How to manage your virtual PR teams using the Active Communications Index, and take a vacation whil

Hello and welcome to the Speak PR Podcast. This is for business owners who'd like to unlock the value in their own businesses with effective public relations, because as we all know, PR is free. Now I'm going to share today the Active Communications Index, and this is a very simple productivity metric that any business owner can use by either asking their internal team or their agency to compile some simple numbers. It'll help business owners to understand how much work is going into the public relations activities at the company while they're away. And in fact, you can use it all the time. Let me dive in and share with you about how I've used social media and automation while I've been on holiday and the Active Communications Index, which I believe will help you to grow your business effectively and efficiently using PR. As we know, marketing is all about creating compelling and consistent content. So I'm going to look at what I've done in the last week and share some of the numbers with you, because I'd like for us to look at the metrics when we're undertaking marketing. Because the fun stuff around PR is the getting noticed, But the reality is that we want to spend this time, but we want to have a return on the cost of that time. So let's just look at some of the stats. This is my website, eastwestpr.com, and also the 10 different platforms that I've been publishing content onto over the last week while I'm away in Wales. Now, my website received 138 visitors. 24% were from America, 17% from the UK, and 6.5% from Singapore, uh, and the other from China and various other nations. The site visitor numbers declined by 6.1%, but the amount of time people spent increased to 1 minute 39. Now it's interesting, of course, to think that we only have 1 point 3:09 minutes of somebody's time to get them to be interested in such a complicated service such as public relations and international marketing. On the upside, I saw that nearly 9% of traffic to my website is viewing the podcast page, and 24 contacts or visitors went to the Contact Me page. Nearly four percent, so I've done something right. But that means I should have 24 leads from my week away. But actually, when I look at the CRM in Zoho, I don't have that many leads. We do have a couple of leads, but those are ones that came through partner agencies in America and also a direct referral. So somewhere down the line, I've got people to my contact me page, but then I've lost them. So that's something I need to look at. One of the things I do know is that my podcast, the Speak PR Podcast, has had 593 downloads in the last week, and I could check that through the Buzzsprout analytics. And considering how much time I've been putting into this podcast, that's really great news. My Facebook group page, I've been posting twice a day using the Zoho automation software, And the links and the images are getting a 40% engagement, much better than the straight text, which is only 23%. So images and links to articles are working on Facebook on the group page. Now my profile views are up 66%, which is great, and my page impressions are only modest at 232%, are also up 60%. So I'm getting some good traction with my Facebook group pages. Another highlight is that my Social Selling Index on LinkedIn is now at 80 out of 100. I'm in the top 1% in the industry and the top 1% in my network. The average is about 47. If you're interested, you can go to linkedin.com/sales/ssi and you could check yours. And in the last 90 days, 685 people have looked at my profile on LinkedIn, but I'm down 52% in the last week because I have not been posting as often on LinkedIn as I do when I'm around normally. On Twitter, we just added 3 followers, and Vimeo, the videos that we've created on the Speak PR, has had 984 impressions but only 2 views. Now, our newsletter Cognition, and if you don't get it, it comes out every Friday, invite you to sign up, it's free. We send that to some 2,695 contacts. We added 5 subscribers in the last week, um, and we've had 260 opens with a 6.5% click-through with 4% unsubscribed. So we're net one up. Now Zoho says that what we could do is look at splitting our mailing list into smaller batches, and that will apparently improve the click rate. It also suggests that we think about the timing. Now interestingly enough, when I look at the open rate 80% of all the emails are opened within 1 day of the sending, and after that, they're pretty much dead. So there's really not much long tail there. So what this tells me is that the constant delivery of content has worked in terms of the maintenance for the marketing, but I am off a little bit. For example, on my LinkedIn, in terms of the number of people that looked for me or looked at me. But most worrying, I've had a good number of people check out my website, listen to the podcast, but not the same number of people as I would like to have as a percentage actually click through and give me an inquiry. So I have a couple of things to think about, don't I really? Firstly, about the nature of my content I'm plainly sending out quite a lot of content, but not all of it is resonating with the people that I'm sending it to. The second thing is that I'm really sending content to people that are just within my network. I haven't been proactively going out and pitching to new audience groups, and this is something that Russell Brunson talks about in his ClickFunnels strategy, that what we need to do is to be going out in pursuit of those people by going to where they are already. So for example, I need to start to think about promoting my content to other entrepreneurs. At the moment, I'm sending the content to people that I've met over the last 15 to 20 years, but not all of them are that interested in public relations. A large tranche were from the days when I was running Morgan, the sports car business, and Lotus, and when I was in China. So I really need to think about my audience group and start to go out and target who I'm sending my information to. Another element that we need to think about is the need for simplicity. Now, I've gone through these metrics, but it's taken me an hour or so to go through the various platforms. In order to cull all of the different numbers together, and forgive me if I've bored you with those, but I think as business owners we need to know what are the metrics in the same way we want to know at the end of the month or the end of the week our cash flow and our future sales forecast. The marketing forecast is also key. These are what in Vern Harnish's Rockefeller Habits. He calls these the SMART numbers because they're going to be an indicator of our future business. If I've got lots of content going out but not many leads, then how on earth am I going to build the sales pipeline without those leads? So I've developed something I'm calling the Active Communications Index, and this is really a productivity metric. And I've done that because going across all of these other, if you like, resultant numbers like impressions, engagements, viewers, and so on is all very well, but what it's not