Do you want to take your Snapchat marketing up a notch? Have you explored all of Snapchat’s features? Learning to use all of the features Snapchat offers is a big part of telling stories people will want to follow. In this article, you’ll discover 10 hacks for creating more appealing Snapchat stories. #1: Use Complementary [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
A firm handshake, a friendly tone of voice, a patient nod -- all of these things can help make your client feel comfortable and understood in a face-to-face setting.
But how do you nurture positive client relationships when face-to-face contact is more often than not replaced by inbox-to-inbox exchanges?
When the emphasis is on plain text, the way you phrase your sentences and questions is more crucial than ever. These seven shifts in the way you communicate with clients may seem inconsequential, but they can have a massive impact on the way your clients perceive your agency's value.
Instead of: "I'll get working on developing your buyer personas."
Say this: "We can get to work on developing our buyer personas."
At the end of the day, you and your client are both working towards the same thing: their success. When you use "I" to discuss a task or a goal, it subtly positions your agency as a third party. Using "we" fosters a collaborative discussion where you and your client are both on the home team. This creates an "all for one" mentality that can improve the bond between your agency and the client, minimize conflicts down the line, and keep everyone on the same page when it comes to project goals and expectations.
Instead of: "You told me that those posts needed to be ready by Thursday."
Say this: "Based on our last email exchange, I was under the impression that those posts needed to be ready by Thursday. Let me know if anything has changed."
Nothing intensifies a simple misunderstanding into a full-blown conflict like firing off a "Well, you said..." in a client email. Using "you" in a tense interaction draws a clear line in the sand -- you versus me -- immediately unraveling any precious progress you made aligning yourself on the client's team.
When it comes to navigating points of friction with a client, the best thing to do is avoid pointing fingers at all costs. Assigning blame (even when you know you're right) is just going to undo your careful team positioning and make it more difficult to see eye to eye with your client on future projects.
Instead of using "you,” make a concerted effort to keep yourself on the client's side of things. Emphasize that you're all working towards the same goal, and you're here to ensure that everything goes smoothly. At the end of the day, preserving the relationship trumps asserting your own correctness.
Instead of: "I spoke with someone from your marketing department on Friday."
Say this: "I spoke with Jane from marketing on Friday."
Remembering names can seem trivial in the greater scheme of things, but it can show that your agency is both committed and truly engaged with a client's business. Have you ever had a barista get your name horribly wrong on your morning latte? It's not a huge deal, but it doesn't make you feel like they were really listening or engaged with what you were trying to communicate.
Learn the names of your client's staff early on, and keep these handy in your notes whenever you draft up an email or shoot off a text. It's more than a small personal touch -- it's a declaration that you're actually paying attention and want to add value to the entire team.
Instead of: *radio silence*
Say this: "Hey Jane! I'm actually about to hop on a client call. Would you mind if I followed up this afternoon via email?"
Balancing multiple clients (and a life) means that you're not always available to chat, and that's OK -- most clients will understand that you can't reasonably be on call 24-7. However, communicating about your absences and availability can assure clients that you aren't avoiding them and you actually do care about addressing their concerns.
Inform clients a few weeks in advance about any major vacations, and give them a contact they can use in the meantime if they encounter any emergencies. If a client reaches out when you're not available, don’t put off returning her call for long; this can give the impression that you're not fully committed to the business. Follow-up, explain that you're busy, and give her some times when you're available to touch base. Clients will appreciate the honesty and feel like they're taken care of, even when you're away from your desk.
Instead of: "That isn't something we can do."
Say this: "This isn't within the scope of our current contract, but if it's something you'd like to consider as a future project, we’d be happy to discuss."
Clients will often push the boundaries of their contracts to get the most value out of your agency, and it's up to you to set respectful and firm expectations around what you were hired to do. When a client makes a request that's simply out of scope, instead of just turning ther down, turn it into an opportunity for a new project. You should always avoid communication that feels like a concrete wall. Even when the answer is a firm "no," lead the client to an alternative solution that benefits everyone.
