H: Welcome back for another episode of Messy in the Middle! Joining me this week, we have Lauren from Brand Good Time. Lauren was actually my very first podcast that I pitched to almost a full year ago at this point, and now I’m happy to say that we are friends and we work together on a couple of projects. Lauren, welcome to the show!
L: Thank you so much for having me. As you were saying that, I was like, “yeah, we’re friends, we collaborate on projects.” But then you also helped me totally ideate my wedding T-shirt, so I just have to throw that out there. She is very good at all of the things, and so we have a multi dimensional working relationship.
H: Yes, I love that. And now we get to be podcasting together! Even though I know you quite well at this point, my listeners do not. So, maybe take a minute or so and introduce yourself and tell them what it is you do at Brand Good Time.
L: Hi, I’m Lauren, I am the founder & CEO of Brand Good Time, and we are a marketing consultancy, but we also offer a lot of implementation. Our pillars are strategy, design, development. We do things in the way of SEO, web design, development, overall marketing, strategy, and brand messaging. We really offer a lot, but we focus on digital platforms.
We work primarily with b2b service based brands, but we are branching out a lot right now into b2c, retail, which has been super fun. I found this company in August 2020. Prior to that, I had my own marketing agency. I sold that agency and then started this business just as an idea to be a one man shop consultancy. I had a kid and decided that if I wanted to scale but also ever take maternity leave again, it was a big “a-ha” moment that I needed a team.
I’m really happy to say that we are growing an exciting team. And, yeah, it’s just been a wild ride, a lot of fun. We work with businesses of all sizes, which is probably the most rewarding and fulfilling part. And it’s just been a very exciting journey.
H: Awesome. It’s been really interesting, for me, watching and being with you in this journey, because I think I did the same thing. I wanted an agency, I built an agency. Then I was like, “I don’t like this, I want to just do it by myself.” I pulled back a little bit, and now I’m at a point where I have some things in place and I’m like, “well, if I wanted to scale up, I could scale up. Do I want to do the whole agency thing again?” It was like putting myself through my own messy middle prematurely because I wanted to scale too much too fast. And now I’m like, “oh, God, do I want to do that again?”
L: Yeah. For anyone listening who might be like, “I don’t know what I want to do either- I’m in that messy middle,” there’s a book called The Company of One. It’s incredible. It really can help you identify how lean you want to be. And really, the big premise of the book is what does success look like for you? Success looked like, for me, being able to take a maternity leave and know my business is still running. Okay, that’s me. Then you break that down and analyze what does your company have to look like to still function?
But the idea of Company of One is that you don’t have to be this massive, massive company. I think everyone, when they think of having a business, especially me, when I worked at an agency and then started an agency, I thought, “well, if I want to be an agency, if I don’t grow, I’m not successful.” If I don’t have a massive team and big clients, I’m not successful. But the book kind of teaches you to not look at that and rather look inward at what you want and what does that mean for you?
H: Let’s rewind even further and talk a little bit about how you got started in marketing in the first place and sort of what was your career goal growing up or when you were in college that led to whatever happened that led to you making your agency?
L: I feel like I need to go back and write this all down. Actually, my mom emailed me yesterday, this letter from my grandfather that he wrote in 2008 that I’d never seen before. But he wrote it for me as a milestone letter, which I think is so freaking cool. I’m going to do that for my kids. But in there, he said write things down because you’re not going to remember. This is one of those moments where I’m like, this is like a little bit fuzzy time, but I got started in marketing.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actress. I remember that. I did improv school, acting school. I was dead set based on all these summer camps every year that I was going to be an actress. Come 7th grade, I totally bombed an audition. Like bombed. And I think that really set the tone for the rest of my life in many ways.
One, I became behind the scenes. I stayed involved in theater, but I was more behind the scenes. But at the same time, too, I failed that audition because I procrastinated and I didn’t study my lines. And I was in 7th grade, and I feel like 7th grade is such a hard year for all of us, but it’s just a big transitional period and school gets a little more serious. I started not doing well in the sciences and histories and excelling in others. I think that’s where you figure out what you’re good at is in 7th grade.
