Is your ROI like the Jobless Rate?

Published: Fri, 01/21/22

From the friendly caves of Pixie Hollow.

What is the 'unemployment rate', actually?

In InDaily this week, I read a self-congratulatory blurb about how South Australia has the lowest unemployment figures in the country.

Everyone was high-fiving each other in the comments.

Go us! We're the economic powerhouse of Strayaaaaaa.

Really? It's an election year. If you are this clueless about media spin, then unsubscribe from my list please.

The unemployment figures are a trojan horse for happy feelings: They're pretty much a load of BS.

Here's why:

Employment isn't about numbers of people in jobs. It's about:

how many are willing to be in jobs.
how many businesses have jobs available.
how long employed folk are in those jobs
what the attrition rate is for those who are mobile
what the attrition categories are for those who move from job to job
what social expectations exist in relation to jobs (maybe the nature of work has to change!)
how much does welfare pay? Because if it's higher than minimum wage, people will opt out of work.

I make that last point because a good friend of mine experienced an injury a couple of years ago and wasn't able to work for six months. He had to have surgery on the spine in his neck.

When he was out on sickness benefits, he discovered:

that his management job paid less than the dole
that if he went on the dole, he'd only have to work 20 hours per week to make more money
that if he only worked 20 hours per week he could do some "nothingburger" TAFE course to keep his payments
... and his lifestyle would be massively different!

And he's a bright dude with a work ethic, yet he was seriously considering whether or not to stay in his job.

It makes sense, doesn't it? If you can work a couple of days, do some study for fun instead of career, and bum about -- and it pays better than your job (when you're in your 50s and at the peak of your career, by the way!) -- then you know something is incredibly wrong with the entire narrative.

Ok, so knowing all of this, and all of the hidden factors, we can see:

the possibility for a whole lot of new ratios to exist
that the surface story is probably not the story
that the "data" will tell whatever story you want it to tell, if you exclude everything else.

So what has this got to do with your business and how it communicates?

I'm glad you asked!

Your ROI, if you're measuring sales vs content marketing ad spend, is just the Jobless Rate. You are in a state of delusion.

Inside your ROI is actually:

the cost of production, from ideation to briefing to creation to deployment...
the rate of production vs rate of income
the lifetime value of your customers
the lifetime value of your content and communications
the cost of the software systems that you use
... and so on.

So if you're not measuring these things, what are you doing?

Looking at (bulldust) open rates?

Relying on some ice-thin version of "oh but brand awareness is more important than a return on financial investment"?

Not measuring them at all? (Hey I'm guilty of this too, so there's no shame here. We're all friends.)

If you're starting to become concerned that maybe you don't know the financial performance of your content, or the value that it contributes to (or detracts from) the bottom-line of your business, then it's high time you had it audited.

Bring in someone who can investigate the financial nature of your content and marketing.

If you do that now, then by the time the end of financial year rolls around you can have a much clearer picture of what to do to lift your ROI across the board.

And what that means is that you can create a meaningful, measured plan, with a meaningful, measured budget, and you're going to be far more likely to get your funding in the new financial year.

You might even increase the level of funding you get, because a financial audit screams professionalism.

Sure, it's still only January.

But June will come up super fast.

If you'd like to be prepared, book your free initial consultation now.

xx Leticia "powering your content with money" Mooney

Please let me know what I can do for you.

Leticia Mooney is a consultant with decades of experience writing with and for people like you. She has coached and edited tens of writers (from PhD candidates to successful authors). Her company Brutal Pixie consults to businesses in a range of areas from content strategy to content writing, from systems audits to investigations. Leticia is also the mother of an intelligent, engaging, and curious boy, who is named after a character created by J.R.R Tolkien. You can learn more about her at https://biodagar.com/about, and her business at https://brutalpixie.com.

Leticia Mooney
PO Box 1190
Pasadena SA 5042
Australia
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