telling me is how much work I actually did to get to those numbers. So the Active Communications Index, which is a productivity matrix, talks about the number of pieces of content, how frequently we publish them, and across how many channels. This is part of our Speak PR methodology where we talk about Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know. The ACI is something I've developed because I think most business owners don't have the time or all the tools to run across all these different platforms to get the different engagement numbers, impression numbers, and so on. But also, those numbers don't tell us how much work we've put in. They're just telling us, in a way, some of the effectiveness or efficiency that we might have from the content. But because so much on social media isn't a result of our own input, but rather a trend somehow, that it can be misleading. So the ACI gives entrepreneurs a metric to manage their internal team or their external team. So if I look at my own metric, I have 10 channels: Facebook, LinkedIn, LinkedIn groups, Twitter business, Twitter personal, Google My Business, Instagram, Vimeo, YouTube, WeChat in China. And, and over 7 days, I have twice a day engaged with content which is unique across these 10 channels, which gives me an ACI of 140. So I have one unique piece of content every day going out twice a day across 10 channels. This gives me an Active Communications Index of 140. Now what I can do now that I'm back is I can track that. I can start to build it up. I can start to increase the amount of content that I prepare in advance and get ready every day. I can start sending out, for example, 3 times a day, which by all accounts is A better number for Facebook and for Twitter, and then I can start to look at how many channels I've got. It's only when I start to monitor the input, the productivity of my marketing, that I will start to get a better idea of the performance of the team. And as the team at the moment is relatively small because I have a we have a zero employee. Agency where everybody is operating on known deliverables and contracts. As all of this work is outsourced to virtual assistants and so on, one direct input productivity metric is key to managing the process. And I share this because for everybody out there who's either going on holiday or coming back from holiday, there will be the stresses of the first day back, as I've had today, of trying to gather all the reins back in again. So through automation and content preparation, I have managed to keep the cadence and the balance of the materials going into the market. So I'm relatively happy overall with the performance of the preparation before going on holiday. I'm not very happy with the content engagement, but I also now have, with my Active Communications Index, created a tool which will make it much easier for myself and for everybody working with me, and for you out there who are running your own businesses, your own teams. A simplistic tool for measuring the productivity of your marketing activities. So just to recap, the Activity Communications Index is the amount of content issued, how frequently times the number of channels, and that gives you a simple number. Track that every day and every week and every month and see a trend. There isn't a right or wrong number. There's what's going to be right for you and your business, and over time, the goal is to increase that number. But of course, what's equally important is to ensure that the ACI remains consistent over time, because communications is about consistency of messaging and consistency of engagement with our various audiences. And as we know, I always talk about 3 different audience groups. We have our internal audiences, we have our partners, then we have our external audiences, often thought of as the customers. So we need to actually communicate with all 3 and with slightly different messages Because they all want to know different things. They'll have different relationships with our businesses. So while I'm away, I have a virtual assistant who helps me to track the emails and to ensure that I'm communicating with my team. I have autoresponders to ensure that I am communicating with partners and clients in case they write and don't get to me as immediately as they would like to. But then I also have delegated to the other members of my organization different kinds of work, be it, for example, managing the Zoho Social Pitching, putting content into my LinkedIn, managing the repurpose.io content from the podcasts across to the YouTube and to the Facebook. So communication and the Active Communications Index is a way of looking at public relations that recognizes that PR isn't a one-off event. It is a consistent and well-planned campaign that our business should deploy in order for it to be fully understood. And then when we come back from holidays, I've done There may not be as many sales inquiries, but there certainly hasn't been anybody that's lost from the business. So I've returned from my one-week camping trip feeling refreshed, but also a little bit stressed, as I always do after holidays, as I try and find out what the business has done while I've been away. I've tried to share in this episode some strategies and some tools that I've put in place so that the marketing activity for the business has continued just as I would hope. Client servicing, sales, finance, all the other business functions are still taking place in my absence. The beauty of public relations now is that so much of it can be automated, but as I've shared The automation is not a guarantee of effective communication. It's simply a way of reducing time, just in the same way that automated manufacturing isn't going to necessarily produce quality and engaging products. Public relations needs creativity. It needs the human touch. It needs constant guidance and management. So as I go through over the coming weeks, I'm going to be sharing more about the SPEAK PR program because we're also going to be launching this here with the Progress Shared team. And in that program, we have SPEAK, which is Storify, Personalize, Engage, Amplify, and to Know. And today has been all about knowing. It's been about knowing the productivity of my own activities, but also the performance of my automation strategy. Now bear in mind, I'm one man working from what I call the TARDIS here in the countryside of England. So the tools and the technologies that I'm putting in place are all either low cost or free, and they're all designed for business owners, large and small, to leverage the value that they've got in their own business through effective communications. I hope that this podcast is proving to give you some food for thought about how you can get away and enjoy your vacation in the knowledge that your business is still building a brand in your absence and be ready for you to come back recharged And to develop the kind of content, the kind of brand story that you know is going to be relevant in this post-COVID times. So with that, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on taking a bit of a break, but that you keep on communicating while you're doing so.