Have you wondered how to better measure your SEO for your website and lead generation? Have you felt like you have been misled or misunderstood what success factors Our guest today is Tory Gray, who is a marketing expert.
TODAY’S WIN-WIN:
Pick the right metrics for your business and why they are meaningful.
LINKS FROM THE EPISODE:
- You can visit our guest’s website at: https://thegray.company/
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ABOUT OUR GUEST:
In a highly dynamic and sometimes ambiguous industry, Tory Gray combines cutting-edge SEO knowledge, a growth-minded perspective, and a collaborative approach rooted in kindness. Her ability to drive proven results and extensive experience scaling businesses has made her a leading advisor for major digital agencies, publications, and mentor groups like Women in Tech SEO.
As CEO and Founder, Tory runs Gray Dot Company, a digital marketing agency known for its technical SEO expertise and one-of-a-kind approach to Digital Consumer Insights.
ABOUT BIG SKY FRANCHISE TEAM:
This episode is powered by Big Sky Franchise Team. If you are ready to talk about franchising your business you can schedule your free, no-obligation, franchise consultation online at: https://bigskyfranchiseteam.com/ or by calling Big Sky Franchise Team at: 855-824-4759.
If you are interested in being a guest on our podcast, please complete this request form or email podcast@bigskyfranchise.com and a team member will be in touch.
TRANSCRIPTION:
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:01):
Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I’m your host, Tom DuFore, CEO of Big Sky Franchise Team. And as we open today, I’m wondering if you have ever wondered how to better measure your SEO for your website traffic and lead generation. And I’m wondering if you’ve ever felt like you’ve been misled or misunderstood what success looks like with SEO when working with your marketing department or some marketing vendors or agencies that you’ve worked with over the years.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (00:37):
Our guest today is Tory Gray, and she’s a marketing expert who shares with us KPIs from measuring the effectiveness of your SEO customer funnel strategy. And Tory combines her cutting edge SEO knowledge, a growth-minded perspective, and a collaborative approach rooted in kindness. Her ability to drive proven results and extensive experience scaling businesses has made her a leading advisor for digital agencies, publications and mentor groups like Women in Tech SEO. As CEO and founder, Tory runs Gray Dot Company, a digital marketing agency known for its technical SEO expertise and a one-of-a-kind approach to digital consumer insights. You’re going to really enjoy this interview and find it fascinating. So, let’s go ahead and jump right into my interview with Tory Gray.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (01:27):
Amazing. I’m Tory Gray. Thank you for having me. I’m the CEO of Gray Dot Company. We’re an SEO consulting and customer intelligence data company.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (01:37):
Great. Well, and this customer intelligence is really an interesting topic and we were starting to get into this a little bit before we hit record on this, and what I’m really interested in, that you’ve shared previously is this idea of how you can evaluate effectiveness of SEO and how you measure this kind of thing. And I’ve worked with enough business leaders, other organizations, and even for our own business, where this SEO seems elusive at times. It seems like you’re kind of chasing white rabbits down rabbit holes and not quite sure what to make of it. So, I’d love for you to talk a little bit about SEO measurement, how that works, how it works with all your other marketing avenues.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (02:19):
Yep. Such a great question and something we feel really, really passionate about because you’re right, it can be funny. SEO is a long-term channel that’s often an investment for companies and it can be really frustrating to do work and to feel like it’s not paying off. So, we felt really passionately about organizing our reporting and KPI efforts around the customer funnel and paying very close attention to leading indicators to ensure that we’re moving in the right direction and that we know that our efforts are paying off to some degree before we’re waiting six months, eight months plus to know that… If we’re waiting that long, we’re waiting too late and we’re not iterating as we should be. So, we quite literally focus, which KPIs at which stage of the customer funnel. So, we’re looking at certain things around the awareness stage. We want to know what the impressions are, we want to know what the rankings are.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (03:13):
So, if you start out not even ranking at all for a particular page or a particular keyword, when do you start showing up in search for that? When do you have impressions? These are the very first KPIs that you should be paying attention to. If they’re not the be-all and end-all, they probably aren’t meaningful to your business at the end of the day, because if you aren’t getting, I don’t know, leads or sales, you’re not getting revenue. So, it doesn’t really matter, but at least you’re moving in the right direction. We care about that awareness stage. What is your visibility? What is your share of voice relative to your competitors?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (03:45):
