How My Marketing - and Business - Performed in 2022

Neal Schaffer: 0:01

Welcome to episode number 300 of the your digital marketing coach podcast. To kick off my first solo episode of the year, I want to ask you how did your marketing perform in 2022 I want to share with you the details on how my marketing channels performed and my plans for 2023 in hopes of inspiring you and your business. In this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer, here, I am your digital marketing coach. Welcome to my podcast. I am a fractional CMO, which is another way of really describing a type of marketing consultant. I'm an author, a speaker, a university educator, et cetera, et cetera. And this podcast, if you're new here, half of the podcast is me doing solo episodes like this one. And another half is me interviewing some pretty famous business people, authors, marketing experts, and what have you. So if you're new here, I hope that you hit that subscribe button, I only publish once a week, I find sometimes some podcasts published a little bit too frequently. And it's hard to keep up. But with this one, it's once a week, I think it'll be a good cadence. So I hope that you will add me to your list. And if you have been a subscriber, Hey, have you ever considered hitting that five star button on Spotify or on Apple podcasts or writing a quick review, I would really appreciate it. So today is going to be in the spirit of number 300. My annual look at how my channels performed I think it's really good as marketers, and as business owners and entrepreneurs, it's really hard sometimes to compare how we're doing to how others are doing. And, you know, what, what are the best practices? What are the benchmarks, so I want to share with you, because when I look at my numbers, at the end of every year, it's this annual thing that I actually very much look forward to do. Because I learned so much in the process, it really helps spell out the trends that you need to follow, and how you can pivot for the new year. And I think as I go through this, it'll become very understandable to you. So let's begin with where I recommend you begin with. And maybe at some point, I'll put together a Google Doc, that you can download a new lead magnet, I'll talk about those in a second, where you can sort of replicate my process. But let's start with in digital and content and influence in social media marketing at the end, your home base is your website, right? At the end when people buy from you. When they inquire about you. Chances are it's going to come from your website, perhaps a subdomain. My podcast website is a subdomain, but this number that I'm going to tell you includes that subdomain and I recommend that you do the same as well, for if you have like a teachable or Thinkific or Podio, or what have you, if you have these subdomains, they should all be put together. Now, some of you may have been on my website on my email list. You've seen me in social media. And you know that I've been promoting this influencer marketing strategy live course this cohort based live course on a platform called Maven, how to create an influencer marketing strategy in two weeks. My next course, is going to be on a completely different subject. Because in 2022, I pretty much doubled my website traffic, my website traffic went up by 98.5%. In fact, my traffic from search engines more than doubled, it went up 103.2%. And if you heard this episode last year, you would have known that last year search actually comprised 89.9% of my traffic in 2022. That number went up to 92%. So I have been very bullish on search as the primary way to drive website traffic because people are searching for answers on search engines and they're used to going off those, you know, SERPs or those previews and going to websites. That's not changed. And I know that there are some people who say, you know, searches data, it's all about YouTube and Tiktok. There are others that say, you know, Google has added all these internal things that are preventing people from going to your website, because they find the answers in the search engine results themselves. And I'm, I'm not going to say that those two are not true. But based on my experience, I'm very confident that when I put together my next course, because this is based on not only what I've done with my own brand, but with the clients that I've helped as well, that there is a formula, there is a system, I take a new look at how to become friends with search engines, and how to create content that with every iteration of the Google updates, whether it is the you know, the helpful content update, or even this new e a t where this expertise, authority and trustworthiness, they're not adding experience to that, with every iteration, I see my rankings go up, and I want to help you do that as well. So be on the lookout for that if you want to be the absolute first to get in on the grip lower. And generally speaking, as you know, with any course creator, any courses that we do, the first iteration is always going to be the least expensive, you're going to get the most time with me, make sure you drop me a line, Neil, Neil Stanford are calm or DM me on any of the socials. But I'm speaking very much from experience here. And this is really based on my post COVID approach to digital, and content and influence on social media marketing, that will be the topic of my next book. And I'm gonna get to that as well, in this podcast, what my plans are there. Now there's also something called direct. So last year, direct traffic was my number two source of web traffic. And this year is no similar. In fact, search traffic went up by 103%, my direct traffic went up by 95%. That to me is really exciting. Because I always tell my clients direct traffic is really a