Measuring Marketing Success: From Metrics to Insights

Mike Jones (00:37.853)
Hey everybody, welcome again to another episode of the Market Brand Podcast. I’m Mike Jones here with

Sam (00:44.174)
and Pagel.

Mike Jones (00:45.725)
Thanks Sam for doing this again. Always enjoy it. Yeah. We’re going to be talking today about how to measure the effectiveness of your marketing. We’ve been kind of doing this long series on basically how to put together a marketing plan. We’re calling it roughly, I think our working titles like inside out marketing. It might be a little tease for what we try to cover in every episode around how do you start from the inside of your brand and your firm and think about how to go to market.

Sam (00:48.27)
Absolutely.

Mike Jones (01:15.485)
in an effective way that maybe is beyond just the traditional, you know, four P’s or seven P’s or 12 P’s. I don’t know how many P’s there are now with marketing, but whatever your P of number, that sounds terrible. It works for you. Anyway, so we’ve been doing this series and today is all about how do you measure, what are the metrics you need to care about? But before we get into that, Sam, you’ve got to name 10 things to get us kind of rolling with our creative juices here.

Sam (01:29.966)
Yeah.

Sam (01:44.654)
Yeah, so we’re going to talk about measurement today. So I thought we should name 10 things that you should never measure, Mike.

Mike Jones (01:52.701)
Planes that pass over your house.

Sam (01:57.486)
Okay, that’s good.

Mike Jones (01:58.493)
Yeah, yeah, I’m just going to start there.

Sam (02:00.91)
I’m gonna say the size of the teeth in the alligator that’s chasing you.

Mike Jones (02:09.917)
Hmm. Yeah. Yeah at that point there there are bigger fish to fry than the size of their teeth I’m gonna go how many times you’ve had to change the oil on your car because Yeah, who cares?

Sam (02:14.446)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Sam (02:27.47)
Yeah, nobody cares about that.

Mike Jones (02:30.045)
cares. It was at least like used to be a thing where you keep track of like every oil change and you stick it like keep keep a record of it with your like car and then when you sell your car people want all those I don’t know. Well but does anyone actually check and care does anyone care?

Sam (02:40.654)
Yeah, you don’t do that?

Sam (02:45.006)
You don’t do that, Mike? Hmm. Have you ever changed your oil? Breaking news, Mike Jones’ car is going to break down because he’s never changed the oil on it.

Mike Jones (02:55.453)
Never once, never once.

Sam (02:57.582)
I also don’t change the oil in my car, but that’s a different story. I’m gonna say you should not measure the brightness of the sun with your eyes, with your eyeballs.

Mike Jones (03:01.085)
Your car doesn’t have any oil.

Mike Jones (03:09.597)
Mmm.

Okay. Don’t ever measure how many minutes you spend in front of screens, because you’ll just be sad.

Sam (03:22.926)
Yeah, that is sad. That’s a very sad metric. I think we’re on, I think that was number five, so we’re halfway there. Do not measure, just don’t do this, Mike. Don’t measure the length of each blade of grass in your backyard or your front yard, either one.

Mike Jones (03:26.045)
Yeah. Yeah.

Mike Jones (03:43.741)
Related note never measure how many petals are on the clover, right? The answer is always three even though you want four it just yeah

Sam (03:49.646)
Hmm.

Sam (03:55.854)
Yes.

Do not measure the amount of food wasted by your children for each meal over time. That will be a sad metric.

Mike Jones (04:07.101)
that’s a good one. That’s a good one. Never measure the brightness of your teeth.

Sam (04:16.269)
mm -hmm. Yeah, with one of those like strips, you know, with the different colors, that would be sad. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, don’t do that. What do we got? One more? Is this the last one? Do not measure. Under any circumstance, do not measure the number of fingernail clippings in your…

Mike Jones (04:17.405)
I don’t know what that means.

Mike Jones (04:22.749)
-huh. -huh.

Mike Jones (04:30.365)
I think we got one more, drum roll.

Sam (04:45.198)
bathroom sink drain.

Mike Jones (04:48.701)
we’re ending on a low note here. That was brutal.

Sam (04:51.886)
That’s, yeah, sorry. Oof, just kinda kept, kept coming there. We should.