Instead of: "Are you sure that's what you want?"
Say this: "I just wanted to confirm these changes with you and offer some further suggestions about how we can meet your goals."
Picture this: You spent three days designing a minimal, clean infographic, and your client shoots back that she wants you to re-do the whole thing in 72 point, bright pink, Comic Sans font. Your design sense is viscerally offended, and you have the immediate, knee-jerk response to write back with an incredulous, "Are you sure that's what you want?".
Questioning a client's decision directly can come off as condescending and can make her feel as if you don't fully value her vision (even if that vision is in pink Comic Sans). Everyone wants to feel like her opinion is respected, so it's crucial that you avoid stepping on toes by immediately rejecting your client's input on a project.
Instead of recoiling in horror at what you perceive as a ludicrous suggestion, try to take a step back, and ensure that you and your client are working towards the same goals. She hired you as an expert, so if you see a project headed in the wrong direction, it's your responsibility to suggest alternatives and identify points where you and your client can compromise to meet the goals. If her suggestions seem out of left field, maybe it's a sign that you need to re-connect and evaluate where exactly the project is headed.
Instead of: "I don't understand what you're asking, could you clarify?"
Say this: "I'm hearing that we need to re-evaluate our keywords for this post, is that correct?"
One of the best qualities of a good listener is frequently checking in to make sure you're absorbing the correct information. After a long conversation or email chain with a client, it's easy to feel like you may not be fully aligned on all points, or you might have missed an important detail.
Instead of merely expressing a lack of understanding, paraphrase what you got out of the exchange, and ask your client if it sounds correct. These mini pulse checks will ensure that you're completely understanding what your client is trying to communicate and confirm that you are both on the same page.
Don’t be afraid to dig deeper at points; it’s your agency’s responsibility to ask the right questions and keep the project moving in the right direction. Does the client just want to change up a deliverable? Or is there a greater shift in the big picture that needs to be addressed? Continue to confirm the end goals and how the success of these will be measured. If objectives begin to change throughout the course of a project, write out the re-aligned goals and send them to the entire client and agency team to keep everyone in the loop.
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Do you want to use video for your business? Are you looking for a resource to help you combine video with social media marketing? Whether you’re using video as an individual or as part of a team, these expert articles will help you live-stream, record, publish and market video to support your marketing goals. Each [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Have you ever heard an acronym but you didn't know what it meant? It can really throw you off your game in a conversation. I usually try to write it down discreetly or, if I have a laptop, look it up online without anyone seeing.
But industry-specific acronyms can have multiple meanings, and sometimes Wikipedia doesn't do them justice.
That's why we curated 34 of the most common marketing acronyms and 41 of the most common business acronyms -- and put them into an epic glossary you can skim, study, or bookmark and save for later.
The more you know, the more likely you'll be able to understand and participate in conversations going on around you.
The four steps of the now somewhat outdated Purchase Funnel, wherein customers travel from consideration to purchase. Learn more here about a more current purchase consideration cycle.
The four criteria sales reps use to qualify prospects. A famous tool for sales reps and sales leaders to help them determine whether their prospects have the budget, authority, need, and right timeline to buy what they sell.
The BANT formula was originally developed by IBM several decades ago. We don't think BANT is enough anymore: Learn more about the qualification criteria set by HubSpot's VP of Sales.
Website bounce rate: The percentage of people who land on a page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything else or navigating to any other pages on your site. A high bounce rate generally leads to poor conversion rates because no one is staying on your site long enough to read your content or convert on a landing page (or for any other conversion event).
Email bounce rate: The rate at which an email was unable to be delivered to a recipient's inbox. A high bounce rate generally means your lists are out-of-date or purchased, or they include many invalid email addresses. In email, not all bounces are bad, so it's important to distinguish between hard and soft bounces before taking an email address off your list. Learn about hard and soft bounces here.
A U.S. law passed in 2003 that establishes the rules for commercial email and commercial messages. This regulation gives recipients the right to have a business stop emailing them, and outlines the penalties incurred by those who violate the law. For example, CAN-SPAM is the reason businesses are required to have an "unsubscribe" option at the bottom of every email. Learn more about CAN-SPAM here, and check out this post to discover what factors affect email deliverability.