result of your brand awareness. If people know about you, they're going to directly enter your name and the URL, your website name, they're going to bookmark your site and what have you. So that number to me is very positive. Now, number three, in 2021, is still number three in terms of source of web traffic in 2022. Social media, but guess what I talked about in 2021. Every year, traffic from social media goes down, you're talking to someone that has over 300,000 followers on social media. And I publish pretty frequently, depending on the platform. But I think if you follow me on social, you probably see my content appear in the feed guess what my traffic from social media actually went down in 2022, went down by 5%. And I'm going to go through the specific channels. But that right there, it went to comprising 3% of my traffic to 1.4% of my traffic. So if I'm trying to get people on my website, where am I going to invest my time and resources? Absolutely. It's going to be in search based activities, I'll divulge everything I do. And I come up with that course. But that's why, you know, social media was never made for website traffic generation. And we're going back to the early days of what social media was about just exposure, brand awareness. And the social platforms are more and more built for that, you know, short form video is about keeping people on the platform longer, and not having clickable content. And therefore, social media or social networks have always wanted to monetize that click that website traffic. And it's very clear with these newest forms of content, that using social media, primarily for web site traffic generation, those days are long gone. And I talked about this a year ago, I'm going to talk about it again, you really need to reset your approach to social media. And I'm hoping you listened to my last two episodes number 298. And number 299, where I went deep on short form video, I'm going to talk a little bit about that as well. But clearly, this has led me to sort of not de emphasize the value that social media has, because social media has intense value, but not for website traffic generation. After that, we have email. So I've been trying to put together more sequences on my email list, obviously get more subscribers, traffic from my email list went up 25.6%. So that's obviously very positive. Interestingly enough, subscribers, my email list only went up by 5%. So when I am getting more traffic than I have, or more increase in traffic going to have increase in subscriber count. That to me is a good sign that I am optimizing that and doing better at that. Still, though, the percentage of traffic that email provides me went down from 0.6% to 0.4%. And then others is about 1% went up 50% various reasons. I won't get into that. So I'm very happy with how that went. And I continue to double down primarily on content creation, which is driving that increase in website traffic from search. It's more than just publishing more content, there is a formula. Just make sure you're subscribed, make sure that you go to my website, you fill out a contact form, you know, you get subscribed by email us, you'll be the first to know. But I'm very, very excited about that. So let's dig a little bit deeper inside website traffic, let's dig into traffic from social media. And this is where it gets very interesting. So those of you that know me, and maybe if you're new here, because my podcast subscribers have grown as well. So some of you obviously, were not listening to this a year ago, Twitter has always been my number one site for traffic generation. And believe me with what's happening with Elon Musk, every month, every week, almost every day, I'm looking for signals as to what's happening. And overall, in 2022, Twitter in 2021, was number one, it comprised about 45% of my social media traffic, it went down in 2022. It actually went down by about 5.5%. It still comprises, you know, 42% of my traffic. So I'll take it right. What's really interesting is that my number two traffic driver, the site where I really question whether I should still be on it is Pinterest. Pinterest has always been my number two driver of traffic from social media. In 2021, it represented 21% of my social media traffic this year, it actually grew by about 17%, and now comprises 25% of my traffic. So right there, Twitter and Pinterest comprise two thirds of my social media traffic. And that's why I continue to invest in those platforms. And this also might be interesting to know, Facebook traffic actually went up by 1%, it's still number three, LinkedIn traffic went down by 5%. It is still number four, I get on average, you know, 20%, more traffic from Facebook than I do LinkedIn. And I pretty much publish more frequently on LinkedIn. And I tend to spend more time on LinkedIn and Facebook. So that's a really interesting one. The other really interesting one, and probably because of sort of de emphasize my use of the platform, but traffic from Instagram went down by three quarters, whereas traffic from YouTube grew by 50%. We're now I get more traffic from YouTube than Instagram, Youtube be my number five platform for traffic generation. And this to me is a preview of what tic toc is going to become and I'm gonna let me get to the end of the episode to get into more of that, I do not generate any traffic from Tik Tok. I do not have 1000 followers. I do not have a link in my bio therefore, and I'm really very, very new to Tik Tok. But I'm really hoping when a year from now I talk about this, that Tik Tok is going to emerge here as well. Now, website traffic is one thing, what about conversions for me the conversions are subscribers to my email list. Obviously, I get business in many ways. And for me, it's it's this surround sound omni channel