Episode 77 // Breaking Down the Data: A Guide to Effective Marketing Measurement

Mike Jones (00:20.009)
All right, everybody. Welcome to another episode of the remark a brand podcast. I’m Mike Jones with my cohost. We are back for another episode. We’re going to be jumping back into this big question of how do I make sure all my marketing is working? How do I make sure? How do I even know if it’s working? And we spent a lot of time talking about metrics and we’re going to spend more time talking about metrics today. So if you missed the last episode, definitely go check that out. This is part of a larger series that we’ve been doing all

Sam (00:25.76)
Sam Pagel.

Mike Jones (00:48.671)
kind of how to set up your go -to marketing strategy, your plan, how to execute on that and really get your professional services firm, especially all our accounting friends, our law firm friends, maybe some engineering friends, business consultancies, IT firms, all you guys, how do you get your firm out in front of the right people and start actually creating business, right, for your firm? I know many of you already doing that, you’re doing a really good job, but

kind of done a deep dive and are putting together basically this, this kind of like all encompassing go to market process that you can use with your firm, specifically for firms that really want to lean into their brand and really create a meaningful impact in the market with their particular brand position where they stand in the market that’s unique to them. So we spent a lot of time talking about that in previous episodes, definitely worth checking those out. But before we do that, got to do a little name 10 things, Sam.

Sam (01:46.894)
That’s right, Mike. Today, we are going to name 10 vanity metrics that we should avoid. Okay? So I’m gonna start us off with tracking the likes on your cousin’s Facebook page. Why would you do that? Don’t do

Mike Jones (01:55.633)
All

Mike Jones (02:03.007)
I like that.

Crunchy

Sam (02:14.252)
Wow, that’s good. mean, maybe if you’re a pet food company, but if not, probably, probably shouldn’t be tracking those. I’m gonna say tracking how many pairs of shoes collectively everyone in your company owns.

Mike Jones (02:36.831)
Every creative agency’s favorite metric to measure is how many cups of coffee do you drink in a year, collectively, as a whole firm. Yeah, so, yeah, I know we’ve done

Sam (02:42.766)
Don’t do it. Don’t do

Sam (02:50.83)
It’s one of those growing pains, think, Mike, that you just have to get over. I’m going to say tracking how many characters that you have on your website.

Mike Jones (03:06.335)
Mm hmm. Yeah, characters. like that. I’m gonna go how many miles you drove to happy hours in the last 10 years.

Sam (03:09.987)
Mm -hmm.

Sam (03:16.766)
Hmm. no, that’s that’s too long. Maybe last year, but not 10 years. yeah. Yeah. Yeah, my my miles are a little low, guys. I got to really step it up.

Mike Jones (03:22.633)
There’s some sales guy out there who totally tracks that. You know

Mike Jones (03:29.737)
figured out the secret to sales. If I just, if I just up my happy hour mileage, I win more.

Sam (03:36.751)
That’s good. That’s good. Let’s see. How many hours that you have spent in the metaverse lately? Just lately. There’s no time frame. Just lately.

Mike Jones (03:47.063)
That’s a good one. That’s a good one. How many different cryptocurrencies you’ve invested in?

Sam (03:56.514)
Wow, that could be an endless

Mike Jones (04:00.413)
Yeah. There’s a way to game that one. You just make more of your own. You just keep making them. You make like a crypto making machine.

Sam (04:01.858)
Very vain, very vain.

Yeah. Yep.

Crypto machine, yeah. And we just put a little ticker on your website. It’ll let people know. I’m gonna say how many degrees it is outside in Fahrenheit. But hopefully Fahrenheit. We don’t do Celsius here.

Mike Jones (04:12.841)
Crypto Machine.

Mike Jones (04:25.575)
Hmm All of our non -us resident fans are just so angry with you right now Yeah I’m gonna go with how how many leftover? Letterhead sheets of letterhead you have left from your previous branding

Sam (04:35.598)
They’re, yeah, they are. I’m sorry. I’m Suri.

Sam (04:47.246)
Ooh, ooh, that’s painful. Ouch. Well, that’s 10, Mike.

Mike Jones (04:50.732)
Hahaha!

Mike Jones (04:54.813)
Is that like golf where it’s like lowest number of wins? Yeah, yeah.

Sam (04:58.299)
I would think so, Yeah, should be zero, hopefully. I mean, maybe one if you wanna just keep some legacy things around, but that’s a good one to end on right there, because that hurt my heart a little

Mike Jones (05:06.587)
Yeah. Yeah. All right. There we go. All right, Sam. So we were talking about my metrics last time what you should be measuring. We talked about kind of like business goals, like really thinking through what are the metrics that matter to the business as a whole, not just in the marketing. But today I want to kind of funnel that down. Let’s start thinking marketer. Let’s start thinking about marketing. What are the metrics that matter to us as marketers in the day to

So I know like a couple I was thinking of was like email metrics, like your signups, how many you know, email subscribers you have, what’s your open rate like the click throughs on your emails, those always feel like kind of like lowest common denominator when it comes to emails. I think there’s one I was thinking about that might actually be interesting. That’s a little harder to track, but might actually be more interesting, especially in professional services firms is how many replies you

to your marketing emails where you’ve invited someone to just reply, right? Like don’t click anything. You don’t have to like go fill out a form. Just hit reply and tell us something, you know, and based on what your content is in your email, you can make that relevant to them. But I actually find that like even in our own newsletter, I kind of like get more excited about the replies than I do about anything else. And sometimes the replies are not even like a qualified lead kind of reply. It’s maybe,

You know, like my, one of my mentors, business mentors, like falls, her newsletter, sweet guy. love you, Steve. but like anytime he replies and says, man, I love this one. This is great. Or, you know, we’ve had other people that are kind of in our subscriber list, may or may not be like a really good fit for us either now or maybe down the road. But when they reply and like, this one really hit home for me. or man, this one I really liked.

This one was really impactful for me and what we’re thinking about right now in our business. I think that probably gets me the most excited about our newsletter and ensure, you see the click throughs. That’s great. I can get really excited about that too, or the open rate. Like, man, that subject line really, really won the day today. But I don’t know, replies might be that kind of surprise metric for email for

Sam (07:25.9)
Yeah, there’s something there with just the like, you know, that they that they read it and it actually meant something to them rather than either a bot tracking as a click through or an open or, you know, someone who might’ve just like opened it, deleted it and went on with their day. There’s something there where it made a connection. And like you said, sometimes those are like, this, this person would never be a client of ours

whatever that looks like, but it’s like, that there’s a real person there. They took the time to read it. Something we created meant something and left a lasting impression on another human being. And that’s really what you should be doing. Right, Mike? Like don’t forget why you are doing what you are doing. Even with something that seems as can sometimes seem as trivial as email marketing, right? Like we all get thousands of emails each week,

When you do create something, and I think that’s a brilliant strategy, are you trying to actually connect with other humans in your email marketing? Are you writing stuff that actually has this personal touch to it? Are you asking questions? Are you calling someone to respond to that? Or is it just like, here’s our products and services. Here’s everything we did really good this month. Here’s some awards. Here’s some other stuff. It’s all about us.