Then we want to move on to say the interest stage. Then we’re looking at clicks. We’re looking at your clickthrough rate. We want to know what your branded search is, and your not branded search. Are people moving through the funnel or not? Or what are those new users? Et cetera. When we get to consideration, we care more about returning visitor rate or are they consuming your content? Microconversion. So, if you have a SaaS product line, you might get a webinar sign up or a blog email subscription, those sorts of things that are warm leads. Maybe you get an email address, things you can take action on or start email drip campaigns, for example. So, these are the pre-purchase things that show this is a buyer that might engage with us and might care.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (04:28):
Then you’re going to move to more stuff like the purchase stage where things are much more juicy and exactly what you want. Are they physically buying from you if you’re in an e-commerce world? Or if you’re in that SaaS world, not just that you got the right lead at the right time for a person who wants to demo your product, but how qualified is that lead and how well have you scored against that? So, that’s what we really care about. And then even post-purchase, we care about loyalty, we care about advocacy. Do we care that people are willing to share our content and how that enables us to sell more in the future? And as a measure of brand loyalty, all of these metrics.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (05:07):
So, again, we organize our reporting literally around that funnel so we early on know what’s happening, that people are getting in the pipeline, and then we can pivot if at any moment when we say, “Oh, people aren’t moving to the right stage, they’re not moving as we expected. We got people to the landing page, but we need enough of them to actually purchase, to buy.” So, that’s the funnel to get them through. And if any of those things doesn’t happen along the path, something needs to change and we need to rejigger our plan a little bit and move forward for growth.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (05:38):
And maybe I should take a step back and talk a little bit or ask you about what sounds like you described this funnel, this maybe an SEO funnel that you’re taking folks through or what you described. Will you talk through that a little bit?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (05:53):
Absolutely. This is the general marketing funnel that we’re using. So, this is something brand folks will use or marketing folks as a whole. It’s not at all SEO-specific, it’s just visualizing a funnel of how your users are coming through. You need enough people up here with brand awareness before they’re ever going to get through any other stage in the funnel, and they’re going to move through as they get closer to purchase. And then there’s a nice little kind of funnel at the bottom.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (06:16):
As you get to later stages post-purchase, where they’re hopefully repurchasing and coming back to you and increasing their average order value, and in taking these other actions that are desirable for your business that mean long-term revenue. So, we’re leveraging this classic textbook marketing customer funnel, and we’re using that and using that language with our SEO reporting. So, I think it’s a miss if we’re just looking at SEO and we’re just like, “Hey, how are rankings?” If that’s all you’re looking at, okay, but where’s your revenue? And if you’re just looking at revenue, you’re going to have to wait a while. So, how do you know you’re moving in the right direction? You have to take the big picture and the whole funnel in mind to make sure that you’re actually going to get there, and maximizing that funnel, getting people through at the right rate, all these fun funnel optimization tactics.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (07:06):
At each of these stages of the funnel, and you mentioned KPI and different KPIs that might be used. So, talk through a little bit about these key performance indicators and how you maybe help assess these at each of the stages. Or are they kind of universal, like this marketing funnel, is it more of a universal? Talk through that a little bit.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (07:27):
Many of these metrics are universal, but we are opinionated about which ones that we include. Our default use case of a reporting dashboard, we’re using Data Studio, but we set clients up within their own dashboards. So, whether they’re using a Tableau, a Looker studio, a Power BI, there’s a variety of business tools that are used for those capabilities and we like to work within your systems. But Data Studio is nice because it’s fun, and we as search engine people tend to live in the Google ecosystem. So, Data Studio is a great tool that’s going to be integrating directly with your Google Search Console account, which is really, really critical for tracking search engine results. Also, your Google Analytics account, but it can also integrate with a variety of other products for other marketing channels and bringing them all together. So, we’re integrating directly with your tool, then we’re working with clients to really determine what’s meaningful for them.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (08:22):
So, how we report on your success as a client will vary if you’re an e-commerce provider, versus if you want to grow leads, because what is a meaningful conversion is substantially different and what a user looks like as they’re moving towards that funnel and how they’re engaging with your content and what content they’re engaging with, whether that’s a good signal or not will vary. So, we’re going to customize that dashboard around your customer funnel for your business. And we also often make different dashboards for different people within an org. So, an executive wants to see probably different high-level metrics, relative to the marketing manager that’s paying attention to all the weeds along the way. But again, we are not reporting on metrics like for instance, domain authority. So, this is a classic “SEO metric” that any third party tool is going to give you.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (09:13):