A Canadian law passed in 2013 that regulates the sending of "commercial electronic messages." CASL covers email, texts, instant messages, and automated cell phone messages sent to computers and phones in Canada. Learn more of the details on CASL here.
The most coveted job in the marketing organization chart. A CMO's skill set is rooted in marketing fundamentals but expands into personnel development, quantitative analysis, and strategic thinking. Learn more about what it takes to be a CMO here.
A web application designed to make it easy for non-technical users to create, edit, and manage a website. Helps users with content editing and more "behind-the-scenes" work like making content searchable and indexable, automatically generating navigation elements, keeping track of users and permissions, and more.
At HubSpot, we think COS (Content Optimization System) is better than CMS. Find out why.
Take a CMS (Content Management System), and optimize it to deliver customers the most personalized web experience possible. Learn more about HubSpot's COS here.
An internet advertising model where the advertiser pays for each specified action someone takes, like an impression, click, form submit, or sale. You can decide if a given action is a lead or a sale. Marketers use it to figure out spending for the desired action they are driving people toward.
The amount of money spent to get a digital advertisement clicked when running a PPC advertising campaign. CPC is used to assess the cost effectiveness and profitability of your campaign.
The amount it costs for your marketing organization to acquire a lead. This factors heavily into customer acquisition cost (CAC), and is a metric marketers should keep a keen eye on.
The percentage of people who completed a desired action on a single web page, such as filling out a form. In general, pages with high conversion rates are performing well, while pages with low conversion rates are performing poorly (though there can be exceptions to this rule).
A set of software programs that lets companies keep track of everything they do with their existing and potential customers.
At the simplest level, CRM software lets you keep track of all the contact information for these customers. But CRM systems can do lots of other things, too, like tracking email, phone calls, and deals; sending personalized emails; scheduling appointments; and logging every instance of customer service and support. Some systems also incorporate feeds from social media such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
The goal is to create a system in which Sales has lots of information at their fingertips and can quickly pull up everything about a prospect or existing customer.
The process of improving your site conversion using design techniques, key optimization principles, and testing. It involves creating an experience for your website visitors that will convert them into customers. CRO is most often applied to web page or landing page optimization, but it can also be applied to social media, CTAs, and other parts of your marketing. Learn more here.
A text link, button, image, or some other type of web link that encourages a website visitor to take an action on that website, such as visiting a landing page to download a piece of content.
The action you want people to take could be anything: Download an ebook, sign up for a webinar, get a coupon, attend an event, and so on. A CTA can be placed anywhere in your marketing -- on your website, in an ebook, in an email, or even at the end of a blog post. Learn more about how to make CTAs effective.
The percentage of your audience that advances (or clicks through) from one step of your marketing campaign to the next. As a mathematic equation, it’s the total number of clicks that your page or CTA receives divided by the number of opportunities that people had to click (ex: number of pageviews, emails sent, etc).
Direct Mail: The delivery of advertising material to recipients of postal mail; also called "junk mail" by its recipients. Direct mail is a dubious investment for most businesses -- here's why.
Direct Message: A message on Twitter used to get in touch with Twitter followers directly and in private. DMs can be sent from one person to another, or within a group. Most accounts only allow DMs from their followers, but many businesses allow DMs from anyone. To learn more about how DMs work, check out this resource from Twitter.
A service by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources, and measures conversions and sales. Marketers use it to get to know their audience, trace their customers' paths, and make a visual assessment of how visitors interact with their pages. Click here to find out why analytics from HubSpot and Google don't match.
A type of performance measurement companies use to evaluate an activity's success. While KPIs are used throughout a business, marketers look at KPIs to track progress toward marketing goals.
Examples of KPIs include CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), leads generated, and homepage views. Choose KPIs that represent how your marketing and business are performing. (Learn more blogging KPIs here, and learn more about email marketing KPIs here.)