Mike Jones (04:58.461)
All right. Let’s talk about some things we should measure. the don’t don’t your body. man. So I think this really came down to this bigger question that, that I was thinking about. We’ve been thinking about of like, okay, we’re working on this big marketing plan. We’re going to market or executing on it. We’re being creative or making it interesting. It’s on brand. Well, how do I know if it’s actually working? Right.

Sam (05:04.142)
fingernails.

Mike Jones (05:27.645)
How do I know that all this effort, all this time, all this expense, all this energy that we have put into our marketing, I can’t, I can’t think of a single firm where like the partners don’t keep asking that like all the time. How do I know if my marketing is working? Right? We spend so much on it. What’s the ROI? You know, we spend so much time on it. We put all these staff on it. We hire an agency or we outsource different aspects of it. We’re spending money. And I just don’t know, is it actually doing anything?

Sam (05:42.19)
What’s the ROI? What’s the ROI? Always.

Mike Jones (05:57.469)
Could I just like shut it all off and we’d be fine? And maybe that’s actually a really good place to start is what could you not do and still be okay? And that might lead you to some really interesting ideas around what is working and what is not working within your marketing. Are you just doing things to do things? Are you doing it? Cause like historically, well, we always did this one thing and we always, you know, sent out this newsletter every single month.

Sam (06:08.526)
Hmm.

Sam (06:17.614)
Yeah.

Sam (06:22.254)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (06:27.709)
So, but maybe there’s a more scientific way to get there than just shutting it off and seeing what happens. Yeah.

Sam (06:33.902)
I think Mike, you know, there’s, there’s a, I think a baseline, like a foundation here of like, you know, the, the best marketers are going to be good at measurement. because you have to have that it’s a crucial element to know not only like if what you’re doing is working, but what you should be and should not be doing. And sometimes that means there’s going to be maybe some difficult conversations with the leadership and some difficult questions that need to be asked.

the example you just gave of like, hey, you know, we’ve been doing this for years. It’s great. Everybody loves it. You know, everybody in the firm thinks it’s a great idea. And there might be a question there of like, well, but why? Why do we keep doing this? What is it laddering up to? How is it? How is it helping the end goals that we actually care about? Is it just something we do because it’s fun? Or because everyone else is doing it. Competitors are doing it. We don’t want, you know, FOMO fear missing out.

So that there might be some baseline questions here that need to be asked of the leadership in your firm around what do we care about? What do you care about partner? What do you care about? What do you wanna know?

Mike Jones (07:49.341)
Yeah, and we’ll get into that. I want to talk a little bit more and kind of unpack, okay, what are some of those measures that maybe your leadership really cares about that either if you can help them measure that great, or if you can ladder up your own measurements as a marketer to those things and say, hey, moving the needle here with our marketing is going to help you with these other higher level goals and metrics that you’re measuring as a business owner or as the leader.

within our business. I want to talk about that in a minute. But the other the other aspect that I think we need to really consider too is we’ve already talked about this in previous episodes of just having a plan that fits your brand fits your firm, your unique goals, as well as reaching the right people. And so like every activity that you’re doing, you should already be doing because you have pretty high confidence.

This is going to make a difference. This is going to get us in front of and have an impact and convince people that we are the best solution for their problems within our specific special abilities, right? Like our special powers, the things that we do really well for certain kinds of people, right? We’ve already talked about that and being like really specific about who you serve or as specific as you can be and how you serve them being specific and not only who they are,

and who you’re trying to reach, but also in how you can best help them. That’s kind of where positioning comes from, right? Like that’s really when we talk about brand positioning, I know a lot of firms are thinking about that at some level. That’s where like, that’s where that secret sauce comes from when you talk about your unique position in the marketplace is being specific and saying, hey, we have something very unique to bring to the table, we can help certain people solve very certain problems.

And then being really clear about that in your marketing, your messaging. But once you have that, that tells you where you need to be. We already talked about that with channels, right? And then what kinds of media did those people engage with? Well, now you know what kinds of content to create, what types of formats. And now, you know, actually, you have some guidelines of what’s going to make it interesting. Well, what do they care about? You should talk about what they care about, right? It’s in the same way your metrics should be driven by your unique brand identity.