That was like a big pivot in my youth. And as I got into middle school and high school, I was really into the newspaper at school. I discovered Adobe InDesign and Photoshop. At the time, it was like, Adobe Creative CS Two. Now it’s all in the cloud, but for anyone who’s ever used the platforms back in, I don’t know, 2007, that’s what it was. Long story short, I won’t bore you, but basically my senior year of high school, I was editor in chief of my yearbook. That movie No Strings Attached came out and Justin Timberlake was the creative director, like, an art director of a magazine and I was like, that’s what I want to do. I want to be a director at some place. I don’t know if that’s an agency, magazine,whatever.
About halfway through college, I had an internship, and it was with a very small sports agency. I learned a lot about marketing there. Really,I didn’t like the way the man ran his business, but that’s where I kind of got a taste of being an entrepreneur because it was so small and I was in it.
That’s why I decided I wanted my own business. I had people asking me to help them with their logo or their SEO. That’s where I started learning about SEO. But I knew that I had to have a lot of learning to do before I opened my own business. While I did establish an LLC at that time, I went and worked for an agency, and I spent a couple of years in Agency Life before taking the leap and doing my own business. That’s kind of the journey. I know it’s long, but that was it.
H: I think we all have a pretty long journey, and it’s kind of twisty and windy, so I can relate to that a lot.
So, you said you first realized you wanted to be an entrepreneur after working at a smaller agency. Was that like a sports marketing agency?
L: It was an extreme sports agency. You know when people are like “let me call my agent?” The owner was that guy, that’s what he was. He was an agent for extreme sports athletes. I came in to help essentially with the marketing of the agency. He didn’t have anyone in marketing. He was like, “I’m just going to intern to do that.” Like we all do.
H: We love the interns, man.
L: He did not. Thank God, I’m a self starter. He was basically like, “I need you to go learn about SEO and then apply it.” That basically was my job. I wrote a lot of blog posts, I ran the social, and then towards the end there, I was really helping with the athletes and their marketing. I was going with him to, like, client dinners and trips, and it was really cool. I think just getting a taste of his growth phase was enough for me to be like, “wow, maybe this isn’t completely out of reach.” I was 20, I turned 21 while I was working with them. I was still in the very early stages of a career.
H: Did you feel like as the marketing person, you were able to have a lot of freedom and creative control with making decisions for the marketing? Or was it something where you were given a lot of responsibility, but then at the end of the day the agency still came down to the boss telling you if you were allowed to post something or not?
L: No, he was very hands off, do your own thing. This was at a time, too, where Instagram was starting to be used for business. Very quick, hilarious side comment- This was also when Joe Rogan started his podcast. He wanted to start a podcast, so he rented a suite, my boss at the time in the place we were in, to build out a podcast room.
And let me just tell you, we spent six weeks in and out of Best Buy, in and out of Google, me and two other interns on the team that I had been promoted to at the time, trying to figure out how we could have someone phone in to the podcast. This was before Zoom, what we’re doing right now, how we freaking click two buttons to get on this because it exists. We couldn’t figure it out. Actually, to this day, I think I left the company before he was able to figure it out.
H: Oh my gosh. Did he ever start the podcast?
L: He did. And I remember he thought we were recording and doing it right. It was not working. And he spent 2 hours talking to someone. It did not record. I don’t know what he ever ends up doing with it. I actually have no idea where he is now.
H: It’s so funny because I feel like soon, our generation is going to be like, “well, back in our day, Instagram didn’t have videos and ads weren’t a thing, and everything was in chronological order.”
So, you realize you wanted to be an entrepreneur, but still knew that you needed to get a lot of learning done before branching out and doing things on your own, which is kind of something that I wish I had done, maybe before branching out on my own. I wish I learned a little bit more before it was kind of do or die. What was it like searching for a job, knowing that you weren’t planning on really staying with that job for a really long time, and then also building your business at the same time? What was that like?
I guess logistically, but also emotionally, because I feel like that’s probably a pretty taxing process.
L: So, I had left the agency, and I was working at another male driven business, which is so funny in hindsight. The company was an aftermarket Tesla accessory company. Tesla had just come out, and this company was trying to literally own the marketplace of making aftermarket accessories for Tesla, because if you’ve ever been in one, it’s very
barebones. Back in the day, they didn’t have center consoles. Your stuff just kind of floated around there on the floor. It was weird. This company had engineered a center console. I started working for this company, they poached me based on my school resumes- I was still in school. They poached me from the agency, and I started helping them with their customer service, shipping, and also marketing while I was there.