An internet advertising model where advertisers pay a publisher (usually a search engine, social media site, or website owner) a certain amount of money every time their ad is clicked. For search engines, PPC ads display an advertisement when someone searches for a keyword that matches the advertiser's keyword list, which they submit to the search engine ahead of time.
There are two ways to pay for PPC ads:
Learn more about getting started with PPC here.
PR is all about getting a company in front of the right audiences at the right time with messages that make its spokespeople sound like human beings, not robots. The idea is to earn media attention, rather than buy it. The goal? To inform the public, prospective customers, investors, partners, and employees, and prompt them to adopt a certain view about the company, its leadership and employees, and its products or services.
Today, that effort has a lot to do with content creation and distribution. For example, a good PR employee might work with an online newspaper to publish an article featuring their company in an attractive light. Download our free, step-by-step press release templates here, along with a full guide of tips and ideas for effective promotion strategies and answers to frequently asked PR questions.
A request to load a single web page on the internet. Marketers use them to analyze their website and gauge how large their audience is.
Scannable barcodes used by marketers to bridge offline and online marketing. When people see them, they can take out their smartphone and scan the QR code using a QR barcode scanner app. The information encoded by QR codes can include text, a URL, or other data. Learn how to create a QR Code here.
An RSS Feed is a web feed that publishes frequently updated information like blog posts, news stories, and podcasts. They let publishers syndicate data automatically, which is why they're sometimes known as "Really Simple Syndication." When you subscribe to a website's RSS, you no longer need to check their website for new content -- instead, your browser will automatically monitor the site and give you timely updates.
A re-posting of a tweet posted by another user on Twitter. There are a few ways you can do this:
1) You can retweet an entire tweet by clicking the retweet button, indicated below.
2) You can post a "retweet with comment" that includes your own commentary in addition to the information you're retweeting.
When you see "Please RT" in someone's tweet, it means they are requesting that their followers retweet that tweet to spread awareness. Learn more about retweets here.
Any software that is hosted by another company, which stores your information in the cloud. Examples: HubSpot, Dropbox, IM clients, and project management applications.
Techniques that help your website rank higher in organic search results, making your website more visible to people who are looking for your brand, product, or service via search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
There are a ton of components to improving the SEO of your site pages. Search engines look for elements including title tags, keywords, image tags, internal link structure, and inbound links -- and that's just to name a few. Search engines also look at site structure and design, visitor behavior, and other external, off-site factors to determine how highly ranked your site should be in the search engine results pages. Learn more about SEO here.
For marketers, an SLA is an agreement between a company's sales and marketing teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and vice versa. The Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing with regards to lead quantity and lead quality, while the Sales SLA defines the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead.
SLAs exist to align sales and marketing. If the two departments are managed as separate silos, the system fails. For companies to achieve growth and become leaders in their industries, it is critical that these two groups be properly integrated. Learn how to create an SLA here.
Social media platforms are places you can post links, photos, videos, and other content, in the hopes that thousands of people will see it, click on it, interact with it, and share it with their own networks. Some of the big ones: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat.
When people use social media to market their business to customers, potential customers, journalists, bloggers, employees, potential employees, and anyone else in the social universe.
Download our guide to global social media marketing here to learn how to run social media campaigns for a worldwide audience.
A person who visits a website more than once within a defined period of time. Marketers use this term in contrast with overall site visits to track the amount of traffic on their website. If only one person visits a webpage 30 times, then that web page has one UV and 30 total site visits.
The passing of information from person to person. Technically, the term refers to oral communication, but today it refers to online communication, as well. WOM marketing is inexpensive, but it takes work and involves leveraging many components of inbound marketing like product marketing, content marketing, and social media marketing. Learn more about creating a powerful WOM marketing strategy here.
Internet hosting that provides computer-based services (aka SaaS products) to customers over a network.
A computer programming term meaning a series of rules. APIs allow an application to extract information from a service and use that information in their own application, or sometimes for data analysis. It's kind of like a phone for applications to have conversations -- an API literally "calls" one application and gets information to bring to you to use in your software. APIs facilitate the data needed to provide solutions to customer problems.
