[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
Welcome back to our SPECIAL EDITION podcast series about how to market your online business in a time of crisis.
(This series comes in response to what’s happening worldwide with the recent COVID-19 outbreak.)
Listen to Special Edition 1: Episode 160 right here.
Listen to Special Edition 2: Episode 161 right here.
Before we dive into this episode, I want to remind you of 3 ways Team Hirsh is offering additional support throughout the next weeks (and ongoing!) –
- This Special Edition Podcast Series will have daily episodes to support your biggest marketing + business strategy decisions, starting now until all your questions are answered! SUBSCRIBE right here.
- Starting March 20, we will release a Special Edition Hirsh Marketing Report every week to share specific ads strategies, results, and behind-the-scenes information. (If you don’t want to wait until Friday afternoon…. you can SIGN UP for our monthly marketing report and we will send you the weekly report as soon as it is released!)
- And we’re opening up our Hirsh Marketing Insiders Facebook group where I’ll offer additional free video trainings and take your individual questions about marketing strategy and ads! JOIN the group right here.
Note – All these resources are FREE, because we want you to have everything you need to make the best decisions in the coming days, weeks, and months.
Now, let’s dive into today’s topic – the importance of data-driven decision making for your online business.
I want to remind you that, marketing is all about numbers.
Especially right now, it’s important to lean into what YOUR numbers are telling you to do…
But, what numbers should you pay attention to? And what do they mean?
In this episode, I’ll lay out 3 steps to daily tracking, plus what each number *might* indicate for your next steps. (Jump to 5:33 to dive right into Step 1!)
Remember – I’m talking about following YOUR numbers here (every business will be slightly different). While it’s important to also consider the marketplace as a whole, always listen to your numbers first…
In this 15-minute deep dive into data-driven marketing, I’ll share…
- Exactly what numbers you should be tracking first, second, third (+what they mean)
- Where to start if you’ve never tracked numbers before
- And how to simplify your decision-making, now and in the future
If you want 1:1 support in clarifying your marketing strategy through this crisis, we’ve also opened up additional strategy calls specifically for this reason. Head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply!
And if you have a special request for a future episode in this series, please send me a DM on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) or email team@emilyhirsh.com.
Listen to episode 145, “Let Your Numbers Tell A Story,” for more about leaning into the data to make better decisions with your marketing.
Listen to episode 12, “Everything You Need To Be Looking At Weekly In Your Marketing,” for more about our weekly reporting recommendations.
Listen to episode 9, “What You Need To Be Tracking Daily With Your Facebook Ads,” for more about our daily reporting recommendations.
Key Points:
[2:49] Here’s why following the data matters, especially right now
[5:33] Start with cost per click. Here’s what to do when cost per click starts to increase
[8:06] Then, track that first step in your funnel (whatever it is for you)
[9:49] Okay – now, track the next step…
[11:32] 3 steps to data-driven decision making (in this order!)
[12:46] The marketing decisions you need to make might be more SIMPLE than you think
[14:14] Everything is about data (it’s not just marketing)
Subscribe To & Review The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast
Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.
Episode Transcripts:
Emily Hirsh: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to our current special edition series, daily series through this crazy time, and just going over marketing and marketing tips right now. I hope you guys are having an okay week, given the circumstances, and how thrown off you probably are from your regular routine. It’s funny, I’ve seen so many posts about, in your extra time watch these courses or read these books. And I’m like, what extra time? I have all my kids. I have all my kids home and a newborn baby. I can’t even get regular work done during this time. Let alone have extra time. I was joking with my husband last night, I was like, do you know how nice it sounds to be quarantined for two weeks with no kids? We would sleep, we would watch movies, that actually sounds like a vacation right now.
So, I love my kids, but oh my gosh. And we don’t have a nanny right now. Unfortunately, our nanny had to leave us when my newborn baby was two-weeks-old. So things are crazy and I’ve also committed to recording daily podcast episodes when my house is loud and I have a baby who barely lets me leave its side or leave my side. So if things are crazy in your world and especially if you have kids, then I am with you on that and I hope you are surviving. It’s very hard for me to be out of my routine and not have predictability. And it feels like every single day right now is no routine, no predictability, like survival.
Yeah. Anyways, so today, in today’s special edition episode, I am diving into following data versus your emotions during this time. And I did touch on this a little bit in yesterday’s episode, if you want to go back and listen to that, but especially if you haven’t to any of my episodes that are specifically about marketing and numbers and reporting and tracking. I want to just talk about this, because it’s so important right now. And if you have listened to those, I want this to just be a reminder for you, and like a fresh touch-up because I think this is critical for everybody right now in their marketing.
