How Analytics and Measurement Empower Businesses to March Forward with Confidence

Marketing is a significant investment! You want to make better decisions. You want to know if your marketing is working. You need clear, data-based information about what to do next and how to measure it.

Today, we will dive into our new series - Measure to March. This series focuses on equipping business owners with the right tools to march forward with confidence as they grow their businesses.

Remember, If you don't have the data, you're just guessing.

Tired of not knowing if you're focusing on the right things? Tune in next week as we dive deeper and share how data can answer the questions you never knew you had.

Thanks for tuning in to Collab with Kiva. Your reviews are appreciated on Apple

Are you ready to take massive action in your business and make data-driven decisions? Click the button below and let’s chat 👇🏽

Podcast Transcript

0:01 Kiva Slade

Hello and welcome to collab with Kiva. I'm your host Kiva, Slade. From the marbled halls of the US Congress to my racing themed office chair. I've learned that there is no perfect path to the life of your dreams. My journey over the past 20 years has included being a legislative director for a member of Congress, policy director for a nonprofit, stay at home mom, homeschooling mom, jewelry biz owner, and now the owner of a service based business. Whether your journey has been a straight line, or full of zigs and zags. Join me and my guest as we share insights hope in lessons learned from our email entrepreneurship journeys. May the collaborative sharing of our stories be the tide that lifts your boat? Let's dive in. Hello, and welcome to this week's episode of collab with Kiva. I am so excited we have welcomed in the month of March. Spring is in the air, my daffodils are starting to bloom. And spring is always such a time of renewal, rejuvenation, all of those things, it's so much new energy that's coming towards us. new buds on the trees, the birds are out, everything feels fresh and new. March is also the only month that is also a verb. That's right, it tells us what we need to do. March means we need to move forward. And I love that about the month of March. For fans of college basketball, March Madness is quickly approaching all of our different conferences are having their games to determine seating and who's going to move forward and who's going to be the number one seed and 64 team and all of the different things. So with all of that, I thought it was only fitting that we kick off a new series measure to march. I've never claimed to be the craftiness of people. But in my mind, it is super important that we use measurement in order to march forward in our businesses. Being able to make decisions that are data based data driven has always been key for me. And I've expressed that previously. So measure to march is my way of combining all things new, energizing refreshing and rejuvenating March Madness, all the things into one, to really start to delve into the importance of analytics as it relates to your marketing. So let me just tell you a quick story. My daughter reached out to me to tell me about her upcoming classes. She's majoring in social work. And she said, Mom, I have to take this course called G I s. And she was trying to find what the acronym was for, of course, as my measures jumped right on in geographical information systems. And I was a elated.

3:47

Why because that was like my most favorite class in grad school. I was totally blown away by the data that was used to tell these amazing stories with visual graphics, and so much more taking census data and actually plugging it into a GIS model, and showing where people where resources needed to be allocated. Oh, goodness, gracious, inner, inner data geek was hog heaven. So, of course, my daughter did have that look also as if, you know, I was a dinosaur in how could I have possibly known about GIS? Well, yeah, needless to say, my excitement totally confirmed that this dinosaur knew exactly what she was talking about. And I went on to tell her how much fun she's going to have in that class. How many amazing things she's going to learn. Not so sure she had the same level of excitement as I do. I share that to say, again, the data was so critically important in that class and in the use of GIS systems, to actually Julie show, Intel a story, a very important story in many instances, let's face it, it's 2020 to every business, you know, most, if not all, need to have some level of an online presence. Whether it is, you know, your local mom and pop shop, whether it's a large corporation, typically of someone, even ourselves as entrepreneurs, in many cases, if someone recommends you to someone else, what do you typically do? You go and you Google bound. It's like a sign of actual verification, you know, that this person, this business, this entity actually exist, and I should trust them. So with that being the case, though, we also know that lots of money, energy effort is spent on marketing. We do a lot of things. When it comes to marketing or businesses, we also receive a lot of messages from other businesses who are marketing their products, software, services to us. The question that I asked, though, is, what are we doing to actually determine if what we are engaging in if what we are spending time on if what we are spending money on is actually working? Alaska, that again, seriously, what are we doing to determine if what we're spending our money, our energy, our efforts on as it relates to marketing is actually working for us and in our businesses. In the sad, sad, sad state of affairs that I have seen in my work with clients is fat in most cases, we're not doing much. We really aren't. And without data, we're basically guessing in our businesses. We are Sandra Bullock with a blindfold on trying to figure out what to do next. And since our businesses support our lives, and in many cases impact the lives of so many others, we don't want to be blindfolded in our decisions, we don't want to be blindfolded in how we should move forward, what the next steps are, how that money is being spent. Tarik Ryman in his book, The secret to capitalizing on analytics, shares analytics equals two thirds of marketing.

