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Hello, and welcome back to the Bilna Sandeep show. In today’s episode, we will be exploring the all-important topic of marketing metrics, what works and what doesn’t. We’ll look at why some metrics are deemed vanity, whereas others offer real tangible results for your business. Get ready to learn about performance indicators, ROI and optimizing your digital campaigns for success.
Ok, let’s dive in.
So let’s get into the topics of vanity metrics, performance marketing, revenue, ROI and these things which you might have almost always heard about from marketers like us. Before we go into it, I want to start off with a story.
My Brand Story
It’s a little story about how my brand started growing, and I think while I’m recording here today, it is the end of the year. It’s raining outside, and it’s not very common to see rain in Dubai. I’m so happy that it looks kind of moody outside. But I don’t know. Rains are always my favourite thing and I kind of feel really good when I see it raining outside. I’m in that very nice mood, and I just announced something on my Instagram stories about the rebranding we are doing for our marketing agency.
So by the time this episode is out, you will all already know about all the rebranding stories. But let me give you a bit of a background about what it is. So you might all have seen one of the Instagram pages, which we have; it’s called @homepreneurs.
So the story about that Instagram page is that I started it back in 2013, that’s like 8-9 years ago, right? And at that time I was taking a career break. And for those of you who do not know, I am a civil engineer. I used to work full-time in construction as a quantity surveyor, and while I was taking a break, that was because my son was small, he was one year old, and I was getting a lot of mommy guilt, and I just wanted to spend at least a year with my son.
The Itch to Work
And what happened at that time was that I realised that it was not the right time for me to be at home. And that’s when I decided I would start off writing blogs online. And then, because of that, I started getting a lot of collaborations from different mommy brands and different kids brands, coming to me to collaborate as a mom blogger. And that is how life was at that time.
And during those times, I started getting a lot of requests from a lot of small business owners, especially other moms who were running businesses from their homes, they were asking me if I could help them in marketing their businesses, and at that time, Instagram was not really a thing and most of the home-based businesses, they were running their pages on Facebook, and that’s how they were marketing their product.
So I decided to start off an Instagram page at that time to feature these businesses and that is how the @homepreneurs page was born at what that was the time when Instagram was slowly growing and penetrating the market, and I started this homepreneurs page and I started featuring small business owners, very talented women from different parts of the world on the page. It was more like a curated page and I had no clue what I was doing with that page.
Meanwhile, I was also trying to help a few women in managing their Facebook pages but what happened was within a month’s time, I realised it was not something that I could do without any sort of external help. It was driving me nuts.
It was driving me crazy and I stopped offering any such marketing services and I also shut down the account. When I say shut down, I just paused it and I didn’t go back to it.
A Restart
But two years back when I started off with my Instagram coaching, it was a course which I had launched at the same time. I launched this page again, and I started attracting a lot of small business owners to that page. A lot of women started following the page. I started sharing a lot of tips, a lot of small business tips, and the page was growing quite quickly, and I think in one year’s time, we hit almost 10K followers on Instagram on that page, but that was also the time when we started Homepreneurs Club.
Homepreneurs Club – Guest Trainers
So the Homepreneurs Club is my monthly membership program for women-owned businesses and there we bring in a lot of guest trainers from different industries who are related to marketing or who are related to business coaching, business consulting and even some of them are accountants who could give advice on bookkeeping and different aspects of running a small business.
That is what we used to cover in these webinars. And members who are part of the platform, they also get recordings of all the webinars right from the beginning and they get to learn at their own pace. Plus we were also developing a community around it. But I realised what happened at that time was the @homepreneurs page, which I was managing, it was all over the place. It wasn’t really focused. So I had to move on to a page, where there was a separate page where I could focus on helping the women who had joined the Homepreneurs Club.
So right now we have around 50 members in our Homepreneurs Club and I wanted to have a space online on Instagram where I could actually start featuring these club members as well as attract more club members into our membership platform. For that I realized the @homepreneurs page which I was having was not really enough because by that time we had already started a marketing agency as well and everything was getting mixed up. So that is when I decided to launch a separate Instagram page for Homepreneurs Club, and what happened after that was that the Homepreneurs Agency was a marketing agency only.
Check out this podcast: How to know if your Business is READY to Scale?
Time to Rebrand
And then I realized that name was no more relatable because we were offering only marketing agency services which were more on social media marketing and different other forms of marketing. So yes, that is when we decided to rebrand completely and that is how growwie.com was born, GROWWIE.com. So that is our new website. If you go in now, you might see a coming soon page only. But we have changed our Instagram handles accordingly and we have already now …by the time this episode is out, we will have already announced it to the world as well.
Why I Decided to Launch Growwie
But that was not the only reason why we decided to launch Growwie. Over the last one year, we have helped around 15 business owners with their social media marketing and some of them we have helped with running ads and a lot of performance marketing-based strategies as well. But what happened is that I realised the people who were coming to us first asking for social media management, but the problem was that a lot of them were so much focused on vanity metrics.
Vanity Metrics
When I say vanity metrics, it’s more about metrics like, what do you say? The number of followers, the number of views on their reels, the reach on their post, these were the kind of things most of these clients were obsessed with. And, as a marketer, I was feeling that crunch, I was feeling suffocated, because what was happening was, of course we could give them these vanity metrics but I knew from inside my mind that these vanity metrics are not always going to give them good revenue, right?
Performance Marketing Vs Vanity Metrics
So with the pressure coming on from the clients, they were always looking for more vanity metrics, and I realised I had to take a step back and tell the clients because it is my duty, because they are paying me, and it is my duty to tell them what works and what doesn’t, right? So for me, any sort of marketing, if they do not lead to giving you revenue, then why are you even spending money on marketing? Right? So this is why I decided I need to completely rebrand our agency, not just in terms of the names or colours or the branding colours or the fonts that we’re using, but also we realise that I have to rebrand our services as well, which is why now we focus on performance marketing.