That’s just, that’s a really key component and that you can apply that to anything, right? Any part of your marketing. But I think so many times, you know, people kind of roll their eyes at another marketing email that we do kind of forget like this needs to be tailored to other humans.

Mike Jones (09:09.801)
Yeah, I think with marketing emails, sometimes you get so caught in like just the grind of getting content out, right? That you kind of forget like, yeah, there’s human beings on the other side of this. And if I was writing this like a one off email, if I just picked one person in my subscriber list, and I said, you know, I’m gonna write this email, like I’m writing to them. And it’s going to come personally from me from my inbox, we’re not going to worry about the layout, we’re just going to type up an email, right? You’d probably draft something.

quite a bit different than what you would put in like your standard newsletter, right? Yeah, like you said, you know, it’s kind of often becomes like this smorgasbord like, well, we did this, we did that, we’re going to be doing this, we have this event coming up, and we’ve got this promotional offer. And here’s, you know, the case study, right? And those aren’t bad necessarily, it’s good to be reminded, you know, be reminding your clients like this is what we do. Here’s what we’ve been working on. Here’s some success we’ve had.

But if you were sending that to like close contact in your list, personally, if you’re sending that with your name and the signature line and your name and the email from the from line, you’d probably approach that a little bit different. So I know it’s getting a little off the topic of like metrics, but it does kind of go back to this idea of like, what are the metrics that really matter and that reveal that your marketing has having impact.

Obviously, you know, we talked about last time, it’s like revenue, sales, profit, the leads coming in, you know, how many, you know, marketing qualifies lead leads do we have now? How many sales qualified leads do we have? All that great stuff. I’m not opposed to any of that. I love it all. Right. Like your business, you need to be tracking that stuff and aiming for that. But sometimes there’s like a human side to that of like, what are the metrics that tell us that we’re actually reaching human beings and we’re having an impact with them? So that’s the other part of this too, is

Every metric is going to give you a little bit different nuance. Reply is kind of tell you the impact. They don’t tell you the numbers, right? know, you could have like three great replies on your email, it probably gives you pretty good indication like, this one probably hit home. People are talking about it. People are thinking about it. Maybe it’s 10. Maybe it’s 20. But maybe it’s a small percentage of your total subscriber list. And then when you hop in, you’re like, my goodness, tons of people click through on that one. So it’s

Mike Jones (11:38.099)
You know, the replies might give you a bit more of a qualified data point. And then you can look at some of those more quantifiable data points. What about websites, Sam? You’re the website guy. live in… Well, you always get stuck working on those projects. I know how it works.

Sam (11:50.65)
Am I? Dang.

Sam (11:54.882)
I do. Yep. And this is nothing new, but conversions, if there’s a clear call to action or like what’s the very bottom of the funnel from your website? How many people are doing that? How many people are getting to that point? How many people are submitting that start the project form or calling in from the website, phone number? Traffic too.

Obviously everyone should be running some sort of analytics on your website, Google analytics, or there’s a lot of other services now. and looking at over time, you know, what, what are people actually interested in? we, Mike, we get a lot of insight and data, really useful data from historical analytics on websites.

when we are redoing a website. So if your firm is gearing up for maybe a rebrand or an overhaul on your website, those analytics historically can tell you like, hey, what’s the most important parts of my website? What do we need to maybe make easier for people to access? For professional services, a lot of times it’s your people. People wanna know who works at your firm, who they’re going to talk to. What industries do you work with? know, those things,

Sometimes we can think like, that’s not really important. We need to put it on there. But then you look at the numbers and it’s like, no, this, this page, the industry’s page was the second highest access page after the homepage. That’s very important to people. So those things are really important. Got to be tracking those no matter how big or how small you are. You got to be running analytics on your website. The other thing, Mike, that kind of falls into the website category is ad traffic and conversions.

So obviously those things go hand in hand. If you’re running ads, you should be pointing people back to your website. And what we found a lot of times, Mike, is when people kind of jump into or start, or maybe they’ve been doing it for a while, running ads for their marketing. A lot of times there’s this kind of brutal learning curve of like, I’m spending money to get people in Bangladesh onto my website.

Sam (14:12.742)
so you really need to look at, that’s not your target. Yeah. probably not. I mean, maybe it is, but most of the time it’s not, we’ve done that and, we’ve had clients who have done that. and so things like that, that’s kind of a silly example, but making sure that your ads are very, very targeted and that every dollar you’re spending on those ads, whether it’s Google ads, search ads, you know, yeah, as on YouTube, wherever you’re putting those LinkedIn, making sure.

Mike Jones (14:13.737)
when that is not your target. Let’s make that clear.

Ha ha ha.

Sam (14:41.56)
that everything you have set up. And a lot of times that’s just like, you need to go find an expert. Like go find an expert who knows those platforms, who knows the questions that you should be asking, knows the settings, you maybe it’s geographical settings, maybe you’re, you know, types of people that you’re trying to get in front of. Maybe it’s the ads itself. A lot of times we see clients who kind of like cobble together these ads and they think like, well, if I spend money, then I’ll get people.

But there’s so many tips and tricks now where you need to make sure that every dollar you’re spending on ads online, you’re doing it the right way. Because there’s so many, so many ways to do it the wrong way.

Mike Jones (15:22.439)
Yeah. Even like going back to both with ads, like landing pages, but just more generally on your website too. I love looking at bounce rates. and, and a lot of these, it’s not a one kind of shot look at the analytics or the data or the metrics that you’re tracking. It’s setting a baseline and then saying, can we improve this over time? Right. When we go back to like the original question we asked last episode, we said, well, how do I know if it’s working? Right.

You know it’s working when you’re improving the right metrics that lead to the business goals that you have. And so, you know, part of it is just starting to measure and saying, hey, we’re going to just start measuring some of these things. Maybe not all of them because it’s overwhelming. Let’s measure the ones that matter or the ones we think. Maybe we have a hypothesis and say, I think if we can move the needle on this number, it’s going to help our bottom line. And then start, start trying things, right?

you know, tweaking that ad copy, start tweaking that landing page, start, you know, changing up things. Obviously the more you can have expertise in that, whether that’s going and getting training certifications within those platforms and within those like kind of advertising strategies or hiring experts who already know all that stuff that can go really long ways towards helping you start to improve and know like, okay, is it actually working or not? But bounce rates are a great way to just kind

you know, judge like our is our content as our page, whatever this thing is that we’ve built, is it having impact? Or and are we driving the right people to it? Because a lot of times, you remember, this was years and years and years ago, we were working with a financial services firm. And, you know, they were telling me about like, they had this amazing blog post that was driving tons of traffic to their website. But I looked at the bounce rate, and it was like over 90%. And I realized

They had written a blog post that basically said, do insurance agents, part of their business was insurance, how do insurance agents get paid? And they wrote it from the perspective of like, we wanna inform our clients. We want them to understand all the nuts and bolts of how agents get paid so they can be better, more informed customers. Really good intentions with that. They were getting tons of traffic from it, but all of it was bouncing.

