#042 – The Magic of Metrics - Dangerously Good Stories

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#042 – The Magic of Metrics

March 12, 2019

If you’re anything like me, you don’t want to waste your time when it comes to how you show up in your business.

When you sit down and get to work, you wanna *know* your time and effort are gonna give you a return.

With some actions, you probably you find yourself asking, “Why bother?” but you do it anyway, because you feel like you “should” — it’s what everyone else is doing and you’re afraid you’ll miss out on an opportunity if you don’t.

For example, you spend 35 minutes coming up with an IG post: 10 minutes on what to say, another 10 to find or make the perfect image, and another 15 writing the caption + sprinkling in emojis, an engaging Q, and hashtags.

Then, Lord knows how much time you spend checking the response.

Now, I don’t mean to pick on IG. The point is:

It’s a problem if you’re actions stem from the *hope* that you’ll do X and create a customer.

Don’t you want more predictability? More clients and customers aligned with your brand — the people who feel like your best clients or customers?

Operating in hope-mode costs you from maximizing your time on actions + predictability.

Today we’re covering the Magic of Metrics, so that your time + efforts come with less “hope” and more results.

Enjoy the story.

In the last episode, we talked about 7 Symptoms of Business Self-Sabotage, so definitely give that a listen to hone in on how you’re showing up in your business.

What are metrics?

Do you track them?

Metrics are the result of a specific action. I’ll give you a bunch of ideas of things to track here shortly, but what I want you to take away more than anything is to create a central place for all your data and a system to make sure you’re checking in with it.

I break up what I track into categories:

  • Intentions
  • Brand Growth
  • Lead & Revenue Systems- which, for me, is start to finish of any given revenue stream
  • Processes – time it takes for us to complete a process to help us save time and be more efficient (i.e. finding + publishing a story on F&F)

Speaking of…

_______________

Did you know F&F is actively looking for new stories to publish on our website?

This is your invitation to submit a story for consideration, friend!

We’re looking for stories from ALL walks in life – not just what we mostly see with stories of parents & little ones – but ALL walks in life. Extended Family. Traditions. Experiences. Friendship. Love and Partnerships. Community. Seasons of highs and lows and everything in-between.

Your stories or, if you’re a photographer, client stories.

We want to see how you documented a super specific story of something you value.

You can share one photo or many or maybe you don’t even have a photograph. Maybe it’s a story you *wish* you would have recorded.

Your stories serve readers by reminding them of parts of their lives they may be overlooking, giving them the opportunity to respond.

We’re also looking for new stories that show us how you’re using your preservation pieces to connect with your loved ones.

Email us with a quick story synopsis, a link to a Dropbox folder or gallery if you have photos, and a link to the full story (Google Doc) for consideration. Or fill out the form here.

Our Director of Stories, Dreama Spence, and I would love to hear from you!

________________

So what we’re going to do is go through the what + the why behind each of those categories, again:

  • Intentions
  • Brand Growth
  • Lead & Revenue Systems
  • Processes (Business Ops)

And I’ll give you a whole bunch of ideas of what you can start tracking.

INTENTIONS

I’m pausing to see what’s been going on and setting a light plan for what’s ahead.

When? I’m tracking intentions: Daily, Weekly, & Monthly.

Monthly reflection + planning session with myself that takes a few hours.

You can actually follow along as I round up my intentions & my prior months’ results (see link under more goodness). In the next episode, I’ll walk you through an example month. Here, I’m giving you the meat & potatoes on the how-to behind setting this up.

I use a few things to set intentions:

  • PowerSheets by Cultivate What Matters
  • Reflect & Thrive Report by Kyla Roma
  • Madness Planner by Method to the Madness
  • My own brain stream of ideas
  • Toggl

Daily & weekly are much shorter versions that help me break the intentions down into small steps. I ask questions like:

  • “What happened this week / today?”
  • “What’s going on? How am I feeling right now?”

Tracking intentions isn’t to point out what you didn’t do in a nagging, less than feel-good kind of way, but it sheds a bright light on where your time is spent and gives you the opportunity to ask WHY something didn’t get done, so you can adjust accordingly.

For example, I wanted to do a writing challenge this month where I write everyday for 28 days. Nope. I didn’t make it a priority or take it seriously. Saying yes to everything else said no to this.

Doing this process also helps me better prepare for things like the kids being home from breaks, etc.

What to track:

  • Goals & Intentions: both business & personal
  • Milestones & Events: what happened outside of your intentions. Example—January problem: fake subscribers, did an overhaul on our main email sequence
  • Time: Per Toggl I worked 118 hours in January. This told me I spent 18 hours doing bookkeeping! Tracking time also tells me how many hours I may need when I hire another community manager based on how many hours I’m doing the work. I typically record the Top 5, because tracking is pointless if you’re not actually reading it. Tracking time also calls me out for NOT doing the PR work (a task I need to do more of). TRY IT.
  • Ongoing Brain Stream list of ideas

BRAND GROWTH

I’m paying attention to our overall numbers + impact.