Mike Jones (10:12.573)
the special things you do for certain kinds of people, right? And so once you have those questions answered, you should start measuring how do we impact those people? What are the signals that tell us that those people are are being reached, right? That they’re understanding what we do, that they’re convinced that we are the best solution for them. This is going to get like really basic pretty quick. Like you’re going to be like, it’s it’s sales. It’s revenue.

its profit, like these are the things that like, tell you that things are working within your marketing. We’ll get into some of the nitty gritty on some more tactical, really low level, like very boots on the ground type metrics as well. But okay, so going back, we’re gonna go back to your point about measuring what leadership and what ownership cares about, right. And I would argue, I don’t know if we’ve already made the point, I’m gonna make it again.

If you’re not measuring things that at least add up to the things they care about, if not actually are the things they care about, then your ability to impact like what you’re doing and making sure that you’re in alignment with leadership within your business is going to be very difficult as a marketer. If you’re getting the question, I don’t understand what marketing does and I don’t understand the impact it’s having on our business.

Somewhere there’s a disconnect between what you’re measuring and what their goals are So they have some idea of like this is where we want to go. These are the things we care about this is how we’re measuring success within our business and Whatever it is you’re measuring from a marketer standpoint Doesn’t make sense to them to the things they’re measuring. So what are some of the things that they might be measuring Sam? That we as marketers should be thinking about

Sam (12:05.774)
Yeah, so obviously you want hopefully you and your firm have, you know, vision strategic plan all mapped out and that is made clear not just to the to the leadership and the partners but to you as the marketing team. And sometimes we get into the weeds I know as marketers, you can get into the weeds of like, how many you know, how many views did this page get, we just set up a new landing page, how many people clicked through and how many how many new subscribers do we have on on our newsletter?

How many people listened to our podcast last month? And we can forget about the actual numbers that fuel a business, right? Like money, Mike. Like typically a business needs to make money, right? That and that is what, you know, that’s going to be a big way that you can get in front of your leadership if you’re having, you know, let’s say you’re having a tough time, like, man, you know, the partners of my firm just don’t make time to meet with me to share about their goals or to

Mike Jones (12:44.317)
Let’s be honest, it’s money.

Sam (13:04.238)
talk about what we’re actually measuring. Well, they’re going to care about the money. They’re going to care about the profit. They’re going to care about growth. they’re going to care about revenue. And so don’t forget that part of it. Like that shouldn’t be a conversation that’s only happening, you know, partner to partner. That should be a conversation you are in as a marketer, as the marketing team. certainly want to, you know, look at revenue percentage growth year over year.

is there a goal has your leadership given you a goal? Like, Hey, in two or three years, this is where we want to be revenue wise, giving you a goal to build up towards. and then company valuation. That’s a big deal, Mike, in the accounting industry. Obviously, that’s always going to be something I think in the back of partnership minds is what, what are we worth? What is our firm worth? It’s our company value.

And, and you know, if you can set up a framework for that, and tie that to marketing and your metrics, that’s going to be a big deal.

Mike Jones (14:12.541)
Yep. Yeah. And just thinking through like, you know, there’s a business level with these metrics. So like you think about profit, you think about the margin, the percentage margin that the business makes, you know, basic, basic math, right? It’s all the revenue you brought in, minus all the expenses, what’s left, right? That’s your margin. That’s your profit in the business. But if you also remember to for most accounting firms,

majority of your equity partners, if there are partners in the firm who have equity in the business, they own a piece of that business, some portion of their compensation is based on the profit that that company makes. Even if that’s as simple as like, hey, there’s some left at the end of the year, and they vote and say, we’re going to pay it out in dividends, right. And so just knowing like, there’s a business level, and then there’s a personal level. So if you’re working with partners, and you’re like, man, they’re they just seem really stressed out about the profit margin.

of the business right now. And you’re like, I was revenues great, we got lots of growth, like, why is this such a big deal? Well, they’re, they’re essentially their take home, right? What they’re making is probably contingent on that at some level. And you know, they could have other metrics that they really care about. Maybe they have a sales metric, they’ve got specific revenue numbers they need to hit. And so that matters to them as well.