Mike Jones (17:45.447)
None of it was like carrying through into the rest of their their funnel. And I started looking at like the search terms that were getting driven there. And I started looking at some of the demographics I realized, these are all people who want to know if I get into the insurance agent, insurance industry as an agent, how do I get paid? Right? What kind of money can I make? and it was like, you have like the totally wrong demographic coming to this page, well intentioned page, right? You can have the

the best intentions with a blog post or with an article you put together, even a white paper case study, something like that. And then realize like, the way we framed it, the way we talked about it, isn’t the right way we’re talking about. We’re attracting the wrong kind of people with it. so, just something to be thinking about when you’re looking at your metrics and how they can start telling you a story about, Hey, is this the right content? Are we saying the right things? Are we attracting the right people? your metrics are going to start to help you do

Sam (18:28.994)
Yep. Yep.

Sam (18:44.056)
Yeah. And, and well, it’s helpful to remember too on anything here. And this is why measurement is so important. There’s never going to be like a out of the box solution that’s going to drive customers to you from your marketing. Like there’s no solution where it’s like, put this in here, add this here, and you’re good. You’re going to get people that want to buy your stuff. A lot of people think that marketing does that, but that’s not how it works. A lot of it’s like trial and error.

Mike Jones (18:44.201)
What are some others, Sam?

Sam (19:10.22)
You got to try things out. You got to test. You got to retest. You got to try new things. You take insights and you tweak it and you take what works and then you take what doesn’t work. You cut that out and you put some new stuff in. So that’s why measurement is so important. And that’s where, you know, like you said, Mike, when you might, you might have a web page or a blog post that just explodes and everyone’s like, this is amazing.

But then when you look closer, it’s like, well, this is actually hurting us because now it’s affecting our bounce rate. Google’s seeing that they’re saying this website is not very good and we don’t want to send more people because they come here and they leave immediately. you know, the, the top line number of like, we got, you know, 10 ,000 people. We just got eyeballs and that’s good. Right. Any press is good press. Well, not always, not always. so you really do need to drill down, and see what.

Mike Jones (19:52.873)
traffic. We just got traffic.

Sam (20:03.756)
what those numbers are actually telling you.

Mike Jones (20:06.055)
Yeah, and that’s that’s where understanding the ad platforms and the technologies behind them and how they work is really critical. So if you’re doing a lot of digital marketing and you don’t have a lot of deep experience in it, I highly recommend like at least like boning up as much as you can get trained, get some, you know, education on it doesn’t have to be something like super formal. I’m not talking like go get another university degree, but

Sam (20:13.058)
Yep.

Mike Jones (20:32.563)
Go find there’s tons of online resources for really understanding like how SEO works, how Google works with SEO, how it works with ads, what the signals are that they’re looking for that are going to give you the best competitive edge when it comes to like putting ads out or having a page on your website and having it rank well for organic SEO, that kind of stuff. Even like, I mean, we’re learning a ton about YouTube right now. Well, you are Sam.

Sam’s got a little Skunk Works project going on here. Maybe we’ll talk about that at some point, but you’re learning a ton about YouTube, right? And so just like understanding a platform that we want to get more into. And if that’s something that, you know, a firm is thinking about like YouTube or maybe they’re thinking about TikTok, like really try to understand that platform as much as you possibly can. And one of the ways is just like, how did the metrics work? Right? And what are they starting to tell me about how people

kind of behave here, because that might tell you some things about whether or not it’s a good platform for you or

Sam (21:34.68)
Well, and a lot of times it’s, learning about what the platform wants you to do. I mean, that kind of sounds superficial, but in a way it’s not. like, for example, on YouTube, we want to get a bunch of subscribers and we want people to watch our videos. Well, you need to make sure that you’re, you are providing a good service to YouTube, right? You are a contractor essentially for YouTube. If YouTube is seeing, that your videos are

Mike Jones (21:38.396)
Yeah.

Sam (22:04.502)
Like people are clicking on them and then they leave right away. It’s similar to that bounce rate. It’s like, well, they don’t want to show more people your video then they’re not going to put it in feeds. Well, they’re not earning ad dollars and they’re providing a bad experience for their customers, right? YouTubes and customers, their eyeballs. Just like Google, Google’s search algorithm is designed, I think, for the most part to provide the best content.

Mike Jones (22:10.921)
Yeah, because they’re not going to earn any ad dollars.

True, that’s also true. No, they want to bury bad content. They want it buried.

Sam (22:31.906)
that the people who are searching, want to find. And so in the same way, YouTube wants to provide content that people like and want to watch and engage with for longer times. So even things like that, where it’s like, it’s not just a guarantee. Hey, if we post every day, we’re gonna do, or if we like, if we have these amazing headlines that like promise something and then we don’t deliver, that’s okay. We’ll still get a lot of people

the systems and the platforms are smarter now than they were 20 years ago. And you can’t just game the system like that. a lot of times, and that kind of goes into social media and how do you use those platforms? Again, like a lot of platforms, they want you, they want your content to keep people on their sites. So if you’re posting links on every one of your LinkedIn posts that takes people away from LinkedIn, LinkedIn is gonna be mad and sad.

They will not be glad.

Mike Jones (23:31.241)
Yep. And even, even just understanding like something with LinkedIn, particularly that’s interesting is like they’re trying to build a thought leadership platform, right? Where they’re like a go to place to get answers to questions. and so publishing long form articles or even long form posts, if you’re not familiar with the difference between those, that’s something you definitely need to kind of understand about, about LinkedIn or native video, right? these are things that make your content not only more valuable

your prospects or the people you’re trying to reach, but also just to LinkedIn. And that gives you a little bit of competitive edge because they’re more likely to show your posts because you’re kind of doing things the LinkedIn way, right? So longer form content generally works better with LinkedIn because as long as it’s deep and it’s thoughtful and it answers really good questions that people on LinkedIn are having, or even offsite of LinkedIn.

Right, because one of the things LinkedIn is trying to do is be found as a resource for answering questions. So if you do a Google search now for lot of things business related, you’ll find that LinkedIn results for articles are popping up. And that’s very much a strategy that LinkedIn has. again, back to your point, Sam, like knowing the platform and how they work and kind of what they prefer is really important.

And starting to measure that you’ll start to see that right in your in your measurements if you’re looking at like, okay Let’s look at engagement. Let’s look at likes. Let’s look at how many views we have on our posts Which posts are getting more? You can start to kind of go. Okay, so this is resonating with our audience and we’re getting greater reach with it You know tagging stuff putting people’s names in it other like partner businesses or if you’re doing, you know Co -marketing with other organizations

tagging them on LinkedIn can help you have a little bit greater reach. What about like ratings and reviews? I know that can be really big for a lot of professional services firms, kind of more locally based ones or locally focused ones.

Sam (25:30.872)
Ken. Yep.