HubSpot has APIs that developers use to get information from our software into theirs. It’s important for marketers to understand what APIs can do to factor them in to their marketing strategies. Learn more about how marketers can use APIs here.
Companies that sell to other businesses. Examples: Slack, Google.
Companies that sell directly to consumers. Examples: Amazon, Apple, Nike.
This is your total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year):
For example, if you spend $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month and added 50 customers that same month, then your CAC was $10,000 that month. (Learn more here.)
The most senior corporate officer, executive, or administrator in charge of managing a company. This person is responsible for maximizing the company's value and making high-level decisions about policy and strategy, and typically reports to the board of directors.
The senior-most executive responsible for managing the financial risks at a company, including financial planning, record-keeping, and reporting. This person is the financial spokesperson of the company, and typically reports to the CEO and the board of directors.
The senior-most executive responsible for the management, implementation and usability of information and computer technologies at the company. The CIO figures out how these pieces of technology benefit the company or improve an existing business process, and then integrates a system to actually make that benefit or improvement happen.
The senior-most executive responsible for managing and overseeing the ongoing business operations within a company. The COO typically reports to the CEO and tends to be second-in-command within the company.
The senior-most executive responsible for developing and overseeing all the policies and programs that protect the people, intellectual assets, and tangible property of a company. This includes everything from privacy and data protection to environmental security, health, and safety.
Sometimes called the "chief technical officer," the CTO is the senior-most executive responsible for focusing on all the scientific and technological issues within an organization. This role is most common in companies within technology-based industries of all different types, from software and ecommerce to biotech and automotive.
A language that manages the design and presentation of web pages: color, look, feel, and so on. It works together with HTML (see HTML), which handles the content of web pages. Think of HTML as the skeleton of your webpages, while CSS is the clothing.
With CSS, you can create rules to tell your website how you want it to display information. And you can keep the commands for the style stuff -- fonts, colors, and so on -- separate from the commands for the content. They’re called “cascading” because you can have multiple style sheets, with one style sheet inheriting properties (or “cascading”) from others. Learn more here.
A server that translates a web address into one or more IP addresses. (See IP Address.)
Colloquially, EOD means the end of the business day -- whatever that means to the person speaking. I might tell a colleague, for example, that I'll get her the report "by EOD tomorrow." In some cases, EOD takes on the more formal meaning of the end of the trading day in financial markets.
Similarly to EOD, EOW simply means end of the week. In colloquial terms, this might mean around the end of the business day on Friday.
The language used to direct the architecture of your website, landing pages, and emails. HTML lays out the structure of your website, from the title and first header, to a bulleted list, to your footer. "HTML is the skeleton of your webpages, while CSS is the clothing." Learn more here.
A numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.
An organization (commercial, community-owned, nonprofit, or otherwise privately owned) that provides internet services.
A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. To calculate LTV, follow these steps for a given time period:
For example, if a customer pays you $100,000 per year where your gross margin on the revenue is 70%, and that customer type is predicted to cancel at 16% per year, then the customer's LTV is $437,500. (Learn more here.)
The ratio of LTV to CAC. (See LTV and CAC.)
Once you have the LTV and the CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.
Changes in levels expressed with respect to the previous month. These changes are more volatile than quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year and tend to reflect one-off events like holidays, website troubles, natural disasters, and stock market crashes. Compare the average of whatever you're measuring in Month X with Month Y to calculate the MoM change.
To calculate percentage growth: Subtract Month Y number from Month X number, divide the result by Month X number, then multiply the final result by 100.
A time period starting at the beginning of the current month and ending at the current date.
The amount of revenue a subscription-based business receives per month. Includes MRR gained by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from upsells (net positive), MRR lost from downsells (net negative), and MRR lost from cancellations (net loss).
A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10, the degree to which people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is derived from a simple survey designed to help you determine how loyal your customers are to your business.
To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10).