You also want to kind of slice and dice this by like division. If you’re a larger accounting firm, and you’re looking at like, okay, we want to actually look at margin, not just a top line margin for the whole firm, but look at it. And same thing with revenue, but look at profit and revenue at a divisional level, right? So their service areas that, you know, are not doing as well. Well, that partner or those partners that we’re seeing that side of the business are probably going to be a little stressed out if you’re not driving leads for them.

because you’re not helping them deliver on the goals that they need to have. So thinking about not only at a holistic business level, but also at a divisional level, especially if you’re larger, you’ve got standalone service areas that maybe are held to their own P and L, that’s, you know, within the larger business P and L. and then as you mentioned, Sam company value, I just want to make it this, this one’s going to be a hard conversation. A lot of leadership teams and ownership.

Mike Jones (16:34.877)
may not want to let everybody know that company value really matters because it it may kind of allude to a fact maybe they’re looking to sell and that’s a scary option for a lot of firms especially for staff so but you know at the end of the day if you are in marketing you’re in the you’re in the business of business and you need to think like a business owner at some level you might not have equity in the firm

But you need to start thinking like someone who does. And one of the things that every single business owner thinks about is what is my exit plan? Whether that’s retirement, whether that’s, you know, I want to move on to something else down the road. I want to be able to do other things. But at some point, like there has to be an exit. So depending on your business model that your firm has and how it’s structured, they may be looking for some kind of big exit like like being acquired, right?

or merging up with other firms, in which case, the valuation of their firm matters, even if it’s not a direct sale. But it’s going to be in comparison to another firm, maybe if they’re doing a merger, or if they’re even acquiring, that can be part of the equation. Sometimes that’s a little less so on that side. And then, yeah.

Sam (17:52.366)
Yeah, it’s also you know and just to forlay some like fears around that that’s just a good that’s just a good way of like tracking over time the entire efforts of Marketing partnerships sales all of that is just a comprehensive. What is our firm actually worth?

Mike Jones (17:58.429)
You

Mike Jones (18:12.573)
Yep. And for the most part, that’s going to be roughly judged on your revenue growth, right? So total revenue plus or multiplied by some kind of like growth metric. So if it’s like, hey, over the last five years, we’ve seen 40 % growth year over year. Well, that’s better than if you know, a larger firm is doing, you know, doing a lot of revenue, more revenue than you, but they’re only growing at 3 % year over year. So

Sam (18:19.47)
Sure. Sure.

Mike Jones (18:41.885)
Like you’ll need to talk to your leadership team about how they’re measuring that. There’s a lot of different ways to do that. NPV is a pretty popular one. That would be one I would consider like at least being knowledgeable about and understanding that that’s probably a metric that your firm is looking at. A lot of your firms do valuations for your clients. So that’s probably pretty top of mind for, for a lot of accounting firms. And then one other metric that I just wanted to kind of caveat in here, just kind of sneak in here.

Sam (19:00.014)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (19:11.773)
is I think a lot of people don’t think about this unless they’re like in finance within businesses. And that is available cash. So cash on hand. And this is impacted both by the margin, the profit of the business and the total revenue. Those are two metrics that will feed into available cash. But the other metric that’s a part of available cash is how much do you spend, right? Your burn rate, essentially. So if you’re a marketer, especially if you have a team,

or you’re managing some kind of significant budget, particularly in a larger firm, your spend on marketing has a direct impact on available cash. And there’s a lot of reasons why your leadership team might want to have a measure of available cash. They might have goals around maybe acquiring another firm, in which case having available cash on hand makes that a lot easier. Maybe they have big capital investments they’re planning on doing, maybe they want to open a new office.

Maybe they want to move offices and do some kind of real estate play with that cash. There’s a lot of reasons beyond even those that they might want to hold on to or have a goal of establishing a certain level of available cash or increasing available cash. Having that kind of conversation with them around like, Hey, you know, I’m not going to necessarily sacrifice my marketing budget just so you can like, you know, have more cash on hand. But if you can help me understand like, Hey, we’re saving for something. Okay, well, well, maybe we can look at where we can cut some costs.