How personal do I get here? I was dating a guy who worked at the gym right next door. And long story short, his best friend’s girlfriend worked in HR at a local agency, and that agency was Merman Advertising. If you look them up, they’re pretty big. I wanted to take my business to the next level. I was kind of doing it on the side while I was working at this Tesla place. I started it officially when I left that other job and I was doing freelance stuff. We had dinner with those friends and she gave me her card and she was like, “listen, if you ever need something, if you ever want to break into it, let me know.” And I was like, yes.
I just felt like I didn’t know enough. This was at a time where the online world didn’t exist the way it does now. There was no really easy way to go buy a course on exactly what I wanted to do. People these days are extremely fortunate because I had to go this route. Although I’m not upset at all that I did because having that hands-on corporate experience taught me a lot.
So anyways, I keep skipping ahead, but long and short is that I reached out to her because me and that guy broke up and I was like, “I cannot work right next door to this guy, it’s killing me.” I was young and whatever. So I called her and I was like, “what do you got?” And she’s like, “we have a paid search and paid social position in the automotive division.” I was like, great, I keep working for all these male driven industries, I might as well keep going. What’s so funny is their automotive division wasn’t even technically part of the agency. Logistically it wasn’t considered Zimmerman, it was considered Z Auto. But I was like, it’s in the building, It is an in for me to get into where I really wanted to go, which was the social department.
I was like, “okay, I’ll interview.” She sent me the job description and I was like, “I know two things out of the 50.” I went and bought a paid first book and I read it cover to cover, and had my interview, I was pooping my pants the entire time, and somehow I nailed it. They gave me the job. It was the coolest thing ever because this is like a state of the art agency. It was super like fancy and had a cool kitchen and coffee machine and Coke machine thing.
I continued to poop my pants for the first two weeks because I just had no idea what I was doing. But I was having to fake it like I did and I learned a lot. In eight months I
worked my way up in the department and then I met someone in social in passing and I was like, “hey, I’m just curious, are there any openings in social?” Long story short, I moved from this paid search, paid social role straight into Social and that’s where I really got into analytics and reporting. That was really my role on the team, was to dig into data based on campaigns and write reports and recommend optimizations.
To answer your question about starting my business while I was there, I started dating somebody else, and he was in with this boat builder that’s here in South Florida. It’s still one of my biggest clients to date. He was like, “hey, we’re going to go down to the Keys this weekend and see so and so, he’s like the marketing director at the boat company. They Need someone to do their social. They haven’t posted on Instagram in six months.” To this day, they are my biggest client. That was almost six years ago this October, and it started as just Instagram, and now we’re helping with the launch campaign.
They were the thing that started it for me. They took me from little projects to a monthly retainer, and I was doing it on lunch breaks. I remember taking calls on my lunch breaks in a huddle room around the corner. And yes, eventually I was able to leave that business. I took a part time job to be able to do both. Eventually, I left that part time job and went full time in my business.
H: I kind of have a similar story. I was never really happy at any of the places that I was working and could not for the life of me get a full time job that paid enough money to cover all of my expenses. I was always hustling, hustling and hustling. Then I got to a point where I was doing double the work at this full time role, and making less money than I was making on my freelance side of things. They were all like, every place. It was like I was the only marketing person, no one really has any trust over the things that I’m doing, so I felt like I spent so much time just wasting time.
L: Yeah, I know that feeling. I can’t say that I loved any of these places I worked at. I remember very specifically one of my bosses while I was in the social quitting to go full time in her business. And I remember being so like, I have so many mixed emotions. I was pissed. I was happy. I was like, “Why can’t that be me?” And I remember having a conversation with her and being like, “how did you do it? Tell me the secrets.” And she’s like, until you get the experience and just the drive to eventually take the leap, just look at a corporate job as paid education. You are getting paid to learn a lot. Just soak that up and look at it from that perspective, and it will suck a little less, you’ll learn a little more, and you’ll be really grateful that you did before you start your own gig.
I know that there’s so many different other ways into entrepreneurialism, but that path, I think, has really set me up. I mean, it’s given me a professional skill set. It’s taught me how to write an email, how to fire a client. There’s so much etiquette that goes into running a business. A lot of people might disagree with me but I really attribute my client retention to that, to having that level of professionalism that came with working in a corporate toxic environment.
