Don’t be afraid to ask

The other day, a friend of mine was telling me about the kind of conversations he had with his social media person, and he was saying something about not understanding half of what this person said to him. He thought he knew all the terminology, but now he wasn’t so sure.

He said something about needing more “conversions”, but I realised that what he meant was that he needed more engagement when he explained to me that he would like to have more likes and comments on his content. He was confusing these two frequently used terms.

Engagement is the amount of time people spend interacting with your content. That includes likes, comments, shares, and all the other possible interactions anyone can have with any kind of content on the internet.

A conversion is when people perform a predetermined action that we asked them to do, like when somebody clicks on the subscribe button of our YouTube channel, adds an article to their shopping cart, or hits the download button to get our app.

It’s easy to be confused about these two concepts, but it’s very important to know the difference, especially when establishing the objectives of a digital marketing campaign. Do we want to get more likes on our Instagram account or do we want more subscriptions for our newsletter?

Many times people pretend to understand what you’re telling them because they don’t want to be seen as someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing, but this is the wrong thing to do because it will only lead to many misunderstandings down the road.

If you’re not sure about what something means, don’t be afraid to ask. There’s nothing wrong with asking. It’s better to make sure that everybody is on the same page than to later find out that everybody on the team had a different idea of what was the goal.

Even when everybody knows all the concepts and terminology, sometimes things get lost along the way like we said on a previous post, and people end up understanding something completely different than what was said. Mistakes happen all the time, and you need to be ready to make corrections.

Is like going to the market in a foreign country, trying to buy some apples and getting oranges in return because you didn’t know the right word for them. You can imagine the frustration anyone would feel in such a situation.

That’s why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask. If you don’t know something or don’t understand enough about how something works, ask your digital marketing team. They should be there for you, not only to do their jobs but to also answer all of your questions and clarify every little detail.