Sam (25:35.916)
Yeah. And not just like the Yelps or the Google reviews. Those, those are helpful to those help with SEO and search ability. But a lot of times like, if you’re search, if you’re a professional services company, if you’re an accounting firm or law firm, most likely there will be local agencies that are tracking things like that. The better business bureau or your local, you know, a commerce authority or anything like that. Those things are probably,

Good to check in with, in a similar way. There’s probably awards that can be. One through through different agencies like that. those I would say are back to the ratings and reviews. If that’s something that you are committed to pursuing, track that set a goal, set a goal. Hey, we want 500, reviews by the end of the year. we want, you know, we’re really want to get better at our local.

each local office of our firm we want to get better with. Okay, that’s going to be Google reviews for your individual offices. Incentivize those, right? Like take steps to get there. Track those per week or per month with the teams that are responsible for those. And then, you know, hopefully you start seeing that growth. But those things are, are, you know, can be really, really valuable. And if you’re not setting goals, and if you’re not tracking them, they probably won’t happen.

Awards are really good too, especially when it’s B2B type stuff, when it’s a lot of relationship type marketing. Those are just good validators. And again, it’s like set a goal. Hey, we really want to stand up more auditing in this industry. Okay, go pursue some industry awards. Go pursue some, you know, and again, Mike, you’ve said this before. A lot of these awards are kind of pay to play. It is kind of the joke on the back

Mike Jones (27:06.624)
Yep.

Sam (27:36.238)
But sometimes it’s just nice to be able to display like, hey, we won this award. We’re a top, you know, sometimes it’s just like, hey, we’re a top 100 firm. Those things, if you really, really dive deep into them, it’s like, that doesn’t really make a huge difference, but it is a validator.

Mike Jones (27:53.833)
It’s a validator. And there are types of clients who look for that or find value in being aligned with a firm that’s winning awards, right? Like, my accounting firm or my lawyer is winning awards. Like that can feel really good, right? To a particular type of client. So, you know, again, all of this comes back to like knowing your own firm, your own culture, knowing your own clients, how they work, the verticals that you’re really focused on and really

building a position within and saying, hey, what matters to them? I wouldn’t chase any one of these, know, whether it’s a certain kind of platform you should be on or certain strategy of marketing. I wouldn’t chase it just because we told you to do it. I would chase it because, hey, this is us. It fits us and it fits our clients. It fits who we’re really trying to go after. Again, you got to know yourself first and we’ll keep saying that over and over. It’s like, this is inside out marketing.

You start inside, really understand yourselves first and then go outside. So yeah, and that’s another part of this too is like, I think we hit this pretty well in the last episode, but just to reiterate, like what are the metrics that matter to the people within your firm? Right? So like if, if you’re tracking one of these just because you think it’s really important, but no one else cares about it. And maybe you can make a really good case. Like I need to track this as a marketer in the firm. have to track this number. know nobody else cares.

Great, do it. But if there’s something you’re tracking, you’re like, I think other people want to know how much traffic we get. And then you ask around, you’re like, hey, on that report I sent out last month, which numbers did you look at? And they don’t ever mention the traffic? I’d be like, I don’t know if that matters. I don’t know if you needed to keep tracking that. Have a good reason. Have a good reason for it.

Sam (29:43.458)
Yeah. And those things are going to change over time. So just because you’re tracking it today or just because you tracked it last year, doesn’t mean it needs to be tracked. Keep it, keep an open book on a lot of those things. And over time, you know, I know for us, Mike, like we, seems like once a year, at least we’re like, all right, let’s look at our, the numbers that we’re tracking. Why do we care about this anymore? Like, do we like, no, all right, let’s just, we don’t need to worry about that. and then, okay, I think it ha it probably happens.

Mike Jones (30:08.191)
supposed to be doing that quarterly. yeah, I don’t know if I’d quite get it every quarter, but we’re supposed to be as good EOS users. We’re supposed to be doing it every quarter.

Sam (30:14.292)
It probably happens. Here’s one, Mike. Yes. Yes. Yes. I hope we don’t get in trouble for what I just said from the EOS people. I’m sorry. Here’s one, Mike, that I know is near and dear to your heart. Number of events attended. Tracking that number. That’s one that I think kind of can fall by the wayside because it’s kind of like this real life.

Mike Jones (30:26.111)
Mike Jones (30:33.382)
Sam (30:42.848)
human thing that doesn’t just come to me in a dashboard. It has to, and it involves other people. Like as a marketer, I can’t really control every aspect of this. This is something that has to be kind of a firm wide activity.

Mike Jones (30:46.565)
Yeah, it’s not always easy to track.

Mike Jones (30:58.611)
Yep. Yep. And you know, obviously you could, you could game this, right? You could just say, well, what counts as an event and then start kind of like stockpiling events that don’t matter. Like who’s there? Do we make any good relationships there? Is it the right kind of people? So obviously like the right number, like the right kind of events really matters. But even just starting to say like, Hey, when we, when we think about like our bottom line, right? We think about these numbers that we really care about as a business, whether it’s the revenue, the margin,

Sam (31:11.192)
Yeah,

Mike Jones (31:28.659)
And then you start thinking, okay, what’s one, two, three, eight layers above that? What are the things that are going to move the needle for us on the things that mattered, you know, at the end of the day, right? The things that matter for our business. So you need to be, you got to know those first, but then let’s start laddering up. What are the things that, that have influence? Like I remember there was, you know, a number of years ago, we started thinking about like, okay, we know that getting deals,

You know, with, with a prospect getting to a point where we’re actually talking about a potential project, that’s really important to us. That’s a really important number for us to track. So we were tracking that and we’re like, but what gets us a deal? Like how, how do we get to that point? And we kind of, I think made a bit of an assumption where like events get us there. And I think at the time that was very much true that, that when we attended events, whether it was a conference, happy hour, obviously within the right.

Verticals or with the right types of events, but when we did those things the more we did them the more deals we got and so like There is just this element of like let’s track the things That move the needle down the line for the things that we really care about at the end of the day So, you know that that could be a really it’s seemingly easy simple maybe kind of like no duh Mike Of course, we would be going to events. But do you track how many you did in the last week?

and then report that weekly and be like, hey, three weeks in a row, we were below our goal. And that’s the other part of this is as you’re starting to track, maybe for every one of these key metrics that you’re like, hey, these are I think are going to be pretty important. As you start to track them and you realize like, when we move the needle on this number, we have some influence over it on what we’re doing with our marketing, then that helps our bottom line. Well, then maybe you should set a goal.

Right? And say, all right, our goal this quarter, our goal this month, our goal this week is let’s hit this number on this every single week. And if it’s starting to drop and our average is starting to drop below that, let’s talk about what’s going wrong. Right? And that might actually start to give you a sense of like, not just like we’re tracking metrics just to track them, but we’re tracking them so that we can get better and we can really start to improve and grow our firm.