So when I go speak or talk to somebody or even if we bring a client in who’s been managing their own ads or who’s had a previous agency or ads team, the consistent thing I see is most everybody, 90% plus of everybody is missing solid reporting and numbers. Is missing tracking data and making decisions based on data. And I think that’s actually going to get more intense through this time than it has been in the past. I think that we’re going to see more people make decisions not based on data because emotions are high, because chaos is high, because overwhelm is high.
So I want this to remind you of first make sure you are making decisions based on data, but also what are you looking for? What is that data? And just a reminder of what that daily and weekly tracking should look like in your marketing right now, if you’re not already doing it. So I like to say at the end of the day, marketing is numbers, and we should be making decisions based on those numbers. I often times will get asked or even ask my team like, hey, what do you guys think about this strategy? Or do you think this will work? And most of the time, the only way you’re going to know the answer to that is by just doing it, testing it, getting numbers, and then making a decision. And the mistake we make is we try to predict a perfect strategy or make a change or change a scenario or something based on what we think is the answer and our emotions behind that answer or our opinions behind that answer.
And that is not the way to look at your marketing and make decisions. Because at the end of the day, your audience and your potential customers and your customers are going to tell you the moves you need to make and the things you need to change and what is and isn’t working. So, right now as you’re marketing during this time, which if you listen to my episode yesterday, which was marketing during this time of panic and chaos, you should be watching your numbers and you shouldn’t pull back your marketing unless your numbers tell you to do that or tell you that you need to pivot or change strategy or make a shift. You should continue marketing.
And so what are the numbers that you’re looking for? You are looking for the following things. I’m going to go through kind of what our tracking process, like a high level of what our tracking process looks like, and this is how I’m able to get on, every day right now I get on our team huddle and I ask my team, we have a slide for updates, and I ask my team, okay guys, what are you seeing? What are you seeing in the backend? What numbers are you seeing? Are you seeing any changes? Are you seeing any red flags? Are you seeing cost go up? Are you seeing cost go down? And they’re able to instantly give me examples and numbers and data. And the reason they are is we track it every day. They fill out a daily tracker. And so immediately if something is off, we know and that is the key with your ads.
So every day you should be tracking your ad and your funnel results and every funnel is going to be a little bit different. But what you need to do is have main metrics for throughout your funnel that you’re tracking. Most people, it’s going to start with a click, the cost-per-click of your ad. There’s a lot of other ad stats you can track. There’s the click through rate, impressions, there’s different stats you can track that can be overwhelming. But, I like looking at the minimum, the cost-per-click, because if you see that starting to rise, it means it’s the ad or the targeting. But right now, if you saw your cost-per-click start to go up on your ad, you could assume that either you need to change the messaging or the copy because it’s not resonating with people in the newsfeed right now, given everything that’s going on, or it’s your ads are basically getting more expensive. And you should be able to catch that almost immediately.
So if you’re watching that every day, and honestly putting it into a spreadsheet, because just kind of watching it in your head and being like, “Oh, this looks like it went up a little bit,” is not going to work. My ads managers write that down every day in their daily tracking, in a spreadsheet for our clients. So write down that cost-per-click because then you can see a trend. You can look at the last seven days and if you were tracking it like our ads managers are, we can compare last month to this month for a client’s funnel. And we’re able to make that comparison to see where the stats change. So your cost-per-click tells you a lot. It tells you is the ad not continuing to work? Is the ad cost rising? And do you need to make an adjustment? And then when you make that adjustment, if the cost-per-click goes down, great, you solved the problem for now.
The next thing you’ll need to track is whatever that first step is. So if you’re sending somebody to buy something, it will be the cost per purchase, and that conversion of that purchase, or if you’re sending somebody to an opt-in or a webinar funnel, it’s going to be that cost-per-lead, cost-per-webinar registration and the conversion of number of people who clicked to people who took that first action, whatever that first action is in your funnel. And so every day my ads managers are writing down for every single funnel, either the cost-per-lead, cost-per-webinar registration or the cost-per-purchase. And that’s actually automatically calculating the conversion rate because we put in the number of conversions compared to the number of clicks and we can get a conversion rate. So again, that’s something that you can see. Is it trending?
Is it changing? Is that going up? Is my cost-per-purchase or my cost-per-webinar registration going up? And is it going up because my click is rising? Or is it going up because people are still clicking my ad, but they’re not taking an action? And then you can make adjustments as needed. Right now, is it, do you need to change the positioning of something? If you change the position of your ads, let’s say, and that got the clicks down, but then they’re getting to the landing page and they’re not taking action, do you need to change actually some copy on that landing page and the positioning on that landing page to connect and have them either buy or opt in or sign up for your webinar. The data is going to tell you the answer. The data’s going to tell you what you need to do.