on the marketing side that aren’t going to like totally kill us in terms of the other goals we have like increasing revenue and increasing profit. You know, you got to spend in order to get right like that. Preach that till I’m dead probably. But like you you some portion of what you care about and what your leadership team cares about for sure is your actual spend. And is there ways that you can either spend less

and have same impact or spend more but have exponentially more impact on the other things that you’re shooting for. So just be considering that to available cash may be a measure that they’re looking at on a regular basis. All right, I want to talk about how well how do you measure like brand, right? And particularly inside your firm from the inside out, right? That’s kind of the theme that we’ve been harping on throughout all these episodes. But

Mike Jones (21:36.925)
How do you start inside and start measuring brand? Because at the end of the day, that’s what you’ve been working on, right? That’s kind of the ladder up to which you’re really trying to have impact is, hey, we want to increase the perception, the trust, the value that our brand holds in the marketplace. How do we start to measure that? And I think there’s some really key internal measures, Sam. Why don’t you give us a couple of those and we can chat about that.

Sam (22:02.446)
Yep. We’ve done this for our own agency and we’ve seen it work really well. And this might be something that you have to kind of shoehorn into maybe some monthly meetings or all hands meetings. You know, if you’re a larger firm, this might be an all hands Zoom call or Teams call, but having a consistent internal review of

your brand. So every month, if you’re meeting every month with the majority of your firm, taking one of your values or one of your personality traits or just doing a quick five minute overview of like, Hey, I know we look at this every month, but it’s important. Let’s just review. Let’s look at our values. Let’s look at our personality traits. And we’ve done a little exercise where it’s like, all right, everybody pick one. Or if you’re focusing on one, Hey, this value, how do we do this month?

Can you give us specific examples of how you live this out? Or maybe you saw a deficiency in this area and you’ve figured out like, I’m going to do this. Let’s share that with a team just to keep it top of mind. Sometimes you’re going to get eye rolls, but it’s important. And if you go over it and you review it, it’s top of mind and it’s there. Sometimes you can also go a little bit deeper. And if there’s, you know, let’s say, let’s say you’ve got a team that’s dedicated to a vertical.

All right, it’s your insurance team. It’s the team, you know, it’s two partners and some staff that focus and are experts in the insurance industry for your firm. Do a workshop with that team. Do a workshop with that team and break down specifically like, hey, how can we leverage our values, our personality traits and our brand anthem in this industry to really make us stand out? Those things can be really powerful. Those things can produce fun, creative things like messaging.

for those verticals and it all stems from again inside out it stems from that brand and then One thing that we’ve been doing a lot of Mike is just external reviews Talk to your clients talk to your customers Ask what they think are we living these out? Hey, did you even know these were our values or our traits? Do these make sense? Do you go? yeah, totally That’s you or do you say what absolutely not there’s no way that’s your value

Mike Jones (24:29.181)
Yep. Yeah. And there’s you can do, you know, quantitative and qualitative on all these, right? So at one level, like maybe like an employee NPS score that net promoter score based on your staff, right? Staff saying, Hey, how likely am I to refer this firm to a colleague for a job? Right? Same thing with your clients. How likely are you to refer our firm from a business standpoint? That’s a really good quality or quantitative measure.

Even within the values and personality traits when we talk about like assessing yourselves I would do that at probably at least three levels one would be at the at the whole brand level So asking all staff maybe annually or once a quarter or somewhere in between Hey, how are we doing as a company on? This value on a scale of one to ten right or pick a scale that you you kind of want to measure off of you got to hold that’s consistent over time so you can

set a baseline to start with and then move that over time. Do that for every one of your core values or your core beliefs. Do that for each one of your personality traits. How are we as an entire company doing from your perspective, right? From one staff person’s perspective. But then I’d also do it one layer down, which would be how are we as a team or a division, if you’ve got like big working groups, maybe around a particular service area, or if you’re broken down by vertical, or even an internal

team like marketing, right, or business development, or maybe back office team, right? How are we doing? Right? From your perspective on this team, how are we doing as a team on delivering this particular value? And then also at the individual level, how are you doing at delivering on these values? How are do you think your teammates are doing it? Like make that part of your annual review and your performance review.

That’s a really, really great way to start embedding measurement of your brand across the entire firm. And then again, doing that with the clients, you can do that through surveying, you can do that through interviews. I think a lot of firms do the surveying pretty well. Maybe expand some of your questions or maybe layer in every once in a while some questions that are more, less about service delivery, which is important. It’s really, really important and that client experience that you’re trying to deliver.