Regularly determining your company’s NPS allows you to identify ways to improve your products and services so you can increase the loyalty of your customers. Learn more about how to use NPS surveys for marketing here.
An Internet slang term used to warn people that the content they're about to read or watch -- whether it's an email, video, forum, or something else -- is not suitable for a work environment. Usually, this means there's profanity or inappropriate content, and it's best to watch it on your own time.
OOO can be used in two ways:
It doesn't necessarily mean you're on vacation; it just means you're not physically in your office. In other words, you can be OOO in Aruba with your family, or you can be OOO at a conference, at a doctor's appointment, at your daughter's soccer tournament, and so on.
Usually, when you're OOO, you set up an auto-reply for your email. Here's a list of 17 of the best OOO email messages we've ever seen in case you need some inspiration.
PMs are, quite literally, the managers of a project. Although they usually don't participate directly in whatever it takes to produce the end result of a project, they're there to regulate a project's progress, figure out ways to reduce the risk of failure, maximize benefits, and minimize costs. They're also the first point of contact for anything that might go wrong.
PTO is a time-off policy some companies have that give employees flexibility in how they use their allotted vacation and sick days. Typically, it means a company gives its employees a bank of hours that pool together given vacation days, sick days, and personal days. Employees can then pull from this bank as needed.
PTO is often earned on a month-to-month basis or every pay period, and if employees take off more time than they have PTO available, they then technically "owe" the company for that time -- or they can arrange with their employer to take the time off without pay.
PTO can differ greatly depending on the position and company you're in. It's best to check with your HR department to get more information on your policy.
Changes in levels expressed with respect to the previous quarter. QoQ numbers tend to be more volatile than year-over-year, but less volatile than month-over-month.
A time period starting at the beginning of the current quarter and ending at the current date.
A performance measure used to evaluate the efficiency and profitability of an investment. The formula for ROI is: Gain from Investment minus Cost of Investment, divided by Cost of Investment. The result is expressed as a percentage or ratio. If ROI is negative, then that initiative is losing money. The calculation can vary depending on what you input for gains and costs.
Marketers should measure the ROI on every tactic and channel they use. Many facets of marketing have fairly straightforward ROI calculations (like PPC), but others are more difficult (like content marketing).
Usually defined as companies that have between 10 and 500 employees.
A SWOT analysis is when a company conducts a study to pinpoint its internal strengths and weaknesses and its external opportunities and threats. It gives a strategic view of the main opportunities and challenges that exist within their particular market.
The outcome of the analysis? A high-level action plan containing the most important tasks that will impact the success of a given department or the organization as a whole.
Learn how to do a content marketing SWOT analysis here.
A type of interface that allows users to control a software application or hardware device. A good user interface provides a user-friendly experience by allowing the user to interact with the software or hardware in an intuitive way. It might include a menu bar, toolbar, windows, buttons, and so on. Learn how to create a user-friendly website registration process here.
Also known as a web address, a URL is a specific character string that refers to a resource. It's displayed on the top of a web browser inside an "address" bar. Learn how to optimize your URLs for search here.
The overall experience a customer has with a particular business, from their discovery and awareness of the brand all the way through their interaction, purchase, use, and potential advocacy. To deliver an excellent customer experience, you have to think like a customer, or better, think about being the customer. Learn more about this mindset here.
Changes in levels expressed with respect to the previous year. YoY incorporates more data than MoM or QoQ, so it gives you a better long-term view.
A time period starting at the beginning of the current year and ending at the current date.
These are just 75 of the most used terms at the moment. New trends are emerging all the time, and the truly best marketers make it a point to continue learning. If you're interested in continuing your marketing education, consider trying one of these types of marketing trainings.
Got a marketing or business acronym to add to the list? Comment below with the term and its definition.
Editor's Note: This post was originally published in June 2014 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
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Crafting a standout resume requires a whole lot of work.
Not only do you have to write the darn thing, but you also have to check (and double-check) for typos, even out your margins, make sure you're not repeating the same action verb ten times ... the list goes on.
While there are a lot of little things you'll want to check before sending your resume to a recruiter, some are more important than others.