H: Speaking of being in the corporate environment, your business that you started while working in the corporate environment, that isn’t the business that you have today. You mentioned on LinkedIn and stuff and in some of your newsletters that you sold your book of business and then kind of started it over. So I guess two questions that I have with that are, one, what does it mean to sell your book of business? And also, how did you retain some of your clients through that? And then what made you decide to sell and then essentially start over? Like, why not just close down or take a break or do something else?
L: This is a very nontraditional situation that happened to me. So to answer your main question, no, I have a new business today. That asset I started in 2015, I have the longevity of that business to this day. And you’re right, I sold my book of business, I didn’t sell my business. Here’s kind of how that works. I don’t know how much I can really talk about it, but basically, I had a client. It was April 2020, so pandemic thick, and they were a start up. They had investors come in, and the investors approached me and said, listen, we think your book of business would carry our company to get us to the place we need to continue to invest and build traction and grow the app. It was an app.
I was like, okay, I mean, that’s an interesting thought. Here’s what I value this to be, and here’s the salary. I would want to join you. I still have this note on my phone to this day of all the requirements I had to be able to do this, because that’s a big thing to ask someone to hang up their business, literally, and go join you and go all in. I was very excited because it was a new opportunity, and there were a lot of transitions happening in my personal life at that time.
Part of the stipulation I had was that if this company ever folded, not that I don’t believe in it, because I did.But if something ever happened, I want full rights to have my book of business back. A couple of weeks into this, maybe one paycheck into this, the investors pulled out. I said, great, I want my book of business back. So, I got very fortunate that I actually took a week and joked about being unemployed, then I jumped right back in.
I started rebranding the asset, if you will. We went from LBMG marketing to Brand Good Time. At the time, I was like, I want to be a mentor. I wanted to enter the online space
and be a mentor and monetize that I still had my book of business. It took me a while to get back to there again. Exactly two years later, I’m kind of back to it. Same but different. The agency model, we still do so much, but I have two more years of knowledge, two more years of industry experience, and just hands on exposure to everything. I’m just so much more immersed because my time is 100% in it.
H: I think that makes a lot more sense than what I had initially thought, which is that you were like, I’m hanging it up, I’m done, I’m selling this, and then all of a sudden changing your mind and coming back. But it kind of sounds like that startup was going to swallow you, but before they could, they spit you back out.
L: Yeah, I got really lucky. I was really happy that I had that hindsight to say, okay, here’s what I’m going to require if I’m going to do this. Always go with your gut.
H: Through all of this, it kind of sounds like you were able to almost educate yourself out of the beginner stage by starting your business while working corporate and then kind of dive head first into the messy middle of running your business. Where do you feel like you are now? Do you feel like you’re out the other side? Or do you think that this upcoming pivot back into being a more full service agency is sending you headfirst back into the messy middle?
L: Oh, my gosh, yes. I think always in the messy middle. And I’m going to say that for a reason. I went through this program called Leadership Fort Lauderdale, they have them in major cities. It’s these programs that are typically run by the Chamber of Commerce, and it kind of immerses you into learning more about being a leader and your community and all of that. They make you take this quiz in the beginning that’s like, what kind of mindset do you have? Do you have a growth mindset, whatever it is, with the goal of growth?
I did not have a growth mindset. I had this know it all mindset like, I know everything. I get stuck there a lot, and I have a hard time sometimes being like, “no, there’s more to know,” which I think I blame the online space for. I see so many things that are so redundant. I’ve had a hard time finding mentors or coaches that I feel are further along than me, not just where I am.
That being said, I’m staying forever messy middle because I’m trying to harness this growth mindset like, “Lauren, you don’t know everything.” Two or three weeks ago, I learned about organizational charts. I think I knew about them but I was like, why would I need that? You need that if you are ever going to not be the sole person in your business. You need an organizational chart. You need to have a vision, you need to
have a plan. I’m in the messy middle because I think there’s more I don’t know that I need to know, but I also think there’s more that I don’t know about where I’m going and then blending that with my personal life.
