How I Know My Online Marketing Works

Welcome to episode 344 of Hit the Mic with the Stacey Harris.

All right, beginning of a new quarter means it's time to check in on your social media numbers, if you haven't yet. And yes, I don't just mean your social media numbers. I want you to check in on how your content's doing, how your website is doing, how things are converting, where your revenue goals are. I like to check in on all the things a lot because there is a wealth of information and answers to a lot of our pressing questions that we're spending thousands of dollars asking coaches and consultants and paying people to execute on things. A lot of times the answers to the question are in the data and other times it's good to check in to see if the things they're telling us or doing for us are, you know, well, working. So that's what we're gonna start with.

I want to talk about some of the social media numbers you need to be paying attention to and why they matter. Daily, I like to check in on my vanity metrics, my follower counts, a real big picture. Has anyone been engaging in the last couple of days or really in the last 24 hours? Full disclosure, I don't do this every day. I don't do it on weekends, just my work days. This is one of the things I do to literally start my day because it will impact where or how or what I am going to be doing during my social networking time. By social networking, I mean actual engagement on social media. It will really be impacted by how those numbers are doing versus my goals.

So whenever I'm checking in on these things I'm looking at where my goal is and where my results are coming from so I can see if they're lined up. I actually keep these in an excel doc in my Google drive and it gets opened every single morning. We look and see what's working and what's not working. Again, basically our vanity metrics are the email lists, the Facebook followers, the Twitter followers, the Instagram followers, and a real brief look at engagement, what's happening engagement wise. The whole thing takes about 10 minutes.

But what's cool is when I check in on these things quarterly, and I do my big review of the 12 weeks, if I hit my goals, if I missed my goals, and I evaluate what needs to be changed going into the next 12 weeks, it's nice to have that comparison of the daily numbers because I can see where my numbers were at the end of March versus the beginning of January or even the end of March to the beginning of March. I can see where there was growth, where there was some stagnant activity or, in all honesty, where maybe there was a decrease. Maybe I did a big promo push to ...

Great example of this, in March we did an affiliate promo for Denise Duffield Thomas, who I'm a big big fan of and she's one of the two people who I promote their content and their courses as an affiliate, and that obviously caused some unsubscribes on my email list, which is absolutely fine. I'm a big proponent of not being upset about unsubscribes. But, I could see very clearly in my numbers where there was stalled out growth. Although there were still people subscribing and growth to my email list, you can't actually see that growth because there were also unsubscribes happening and a little bit of a peak rate versus where they usually are.

Knowing what's going on and being able to see a whole stretch of numbers is really helpful. That's why I make sure I track those daily. On the flip side of that, weekly I'll go in and I'll actually look at my email list because I send an email once per week. I'll look at subscribes, unsubscribes, clicks, where they're clicking, what they're clicking

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