So you’re going to track the clicks, you’re going to track that first step. How many people are taking action, costs to take the action, and the conversion of people clicking versus taking action. And then you’re going to track the next step. So for some people, if it’s a purchase funnel, they have an upsell, they have something else they’re selling down the funnel, or if it’s an opt-in or a webinar, are they taking action on the webinar? Are they buying? Are they buying the product and how much is it costing you to get a customer? How many people are converting? And we can, with that number, so if we say, “Okay, we got 100 people in our webinar and two bought.” We have a conversion rate. We have our conversion rate of 2%. if you’re tracking that, you’re going to have that number day-over-day.
And so every day my ads managers are tracking those numbers. The next step in the funnel, which is where a lot of time the profit comes in. So it’s where if someone buys on the webinar, that’s where we make money. If someone buys the upsell in a product funnel, that’s where we make the money. So you’re also tracking that. Is that going up or down? Is that shifting? Is that changing? Again, is it a messaging thing? Are people not buying for some reason right now? Do you need to shift the way you’re positioning the offer? Do you need to shift the actual offer you’re offering or the way that you position the problem that it solves? The numbers will tell you the answer to this. So, those are the high level numbers that you should market. Now, if you’re in an eCommerce funnel, really your biggest thing is, what is the cost you’re paying for a sale?
And you also should know what’s the max that you can pay. And if you’re going over your max, you’ve got to figure out what the problem is. Is it messaging? Is it your ads? Is it actually because right now you need to pull back your marketing. The numbers are going to tell you the answer to that, and that’s the summary of this episode, is one, start tracking your numbers right now, if you’re not. If you’re spending money on ads and you’re not tracking your numbers, stop listening to this episode and go set up a tracker. We actually are going to have something soon that we will be selling our trackers, our ads checkers, which took us literally years to make. They’re amazing. Years of revisions and updates and modifications. Two, so one, track the numbers. Two, look at the numbers, start making comparisons day-over-day. And then three, make decisions.
People are usually doing that backwards, they’re making decisions. Then maybe looking at the numbers, if they even look at the numbers, and they’re not even tracking them. That’s how most people are doing that. And it’s okay if you’re doing that. I’m not saying you are terrible for doing that. Usually the reason why people are doing that is they don’t have the help or the knowledge to do it and they’re trying to run ads without enough support or expertise behind them to be able to track it. But if you have an agency who’s not tracking your numbers and giving you data, get away from them. You can’t. You have to have that to be able to make decisions. And so breathe, slow down, track those numbers, review those numbers and then make decisions off of that.
And the decisions might be simple. For example, you might see the cost-per-click is going up on my ads right now. So that probably means I need some different copy and messaging to connect with my audience during this time. And that’s perfectly fine. If you’re able to do that, that’s a quick fix. That doesn’t mean turn off all my ads, pull back my ad spend, quit, freak out, what if I go out of business? That type of mentality. It just means, I need to get some … change my copy on my ads, or change my creative, see if I can bring that cost-per-click down. And if everything’s still continues to convert. Do you see how much easier it is to go at your ads from that angle versus this overwhelm, emotional, what should I do?
I’m freaking out about my money and my spending. Right now, is not what you should do. So, follow that data. Marketing is numbers. Don’t give in to those emotions and that overwhelm, and that panic, and what other people are saying on social media, and what people are telling you what to do. I’m not sitting here telling you how to market during this time exactly, because it’s going to be different for your business.
You need to look at your numbers and then make the decisions based on those numbers. And the decisions for everyone are going to be different. For every one of our clients, we’re going to have to shift different things, adapt different things, accommodate change different things based on their audience, their offer, their funnel, their business. And that’s the same for you. So, hopefully this grounded you guys a little bit. You really shouldn’t, can’t make decisions without data.
And honestly, this actually goes into other parts of your business too. For me, sales. If the sales conversion rates changing, it’s going to tell me something in my business. If the number of applicants for our jobs that we’re hiring for changes, right? It’s data. Everything, we can make decisions off of data in our company, including marketing. And so make sure that you don’t skip over that. First step is to track it. If you’re not tracking it, start tracking it now. And what’s cool is after, once we get through this couple of months of craziness, we’re going to have data of what happened through it.
So cool. And we’ll be sharing a lot of the data in the Hirsh Marketing Report that we’re releasing weekly now. So if you go to hirshmarketingreport.com, if you’re not already subscribed to my email list and subscribe to the Hirsh Marketing Report, you’re going to want to do that, because every week we’re going to put out a special edition Hirsh Marketing Report that’s going to be data driven on the numbers we’re seeing right now. What they mean, how you need to adapt your marketing based on that, different strategy ideas and concepts we’re implementing for our clients. That could give you ideas based on the industry that you’re in.
All of that will be super valuable information, data-driven information, so if you want to get access to that, you can go to hirshmarketingreport.com. Otherwise, I will see you guys all here tomorrow for the next daily episode. Thank you. And all of you guys, take care of yourself. Stay healthy, stay sane right now. We can do this together. I am here for you. We are here for each other and I am grateful for that.