That is the epic messy middle. There is no such thing as balance. I am the type of person that’s so challenged by that. I love it. I love the mess. I make a GoogleDoc or spreadsheet at least once a day to get my thoughts out on paper or rationalize numbers. That’s the place I really love to be. I think that is not to say that you’re not a good entrepreneur or not meant to be an entrepreneur if you don’t like the messy middle, but you have to be able to handle it and be excited about it to succeed in business. There’s always going to be a mess.
H: Speaking of messes, now that you’re scaling your consultancy back into an agency, when you had your agency the first time around, was it just you or did you have a team behind you?
L: I had an employee and she’d focus on helping just kind of translate some projects to the team. We were a digital marketing agency who built our agency by being out in the field. We were at events, conferences, networking. We were all over town and we were known as the Laurens because my business person was also named Lauren. It was pretty funny.
H: So, you had a team in the past and then you kind of scaled back to become part of someone else’s team and now you’re building up to grow your own team again. Are there any challenges that you are experiencing now related to that team agency growth that you’ve already experienced and are there any new or unexpected challenges that are popping up now that you maybe weren’t as prepared for?
L: Yeah, so before, I had a team that knew what they were doing and everyone knew they had a place. Managing the team looks a lot different now because we’re so much busier, like, the contracted hours are so much higher. What I’m learning from it and what I’m experiencing is in order to really be where I want to be as a company, I have to be able to trust my team. Prior to Brand Good Time, at my other business, I had a brief for every project. Everything that needs to be done, there was a brief and I told them what to do. Anyone who comes into this company, they have a stake in the game. While I like to lead strategy, I also love showing up to my meetings with my contractor or just someone on my team and listening to them talk to the client about their ideas.
What I’m doing a lot differently now is just really letting my team be creative and letting them take the reins. Some people don’t do well with that. So we’re figuring that out now.
We really need the type of person that’s an ideas person that comes to the table excited about it and doesn’t feel the pressure to come up with things. That’s what we’re doing much differently now and it’s been extremely liberating and exciting because this isn’t just led by me anymore. It’s a conglomerate of ideas. That’s really what we sell to our clients. You don’t just get one brain, you get a whole team and you get people who get different facets of different industries. Together, we come up with a plan that moves you along.
H: For these clients, are you doing done for you work for all of them? Are you doing the done for you work for your older clients and then the newer ones are still a little bit more direction/consultation driven?
L: That’s a great question. That’s why we operate under the pillars of strategy, design, development. You can’t really come in for design and the development, or you can’t just really come in for development. All of our clients need to have worked with us in a strategy capacity because I don’t want to implement another agency strategy. If I don’t agree, I’m sure there’s going to be things I don’t agree with or understand. So for that reason, the minimum thing that people come in to with us for would be a strategy of some sort or an audit where we look and tell you where you could make improvements. The design and development, which would be implementing or creating that happens with existing clients.
H: You mentioned before how when you were growing the first iteration of the business, you were doing mostly in-person marketing. It was like word of mouth, stuff like that. And I think we can both see the irony of being a marketer without a real marketing strategy. I was definitely guilty of this until like six months ago. Can you talk a little bit about what your marketing strategy looks like today and what channel or method helps you get the majority of your clients?
L: That’s such a good question. I think the biggest takeaway from this we have developed some very strategic industry referral partners. That could be people in our same industry or other agency owners. We’re also a Showit design partner agency. So we are listed on showit.com as a preferred partner. We’ve gone through their courses, we’ve gone through their robust approval process. It takes a long time. So, we are vetted experts for Showit, we have a listing on their site. We get about 100 hits a month from them and we get probably one or two inquiries a week for custom Showit websites.
We are also Tonic who build Showit website templates. We are affiliated with them, they also send business our way. What happens with a lot of that side of things is that people come in and realize we do more than that and we end up doing some marketing
strategy and web design. That’s a really big lead source for us. On top of that, I spent a lot of time building up our Instagram, so we get a lot of traction there as well. Just some long term relationships that have taken us two years to build. This, again, does not happen overnight. We also get a lot of attention on LinkedIn. I post very strategically to my LinkedIn. A lot of thought leadership content, thanks to you.