Mike Jones (33:51.465)
right at the end of the day, like that’s what every firm wants. At some level, you want growth. And you know, you can get an argument about like, hey, we just have to keep our clients and we’ll be all right. Well, you’re not going to keep every client, right? Like, that’s just not going to happen. That’s not how it works. I do agree. Keep your clients make them really happy. Do a great job. But wouldn’t it be better if you could also grow your accounts, not only grow the number of accounts that you have, but grow the reach of each account.

different services you offer, how much the dollar amount that you’re getting from each client, because you’re doing a better and better job servicing them and giving them more opportunity for you to add value to them. That would be where it’s like, if you want to start to figure out how to grow as a firm, as a marketer, you need to know what things do I do that actually influence my bottom line or the things that matter to our firm. And that kind of gets us into the next big

category of that we wanted to talk about and that is activity metrics. So, you know, we’ve talked about kind of business metrics. What are the end of the day metrics that really matter to the ownership to the partners to your leadership team? Maybe those are all a bit different between those groups. That’s okay. But you need to know that as a marketer. What are the things that matter to you as a marketer? So we just talked about that with all these different channels. And then finally, I think there’s we need to talk about like the activity metrics.

This is where it’s like, it’s kind of dumb, but like, how many articles did you push out? Right? How many podcast episodes did you ship? Was it consistent? Did you, were you hitting it every single month or every single week? Like you said you would, you have goals for those. I honestly think like if there is something you’re creating on behalf of the business, there should probably be a reason why you’re creating that first and foremost, but also like it should be something you’re creating over and over and over

If it’s important to the business and it’s actually moving the needle, then why not do it again and then do it again and then do it again? In which case you need a cadence and then you need to start tracking and making sure that you’re moving that cadence forward. They’re actually building a marketing program, one that is publishing consistently. I’m not advocating that every firm should be publishing a blog post like every two days, right? That might not be relevant. mean, I know of a accounting firm that’s now doing daily podcasts.

Sam (35:55.234)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (36:17.841)
I’m just like, my goodness, that sounds insane. But it works really well for them. And they really don’t do hardly anything else. They create articles out of those podcasts, which is fantastic. But they’re not like also doing webinars and also doing all these events and also doing like tons of other stuff. The core of their marketing is their podcasting. And I think it works really well for them. And it works really well for the market that they’re in.

trying to reach a very specific market that I think podcasting actually caters really well to. So, you know, but the activities matter. And then, you know, are you on track? Right? Are you actually hitting those consistently? So what do you think, Sam? What are thoughts you have on like tracking activities?

Sam (37:03.52)
Yeah, again, you got to figure out what works for your firm, what’s important to your firm. I will say kind of an inside secret, Mike, is I think in professional service firms, one of the biggest missing pieces that we’ve seen, we’ve done a lot of research, is video. No one’s really, I mean, there may be a few, maybe a few firms.

Mike Jones (37:30.281)
There’s a handful.

Sam (37:31.594)
are doing video really well. I mean, you just mentioned like there’s there are firms who are like, we’re gonna be the podcast firm, that’s gonna be our main marketing engine. I think there’s so much opportunity in video. And there’s so many measurables that come out of that. And so many ways you can use that as well. And now Mike, you mentioned it, you can post video on almost every platform that your firm is using. Native video, obviously on YouTube.

but now on Facebook, on LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever your firm lives on the web, you can be posting that and using that. still true today, it’s been true for a while, video is the most engaging content out there.

Mike Jones (38:19.197)
I think also, I mean, I know this this episode isn’t supposed to be about like what kinds of media you should be publishing. I think we spent a lot of time talking about this already in a past episode, but video not only is the most engaging, but it’s the most versatile because out of one piece of video content you can create really quickly, like very efficiently all sorts of other types of content. So, you know, if you’re if you’re doing kind of vidcast style stuff,

right where it’s video, and it’s engaging, it’s got visuals, it’s got audio, kind of like what we’re doing right now. It can also be just an audio track, right? And now you’re hitting people with a podcast. It’s not that hard. It’s like really easy to spin that off. That can be transcripted. And you now have a transcript, right? That can be written content that goes on your website starts to build your SEO, take it one step further, take that transcript and rewrite it. I mean, you can

Use chat GPT to reread it for you or hire a writer or do a combo of the two. and you’re going to get like some really great articles out of that. One episode might even be more than one article. So it starts to turn into this kind of like snowball effect. And then obviously clips from your videos, become social pieces. Those become ads. It’s like video becomes like this kind of content. It’s, it is a little high production. There’s a little bit of work,

Sam (39:34.806)
It’s, yeah.

Sam (39:46.146)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Jones (39:46.815)
probably not quite as easy to publish or create a video as it is to just sit and write an article. Because it takes probably a couple more people, right? But the kind of the way that you can stretch that out and create so many other types of media from one piece of like central content is huge with

Sam (40:08.398)
It’s also very, very measurable, very trackable. You can’t really tell like, okay, we had 30 people click on this article. I wonder what the most important part of it was. What did everybody like the best about this article? When it comes to video, depending on the platform, but hey, if you’re building a YouTube channel for your firm, there are so many metrics coming out with YouTube where you can tell

this is the part of the video that everybody liked or that people came back to and they skipped to this point because it was really interesting. They used it multiple times. Or on the adverse side of that, this is where everybody left. This part of the video. Nobody cares about tax planning for your dog, know, whatever it is. So very measurable, very trackable.

Mike Jones (40:59.667)
I want to watch that video now. Tax planning for your

Sam (41:02.392)
You know, some dogs are entrepreneurs. You just never know. I think too, Mike, you know, the the quant we’re talking about the quantity, right? The frequency. What about the quality? The quality.

Mike Jones (41:05.651)
Yeah, maybe.

Mike Jones (41:12.361)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The quality. Like how good is it? The creativity of it. You know, I think about a few different tools that might be helpful in this. I think I gravitate more a little bit more towards like the tool side of this. When we talk about the quality, what is use Yoast or some other kind of like SEO, anyone using WordPress, you’ll be familiar with Yoast, but there’s tons of other tools you can use out there to measure your own like quality of your pages looking at

kind of reader level, is it well written? Use Grammarly, that’s another great one, to just kind of double check everything, plug it into your favorite AI tool. Although I’ll be honest, like ChatGPT and editing don’t really go great, it’s not my favorite. Claude, think, might be a little bit better, but for those that aren’t familiar with Claude, that might be another AI tool to check out. And then running like maybe some regular audits.

of your content, right? Is it on brand? Is it creative? Is it interesting? You’re going to need to create kind of your own guidelines for that, for what works for you and for your brand, the level of what you’re kind of looking for, like are we just we’re just looking for nailing the brand guidelines and no deviation whatsoever. Great. Do do an audit and start kind of looking at things maybe quarterly or annual, something like

Maybe you have a process to embed that into your creative process. Maybe it’s not after the fact. Maybe it’s actually before you’re getting published on all those things. Another kind of, I didn’t put it on my list here in our notes before the show, but I was just thinking about like, just paying attention to what other industries are doing that’s interesting.