They’re going to call it DA, they’re going to call it a variety of things, whether they’re using a Moz, a Semrush, an Ahrefs, whatever your big tool of choice is. But that’s not a KPI really you want to track because it’s easily gamed. You can get a bunch of links and suddenly you can change that KPI and they’re not necessarily good links, and that doesn’t mean your business is doing better and you have more money in the door at the end of the day. So, we have to pick the right metrics that matter for your business, that are going to move the needle for you. So, we did spend a lot of thought in which metrics go in which stage, as well as being really selective about, what’s this KPI and why and is it really meaningful to your business or not?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (09:56):
As I’m thinking through what you’re saying, it sounds like at each of these stages, let’s just use this funnel, for at the top of the funnel there are going to be certain KPI that the indicators are there, it should lead to results in the next level. And then you’ll have different KPI that you’re evaluating, assessing, and if those are trending in the right direction, hopefully, if it’s doing what it should be, it should be seeing results that trigger down-
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (10:19):
Yeah, it’s literally getting in the [inaudible 00:10:20]-
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (10:20):
… which ultimately lead down to the conversions, which I know has, in my experience as just a consumer who’s worked with marketing professionals for my own business, and as well as working with clients along the way, that tends to be one of the pain points to say, “How are all of these connected to lead to that conversion?” So, often I’ve heard marketing professionals say, “Well, SEO, it’s a long game. It could take six months, it could take 18 months, it could take longer before you start seeing that.” I guess I’m just saying in defense, or in what you’re doing, I really appreciate it if you can show measurable achievements at each of these levels, it really makes a big difference. And to show progress to the organization and the organizational leaders that it’s not money misspent, you’re actually doing things, and not just money, but resources also, just resources in general going in the right place.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (11:12):
Yeah. We all have limited marketing budgets and we want them to be going towards the right initiatives. And so, if you don’t even have some better rankings after six months, something is going wrong and you need to reevaluate what your strategy is. If people are driving traffic to your page but nobody’s converting, there’s a problem. It may or may not be with SEO, right? Maybe we’re going after the wrong keywords and they’re not bringing in the right users, or maybe you have a UX problem on your site and you need to improve your conversion rate. There’s different problems we can solve at different places, but we have to measure it so we can identify where the problem is, and then we can develop hypotheses about how to fix that, work on testing those, resolve those and move forward. Rather than saying, “Oh, I’m going to throw up my hands. It takes six to eight months. Oh crap, it’s been nine months, probably just wait a little bit longer. It’s fine. I swear.” It isn’t fine. We need to know and we need to measure it along the way.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (12:08):
What have you found to be kind of a best practice or a cadence, or just something that you find fits well for maybe those check-ins or reviews? Is this every week? Is it every month, once a quarter? How do you usually see that flow?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (12:21):
The most successful cadence is typically monthly for most clients on the whole. I think that that can change. So, if you’re an enterprise client, certain clients are going to be looking daily and weekly. Granted, what they’re looking at is not for growth progress. You’re not going to see it on that short of a timeline, but what you can identify in that short of a timeline is that something went really wrong, and that enables you to fix it really, really quickly before it gets worse. So, those clients tend to like to look at it very, very detailed. They’ll have their own live dashboards. They’re looking at that, at minimum every week probably and every day. But again, you’re mostly looking for those cliff drop-offs.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (13:02):
If you’re looking for measurements and understanding your growth and what’s happening there, you’re typically talking about a monthly cadence makes the most sense, unless you’re doing A/B testing, right? Then you can be checking in, depends on your traffic volume and how quickly you can get to significance with your test. And that could be days. If you’re Amazon, that could happen within hours. So, results may vary there.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (13:25):
And what are some, just as an example, maybe of a case study that you might be able to reference, or a project or a client you’ve worked with, where you’ve seen them go through this progress? Talk through maybe some of the KPIs that this client or case study used that you helped determine where the right KPI would be evaluated and assessed, and how that progress worked. I’d love to hear you talk through that.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (13:51):