Mike Jones (26:53.693)
and more about the brand itself, right? We say we hold ourselves to this really high standard with this particular value. How have we done with that in your perspective, client? And I’d also just encourage you to think about interviews in that process beyond just the survey. Surveying is great. You can get a lot of aggregate data. You get some really good insights from that. See some patterns where things are, you know, maybe there’s some showing up to do, or maybe an area where it’s like, this is really strong. Maybe we need to lean into that even more.

But I think interviews give you a more qualified sense and maybe having a third party do that. And I’m not advocating that because we could be that third party, but just that you get different answers from a third party when they ask the questions and the client is talking to them. You might uncover some really, really fascinating insights from your clients when you ask them these questions in more of an interview process. And then you can go, well, why is that? Why did you answer it that way?

That’s harder to do in a survey and kind of ask the why and then ask it again and ask it again and get to like kind of the root of of why they’re saying something. That’s harder to do with a survey. It’s a lot easier to do in an interview. And then again, like you might get a more a more real honest answer if you’ve got some kind of third party asking those questions. But you’ll be able to assess that. You know, some of you have great relationships with your clients and

Sam (28:15.982)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (28:21.245)
they’d have no problem telling you full truth. All right. Yeah, yeah, go for it, Sam.

Sam (28:23.886)
Well Mike, should we talk about types of measurements? Types? And I’m not talking about typing like on your keyboard, I’m talking about the different kinds of measurement you can do.

Mike Jones (28:28.349)
man, there’s so many. There’s so many.

Mike Jones (28:37.277)
So glad you clarified. I was super confused.

Sam (28:38.99)
Yes, yeah, I could see it. I could see it on your face.

Mike Jones (28:42.813)
Yeah, well, I Yeah, I think one category that are two categories, I kind of jump right off the bat and talk about are just what I call brand versus marketing metrics. And I don’t know that there’s like a definition out there that would pose it this way. This is kind of my definition. To me, brand metrics are things that like, impact the overall perception of the firm.

your brand, right, the identity of your firm and the way that people perceive that identity, both internally with staff and then externally in the market. And I think there’s a bunch of metrics that are really, really helpful to start thinking about, you don’t have to measure all of them. But some of these might be really helpful for you to think about as brand metrics. And then I compare that to marketing metrics. Marketing to me is the metrics of marketing.

are a little bit more boots on the ground. There’s the things that are maybe more short term. You’re going to see them move around a lot from day to day or week to week. Your brand metrics probably not moving as much. Probably don’t have to measure them quite as often. But your marketing metrics are kind of more of that like day to day cycle, the day to day rhythms of marketing. That’s things like email, you know, metrics around your open rates, click throughs, website metrics, things on your social.

Maybe even just we’ll talk about this a little bit more when we get there, but Maybe even just like the activity of marketing itself So like are you writing and publishing articles on a regular basis? Do you measure that right? Do you measure how often you’re you’re executing on the activities that that your strategic plan and your marketing plan you’ve defined are important to you, but going back up to brand metrics I think these are are just

Sam (30:08.462)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (30:28.221)
So, so helpful to start thinking about and then maybe start measuring a couple. And if you want to layer in more over time, great. But these are the metrics that are going to start to align marketing to the business goals. So when we talk about sale or we talk about revenue, we talk about profit. We talk about even like company valuation. Sometimes as marketers, it’s really hard to be like, well, I don’t really control that. And

Sam (30:52.782)
Mm -hmm.

Mike Jones (30:53.309)
I’m not able to even measure it all the time. That’s someone else’s responsibility and I don’t have access to all the data to be able to measure that. But there are things that you can start to measure that you do probably have access to. And if you don’t, maybe this is a case to get access that ladder up to revenue and profit and company value. So those would be things like client loyalty. So your average customer lifetime value would be a great measure.

as a marketer to start to look at and go, okay, on average, how much total value do we get out of every client in our firm? Right. And so there’s a measure of length of tenure with your firm, as well as how much they give you in terms of revenue, how many services are they using with you? Are they growing over time? That kind of measure, you can do that across the board with all of the clients and get an average across all of them.