Right? So even just like, you know, everyone loves to like watch the Superbowl and kind of do like a audit of the ads after the fact, maybe do that for your firm. And what that does is it starts to conversations, even within your own marketing team of what matters to us as a firm when it comes to creativity, when it comes to like our perspective on marketing and advertising, and you can start to put together some guidelines that say this is how we think about the quality of

Mike Jones (43:29.211)
our ads or the quality of our content or the quality of these different marketing assets that we’re putting out in the marketplace. Yeah, what else Sam?

Sam (43:38.776)
Yep, two things with that. think one as you know, you’re doing these activities, you’re publishing over time. Are you seeing a progression of like we’re getting better at this? Like, yeah, that’s probably most easy to track, like on a visual thing like hair, social media posts from two years ago. Man, I can’t believe how bad those were back then. We’re so much better now, right? Like, that’s a good thing. The video con man, we started off with like this little handy cam and now we’re like

doing these really nice productions and our blog posts like, man, I went back and read something from three years ago. Man, I can’t believe how much we’ve grown in our writing capabilities. The second thing too is, if you work at mid -size to a larger firm, what kind of internal feedback are you getting? Is anyone from your firm reading or viewing or listening to what you’re putting out?

Sometimes that’s a really good indicator of like, got two partners that came to me, like they stopped me in the hallway and said, hey, I love that latest podcast episode or that latest article we put out was so cool. Like that was awesome. You know, how often are you hearing those things? Yeah, it’s not that it wasn’t them on the podcast. Yeah. Sometimes those things can be really, really encouraging too, as a marketer of

Mike Jones (44:52.851)
And it’s not them in the byline.

Sam (45:03.522)
people in my firm are actually like looking at what we’re doing. This is really cool. That might be something to track too. Maybe, maybe just on your own little spreadsheet, but you know, are the people engaging again? We’re talking about inside out. If nobody in your firm knows what you’re doing as a marketer, that’s going to be a problem. If they don’t know what you’re talking about, and if they’re not involved in that, if they’re not looking at it, if they’re not seeing it, this is going to, you’re just going to run into, into issues like you’re going to have, you know, hopefully

Clients calling in or, hey, that latest podcast episode was really cool, client says to partner. yeah, we have a podcast? What? So that’s something too. And there’s ways, again, to get your marketing in front of the people that work at your firm, the partners of your firm. Are you setting up programs and processes to do that? Yeah.

Mike Jones (45:44.253)
Hahaha!

Sam (46:03.946)
Mike, we are just having way too much fun, but I think we should keep going. I think we can get through these last few things here, but let’s talk about what we talked about at the beginning of this episode of Vanity Metrics.

Mike Jones (46:09.759)
It’s gonna be long one, I think. That’s all good. We’re getting close.

Mike Jones (46:19.923)
Yeah, vanity metrics stuff that just doesn’t matter. I mean, it’s so easy to get caught, I think in the vanity metrics. And that’s why we wanted to put this in here, really make sure we had a chance to talk about it. Obviously, like likes reactions, comments on social are just a really easy place to kind of get consumed with metrics that may or may not actually matter to your business. So like not just looking at the likes the pure number, but look at who’s liking it, who’s reacting to it, who’s commenting

Is it ever like, is it all your partners like parents or like their family members like, okay, like cool, but like, that’s not going to move the needle for your business. If it’s, you know, qualified people, know, prospects, even existing clients, current clients, and you’re building deeper relationships with them through that content. Okay, that’s cool, right? Maybe that’s something worth tracking.

But just be careful. know, not every metric is really telling you the full story of what’s going on and making sure that you really understand that. I know one thing I think we’ve said this before, but it’s good to say it again. LinkedIn, we found this really interesting phenomenon where current clients partner, you know, partner organizations, right? Or maybe if you’re doing sponsorships and that kind of thing, the organizations that you’re sponsoring or that you’re co marketing with.

friends of the firm, past employees, current employees, they will all like and react and comment on your stuff. Who doesn’t like and react and comment publicly on your stuff is prospects. It’s a really interesting phenomenon. It’s particular with B2B, like that marketing and sales process. They will look at your things, they will pay attention to them, they are interacting with them with their mind, right?

They might click through and look at whatever it is the offer is, but they’re not gonna have overt kind of public conversation with you or public reaction to your posts more often than not. That’s just part of it is they don’t wanna signal that they’re checking you out. They don’t wanna signal to others that they’re checking you out. And they’re not ready yet. They don’t trust you yet enough.

Mike Jones (48:40.499)
to have that kind of relationship where they’re gonna interact and have a reaction or have a comment or share your content. So just keep that in mind. I think a lot of firms get discouraged. like, our prospects don’t do anything with our posts. We must have the wrong strategy with our social content. And it’s like, well, I don’t know if you’re gonna be able to tell that from those metrics. There’s other metrics I’d be looking at to know

Sam (49:06.478)
Yep. Another thing to be aware of is bots. Like it is sad. You might see a ginormous spike in conversions last week. And then sadly, you get an email from the person who takes those inbound leads from your website and says they send you an email saying we got 50

Mike Jones (49:13.118)
my goodness. Yeah, we do have to talk about this. It’s so sad.

Mike Jones (49:21.843)
Hahaha!

Mike Jones (49:32.617)
This is garbage.

Sam (49:33.934)
We just got 50 ,000 bots on our, our forms. Just be aware of that and take the necessary steps to limit

Mike Jones (49:41.663)
I mean, it’s it’s again where like just be careful what you’re tracking. It’s really easy. Here’s the sad truth. There is a ton of bot traffic on the Internet. And unfortunately, a lot of it plays in the advertising world. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. If you want to deep dive on that, maybe we can do a whole nother episode on that. I want to bring in a couple of experts that I know of who could probably speak really well of this. But it’s sad, sad, but true.

When you’re looking at your own advertising traffic numbers, when you’re looking at impressions, both in advertising and in social in particular, just take those with a grain of salt. Some of that traffic is not real people. Some of those impressions are not real people. And then there are beyond that. There’s just things to know with like any platform. Again, this goes back to what we said earlier, really understanding how the platforms

understanding how the platform’s reporting and the metrics work is really important. So like for instance, I remember there was a time when Facebook launched their native video feature where you could actually publish video straight to Facebook as a post. And they were tracking a video play as one second of video play. Like that’s a play. If one second of it got played versus YouTube at that time was three seconds.

So they wouldn’t count that video as viewed if it didn’t play for long or for less than three seconds. And so just knowing like, like our Facebook stuff, our videos are doing great. Well, it might be because of the way they’re tracking it. And if you’re comparing it, like you’re probably not comparing apples to apples when you look at one platform’s version of a metric versus another platform. So just keeping those things in mind, knowing that some of that is not real people.

or it’s kind of false flag type metrics where like, you know, if you’re on Facebook and you’re scrolling and technically every time the ad just even is like, it can even be below the fold before you see it, but it’s counted as an impression. As long as it got loaded, it’s considered an impression.