A great example might be a very large mortgage lender that we’ve worked with that has more recently been acquired. So, they started out many moons ago, maybe six plus years, we’ve been working with them for a very long time. They started out with their primary brand. They have loan officers, so analogous to real estate agents, those loan officers might have their own individualized brands and they’re going to go out there and they’re going to sell their product. So, we had a structural setup that we wanted to enable them to go out there and do that. They can do that via a profile page on our site, and there might be office pages on our site and there’s different ways of getting people interested in them. So, are they looking for that person by name? Are they looking for people in that location, maybe their neighborhood, maybe their city, maybe their state so that they can get help getting that home loan locked down?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (14:41):
Are they talking to, or do they need a whole other website? Do they need a microsite and do they need support of that? So, we work together with this team to really build an infrastructure of a site that would scale like that and would enable the right functionality in the right places, in ways that are optimized effectively for SEO, which is what you might call programmatic SEO. So, all the information is ingested into a database, and then that database is used to automatically create these pages, but then we’re customizing them and improving them and making them to be really valuable, really localized pages. So, reporting here evolved through the years pretty significantly when we’re looking at one brand, and eventually they’re not just talking about… At their largest point, we had over 200 microsites, many profiles, as well as eight different DBAs that we were maintaining.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (15:37):
So, different brands with different branding around them. So, they had Hero Loans, for example. So, how to get your loans as a firefighter or a police officer, or other roles in the world. So, they have different brands that target different people and their different loan needs, based on things that they can qualify for. So, as you can imagine, the reporting changed from, “Hey, let’s go after some keywords,” to, “How does this this scale? How do we understand? How do we tag these keywords and group them in meaningful ways? How do we improve, not just traffic to the main site and is that growing over time, but how is it improving over here?” So, that system for scalability, that reporting for scalability, and really, a lot of that involves focus of where does that matter?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (16:25):
Because in an ecosystem of 200 with one team, that is my team, we’re not going to give everyone 100% all the time. We’re going to be shifting and strategizing, like any enterprise is. We’re going to be focused on this brand. And then we want to deep dive focus on, what are the metrics that matter for them locally? Largely around visibility, rankings, clicks, and share of voice. How much do they own for the keywords that we care about? What is your visibility on that and can we grow that significantly over time? So, are you showing up in those hyperlocal searches that are really, really qualified customers that are ready to get that loan and buy that house?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:02):
And that’s a great example too, because a lot of people in our ecosystem are multi-site type businesses. We help companies franchise. And so, very often folks that’ll tune into the interview here will be franchisors or that have maybe five, 10, maybe 50, 100 franchises and growing. So, that’s a great example.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (17:23):
Multi-site strategy is fascinating and I love it. And there’s all sorts of different ways you could go about that, and how do you make sure all your sites are set up for success? It’s a super fun challenge. Franchises are amazing.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (17:36):
One of the questions that comes to mind here is really how your work and what you do fits in with franchising. And it sounds like you’ve got some experience working in the franchise realm, so the franchisor/franchisee dynamic is unique, and so I’d love for you to share about how a franchisor might be able to incorporate some of what you’re doing.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (17:56):
Great question. Franchisees are such a fascinating topic, and I’ve worked in SEO and marketing on both sides of this. So, I’ve come in and worked for individual franchisees and I’ve worked for the corporate entity, that then supports the marketing of all the sub-branches, you might call them. Everyone has different language around this. It’s interesting. And it’s interestingly Wild West because the legal contracts around who’s allowed to do what, in what instances, over what areas can vary so dramatically. And I love organizing chaos and making sense of that chaos, and pulling that together and really understanding those rules and those legal things that we need to square away and pulling them together. Some of the challenges we often face specific to search, whether it’s organic or paid, is really carving out unique differences. So, if you have, for instance, I’ve done this in storage units, so you have this localized storage unit and it’s different and it’s owned by this other one in this other part of town.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (19:03):