In the name of prioritization, check out the infographic below from StandoutCV for a list of nine of the resume mistakes you definitely don't want to make the next time you apply for a job -- and how to avoid them.
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Do you need to increase your productivity? Looking for browser extensions that simplify your marketing? In this article, you’ll discover six browser extensions to help busy marketers. #1: Group Multiple Tabs Into a Single Tab With OneTab Some of the best tools are the simplest ones, and you can’t get much simpler than OneTab. When [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
Whether you’ve worked in the industry for 25 years or two years, it can be difficult to navigate the complexities of a career. This includes figuring out the internal politics, processes, and opportunities that drive growth within a company and the small steps and education that lead to defining the different stages of a person’s professional career.
Making decisions about both of these paths benefit from having a mentor: someone who can be a guide, a motivator, and an advocate. And it's a smart investment for companies to make: According to a study by Jerry Wilbur, mentoring is a significant predictor of career success. Mentees earn more money and experience more satisfaction in their work.
Yet, few agencies consider the impact or invest resources in mentorship programs that can increase employee motivation, happiness, and most importantly, retention. Attrition in agencies is especially problematic. According to a recent study by the 4A’s and LinkedIn, the rate of turnover at agencies increased 10% compared to competitive industries. The report also found that 54% of agency employees left because they were concerned about the opportunities for advancement in their current position.
A clear career path is important but also is the idea that the company you are working for is invested in your professional growth and development. It was this core concept that spurred MEC, a global media planning agency with around 650 employees in the U.S., to launch a formal mentorship program in March.
“Everything we do is to make sure that our employees feel engaged and rewarded and motivated to stay -- our intention and our purpose is in keeping great people as long as we can keep them,” said Kristen Metzger, who is the managing partner of people and culture at MEC.
MEC faces a competitive marketplace like so many in the industry, and Metzger believes that those agencies that offer better guidance around long-term goal planning and foster stronger relationships between team members are in a better position to attract and retain talent. If an employee leaves because he says he didn’t know what his career path at the company looked like, then that’s “shame on us,” she said.
In addition, mentorship programs help solve a few common employee frustrations:
There are some questions you want to ask but that just would make for an awkward encounter with your manager. This is typically more important for new hires; however, navigating the internal politics, culture, traditions, and relationships in a new company can be the most complex part of adjusting to and succeeding in a new role. When you have a mentor who is removed from judging your performance, it makes it easier to ask those questions, vent about small things, and open up about fears, worries, and the inevitable stumbles.
Retaining top talent requires some creativity when it comes to growth. Some individuals are happy to stay in the same position for five or more years, while others want movement and new challenges to remain happy. By pairing a person up with someone from another department or team, you are exposing the employee to new knowledge about the way the business is run, people with different ideas and perspectives about the industry, and new opportunities. This is especially important for people who may love the company but have found out that they are just not passionate about their current position.
A Society for Human Resource Management survey of managers found that only 2% were providing quarterly or ongoing feedback to employees. People crave feedback, and they need it more than once or twice a year. They want recognition of their efforts and advice on how to improve. And a mentor can provide some of that missing validation and guidance when someone is craving more interactions with peers or people they see an experts. Mentors can provide that push to employees to not only perform better in their current positions but to also take on learning something new, pursuing a side project, or getting involved in industry events.
Mentorship is a vague term, which hasn’t helped to improve its credibility. But when done right -- when it's something people actually want to participate in and are given the tools to do so in an effective way -- a mentor-mentee matchup can provide huge dividends to the people involved in the program and the company as a whole.
MEC’s program, which has 88 participants, followed these tenets when launching its program:
Metzger and her team started by sending out a survey to employees to vet who was interested in being a mentor and who would like to be a mentee. Many people had asked for a formal program like this, but they needed to better understand what specifically employees would find valuable and useful. The survey included a list of 15 possible topics people would like to engage with a mentor or mentee on -- from digital fluency to career development to conflict resolution to work-life balance to mobile media.