marketing, where maybe someone, they listen to the podcasts, they subscribe to the email, they join a webinar, and then they buy one of my, you know, cohort based courses, I find that people come or they read my book, they went to my website, and then they contacted me, and they became a fractional cmo client, I get clients and a lot of different ways. And because it's primarily b2b, it's not always easy to trace, or to really have 100% accurate attribution, which doesn't bother me, actually. But let's look at the email subscribers because I know that email is the key to getting a business and building a deeper relationship with my community. So interestingly enough, although website traffic pretty much doubled, the number of conversions I had actually went down by 20%. Now, this is a result of a few things. I think, primarily that when you think of conversions, in terms of lead magnets and such, you need to be creating more, right, it becomes this product that you need to have more of, you need to always have new things have to interest people, especially those that are already on my list. And this includes, you know, conversions from people that are already on my list, I'll go through those numbers that subscribe to a new lead magnet. But, you know, for me, I have two takeaways here. Number one, I need to be putting out new lead magnets, like a preview of a book that I published in 2020. The age of influence is not a new lead magnet, right? I need new ones. I have a lot of blog categories that are getting more and more traffic that I do not have a lead magnet for for instance. So I need to do better on that. Interestingly enough, the only channel where conversions grew was conversions through search. So conversions through search was my number one way of converting in 2021. It's still my number one way of converting in 2022. So inbound marketing truly works. It's not just creating content for website traffic sake. It's creating targeted content that drives targeted conversions. Now obviously, you to the fact that I doubled my traffic from search, but the conversions only went up by 3%. This leads to once again, do I have enough lead magnets covering a lot of categories? And am I using the right technology to get people to opt in when they come to my site. So there's a little bit of CRO conversion rate optimization that I'm currently on the path of doing, from, you know, what I'm talking about here. In 2021, direct traffic created or generated the second most conversions still the same in 2022. In 2021, the third source was email, or, or getting people from my list to convert a new lead magnets, and that's the same, and in 2021, social media lead generation was fourth, and it's still fourth in 2022. But the percentage of people that convert from social media, as a total went down from 10%, to 5%. So once again, across all these different levels, the importance of social media, in terms of web traffic, and conversion continues to decline, and I am not paying to play. This is 100% organic approach here, you're not seeing any paid data that is sort of marking the statistics. So let's look at conversions from social media. Well, one from 10% to 5%. Right? conversions from social media actually went down quite a bit, like 80%. But what's interesting, when I look at it is in 2021, the number one place where people converted went from Twitter, the number two was LinkedIn. And number three was Pinterest. Twitter has now gone down to number three, LinkedIn is number one, I've been focusing more on creating higher quality content for LinkedIn, in hopes of getting more conversions and Pinterest, one of those networks where it's like do I pull the plug, I'm not sure it's number two in conversions, I got to keep going, I need to keep optimizing that my optimization on Pinterest is every month generating fresh pins, as well as experimenting with IDEA pins, if you're curious, Facebook is number four. And then Instagram used to be number five that has now been replaced by YouTube. Now, I mentioned that my email subscribers went up by 5%. I am irregular pruner of email. So if someone on my email list does not open, or click an email in 90 days, I will send them a follow up. And if they do not click or open that follow up, I removed them from my list. So this is a very, very high quality list that every month or every few months declines, or I am pruning people out of that list for that reason. So the fact that this list grew by 5%, I'm happy with but how do I grow it even further? Well, it's the lead magnet from our website. It's also doing more events, webinars for me, I can leverage my social media following and my email list to do webinars, when I find when I do that, I still get a lot of people that are not part of my list that join the webinar, or they are less frequently engaging with my content, but then they join the webinar. And they engage more with my emails after that. So that's where I talk about lead magnets. But with email, the webinars for me are really, really a key way. And I'm looking to do more of those on a regular basis. Once again, make sure you go to Neal schaffer.com and sign up on my list to get educated, or I should say to get informed when I do one of these webinars. All right, well, what about the your digital marketing coach podcast? Well, I'm going to talk about two things here. Number one is my downloads went up by 45%. In 2022, I'm very happy about that my number of episodes that I published, also went up by 16%. So I'll take the 45%. That's very, very encouraging. For me, I want to basically, ideally, double my number of downloads and 2023. Well, we'll see how I do. But I am on a mission that every year I want to publish 50 episodes, I play a little catch up in 2022. I wanted to get to 58 episodes, I only got to 