below.

Sometimes we ask our marketing teams to be superhuman. As hard as they work, there are practical limits to human capacity. They can only follow up with so many leads. It’s easier for them to achieve superhuman status when they get a little help – like marketing automation.

Using a marketing automation tool to set up workflows can give your membership conversion efforts an exponential lift. Automation lets your team set up winning workflows that work around the clock nurturing leads and retaining members, while your team gets to enjoy their weekends.

What Marketing Automation Really Is

The biggest myth about marketing automation is that you can set up a couple workflows and conversions come rolling in. It’s more complicated than that. There are some pre-conditions for success, including a healthy-sized database with a steady stream of leads coming in, and good processes in place that already convert leads into new members.

The challenge that marketing automation meets is optimizing your traffic and lead flow – following up and nurturing all those leads human hands can’t get to in an effective way so you achieve higher membership conversion rates from the same pool of leads.

Automated workflows let you customize nurturing on a more granular basis. Without it, your team members having to find relevant content for a specific lead, remember to send it out and follow up. Or, they have to send email blasts that don’t address the interests and concerns of individual leads. The workflows can send customized, relevant email for every lead or member that meets predefined criteria.

Some Sample Workflows

Let’s look at some sample workflows for three common scenarios.

New prospects: A visitor has just provided you their email address and is now in your database. They shared their email address to access your interactive annual report. You’ve set up workflows to trigger different email series based on which section of the report they spend most of their time reading. The general series in these workflows are the same, but the content and links are customized based on which section of the report was most interesting to each one. You want to further entrench their interest in your association. A potential workflow could be:

• Immediate thank-you email with link to a report or video that goes in-depth on one of the section’s issues.
• A week later – send an email with another link to a different piece of relevant content.
• If they’ve clicked through either of these links, send an email inviting them to sign up for your newsletter the following week.
• If they haven’t clicked through either of these links, you might send them an email 10 days after the second one with a short embedded video they can view right there, with a with a call-to-action (CTA) to follow you on social media or subscribe to your YouTube channel. 

Longtime prospect who hasn’t yet joined: Here may be your goldmine of new members. The first thing you can do with marketing automation is “score” these prospects based on all the digital information you’ve been able to collect about them and how they’ve interacted with your association online. This way, you can separate out the prospects who are the hot leads you don’t want to ignore any longer.

Assess what issues and content formats they’ve engaged with and which they tend to ignore. These are criteria you can use to segment your hot leads into workflow lists. Let’s say you identify a subset of hot leads who’ve attend live events (either a webinar or an in-person gathering) in the past three months. An automated workflow for them might be:

• An email with a brief survey asking for feedback on the event.
• People who respond will get an immediate thank-you email with a link to an upcoming event or calendar.
• People who don’t respond may get a second email asking for feedback a week later.
• A few days later (either after the thank you-email or the second survey request email), they’ll get an email sharing some news or content directly related to the topic of the event they attended.
• Those who responded to the survey and clicked on the content link will then get an email inviting them to join the association a week later.
• Those who don’t yet meet these criteria get redirected to a new lead nurturing workflow based on other indicators from their digital behavior.

Lapsed members: You want them back! Let them know. Let’s look at a potential workflow for those whose memberships in the past three months lapsed. You start with the assumption that it’s just slipped their mind.

• First email is a direct CTA to renew with some “hey, don’t miss out, you may have forgotten to renew” copy.
• For those who don’t renew off that email, a second email goes out a week later sharing some information about a program in which they participated or service they benefited from while a member with another renew CTA.
• A reminder email with new, relevant content, and another renew CTA can go out 10 days later.
• For people who still haven’t renewed, send a short survey email asking their reasons why. Include a renewal link and CTA in case “they just haven’t gotten to it yet.”
• For those who don’t renew, you may decide to follow up with a few directly based on what they said in the survey, as well as a couple who didn’t respond to the survey at all. The others can get redirected to other nurture workflows.

More Automation – More Metrics

One of the other great benefits of marketing automation (you know, besides the 24/7 marketing operation you’re now running) is your pool of data about what works and what doesn’t will pop out at you after awhile!