So, how do you make all these meaningful pages so that users go to the right one and that everyone gets supported in an equal way and people don’t get more or less support depending on where they are? I think that there’s a fine art and a science there, but a lot of it goes into your keyword research and really understanding, are people looking for neighborhoods? Are they looking for the north part of the city versus the south part of the city when they’re looking for storage? People can get very, very localized. Or I’ve done this for gyms and massage places. There’s been a few different instances of, we’re ultimately solving the same problem of, how do we not replicate the same page and cause SEO problems for duplicate content? A lot of that can be through the use of dynamic fields. So, replacing the name, the address, the name of the owners, putting a friendly face, we can customize the alt text on the images.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (20:00):
I’m getting into the technical nitty gritty of SEO here, but there’s ways you can do this dynamically and add reviews that are localized to you and add a lot of personalization in ways that make those pages juicy and differentiated and rankable in their own right. On the paid search side, it’s a lot of, again, differentiating, but a lot around the geotargeting so that you’re not driving up your ad budget and accidentally competing with yourself, either on accident because maybe you’re doing it on a corporate level and you don’t realize that you’re showing the same ad for two different locations at the same time.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (20:36):
Or in some places, the two different franchisees each have the legal ability to do and run their own ad account separately, which means they’re both advertising in the same city and they’re both driving each other’s costs up. So, that’s one where you really have to coordinate and carve out your zip code level targeting of what you want to do, where. Or keywords you want to go after that are maybe differentiated around neighborhoods or around, I don’t know, if we’re talking the storage center, maybe you store large items at this, versus more standard everything, smaller storage units, there can be strategic angles that you go after. So, it’s a lot of creativity, a lot of strategy, a lot of research and a lot of testing to make it come together in the way you want it to. But it is a pretty fascinating challenge altogether.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (21:29):
Tory, this is a great time in the show where we make a transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question is, have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (21:40):
Oh, absolutely. We’ve all had misses. My miss that I want to talk about today is struggling with communication, especially to executive teams, especially early in my career. I had been working primarily at agencies at the time, and I wanted to make the leap in-house in order… I was banging my head against the wall. I had these strategies I’d put together, I handed them over. I was really excited. I knew these things would help them grow, and I heard nos and I didn’t know why, and I wanted to take action on that. So, I eventually went in-house, and it was a challenge because I didn’t automatically magically learn that, right? That is a learning process. How do I connect the dots? How do I use their language?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (22:20):
Also, they’re individualized people with different needs. So, whether your background is in consulting or if your background is in tech, how I talk to you and the words I use to be meaningful to you are very substantially different. So, it was a miss, not knowing the why and not being able to connect the dots to the why, and really explain the strategy and help them come along with me in a really simplified way. So, it is something that I eventually had to learn, but it was a painful growing process, I think for many of us.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (22:51):
I’ve been in a similar spot. I know exactly what you’re referring to. Well, let’s talk about on the other side of this, let’s talk about a make or two.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (22:59):
I’d actually point to the same brand that I was working on. This was Craftsy. This was a startup. I believe it might still be to this date, the biggest consumer product acquisition in Denver’s history. And I was their SEO over a four-year period. So, this coming from agency world, where you’re often replicating the same work kind of again and again and again for the same kind of tier of clients. And I really loved having to dig in and innovate and change over time. So, cool, we got 300% growth first year. How do I do that again in year two and do that again in year three? And how do I really dig deep and come up with new innovative tactics that are really going to move the needle when most people, especially with an agency environment, are kind of just used to doing the same thing over and over.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (23:52):
So, it was a new learning, innovating, “Let’s try this. Let’s try this. New ideas, let’s test, let’s iterate, let’s grow. How do we scale this?” And having that iterative growth year over year, and really proving to myself and the team that it could be done and it could be meaningful for the bottom line of the revenue was really impactful and something I’m very proud of.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (24:16):
Thank you for sharing. Let’s talk about a multiplier that you’ve used to maybe grow yourself personally or professionally or maybe other business ventures you’ve been involved with.