If I’m breaking it out in the funnel, our top of funnel strategies are social, like LinkedIn, and our podcast. Our podcast also bleeds down into the middle of the funnel. I lead a podcast that is kind of a blend of strategy. There are 10-15 minutes episodes, just telling you you really have to do something, but then also just kind of like relatable things. Think about it as entrepreneurial reality TV kind of episodes too, where I just go and vent. On one of the recent episodes I talked about brand origin stories that aren’t really true, like uncovering some big brands that we all know where we think their brand story is, but actually that’s not the truth at all.
For marketing, I get to do a lot there and our listeners are really into that. I think that nurtures a lot of them, especially when I drop little nuggets about how they can work with us.
H: And for my listeners, I listen to Lauren’s podcast while I go grocery shopping, so it’s like she’s in Whole Foods with me.
L: When you said that to me, I died. Then, we have our email list. Our email list really gets snippets of the podcast. And then every Friday I send this newsletter called Toast Worthy which really ties in the fun side of the brand, but also just the relatable side of running a business. I talk about like, “here’s all the things that went wrong this week,” “here’s a client fail,” “here’s everything that I broke or spilled,” “here are some Tik Toks that made me cackle.” I always end those newsletters with something to read Monday to have it bleed into their week.
I would just say my marketing strategy has been creating a community. People that I talk to on Instagram, on LinkedIn, through email, all from content we put out that’s, in my opinion, extremely effortless. We maybe spend a couple of hours a week on marketing, and that’s between me and my entire team. So again, strategic partnerships do the work for us. Having a website that is clear and concise and tells people how they can work with us allows us to get sales calls, bookings or inquiries. The social just really reinforces everything else. Being active on platforms is enough for people to be like, “okay, she’s in business, let’s work with them.”
H: I think that’s something that a lot of people can get caught up with. If you have a solid referral network and you don’t necessarily have people checking out your social or checking out your website as much, it’s easy to be like, “well, it doesn’t matter. That’s not where my clients come from.” But I’ve definitely noticed that as I become more consistent, even if it’s like posting less, if I become more consistent on a platform, then my engagement and sales down the line wind up becoming more consistent too.
Our team stopped posting on Instagram back in June. We did the nine grid thing and we’re like, we’re done. No more feed posts. Our Instagram has grown, and we’ve gotten more clients from Instagram in the last two months than ever before because we set the expectation, and the expectation was clear and digestible.
For our listeners, check out @propegy on Instagram. Yes, technically it’s an 18 grid because we’ve got the nine posts and then like nine podcast episodes, but still, the point is we haven’t updated it since June.
Before we wrap up, I want to pivot a little bit into the work that you do for your clients. You mentioned this already, and it’s also no secret if anyone follows you on social media that you’re a total data nerd. When you start with a new client or if you’re consulting with someone who is just getting into their analytics and data for the first time, where do you recommend looking to get the most out of your data and start making those informed decisions? Because I think sometimes when we get started, it’s so overwhelming how much data there is that you just want to grab onto something and make it work, but you don’t really know what to grab onto.
L: Where you should start is the bottom of the funnel. Like, what are those efforts? So it should start where the point of sale is. What’s your data there? What are your monthly numbers? Break that out. How many phone calls? Or if we’re making this very simple, how many quality lead conversations did you have? Discovery calls, whatever you call them within your business. Then, how many touchpoints did you have? If you’re hearing this and you’re like, “I’m not tracking any of that,” start tracking. I use Monday.com and there, anytime someone inquires to HoneyBook or I have a conversation, they get added to an inquiry board. That way I know I’m visualizing all the people I’m talking to.
I have a calendar invite every single week to follow up with those people. It makes a big freaking difference because someone could be so excited to work with you. And this actually happened to me. Literally, they send you an email and say, “I’ve been wanting to work with you for a year. We talked last year, couldn’t afford it. Now I have the money, I’d like to get started.” If I didn’t have all of that, she might have fallen off for another
month or two even though she was so excited.I just needed to nudge her because she’s busy too. You just never know what’s happening on the other side.
But anyway, back to the numbers. Make sure you’re tracking conversations and all that, then take it the next step further. Let’s just say that most of your inquiries come in through Instagram, through the link in your bio, and they’re going to your website. What’s the traffic on your website looking like? Where are people spending time? Some of my favorite tools for this are Google Analytics and Hotjar. Hotjar allows you to see heat maps of where people are clicking and do screen recordings. It’s kind of creepy, but it’s also where I’ve been able to find that certain buttons aren’t working and stuff like that.