8:40

Now for all who are like, hey, Kiva, this is audio. That means 1/3 is what's remaining in that pie. That actually is the focus of our marketing. Two thirds of it is actually focused on analytics. What are your percentages, your fractions, I'd love to know about that. Because when we think about it, so much of our marketing is a spiderweb of connectivity. Okay, and it's all connected to our bigger goal of getting our message out there to the people who will buy it. Whatever that message is, whatever that product that service, we want to get in front of those people who will resonate with what we are saying, who realize that they if I'm talking about service based entrepreneurs or business providers, they have a need for the service that you provide. They know they have a need for it or your customer journey is expose them to that need. And now they are ready to buy what you have that's gonna fix their need. And when it comes to marketing, there's SEO there's Google and analytics dashboards, traffic ads, AB testing, conversion rate, content, copy, vote two different things. And we talked about that email marketing funnels, and the list just goes on. And on and on to the breakdown. And with that being the case, there's so many different things that each of us is having to focus on, or marketing directors or chief marketing officers, or whomever we're working with, are having to focus on in order to again, get our message in front of the people who will buy.

10:45

But again, how do we know that it's actually working. And today is your lucky day because you get another story. Another grad school related story. And this kind of also relates to being a dinosaur for some people. But when I was in grad school, it was after the big Welfare to Work push from the Clinton administration. And for those that don't know, I have a Master's in Public Administration, which is like your MBA for government, as we would like to say. And so with that being the case, there were huge movements afoot to move this population of people, ie those that had been on public assistance in to work. That was the goal, that was the overarching goal. So just like your overarching goal is to get your message in front of people who will buy the overarching goal of the Welfare to Work movement was to move people from welfare, public assistance

11:56

to work.

12:00

And so one of my internships was with the housing authority of Baltimore City. If you know anything about Baltimore, it's it's a town that's a city that has it's seen its share of, of things throughout the history of the US. So you have some parts of it, where hey, you can go downtown at the Inner Harbor, and go see where Francis Scott Key and you know, so many other things, you go a few blocks beyond the Inner Harbor and certain directions, you land into the other parts of Baltimore, and the housing authority, at that time, own a lot of the properties that were in those other parts and housed 1000s of people.

12:57

So I was working with a program called step up, which was really ideally geared towards getting people who did not have their high school diploma, getting them to a GED, because in most cases, they had dropped out, getting them to a GED, and then moving them into carpentry work. Okay, because that was a trade that was always needed, always in demand. Okay. The thing about it is, with this whole push for welfare to work, it was like we got to get everybody working. Just like all of those other parts that lead up to your ultimate goal. There were parts that lead up to getting people to work that not everybody had thought through, for example, with a population that we were trying to serve. Hey, it sounds great. Let's go get your GED. Woohoo. We're gonna take you through some classes and make this an easy process. The GED was now on computers. That sounds pretty foreign to most of us, like 2022 Yeah, surely it was on computers, everything's on computers? 1996 1997 1998. No, no, no. computers weren't in every household and as readily available, accessible, as they are now. And you're talking about a population of people who, when they left school, hello, there weren't any computers. So the hurdle of moving those people from welfare to work just got exponential. Harder, because we had smaller hurdles that we had to jump, which was, oh, you might actually need computer literacy skills in order to figure out how to use This piece of machinery that we want you to use to take advantage of the skills that you've learned on the GED course in order to take the test. And once again, those were the things that often were over looked. And when it comes to the work that so many of my clients are engaged in. That's also overlooked that point about understanding the smaller pieces that lead to that big goal of getting your message in front of the people who will buy the smaller pieces, which in many cases, data measurement analytics will actually fill in for you and give you insights are often skipped. We focus on the flashy, the flashy, was, we're gonna get all of these people from welfare to work, boom, done. This is going to be great. The flashy in our business. Oh, I need good web copy. I need good SEO. I need good content. copywriters. So I'm going to focus on all of those things. However, not all times, do we make sure that the content aligns with the SEO strategy? And when do you go back and check that that is those SEO words that you have chosen? are actually driving traffic to your site? Yeah, I know, it doesn't happen that often. I get it. The thing about it is it needs to happen. How do you know that bad SEO research you invested in was actually helpful, that it actually has a return on your investment. So when I work with clients, I always like to start them with their mission, vision and values in for many, they feel like they've have those things already, that they flushed those things out.