Mike Jones (52:03.187)
So that happens a lot with display advertising where whole pages with ads will load when the user first loads the page and whether they scroll down and look at them or not, it’s counted as an impression. So if you’re paying for impressions or you’re looking at impressions as one of your metrics, just know like some of that is not legit, unfortunately. Again, that comes back to the platforms and how they’re tracking things. So just keep that in

Sam (52:32.62)
Mike, should you be a hoarder when it comes to data?

Mike Jones (52:36.339)
I love data hoarding. Now, I’m probably the worst vendor at this. I probably track too many things. But yeah, I think there’s an element of like, you could start to track everything and then be overwhelmed because you don’t know how to use any of it. And I think this really goes back to a larger point, which is like only track stuff. It’s good if it’s going to help you make changes that are going to improve your effectiveness, right?

So don’t just track stuff to track stuff. Don’t just store it in a database to store it in a database. we’ll get to it sometime. No, you won’t. I promise you, you won’t. Start tracking it when it actually matters and then keep tracking it until it doesn’t matter. And especially if you’re not getting insights out of data, if you’re just like, we track this stuff, but whenever we really look at it or when we do, we don’t really know what we’re looking at. It doesn’t really help us to know.

how to make a change to what we’re doing with our content or with our marketing strategy or who we’re trying to reach. I’d say like, why don’t you just stop tracking that? It may just not be that important at this point. So measure what matters. That’s my final say

Sam (53:49.026)
Yeah. So at the end of the day, Mike, we don’t just track and measure things because we love numbers and we love graphs, charts, pie charts, all that stuff. What do you do with all? We’re not. I’m not. I’m not either. Yeah, spreadsheets can be fun. But what do you do with even if you have that cool spreadsheet, Mike, what do you do with that? What do you do with all the measurements?

Mike Jones (54:00.615)
No, because we’re not accountants. I don’t know if anyone knows that, but I’m not an accountant and I actually I do like a good spreadsheet. I’m weird though. I’m weird.

Mike Jones (54:16.787)
Yeah, I mean, I think I just said it. I’ll say it again. Insights, right? The goal with the data is to what story is it telling you, right? Either there’s an issue that needs to be solved that the data is kind of surfacing for you, or there’s some new opportunity you’re missing out on right now. And those are the two things, right? What are the issues and what are the opportunities and being looking at the data in interesting ways to kind of go, there might be an opportunity here. That kind of goes back to

when I was talking about bounce rates, I think that’s one that I like because it often surfaces opportunities where it’s like, whether that’s something where it’s, the bounce rate on this page is awful. If we just made a couple changes, I think we could really change like, the flow of our website and make sure that people know like there’s there’s a next step. Here’s the next thing you’re supposed to do and making that really clear to them. And then all of a sudden the bounce rates gone. It’s not the bounce rate that I care about.

It’s like the what’s what it’s telling me about what behavior needs to change. Or going back to that example of, you know, a podcast or sorry, not podcast, a blog post, where that’s getting tons of traffic, but really high bounce rate and finding out, it’s because it’s it’s attracting people that have nothing to do with our business. These are not potential clients. And then you have to make some decisions. What do we want to do? Maybe that maybe that blog post is still really helpful for your customers.

and your clients. And so we want to keep it. Maybe it just needs a little tweak with the title or with the URL so that it’s not getting all this bad traffic that’s hurting our overall bounce rate on our website, which is going to have an impact on the rest of your marketing. So you do want to fix those things. Or maybe you need to like, there’s an opportunity here. You know, that example I think is a really interesting one. if you’re, let’s say you’re an insurance agency like they

and you’re trying to attract talent. Well, if you find all this blog posts that we wrote that was originally intended for customers actually is attracting tons of potential agents. Well, there’s a whole bunch of talent. And so there’s an opportunity maybe repurpose that that blog post and put the call action on it. That’s a little different. Maybe it’s now like, interested in finding out more about how to make, you know, earn a living and create a career.

Mike Jones (56:43.303)
as an insurance agent, we have a application for a job for you, or we have a course that we’d like you to take, or some other kind of lead gen, but more on the recruitment side. So, or like we’ve seen stuff, I think one of them is our own. We had a…

A piece of content we kind of came up with on the fly. was kind of a random, super random, not strategic piece of content. was a, a bingo card for zoom calls. This is back like I think 2019, 2020 and COVID era. And man, that thing took off. People were downloading that like left and right all over the place. And we’re finding that like most of them were actually in HR. And so it’s like, you know, we didn’t really have a strategy for what to do with that at the

But like if you’re a bigger firm, maybe there’s an opportunity to say like, HR is not like maybe our core target for our services. But maybe there’s a way to utilize that list that we’ve just accidentally built from all these people downloading this piece of content that are all HR managers to get to the people in the firm that we want to talk to, right? So creating kind of like a, almost like a referral program for HR managers or something like

Or just some kind of like content piece that gets them to talk about your firm Within their within their company and say yeah I downloaded this like bingo card thing and that was really cool and it came from this company and I’ve shared it around So making you know again going back to like brand everything All right. Make sure your brand is is very clear because you never know who’s gonna pick it up. So Yeah, just some interesting ideas

Sam (58:29.368)
tactically, you want to make sure that you’re putting the right numbers in front of the right people, right? So that could be your marketing team. It could be, mean, you hopefully are meeting with a partner or some of the partners or all the partners on a regular basis, making sure that you have the right numbers and the right insights that you put together. We call that a weekly scorecard, Mike. That’s what we do internally. We’re tracking those numbers on a weekly basis.

Mike Jones (58:36.02)
Mm -hmm.

Sam (58:59.727)
and a little dashboard that we keep and that just, mean, go ahead.

Mike Jones (59:03.355)
And that’s a principle and a tool out of a larger business management system we use called Entrepreneurial Operating System, EOS. I know a lot of firms are familiar with that system. You’re gonna find too that like you might have a scorecard that’s a little more granular at your marketing team level. These are the activities that matter to us. These are the marketing metrics that matter to us. And then maybe you have a scorecard that’s more for your leadership team, right?

And it doesn’t go into the weeds on all the metrics that you’re tracking at the marketing team level. Like your partners probably don’t really care like what all the activities are that you did last week. Unless they don’t trust you. But you know, they probably care about things like, how many, you know, marketing qualified leads did we get? How many sales qualified leads? How many deals came in the door?

How many new prospects are in our pipeline right now? How many deals did we close? And that might not be on you to track that, but if it is, because you’re owning the CRM or something like that, like make sure you’re putting metrics in front of them that they care about and that matter to them. But just knowing like you might have different scorecards depending on who you’re kind of interfacing with. We talked about leadership, your leadership team, maybe creating a live dashboard. That can be a really interesting way to think about reporting.

and maybe start to get some unnecessary work off your plate. I know a lot of times as marketers, we’re just kind of asked on the fly, hey, could you get me a report on this number from last week? And then you’re like, no, it’s gonna take me like four hours to like dig up all the data, figure that out, put it in front of them. It might be worth the investment to just create a live dashboard for the numbers that you no matter to your partners and say, Hey, we’re tracking them. Here they are. You can log in anytime and see

If you ask me for it, great, I’m going to send it to you. It’ll just be a screenshot and just making it really easy for them. There’s some great tools out there. I know a lot of people are familiar with Tableau, which is now a Salesforce product. Google Looker Studio is great. You can plug in a lot of things with that. There’s plenty of other ones out there that’ll let you like basically just plug in lots of different data feeds and then start to manipulate them and put them into, you know, the kinds of reports, the charts and graphs that you want to use.