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (24:27):
Well, speaking of franchises, I’m a big fan of scale in general, both in terms of the strategy to get there, as well as the tech to make it happen. So, I feel really passionately about things like UGC or user-generated content. How can we get users to give us content that is meaningful for our growth of our business? How can we use a programmatic strategy, like we did with the mortgage lender, where we’re building the right landing pages, we’re doing that relatively automatically? We’re not making those dry, bare-bones page that don’t hold enough information, that aren’t meaningful to users. How do we make those juicy, meaningful, worthy pages that are useful for users and are worthy of indexing in Google?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (25:09):
Because they aren’t always. I’ve seen lots of programmatic strategies that end up creating lots of generic landing page variations that aren’t meaningful, that don’t actually solve a problem or that people aren’t looking for. So, it’s a lot of things to come together, but I work on lots of strategies that work on that. How do we repeat? How do we get it without scaling the team 100% in order to make that happen? How do we use tech to our advantage? How can we use users to our advantage? How do we use your inventory to our advantage in new and creative ways that help you grow?
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (25:47):
Excellent. Well, and Tory, the final question we ask every guest is, what does success mean to you?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (25:54):
This is my favorite question, because I have a very defined answer. I care about working with cool people that I like and respect, on cool projects and getting paid well to do it. That’s my personal why.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (26:06):
Fantastic. I like that. I like how you’ve really personalized that. I love it. Well, Tory, as we bring this to a close, is there anything you’re hoping to share or get across that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (26:19):
I would love to encourage people to come to our website and check out our Customer Intelligence services. This is a new service line that we are piloting, and this is using search data to answer meaningful market research and market intelligence questions for your business. So, what questions are burning that you wish you had data for, but maybe you can’t afford that 100K or 250K Forrester report, and you don’t have an internal data analysis team? What questions can you answer to define your prioritization for your product roadmap, to define your internationalization plan, to define what new product lines you want to offer?
Tory Gray, Gray Dot Company (26:57):
These are all really interesting and juicy problems that we can help solve through core data that people are volunteering to Google and to social media sites, P.S. So, it’s a pretty exciting new, innovative way to get the answers businesses have been wanting for a long time. You can find us at the Gray Dot Company and you can also look up Digital Consumer Intelligence and it’ll be right there on top.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (27:20):
Tory, thank you so much for a fantastic interview, and let’s go ahead and jump into today’s three key takeaways. Takeaway number one from the interview is when she said to pick the right metrics for your business, and why those metrics are meaningful to your business. So, her whole point was figuring out which KPIs you should be tracking for success when you run SEO and digital marketing. Takeaway number two was when she said, “If traffic is coming to your page and it’s not converting into leads, that’s a problem.” And I think for a lot of business owners and business leaders I’ve run into over the many years in consulting, that that is one of the most common pain points I hear, where they describe having these marketing agencies driving traffic, but the conversions aren’t there or the wrong kinds of conversions. And this gets back to point number one that she had mentioned, which is why you need to know the metrics of success ahead of time.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (28:22):
Takeaway number three is when she talks about the frequency or cadence for you to have review meetings regarding your marketing and success of it. So, she said that for most of her clients and for most small businesses, a monthly review is sufficient for it to be successful and for enterprise clients or large businesses. She said sometimes that needs to be more frequent, sometimes as frequently as daily, but at least weekly for those large brands. And one other little note she mentioned about successful KPI, she said, “Make sure you integrate A/B testing into your marketing efforts.”
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (29:00):
Now it’s time for today’s win-win. Today’s win-win is when Tory talked about picking the right metrics. And I’m just reemphasizing our first takeaway from the day because it’s so critical. Define what success means for you in this endeavor. And if you don’t know for sure, then talk with other people on your team or get advice from some mentors or marketing professionals who can support you. I know that I can tell you what we work and look at internally for measuring our success is number one, conversions, lead conversions. When people are coming to the website, are we getting leads or contact forms submitted or appointments booked through our booking system? And then we have a qualitative assessment for the people that are taking those initial inquiries and calls. Are those the right kinds of leads or opportunities that our company is looking for? So, that’s what we use when we’re evaluating that, and I recommend you do the same.
Dr. Tom DuFore, Big Sky Franchise Team (30:02):
I think that’s a great win-win for the day. And as we have refined that in working with our marketing professionals, it’s made it a lot easier for both of us to identify what success looks like and develop a really great working relationship. And so, that’s the episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know is ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at bigskyfranchiseteam.com. Thanks for tuning in and we look forward to having you back next week.