Right now, I’m using my bound Reflect & Thrive Report from Kyla’s program to store everything. In the past, I used a planner for entrepreneurs. You can use a spreadsheet.

I check in with this monthly.

Here’s what I’m looking at:

  • Who have I / F&F helped? How?
  • Content published & shared. I use notebook oriented calendars by TF Publishing.
  • Google Analytics: Install and use Google Analytics if you haven’t already! I integrated it with my website and my checkout software, Samcart
  • Website Traffic Numbers: Page views and unique visitors
  • Website User Behavior: Most viewed pages on the website & what content my audience is most-interested in, so that I put more energy into pages eyeballs are actually on—making sure those pages are actionable by inviting readers to the next step I want them to take. Measure it.
  • Where traffic comes from
  • Email subscriber count
  • Social media follower account
  • Top Pinned content
  • Email responses & social comments that give you insight to Dreamies
  • Revenue for EACH revenue stream & Expenses “I spent X on _____”
  • Launches (Episode 021: All About Launching with Kyla Roma): dedicated time period hyper-focused on ONE specific offer. Lately, that’s the 7 Day Storyteller’s Challenge or The Preservation Project, for example. I’m monitoring the entire chain of events.
  • Revenue Action List
  • Important Contacts

LEAD & REVENUE SYSTEMS

Every single one of your offers—class, ebook, service, products, etc.—is a part of a bigger system whether you’ve created the system intentionally or not.

For my documentary photographer listeners, creating this is exactly what you DO in my Mastery Moment-Seekers program.

Your Lead & Revenue System(s) starts with intentionally crafted content and all the pieces that follow leading your potential client or customer to your offer.

There’s a lot of moving parts and a lot worth paying attention to!

Potential clients & customers are seeing a social media post, an article on your site, an opt-in page, emails, your sales page (investment page). Inquiry calls or events offline.

So what you want to do is track the behavior that’s happening throughout.

You want to know where someone stops paying attention or when they’re practically rabid for MORE.

So, what I’ve started to do—it costs a little money, but worth it—is create bound + printed System Books that show the system in chronological order.

I’ve screen grabbed everything—from social posts, website content, any pages they hit, the full email sequence, everything—to put inside of this little bound book that I have printed by FedEx Office.

I can measure traffic, conversations, engagement, sales, all of it and it’s all in one place.

It’s helpful too to see a bird’s-eye view to measure the cohesiveness, take notes, and get messy with what I can to do make small tweaks to the system.

What to track:

  • Deep dive into your dream clients & customers: who are they?
  • Story bank – timeless content
  • Traffic to every interaction: content, landing page, sales page
  • Conversion rate for opt-in & sales (500 people visit your sales page and 5 buy = 1% conversation rate)
  • Email open & click rates
  • Why did you / didn’t you buy
  • Why are you here?
  • How did you find me?

PROCESSES

A couple types of processes:

  • Onboarding: the system in place for AFTER a customer buys.
  • Internal steps for business operations: Loom video to record business how-to’s and store the links in a Google Doc

When: Onboarding – when focused on serving & growing your offer. Internal steps: as you do them, record them.

What to track:

  • Inquiry process
  • New customer or client welcome
  • FAQ’s / email swipe file
  • Processes for publishing stories, Honestly Documented, VIP Contributor List, filling up Sendible & Tailwind
  • PR – pitching to other brands
  • Create a How-to document for your business of tasks that can be handed off

Closing Thoughts

How do I have time for this? I make time for this.

What if I’m not a planner? What if I don’t track things? I’ll never remember. It’s hard to be consistent.

Well, it’s hard to waste your time. Testimony to tracking:

There’s definitely time for experimenting, but most of my actions, now, are intentional. I can guess the results before they happen. I know, if I fill up my Sendible queues, my email subscriber rates will nearly double.

Do you have that predictability in your business ops? A better question, what’s the cost of NOT having that predictability?

It goes back to that old adage of: choose your hard.

Example: the Toggl app. I thought I’d have a hard time remembering! I practiced. Now it’s a habit.

I’ll link below to a book in the show notes that’s brilliant on creating habits.

Reflection Question:

What piece of your business would be MOST valuable to start measuring FIRST?

I gave you a whole lot and if you haven’t been recording your metrics, it probably feels like a boatload of work. So just pick one thing and begin.

More goodness:

Some links below are affiliate links.

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