17:46

But honestly, digging deep into those values is important not only for the overall work of your business, but also for your marketing efforts. Your values need to be clearly defined, because when you clearly define your values, you'll that will inform the work you do to have clearly defined objectives, which means that your marketing will be in alignment with your objectives, which also means it's an alignment with your values. And that will help you pay attention to the numbers when the numbers are starting to come in. Because you've done that deep work of looking at your values of understanding objectives. And what that alignment is, those numbers will make a heck of a lot more sense. In once again, like the spider web, that is marketing and SEO and Google analytics and dashboards and traffic and conversions and funnels, and AV testing, ads and email marketing, and so forth, so on etc. There's still a spider web for your business, a spider web of interconnectivity between not only your values, your objectives and alignment, in data, but all of that needs to work together and understand the connectedness of it. So that the investments that you make, all leading to your big goal of getting your message in front of the people that will by all of those steps that are getting you there are feeding each other in data is driving, what those moves are going to be. What took place with Welfare to Work was there was a huge, huge part that was missed. And that part was around understanding the population of people who need it to be moved. There were initial games. Those were people who it was relatively easy to move from well Fair to work. Those were not the people in trenched. Those were not a people who had not been in school for many, many years, those were not the people that in order to move them, it was going to take some extra steps. That wasn't factored in. In so there was a lot of repositioning, and a lot of re allocation. Based on that data that came back that said, Hello, Houston, we have a problem. We can't just move these people as easily as we thought we could. The same applies to your business. Without the data, and it's really a circular process. The data is informing your decisions, new data comes in, it informs future decisions. And it's circular, you should constantly be going back to the numbers and listening to the story that they're telling you. And when you're doing that, in there's following of that, those numbers and that data, and it's helping to inform your decisions, you are then able to not only in some cases, if you're a chief marketing officer, prove your worth to your clients, you're able to clearly demonstrate to them, what's working, what's not working, and what needs to be changed. And it's not based on a hunch, it's not based on a whim is not based on Oh, yeah, I have this really quick thought, let's try this. It's not based on throwing spaghetti at the wall. It's based on data. So this, again, is going to be a series for the month of March, we are truly going to start to dig into what it looks like for you to measure in order to march measure to march because I want each of you to be able to march forward in your businesses in march forward confidently. Knowing that the choices you're making the decisions that you make, the things that you are choosing to invest in, not invest in, whether that's money or time or energy, or all three, are actually the things that are moving the needle in your business.

22:49

It is wonderful, I applaud each of you for I have four blogs that are posted I am unlinked in, I'm doing this, I have hashtags yada, yada, yada, yeah, fill in the blank. But if you don't know, then all of that is leading to actual traffic to your website, which is leading to actual booked calls or purchase products that is leading to an actual money in your bank account. And then we still have talking to do because there's more measuring that is needed for you to actually March. So all of that shared today, I want you to ask yourself, if analytics equals two thirds of marketing, two thirds, how much? Is it in your business? Would you say analytics? is two thirds of your marketing budget? marketing efforts, marketing time, marketing focus? Or would you say Analytics has been on the back burner? Because let's be honest, numbers can be scary people. I am not going to pretend. But numbers also don't have emotions. We project emotions onto numbers. But numbers are what they are. So when it comes to your business and your marketing, how are you thinking about your marketing? How do you see analytics data playing a role in your marketing? Does it play a role in your marketing? And let me be real with you. There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. These are your answers. If you feel it should be playing a larger role, then guess what? You can change that If it's already playing a role, congratulate yourself for having taken that step. Either way, these are your answers. And that means you can do something about it. So I want you to make sure you tune in next week for our second installment in our measure to march. Also make sure you're following me on LinkedIn in. I am found there as my name Kiva. Slade, for more about this topic. And there's some exciting juiciness coming your way. As we start to head into March Madness, don't worry, it's a good kind of madness. So I hope that you have at least been thought to have been provoked to think about what role analytics is playing in your marketing, and what role you'd like it to play. Feel free to shoot me a message and tell me reach out if you have any questions. I'd love to hear from you. And I want you to tune in next time for our next episode. Talk to you soon. Measure to March, I want to see you all marching forward. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of collab with Kiva. You know my heart, and it wants you to know that you are uniquely made and that your business path is unique to you. I hope that now you have some clear takeaways from this episode that have left you inspired and motivated to keep pressing forward on your unique path. Make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. And of course, your reviews on Apple are greatly appreciated. If you are a small business owner, and you are ready to build out your business playbook, and you're ready to document and delegate what takes place in your business so it can grow beyond you. Make sure you visit me on my website, the 516 collaborative.com and let's schedule a time to talk. I'll see everyone next time. Bye

Meet Kiva Slade - the Founder and CEO of The 516 Collaborative. With a unique background in high-power politics on Capitol Hill and sixteen years as a homeschooling mama, Kiva found her calling in the online business world as a trusted guide for entrepreneurs looking to build the business of their dreams.

Kiva's work began behind the scenes, orchestrating the back end of businesses and managing teams. But her inner data diva couldn't help but notice that small businesses needed help harnessing the power of data for growth. So she and her team set out to uncover and tidy up the data required to enable clients to grow their businesses confidently and easily.