Before you start with automated workflow, identify benchmarks for how your emails perform, membership conversion numbers, and other metrics. With the volume of emails you’ll be sending out, you’ll have enough results that you should see a higher level of engagement and conversion metrics than the starting baseline.

There are also some new, automation-related metrics you should start tracking, such as which trigger criteria are more effective than others at eliciting conversions.

Did you include mobile content access in the criteria, but didn’t hit engagement goals? Perhaps mobile access was just the starting point. Review past behavior. See if mobile-only access versus a mix of device access have different conversion rates? Maybe conversion rates on this workflow are awesome only for people who access content on mobile. It’s the lack of engagement by the mixed device folks that lowered the overall conversion rate. Now you can tweak mobile access trigger criteria for mobile content.

OK, you can see how this can go on. As with all your inbound digital metric opportunities, clarify which metrics are most valuable to your association’s needs. They should keep you driving towards optimizing the database and improving the lead-to-membership conversion rate. 

Between photos of beautiful dinners created with the help of meal delivery services to videos featuring the “unboxing” of a new mobile phone, people love to share their experiences with brands on social media.

This type of content is known as user-generated content (UGC), which is produced by actual product users through their own publishing and social media platforms.

Many brands have started sharing UGC on their own social media channels to leverage user social proof and show their products being used in action. And while consumers might agree that UGC is more trustworthy than content created by brands themselves, there’s a generation gap when it comes to how consumers interact with UGC.

Olapic surveyed consumers of all ages to determine how they viewed and interacted with UGC on social media, and they found that 76% of those surveyed thought UGC was more trustworthy than branded content. However, they determined differences between which types of UGC millennials and baby boomers preferred, and what social networks they liked to use. Read the infographic below to learn more about how to inspire trust in consumers by using UGC on social media.

Emotional intelligence is more than just a buzzword.

The ability to emphasize with others, build lasting relationships, and manage emotions in a healthy way has been proven time and time again to be one of the biggest indicators of workplace and interpersonal success.

In client-facing roles, emotional intelligence can be the difference between a lasting agency-client relationship and a severed contract. Agencies hiring new employees need to pay close attention to a candidate’s level of emotional intelligence, since it will likely have a big impact on their early success (or failure) on the job.

Emotionally intelligent individuals can more easily adapt to new environments and relate to new colleagues and clients — crucial skills for anyone working at a marketing agency. People with low levels of emotional intelligence might have difficulty managing relationships and dealing with stress, which could lead to burnout or bigger conflicts down the line.

Among employees who fail to meet expectations during their first 18 months on the job, 23% fail due to low emotional intelligence. That’s the second most prevalent reason new hires fail, following only general lack of coachability.

We know gauging a candidate’s emotional intelligence is pivotal when it comes to hiring the best new talent — but can something so complex be sufficiently evaluated in a brief interview setting?

Some candidates have mastered the ability of seeming emotionally intelligent — responding instantaneously with practiced, too-good-to-be-true responses to classic interview questions, e.g.:

What’s your greatest weakness?
Well, I just care too darn much about my work.

To help you sift through the rehearsed responses and dig deeper into a candidate’s real level of emotional intelligence, we’ve put together the following list of interview questions. Learn what to ask below and how to identify an emotionally intelligent response.

5 Interview Questions to Assess Emotional Intelligence

1) Can you tell me about a time you tried to do something and failed?

Asking a candidate to explain a failed project is not only a great way to see how they cope when things don’t go as planned, it’s also an opportunity to see whether or not they’re comfortable taking full responsibility for their actions.

Look for a candidate who can straightforwardly describe a recent failure without shirking the bulk of the blame on other parties or unfortunate circumstances. Even if some external factors played a hand in the mishap, you want a candidate who is comfortable being held fully accountable, and can discuss even the nitty-gritty details of a failed project with fair-minded focus.

Does the candidate seem like they were able to fully bounce back from the issue without getting defensive? Emotionally intelligent individuals possess an inherent self-confidence that can buoy them through setbacks and lets them assess troubling situations objectively, without harsh self-judgment or resorting to outward frustration.