And that’s actually a really good starting measure for like how much impact are we having with our brand? That number should be moving up. If you are investing smartly in building your brand, right? They should, you should have clients that last longer, who do more revenue with you over time and, and still in your delivering more service, more opportunities to serve them over time. So a little bit of kind of loyalty in there.

A little bit of cross selling is involved with moving the needle on that. But that’s a great measure to start going, OK, I might not be able to measure the total margin of our business. I don’t have any control over what we spend overall as a business, but you do have some control over the messaging and the activities that communicate what we do, who we do it for, why it’s valuable to them so that

they can start to become longer term clients who do more work with you. Right. Some other ones, satisfaction, we can already covered this NPS, but even looking at your referrals, right? How many referrals are we getting? That’s a great measure of brand is like, Hey, are are we getting more and more referrals over time? Because we’re more and more trusted, and we’re being more and more specific. It is easier for people to refer new clients to you.

Mike Jones (33:16.477)
whether that’s through a referral source or an existing client, when they know exactly who you serve and exactly how you best serve them. The more specific you can be with your marketing, the more opportunity you give to people to go, I know what your firm does and who you do it for. And so when I meet someone or I run into somebody, I can like judge whether or not they’re a good fit for you. And I can make the referral rather than just this like the shotgun approach, which honestly doesn’t work.

people have a really hard time making referrals for companies they don’t understand. If they’re like, you’re really broad, I don’t understand who you serve, it’s not specific enough, you’re just not gonna get a lot of referrals. Another measure would be your pricing, right? So great brands over time deliver same level of product, same types of service, right, for higher prices. Are you able to increase prices as a company?

That’s a measure of your brand. So look at that. Maybe start measuring that. What are the prices? Are they increasing over time? Are we able to increase them over time without losing client like without losing all your clients or not being able to acquire new clients? Another measure that you could probably start to measure if you’re not already is sales volume per advertising dollar. Right. So for every dollar you put into marketing or advertising,

you want to slice it at the marketing level, great. If you want to be more narrow, just look at advertising dollars. For every dollar you spend on marketing, are you getting more and more back in terms of sales, right? Great brands deliver same or more sales for less dollars, right? Lesser brands have to work harder. And you’ll see that in the fact that they have to spend more on advertising. Some of that is like, you

You know, if you’re having if all your acquisition is through paid media, it’s really expensive. It’s really expensive. If your acquisition of clients is coming through referrals, it’s coming through word of mouth. It’s coming through organic, right? So like SEO, if you think about it that way, because of your reputation, because of the brand that you’ve built, people are talking about you, they’re hearing about you, the PR is working, then you don’t have to spend quite as much ad dollars to get the same number of

Mike Jones (35:42.461)
eyeballs. So that’s what we’re kind of talking about there. Similarly, you can do cost per acquisition, right? Like how much does it cost you to acquire a new client? Or if you don’t want to work at the client level, maybe you don’t have access, or it’s not easy to get access sometimes, especially smaller firms, if you’re not tracking your deals very well and your client acquisition.

Sometimes it’s easier to measure at the lead level. You probably know when the lead comes through. You might not know when the deal gets signed. So, you know, cost per acquisition could be at the at the lead level. And then this is kind of a little outside of the normal thought on, you know, how do you measure brand? But to some degree, awards is another measure of brand. You know, and I get it. There’s a game to be played with awards. A lot of them are like pay to win.

Sam (36:10.958)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sam (36:35.47)
Mm -hmm.

Mike Jones (36:35.613)
So be careful which ones you’re measuring. I wouldn’t measure quantity. I’d maybe pick a few and say, Hey, how frequently can we win this award within this category? I mean, it’s like best workplace. So that’s more of an internal measure of, you know, your staff and their perception of the brand. Maybe there’s something external within a specific industry that you’re focused on a vertical that you’re focused on. Think about that in terms of a measure of brand.

I don’t know if Sam, did you have anything else on this category?