If a website is a point of someone reaching out to you, optimize the shit out of that if you need to. For numbers there, look at things like bounce rate. Bounce rate means how many pages are they visiting before they leave your site. The higher your bounce rate, the less that they’re actually taking action. If your bounce rate is, let’s say over 60%, you want it to be lower than that. How many site visits are you getting? 100, 200, 300 visits? What are the conversions outside of that? That bleeds back down into conversations.
If you have 100 site visits a month and only one call, that’s like a 1% conversion. How can you improve that? You improve it by looking and seeing where people are clicking off the page. You’re someone who’s super into quizzes? That’s a great lead form. Trying to get someone to take a quiz on your site, like get them to take an action, downloading a guide, taking a quiz, filling out a contact form- those are the types of conversions that we want to see that get people to engage more.
You can also look at your main marketing channels. Look outside of your website, outside of your opt in. For me, that would be like my podcast. How many downloads am I getting? Okay, well, I’m starting to notice just when I thought maybe I’ll just take a break from podcasting for a little bit, we’re getting double the downloads on our podcast episodes. Oh, damn. If I had just said, “I don’t think the podcast is really doing anything for me, I don’t get leads that say, I found you through the podcast,” that’s not the purpose of my podcast. My podcast is there to be a reinforcement of everything else I do and stay top of mind so that when you are ready to hire someone for marketing, you think of me because you’re listening to my podcast every day, right?
If I just didn’t know my numbers and said, “I’m going to chill for a little bit,” I would not have known that our downloads are increasing and this is the content people are interested in. Knowing what episodes are most popular and being able to lean into
those types of topics a little bit more, that’s how knowing your metrics informs where to spend more time in your marketing and just where to put your efforts.
H: So, your recommendation would be starting at the closest thing to the point of sale and then sort of zooming out until you find or as you find places to optimize and focus on making things better over time.
L: Yeah, and also just really think- let’s just say my podcast downloads weren’t great. Okay, well why? Is it because I’m not promoting it enough? Am I sending emails? I’m doing emails and social posts. There are points of entry there. You have to also not only do the act, but drive traffic to the app.
It sounds like a lot.It’s really not. I’m happy to share my metrics tracker, which is very helpful in this process.
H: Yeah, I love your metrics tracker. I started using your metrics tracker for everything and I’m especially excited to do it this month because I have participated in a bundle. For those of you who are listening to this in August, I participated in a bundle and I tripled my email list and so I’m so excited to have good and fun metrics to play around with through the end of the month.
You touched on this, I think a little bit, but what about for small businesses who maybe don’t have a lot of data to work with? Maybe their website hits are in the 10’s and none of the data feels meaningful because it’s all so small. Is it something that you would recommend, like, just trying to find any change to notice? Or would you recommend just trying to increase numbers to try and get some more meaningful data? What recommendation would you have for someone with basically no data?
L: Yeah, data is all based on traffic. So what platforms can you lean into as a brand that are going to maximize your traffic a little bit more? If you’re looking for kind of instant traffic, my recommendations are LinkedIn, (so joining the thought leaders collective, obviously), and Pinterest. If you just put a little bit of effort into Pinterest, it’s pretty easy to get traffic from there. There’s also PR, getting on people’s podcasts. There are definitely some quicker wins to help increase traffic and increasing traffic will increase numbers.
Now, that’s not always a good thing though, I think. Ten website visits one month and 15 another- you can probably get a lot from that, right? That’s just as you’re starting your business, you’re just planning your route, so you can’t expect to get a bunch of leads right away. I would just say be really strategic about your backlinks, which just means
what other sites are you featured on? Maybe recommend to a colleague or something like, “hey, can I do a guest blog this month that will drive traffic to your site? Hey, can I be on your podcast?” That’ll drive traffic to your site. Get really good at honing in on your Pitch Perfecting, who you are, and what you have to say and what is your message. Then start bleeding that out into necessary channels and you’ll build the foundation from there, for sure.
H: Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to hang out with me! Where can our listeners find you, work with you, learn more about you?
L: You can find me on Instagram, LinkedIn, my website, and my podcast– I’m checking notifications all the time!