Be wary of candidates who fixate too much on who or what they blame for the failure. When a project doesn’t work out, the key takeaway shouldn’t be based on blame. Emotionally intelligent people know how to move on and examine a situation without bitterness or resentment clouding their judgment.

2) Tell me about a time you received negative feedback from your boss. How did that make you feel?

One of the most easily recognizable qualities of an emotionally intelligent person is their ability to deal with criticism. People with high emotional intelligence are well-equipped to handle negative feedback without losing stride. They can process even unexpected feedback without letting it damage their self-worth.

That’s not to say negative feedback has no emotional impact on emotionally intelligent employees. People with high emotional intelligence experience emotions like everyone else — they just know how to fully process those emotions with a level head and a clear focus on the facts.

Look for a candidate who can specifically describe the feelings they experienced upon receiving negative feedback, e.g.: “At first I was surprised and a little frustrated by my manager’s comments on the project, but when I looked deeper into the reasoning behind her comments, I realized that I could have definitely given more attention to several key areas. On my next project, I was able to use her feedback to develop a more well-rounded approach.”

A response that acknowledges the specific emotions they experienced and shows an empathic understanding of their manager’s point of view indicates a high level of emotional awareness.

Candidates who say they felt “bad” or can’t really express why the feedback affected them might be less emotionally intelligent. Similarly, if a candidate thinks the feedback was wholly undeserved and doesn’t attempt to understand their manager’s point of view, they might have difficulty stepping outside of their own perspective.

3) Can you tell me about a conflict at work that made you feel frustrated?

Everyone gets frustrated sometimes. It’s how you handle that frustration that really matters.

Hearing how a candidate explains a work conflict can offer some valuable clues into their level of emotional intelligence. Conflicts can stir up a lot of difficult emotions, and asking a candidate to describe a dispute and how they dealt with it can give you meaningful insight into how they manage their emotions and empathize with others.

According to psychologist and author Daniel Goleman, emotionally intelligent people have four distinguishing characteristics:

• They were good at understanding their own emotions (self-awareness)
• They were good at managing their emotions (self-management)
• They were empathetic to the emotional drives of other people (social awareness)
• They were good at handling other people’s emotions (social skills)

All four of these characteristics are put to the test in conflicts situations. Emotionally intelligent people will be able to explain a conflict situation clearly and objectively, giving a specific run down of how they felt at the time, how they managed those feelings, and how they used social cues from those around them to inform their decisions.

As they explain the conflict situation, consider the following four areas:

1) Can they clearly articulate the emotions they experienced during the conflict? (self-awareness)
2) Were they able to move past any negative emotions and work towards a resolution? (self-management)
3) Do they seem aware of the other person’s motivations and challenges? (social awareness)
4) Were they able to mend the relationship and move past the conflict? (social skills)

4) Tell me about a hobby you like to do outside of work. Can you teach me about it?

Ask the candidate to explain one of their hobbies to you as if you know nothing about it. It can be anything — golf, horseback riding, cookie jar collecting — anything they’re interested in and willing to share details about.

As they explain the hobby, prompt them with questions that force them to simplify, re-explain, and change their communication style to suit your clear lack of understanding. See how they react. Are they getting flustered or frustrated? Are they quick to adapt their communication style to meet your needs?

Emotionally intelligent people remain patient and calm when faced with a communication challenge. They can easily read social cues when their message isn’t clearly getting across, and will deftly pivot their approach to meet the needs of their audience.

5) Can you tell me about a time you needed to ask for help on a project?

Emotionally intelligent people are self-confident without being overconfident. They have a realistic understanding of their own strengths and limitations, and they aren’t afraid to admit what they don’t know. They know that asking for help and collaborating with others is a sign of strength, not weakness.

Be wary of candidates who seem hesitant or embarrassed to admit they need help sometimes. Look for someone who can confidently discuss a time when they sought the help of a colleague due to a gap in their knowledge of a subject.

Emotionally intelligent people will be transparent about their weak points, and will show a real drive to better themselves by collaborating and using all the resources available to them.

What interview questions do you ask candidates to measure emotional intelligence? Let us know in the comments.