Sam (37:06.926)
Yeah. So going back to like cost per acquisition, what you could be doing there that would be really interesting is if you’re tracking that over time, you could have some correlation, right? Of like, this month, like our cost per acquisition went way down. Like what happened? What did we do? yeah. Two of our partners attended a trade show. wow. That’s crazy. You know, like just things like that, where it’s like over time, you can start connecting some of those dots and saying, Hey,

we’re going to spend less on our AdWords and more on sending partners to trade shows. And those are the types of measurements where it’s like, yes, now we’re finally getting like the right insights and we can, we can be actionable on these things, right? And it’s not always going to be perfect, but you can start to do some of those things with this data that you’re starting to track over time. And you’re seeing like, there was a big dip there or there was a big jump there. And that’s when you can really start to use those insights.

for actionable items.

Mike Jones (38:04.893)
Yeah, you know, I can get he can get nuts with like trying to track everything. But if you have the ability, if you have the ability, maybe think about like, hey, every single activity we do, we need to create some kind of measurement tracking on it. So everything down to like, okay, if you got partners going to an event, traditionally, it’s like really hard to track the measurement from that. Even simple things like they’re speaking, right? Put a QR code.

in the deck with your main call to action and really incentivize people to use that QR code right in that deck, whether it’s like downloading the deck, right? Maybe that’s all it is. It’s a slide that says download this deck and here’s the QR code. You can do it right now. It’s really easy. That’s trackable. You can set that up in such a way where it’s like, we know exactly how many people access that QR code at that event. And then

that makes it a little bit clearer as you kind of ladder all the way up to some of these really high level things of like revenue, profit, cost per acquisition, client loyalty, right? Now we can start to measure like, well, which activities are having the most impact? That’s a lot of work. You can do it without doing that. You can do some kind of gut analysis, right? Like you just said, Sam, like take a timeline, you know, cost per acquisition went, went down, which is great. You know, you want your cost per acquisition to go down over time, hopefully.

it went, it dipped here. So what activity were we doing? And if you’re a small firm or you’re a small team, a marketing team, you probably know, probably have an idea. that was like June 15th, 2024. yeah. We were doing this event or we sent this email out or, we had this other activity. and sometimes you’ll be surprised actually start measuring things like, what activities are actually working and which ones are like just not having any of.

on the things that matter. Sam, we have been having too much fun on this episode and we have only made it like a third of the way through what we wanted to talk about. And I think we’re going to go to an episode. We’re going to have to do a second episode on this one. Yeah.

Sam (40:17.902)
Absolutely, yeah. I was thinking that 20 minutes in, Mike. I’m like, there’s just no way. There’s no way we’re gonna cover it all. I think that’s a great idea. What do we have to look forward to on part two of this measurement episode?

Mike Jones (40:21.917)
Hahaha!

Classic.

Mike Jones (40:31.677)
Yes. So part two, I think is going to be all about the marketing metrics. What are those like day to day metrics that you need to start measuring if you’re not already? There’s some, I want to talk about activity. So like beyond like, okay, a lot of metrics tend towards like client behavior, client acquisition, the prospect or the client’s activity. And then you’re measuring how they’re responding to your campaigns and to your content and to all your marketing activity. I want to also talk about just

how valuable it is to measure your own activity as a marketer or your marketing team, right? So things like, are you publishing? How often are you publishing? What frequency are you publishing? Are you getting long enough in terms of long form content? Like, hey, we published, you know, 80 ,000 words over the last year. That’s kind of cool. Now, you know, you got to link that to something that matters, but we’ll talk more about that next time.

Sam (41:28.974)
Yeah. Yep.

Mike Jones (41:30.749)
we’re going to talk about how to measure quality and creativity, which I think is a very missed opportunity for almost every firm. and we’re going to talk about some vanity metrics that maybe don’t matter. and some concerns that we have around some ways that you might be thinking about gathering data, maybe too much data. and then how do you make sense of it all? Right. You got all this data, you’re measuring all these things. What do I even do with all of it?

Sam (41:43.534)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (42:00.637)
Right? It’s kind of the inverse of like, how do I know what’s working? Well, now it’s like, it’s all there’s so much measurement, I don’t even know what to do with it all. We got to make some decisions now. So how do I do that? That’s what we cover next time.

Sam (42:14.734)
Fantastic. Looking forward to it, as always.

Mike Jones (42:16.125)
Awesome. Me too. I’ll see you on the next one, Sam.

Sam (42:21.134)
All right, I’ll see you there, Mike.

Sam (42:26.894)
All right.