317 - Let's talk KPIs
On today's episode of the podcast I'm chatting with Tayler Cusick-Hollman, founder of Enji, about all things KPIs.
Tayler has been a small business marketing consultant for nine years with a majority wedding professionals client base. She's helped numerous solopreneurs come up with realistic marketing plans that they can realistically do themselves. During COVID Tayler developed and released Enji, a software to support your marketing and brand efforts, so she could help more business owners.
The software was inspired by the marketing system that Tayler had pieced together over the years to run her businesses really efficiently. She didn't want others to have to hack their own together while also wearing all the other hats that come with running a business. The idea behind Enji was that her clients needed support and were always coming to Tayler saying "just tell me what to do," so she created the software to provide them ongoing help. Enji is a marketing system like you use a CRM to manage your booking.
Inside Enji you can track your KPIs (key performance indicators). They are data points, or metrics, designed to help you understand the health of your business and the impact of something, like the impact of your marketing. Depending on what you're focusing on you'll have a mix of KPIs.
For me, the primary KPI is revenue and then since I can't track every data point, what impacts my revenue? For me it's leads and conversions. Below that KPI would be number of social media hits and website hits. And these evolve over time, for example in the beginning of my business I was heavily focused on Instagram followers, and that's not it for me now.
For wedding vendors or anyone opening a high-level 1:1 service, Tayler recommends tracking where are your most highly-qualified leads coming from because that's a really strong indicator of where your time, money, energy and attention is well spent. Track your lead sources. Document how many leads per source you're getting. For example, maybe you're putting a lot of time and stress into Instagram but you don't need to put as much time into there. To really drive home what marketing channel is worth your energy, track the average booking value you're getting by lead source to really drive home what's worthy of your time, energy and attention.
And some of the things we do our for nurturing versus organic attraction marketing, like this podcast for example.
We want to track these numbers because marketing is experiments. For a fun experiment, every time somebody books you, go and see if they follow you on your various social media platforms. I highly encourage people with an email list, especially course creators with high ticket programs, to manually go and look at everyone who joins to see how long that person has been on your email list and nurtured by you before buying. How much warming up do they need? It's easy to be lazy about these numbers until you have a good tool which is why I'm excited about using Enji. As Tayler says, "The least lazy marketer is the one who wins."
When it comes to social media KPIs, Tayler recommends understanding your audience size. Your follower number is a vanity metric, but you need to make sure your audience is growing and changing so you have new people to reach. She likes to track it to get insight into who she's talking to and then getting into the nitty gritty of watch times and engagement. For me, slower growth on social media shows that I'm not meeting that many people in real life that month or speaking at that many events for people to discover me.
Tayler tracks 12 KPIs for Enji and she's only recently added a few of them as the business evolves. She recommends 10-12 is a good place to start and keep trying to find the thing that helps you understand what you're doing at a level that unlocks the thing you're chasing.
KPIs for online educators with courses, memberships and folks with clients. In my business we have several online programs including my 1-on-1 signature service, the Contract Club, my course on LLC formation, and a lot of these things you can go on my website and join. What I want to dial in in 2024 is just general client satisfaction and program completion to increase referrals, reviews, etc. and I'm trying to find the best way to track these. Tayler recommends breaking it out by program to see where they're having the most success. She finds that people tend to gravitate toward lumping lots of KPI numbers into one but eventually you are going to want data on very granular level.
On the front end, you could ask why you're here to see who's there for education or to pass it off to someone else to use the resource. What are the three high-value options we want people to take? For the Contract Club it might be watching the first lesson or using the most popular contract people come for, you want to track how many people are doing x,y and z.
Get in Touch with Our Guest
Tayler Cusick-Hollman, owner of TAYLRD Media Designs and founder of Enji
Get a free trial of Enji at Enji.co
Follow Enji on Instagram @enji_co