She wanted people to see the mentorship program as a learning opportunity and a way for people to gain experiences outside of their departments.
Ildi Conrad, the director of learning at MEC, said there were three key themes that emerged from the survey results: 1) People want general guidance on career development and to network with other people in the company. 2) Employees, especially junior-level employees, want to learn more about the media industry, the various jobs available, and the career opportunities they should consider. 3) People want to gain knowledge about a specific area of the business or learn a new skill that would benefit their career.
The survey also asked people to detail what they would like to get out of the program and the qualities they would like to see in a mentor.
“We matched them on a personal basis,” Metzger said. “We literally sat with all of the results of the surveys and paired people together who were like-minded, had similar interests, and wanted similar things out of the relationship.”
While there are automated ways to do this type of matching, Metzger felt that it was important to hand-select the pairs to create the best matchups.
For example: One junior-level female mentee wanted career development advice and was looking to be matched with someone with broader business experience. Metzger's team paired her with a senior female leader who manages one of the agency’s largest accounts and previously spent time on the client side. Metzger said they’ve spent a lot of time talking about the different opportunities in the media industry and the career paths available, empowering the mentee to take ownership of her career journey.
MEC didn’t make the mentorship program a mandatory activity for employees, but it did require that mentors and mentees make a serious commitment to the relationship. All pairs signed a “contract” that stated they would make the program a priority and honor their commitments to one another.
Metzger has heard of only one pair who faced challenges meeting frequently and has connected with them to determine how the two would like to proceed with the relationship. The key is to not to force something on people if things aren’t working -- they need to decide together if the pace is manageable and address changes that need to be made to make the meetings valuable. Either way, it must be their decision, she said.
At MEC, the mentee is responsible for setting the time and date of the meetings. And they gave each mentee a Starbucks coffee card so they could be seen as the one "taking out" their mentor, providing a cup of coffee for a valuable advice and conversation.
“We want the mentee to feel empowered and to make sure that they understand that they also own the relationship,” said Metzger. “We wanted to make sure that the mentee, who was really leaning in and asking for this, was equally if not more responsible for making sure that it happens.”
The card also encourages pairs to get out of the office where they can have less formal and more private conversations.
For a mentorship program to work, it needs to be flexible enough to evolve with the relationship, but it also needs some boundaries and requirements to maintain momentum.
In the contract mentorship pairs signed, it provides a simple framework: Pairs should meet once per month for a year. Already stated was the encouragement to meet off-site, and the survey helped people to pre-determine what they wanted to learn from the meetings.
In addition, the people and culture team sends a monthly email newsletter to participants, highlighting news, articles, and resources that can spark conversations for their one-on-one conversations and encourage personal growth. For example, an initial email highlighted the importance of goal setting specific to the mentoring relationship, while another provided guidance on asking open-ended questions that would spark productive conversations.
“I think it's important to note that the mentor mentee relationship is not necessarily senior versus junior,” Metzger said.
For some, the launch of the mentorship program was a way to learn something new from someone who is on the “front lines.”
Marla Kaplowitz, CEO of MEC North America, applied for the mentorship program stating that she “wanted to connect with today’s tech-savvy generation to better understand how they are truly using and connecting with new and emerging tools and technology.” She joked that her mentor would have to be open to “teaching an old dog some new tricks.”
Kaplowitz was paired with a director on the activation team and the reverse mentoring matchup has been beneficial for both partners involved. It shows there are opportunities for employees to engage with and share knowledge not just across teams or from the top of the corporate ladder.
While Kaplowitz’s involvement was purely voluntary, it is a good idea to get senior leadership involved in any type of formal program. It shows the team that this is a priority for the agency and that there should be no end to learning and professional development for employees.
Creating a mentorship program is an investment in the future of your team members. You’re giving them the opportunity to better understand what they want for their career, to see your company through the perspective of someone either more senior or junior, and the chance to improve their understanding of the industry and develop additional skills.
It’s about creating new personal connections that can go a long way when your top performers are considering what their next career step looks like and if it includes continuing to contribute to your agency’s success.
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