Performance Marketing
Basically, what it means is that when the clients come to us for their marketing needs, we clearly tell them, “If you are coming in because you want to increase your revenue, yes, you are our ideal client, and we are ready to support you. But if you’re coming in only for a social media marketing package where you want us to create maybe ten reels per month or ten posts per month, these kinds of packages, if that is the only thing that you’re looking for, we cannot onboard you because that’s not in line with what we want. This is why we have decided to rebrand our complete services packages as well.
Now, what we do when clients come to us is we ask them, we have a discovery call with them, and we ask them what their current revenue per month is. And we ask them the next question: what is the revenue that you want to achieve per month? And that becomes our most important KPI in marketing, and that is what leads to the rest that is based on the monthly revenue that they want to generate.
Our Growwie Strategy
We come up with a package that has a mix of ads as well as different strategies of marketing. So when I say ads it is usually Facebook & Instagram ads. Sometimes it’s a combination of Facebook and Instagram ads along with Google ads. Sometimes it’s a combination of SEO, Google ads and Facebook. And of course when these clients come to us, we do give them a package in which there’s some amount of a bit of social media graphics and other post creation included as well.
Sales Funnel – Results Matter
But that is not the key focus of the package, so that comes as an additional complimentary service to them. But our focus is on running ads that give them results. Okay, so for example, the best sort of clients that we can help is, for example, e-commerce brands. Probably you might be having a WordPress Website that is integrated with WooCommerce or you probably have a Shopify website. So for this kind of website, we do a complete sales funnel analysis for them.
We look at what is the current sales funnel they have. So we look at the complete sales funnel of the existing client, and we create, we look at the ordered sales funnel. We look at where there are gaps. When I say sales funnel, It’s a combination of ads. It’s a combination of email marketing. It’s a combination of WhatsApp marketing. So we always focus on increasing revenue. That is the first KPI.
You might find this podcast about channels to grow your eCommerce business interesting!
LTV – Life Time Value
The second thing is we focus on increasing the LTV, which is Life Time Value of a customer. This means it is always easier to market to an existing customer than bring a new customer on board. Of course, you need to have systems and strategies to bring new customers on board as well. But to increase your monthly revenue you must focus on your existing customers as well. So for example, some of the things that we do to increase their lifetime value is we look at their purchase behaviours.
We look at how we can send them related products. We send them an automated review request. Once they have given a positive review, then we send them a suggested new product. Also, during the time of sales, when people are adding things to the cart, we also have an upsell strategy where we can provide them with related products that they can purchase, thereby increasing the average order value (AOV) of the website.
A Non-eCommerce Example
So, these are the different things that we do. Now, for example, if you are a coaching business, if you are into providing some sort of coaching or course, then we also have a launch funnel for that. We always recommend live launches for the courses, and if it’s not a live launch, we also set up an evergreen funnel for you. So all these things we do for our clients and we are also happy because we see the revenue being hit. We see the KPIs the client has set for us and we have a very clear direction to work on because we know that yes, this is the KPI that we need to work on.
Understanding the Vanity Metrics
So this is the reason why we have completely undergone a rebranding and when it comes to this, vanity metrics, I want to talk about them a little bit more. So, some of the vanity metrics that you might see is social media follower count.
For example, a lot of agencies, even including us, I don’t blame anybody else including us, when we used to do our reporting, we showed the number of followers count increasing of course, because that is something that our clients feel happy about, right? It’s good to put them on a report, but we need to realise that that may or may not bring in revenue for your business because the quality of a follower is what matters, the engagement of that follower is what matters, right?
And when I say engagement, there are a lot of customers who will not hit the like button, who will not hit a save button or who will not hit a share button on your post, but they are still watching, and they are most likely, the ones who are going to buy from you, which is why I always tell the customers do not run after these numbers. Run after your revenue because that is the only thing that matters for a business owner at the end of the day. Right?
Bounce Rate, Cost Per View & Conversion
Then, for example, bounce rate, a lot of times what happens is that there are a lot of people who are coming and visiting the website. We can show the traffic of the website. But what if the bounce rate is high? The bounce rate is high means people are not even staying on your website, they’re quickly exiting it as well, right?
This means that time spent on a website is more important compared to the traffic that is coming to your website. Now, while running ads, some of them might give you metrics that the cost per view is very small. That doesn’t matter, right? How would it even matter if the people who are coming and viewing the ad or landing page of the ad are not taking action or are not converting?
SEO
Then, what is the point, right? So the cost per view is another vanity metric, I would say. Now, in terms of SEO, okay, sometimes people might say, okay, you are ranking on the first page for this particular keyword. Probably I might say maybe like my website Bilna Sandeep. If, of course, anybody types Bilna Sandeep my website is going to come up first on the ranking page but that is a vanity metric, right?
The people who do not know me will not search for me, right? So there is no point in bringing the keyword ranking of my name Bilna Sandeep on the first page of Google. You need to be ranking for the words that your customers are likely to search for, right? So that is why these kinds of metrics do not really matter.
Check out this podcast about SEO Optimisation
ROI – What Really Matters
End of the day, what matters for anybody or any business owner is the performance which is the ROI, the revenue, the ROI, the return of investment on your marketing spend. How much are you spending on marketing versus how much are you getting back? Are you hitting your revenue targets every month? These things should matter to every business owner when it comes to marketing. So that is all for this episode. See you all back in the next episode.
If you would like a more personalised insight into what metrics you should track for your business, book a call with me at this link.
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