57. And therefore this episode number 300 is actually the my second episode of 2023. But I'll do 51 This year, I'll get caught up so that episode number 350 will be and I'm going to say right now will be our first episode of 2024. So that was a really good number. The other number that I look at outside of all this when I'm analyzing all my different marketing channels is my YouTube channel because YouTube is like a podcast. It's sort of a different medium for content. It's quasi social media, but it's also quasi search engine. So on YouTube, my subscribers went up by about 94% So that was a really good year for me. It's still very, very small. I'm only at 1300 and my watch time only went up by 26% So I did publish in 2021 Only two videos. And in 2022 I published nine videos and I started out strong videos always been the tough one for me, but 2023 I really need to strategically approach this and get going. I have seen how even just publishing nine videos can increase that watch time, increase the subscribers, increase the web traffic, and can increase the number of conversions. And, you know, I just think to myself, if I can publish as many YouTube videos as I do podcast episodes, the podcast doesn't, you don't see the direct results in your Google Analytics, although I could look at the subdomain and see how that did. And maybe that's something that I'll do for 2024. But with YouTube, you can see the direct results. And I do believe that every YouTube creator that I have talked to and learn from, always say there's a certain tipping point where your channel becomes recognised, and the watch time the subscribers and everything else goes up significantly. So I'm looking forward to that. But I'm thinking that in 2024, I'm hoping that tick tock is going to be similar, you first need to have activity on tick tock, which drives video views, which drives followers. And then when you get to a certain point that is going to drive traffic, like YouTube drives traffic and conversions for me today. So 2024, or I should say, 2023, for me, is is YouTube, is short form video. And that's going to help YouTube as well as this new Tiktok channel. And it's lead magnets. And it's webinars, you know, it's further optimizing everything else I'm doing and continue on my path when it comes to my podcasts and my content. But when you look at your numbers like this, it becomes pretty clear that directs that you need to go. And I'm hoping that that serves as a or these numbers, you know, without giving you too specific numbers, serve as a Northstar, and maybe help clarify or help you better understand the numbers that you're seeing, I'd be really curious if you're seeing radically different numbers, feel free to reach out to me, maybe we can have a show where we really compare our numbers without giving away the exact numbers. But I'm really fascinated to see how your marketing all performing. And hopefully this podcast played a contribution to that. But I don't want to stop here. When I talked about this a year ago. This is where the podcast pretty much ended. Or I should say the episode ended, I want to go a little bit further. Because at some point, you need to connect the audience that you have, with the products and services that you sell, with the actual money that you earn. We're not doing digital marketing for the sake of doing digital marketing. We're not in college, doing a research project on how to generate more website traffic. This is our livelihood. Right? This is our business. This is how we support our families, we grow our careers, we get bonuses at work. So I urge you to connect the dots. Now for me, I'm in a unique position, I have a lot of clients, and some members of my digital first mastermind, they don't have product, and they're trying to build audience and generate revenue. I have audience, but I don't have as much product, and therefore my revenues are limited. Hoping that makes sense. It's a pretty unique situation to be in, it's actually a really good situation to be in. Because even without product, my products are primarily b2b. But when you double your traffic like that, there's a lot of people that are pinging you. And they're not just businesses, they're also people. So my b2c products, I began in 2021, with the digital first mastermind group coaching mastermind community. And in 2022, I added a new cohort based course, which is just creating an influencer marketing strategy. And, you know, I am looking and I am probably very much like many other members of the crater economy, I have eight different streams of revenue. That was in 2021, and 2022. I increased that by one with this cohort based learning course that I created. And in 2023, I want to increase that one more, I want to go from eight to nine to 10 streams of income. And this is how I want to better monetize my own audience. And this is by launching courses, Evergreen courses, what I've learned with the cohort based course is that not everybody is ready at the same time. And although there is a time limit as to hey, if you don't join by a certain time, you're gonna have to wait a few months. I don't think that's incentive enough. I think people really want to, well, they really want to go at their own pace. So it'll be interesting to see it's another experiment, but if you don't experiment you never know. Another way that I'm looking at monetizing, believe it or not, is by doing a little bit of advertising, a little bit of Google AdSense. And if you were to go to my blog posts, you might inconspicuously as you scroll through a blog posts, you might see a little ad in there, here and there. And I'm experimenting with revenue generation from this traffic, but also, what's the feedback that I get from my community? Do people tune out of my site? And I think that