Mike Jones (01:01:32.209)
Sam, what happens when nobody cares about my reports? I send them, I don’t get any response back. I’m not even sure they even look at

Sam (01:01:42.434)
You know, it might just take some deep introspection, Mike. Are you measuring the right things? Are you measuring things that they care about when maybe there’s a little confrontation between you or your team and the partners? what do they, what pain points do they have about their own marketing team? And from that extracting like, you want to know this, you want to know this? Like even if it’s some

you know, undefined number of like ROI on our marketing. You know, like that’s always what they want to know. It’s very hard to track, very hard to track. But hey, maybe you could get really creative.

Mike Jones (01:02:18.781)
Hahaha!

If you could deliver that number, man, I think you could make a lot of people in your firm really happy. Really happy.

Sam (01:02:29.632)
Maybe there maybe there’s a way to get some kind of arbitrary number of like, Hey, this is what we’ve spent this year. Here’s the, you know, the number of new clients that we’ve on boarded and the amount of business that they’ve brought us, you know, some simple things like that. Mike, we talked, a few weeks ago now about actually just tracking like financials. Like, do you actually, do you have access to those? Are you able to see

Okay, we spent this much, here’s our marketing expense and here’s what the firm has done this year or here’s the new business that we’ve brought in in this calendar year. That could be just simple things like that that I think a lot of times we forget about it. Like what are the actual numbers? What’s the bottom line? Those are probably some of the things that the partners and leadership of your firm are gonna care about. And then have you communicated clearly?

how those metrics kind of ladder up to what they care about, what they want to know. And sometimes that you kind of do need to be a teacher a little bit, right? You got to be a little bit of a teacher, come alongside of them, listen, be a good listener. But also there might be a time to be a little firm and say, this is why we’re doing this. Here’s the vision, right? You’re painting the vision. And this is how marketing works. And the better you know your craft.

the more clearly you’ll be able to kind of paint that picture.

Mike Jones (01:03:57.491)
Yep. And I think kind of a last point here on this topic of how do I know if it’s all working is use your measurement to actually get to know your clients better. Right. So like not just these prospects but really the clients you’ve already got in the door. They have a lot of conversations with firms right now around the missed opportunities that they’re seeing with their existing clientele.

You know, and some of that just goes back to the age old principle that like it is much easier to sell to an existing client who already trusts you, right? They’re bought in, they trust you. You just need to do a better job of telling them what you do and the other services you offer, how you could better help them, you know, at a greater deeper level. And so your measurement should also be about your existing clients as well. Get to know them better. Part of this too is

When you’re out looking at how people behave, prospects are behaving, you’re learning data about how people behave, how your particular kind of target market thinks and acts. And hopefully that makes you a better, smarter, more effective marketer. I would hope it would, if you’re really paying attention to those things and asking the right questions.

Sam (01:05:11.34)
And hopefully you have access to those clients, right? Like hopefully at some level you’re interacting with them. It doesn’t have to be all the time, but Hey, maybe there’s a handful of clients that you just want to, you want to get inside their heads a little bit. Like, Hey, run some surveys or get on, get on a zoom call and ask them questions. And, those things can be really, really important, for you as a marketer. and then, you know, Hey, have some, have some little ratings. If you’re doing a little interview,

Hey, on a scale of one to 10, how good do we do living up to this part of our brain? even if it’s like gut reaction, like, I don’t know a seven, like there’s some truth in that still. Right. And then track those, track those things. and you’d be surprised at how well your customers know your business, especially the ones that have been around for a long time. They might know it better than you. They might know better some of the partners at the firm. so getting access to those clients,

is really, it’s fun and it’s really

Mike Jones (01:06:13.486)
Sometimes it even helps you to like talk to them and realize like, we’re kind of tired of maybe a message or we think we’ve moved on from a particular position in the market. And to talk to your clients and find out like, no, actually, like, that’s still what really matters to them, that position that we had five, eight, 10 years ago, or that message that really resonated with them five, eight years ago still really resonates.

It’s easy to get distracted with I think a lot of the conversations happening outside of your industry or outside of your clientele and think like, we really got to be talking about all those things. Well, once you have those conversations again, especially as a marketer who’s thinking about this from a marketing perspective, how to tell the story of your firm that you start to realize, maybe we don’t have to talk about all those things to the level we think we do. Like they’re hot, but they’re not really what matters.

And so just, just have conversations, right? I think some of the best, smartest marketers I’ve ever worked with, whether it was a boss that I’ve worked for, whether it’s like clients that we’ve had on the market or in -house, the best ones, the most effective ones have all been huge advocates for like them sitting in front of clients and having conversations with them and really learning their clients, going, going to their business, learning their business.

Learning how they think learning how they talk learning what issues and challenges and problems and context they’re living in I think that’s a huge huge part I’d even argue might be more important than a lot of this other stuff we talked about today So I’m gonna maybe end it there on that note So Sam this has been awesome we’re gonna jump back on the next one and be talking about how do

Sam (01:07:56.354)
Yeah. Yep.

Love it. Love

Mike Jones (01:08:09.873)
Make sure it’s still all feels like us, right? We’ve been doing all this planning. We’ve been doing all this execution. We looked at media. We looked at channels. We’re measuring things. How do we make sure it just it’s still us and we don’t lose our way? So we’ll be talking about that next time on our next episode. And I’m really excited about that. I’m also excited. I don’t know if we’ve made this fully official even internally yet,

Sam (01:08:23.266)
Yep. Yep.

Mike Jones (01:08:35.721)
We’re going to be lining up lots of interviews with lots of marketers in professional services firms over the next few months. So I’m really excited to start having some of those conversations more publicly. I’ve been having a lot of private conversations one -on -one and I’m excited to start kind of making those a little bit more known and say, Hey, we want to have these conversations, but let’s have them out so people can respond to them and think about them. And we’ll be talking about all sorts of stuff, everything from like growth, how,

Counting firms and other professional services firms can be thinking about growth, right? With the, particularly with the CGO that I know that thinks really deeply about this stuff. We’re to be talking about technology and AI, of course, because everybody needs to be talking about that, thinking about that right now. And we’re going to be talking about all things brand, always and forever. And then another category that I’m really excited to be talking about is business development, which I think is kind of the next.

kind of tier of interests that a lot of firms are really starting to think deeply about. How do we get better at business development? What’s our model? What’s our strategy for it? What fits us as a firm and our unique identity as a firm? Our culture. There’s a lot of different ways to do business development. So I’m excited to be having lots of those conversations over the next few months and we’ll be dripping those out on the podcast.