there's a way where, you know, I'm realizing even with this growth in traffic, my business is growing, but the business grows above and beyond the traffic growth. So I realized that I can put a little bit of advertising revenue, or I can put a, you know, sprinkle a little bit of ads in there for an experiment just to see if it can make a significant impact on my annual revenue. If I put in an advertising, I can grow my revenue by 10, or 20%, that's not bad. So I'm gonna see how it goes, I'll report back to you, it's still very early days. And there's still many different ways to experiment within this. But I'm going to be very cognizant that I don't want to turn people away, and I don't want to leave money on the table, which is my own money. But my site has very much become a media site. And for that reason, I recognize that if I can't convert people to becoming a client or a lead magnet, then at least converting them through ad revenue is another sort of soft conversion that I can do. So I also believe that talking about the chorus, which will be a new stream of revenue, I also believe that the course is going to add to my digital first community revenues. Or maybe I'll be able to launch new community services from people that go through my courses. I realized with my cohort based course, that my people that join that they wanted handholding after the Course was done, it's a natural extension. So I'm thinking that the course is also going to help me increase my community revenue. Now, from other revenue sources, books are a powerful way to increase revenue for me, when I publish a book, I get inquiries for speaking, I get inquiries from my fractional cmo consulting, speaking is back had a very positive year speaking, last year, went up, you know, exponentially increased compared to 2021, as you can imagine, but the fractional cmo actually did not have as good of an increase as I would have liked. And I think it's the fact that I haven't published a book since March 17 2020. And it's 2023. So that's why a lot of authors like to publish on a frequent basis, it's always fester, it's always used an excuse to contact people get your name out there. And I do realize that as a author, and as a speaker, consultant, that is a missing piece that I need to keep on doing to keep my name out there. Obviously, my name is out there and other forms as well. But a book I have found is a very, very powerful way to do this as well. And I do believe that by writing and publishing a book in 2023, which is my goal, it will add to my fractional cmo and to my speaking revenues. The other source of revenue that I look at, and some of you might be creators yourselves is influencer revenue is doing more collaborations with very, very specific companies they already have brand ambassador relationships with, but also doing more on YouTube and Tiktok. Because that is where a lot of influencer marketing budget is going. And YouTube is a site where I can do a product review. And it's not going to sound like a sales pitch. If I was to do that on a podcast, if I was to do that in a blog post, or in a social media post, it would be considered very different. But I think people that are on YouTube are very much looking for, hey, how do I use this tool, for instance. So I do believe that YouTube for me is a natural place to do more. And I believe I can generate more revenue from there as well. So there you have it, that's connecting the dots between the money, the community in all these different channels, and obviously product. And that is the exercise that I want you to undergo. That's why I've taken a little bit of time. And in this episode, I want to get the year off your started off, right. I want to get it started strategic. And if you're not doing a lot of what I'm talking about, hopefully this will help you plan. If you're interested in the spreadsheet that I use. Obviously, I'm not going to you know, give away all my numbers. But if it sounds like a convenient way to organize all your traffic and your revenues and your conversions, and what have you dropped me a line, maybe this will become my next lead magnet, and it will help me it will help you and me. So hopefully enjoyed this episode. If there's any questions that you have about this or how you can apply this to your own business, please feel free to reach out to me. It's Neal at Neal schaffer.com. Obviously, in Neal Schaffer everywhere on the socials tick tock is the only unique one where my username is Neal Schaffer, social, but hopefully you'll be able to find me there. And if you need a little bit more hand holding? Well, I do have the script coaching mastermind Digital First, you can go to Neal schaffer.com/membership. And if you need some one on one hand holding, I do offer a fractional cmo marketing consulting service, you can go to Neal schaffer.com/cmo. The membership is only $75 a month for weekly zoom meetings. And my marketing consulting starts at a minimum of $5,000 commitment. So if you do have any extra budget, I would love to help you and really serve your business. All right, everybody. Well, this episode has come to a natural end. I'm really psyched and really bullish. About 2023 My work is really cut out for me, I know what I need to do. I'm going to start doing it. I hope that you are in the same mode. And I hope that a year from now, we're both going to look back at how we did. We're going to remember this episode. And hopefully it will have been the guiding light, not just for me, but for you as well. So thank you as always, for your download for your loyal subscription. And I look forward to serving you in the next episode. This is your digital marketing coach. Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog post that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.