Metric-Driven Marketing with Rita Barry (Transcript)
Understanding your business’s numbers — and making strategic decisions based off of them — is an essential skill as an entrepreneur, and it can actually be quite interesting and easy!
To show you exactly how to do this for yourself, I asked Rita Barry to come on the podcast this week. Rita specializes in metric-driven marketing for online businesses, and she shared some really practical advice on how to get started making more strategic, numbers-based decisions in our businesses.
This is a transcript of Work Less, Earn More, Episode 50. Listen to the episode here.
Rita Barry:
It’s something I hear all the time from clients and potential clients that they feel really like they should be doing this better. Right. And I can assure you that people across our client load, there are people that have incredibly successful businesses that literally have no idea what their marketing metrics are. They just know that something’s obviously working because they’ve got some money in the bank account.
Gillian Perkins:
We became entrepreneurs because more than anything, we want freedom. We want to be in control of our own schedule, income, and life. But unfortunately, that isn’t always the reality of being a business owner. I’m Gillian Perkins, and I’m on a mission to take back entrepreneurship for what it’s supposed to be. In every episode, I’ll share with you how to get the most out of every hour you work, so that you can work less and earn more. Let’s get to it.
Gillian Perkins:
Hey there everyone. And welcome to the show. In today’s episode, I am talking to Rita Barry, a certified measurement marketer. And I’m really excited for this interview because there’s nothing I like more than gigging out about A/B tests and figuring out how we can make our marketing just a little bit more scientific, so that we can be getting bigger results without having to work any harder, because that’s really what data driven marketing allows you to do.
Gillian Perkins:
So with that being said, allow me to introduce to you Rita Barry, welcome to the show Rita. So I’m really excited to be talking to you about data driven marketing today. I checked out your website and I’ve been taking a look at you around the internet, and I can see that you’re doing some really interesting things. And I immediately knew that I wanted to talk to you because one of my favorite things that I do in all the different aspects of marketing that we do at the company is A/B testing.
Gillian Perkins:
And the reason I love it so much is because it seems like it gives me real factual answers about my marketing. Back in school I always really liked math class more than creative writing, even though I enjoy writing because in math class, there were definite right answers. But in writing class not so much, it just seemed like it was a little bit more theoretical, a little bit more subject to personal opinion. And sometimes is marketing can feel a lot that way. But when I run an A/B test and I see the data, that one option, one variation clearly outperformed another. I can see that I have a definite answer and I feel really confident moving forward. And I can see that that is what you help your clients with. So that’s why I’m so excited to be talking to you today. So could you start out by just telling us a little bit about the work that you do?
Two Main Avenues of Business
Rita Barry:
Sure. We have two main avenues of business. One is acquisition and paid traffic. And the second piece which we’re going to be focusing on today is really all about measuring people’s marketing efforts. And so in the digital space that we all live in, just the opportunities to measure everything that we do is really almost infinite and therefore quite overwhelming, because since you can measure everything, the question is then should you measure everything? And the spoiler alerters, know you really shouldn’t.
Rita Barry:
But ultimately we just really help our clients understand the math of how their business makes money. And that really is all that marketing metrics are. It’s just, they seem really intimidating when you come at them from just spreadsheets and Google Analytics and just the data, data, data. Instead of that big picture, look of, I’m just going to figure out how all this marketing stuff that I do actually turns into dollars and cents at the end.
Gillian Perkins:
That makes so much sense. And I can really relate to what you just said about how, when there’s so much that we could measure, it’s really difficult to figure out what we should measure. I run into that on a daily basis with my business, where we use all these different marketing platforms and pieces of marketing software, that’s spit out all this data at us, everything from email open rates and click-through rates to how well a landing page is converting, or how many sales we’re generating from any given product on any given day. And it’s a lot to sort through. So considering all of that, where would you recommend to someone in my position start?
Rita Barry:
So the biggest thing is exactly what you said. It’s really understanding that there is so much available to you and all of it is siloed. And that’s one it’s in tool A, B, C, and D. So that’s also something to consider is that when you’re looking at data across different sources like that, it’s going to be innately confusing because they all measure often the same thing differently. And that can be really, really confusing and very frustrating, not only just to people that are new, but also to people that do this for a living, it’s endlessly frustrating for those of us that measure marketing, because a page view and a conversion rate are measured differently across different pieces of software.
Rita Barry:
So if you’re not aware of that, and then you’re trying to examine these things, you’re like, well, this tool says this number, this tool says this number. They don’t agree how am I supposed to figure out what’s right, right. So there’s just so many different layers of confusion that can come with this. But the main place to start is just the curiosity Joey says too, because marketing metrics are very similar to bookkeeping and accounting. Where people can have a lot of guilt and a lot of self judgment about looking at their numbers, because they don’t think they’re good enough. They don’t think maybe they’re not math people. Right. And they feel like I’m not going to be able to understand this.
Rita Barry:
So if you approach it with a curiosity of like, I’m just going to figure out how this is all working and I’m just going to keep looking into it and not be judgmental of myself. Because it’s something I hear all the time from clients and potential clients that they feel really like they should be doing this better. Right. And I can assure you that people across our client load, there are people that have incredibly successful businesses that literally have no idea what their marketing metrics are. They just know that something’s obviously working because they’ve got some money in the bank account. So that’s the first piece is to just be kind with yourself about it.
5 Areas for Measuring Marketing
Rita Barry:
But there’s really five main areas that we concentrate on when we’re looking at measuring people’s marketing. And the place is to start with a plan. So this doesn’t even go anywhere near any of the tools in your marketing technology stack or in Google Analytics, it’s figuring out what are the things that you actually want to measure? And why do you want to measure them? Because if you can’t actually take action to fix something, collecting data on it is really not very helpful, right? Because lots of people are tracking all of these metrics like that quantity we talked about.
Rita Barry:
And it’s not really very helpful because you can’t really do a lot with it. So just start super simple. When you have a membership site like you do, or digital products, most of the time we’re starting with sales. So when we’re creating that plan, it’s like, well, what are my goals for my sales? What are my goals for the year? How does that translate into a monthly goal? If your evergreen you’re looking at monthly, if your launches, your figuring that out in a different way, but ultimately how much do you want to sell? Because if you don’t have that place, you’re going with so many things in life, you don’t know where you’re going, you can’t get there. And that’s the biggest piece is knowing that North Star Metric that you’re looking for.
Gillian Perkins:
And thinking about how much someone wants to sell. I think the challenging part of that question is always well don’t I want to sell as much as I possibly could? So do you have any advice there on how to make a realistic goal and one that you can have confidence in?
Rita Barry:
Absolutely. So if you start with your baseline of what you sold now, understanding how your business is currently making money with your marketing will be the place to start, because you’re right. You could say, well, I just want to make a million dollars this year. If you haven’t even made a 100,000 that’s going to be pretty challenging. And probably just endless frustration.
Gillian Perkins:
We can’t just visualize all the way there?
Rita Barry:
You cannot, there are no vision boards that are going to make this something [inaudible 00:07:39] absolutely. So say you wanted to, we’ll go with a 100,000 something that’s a little bit more tangible because you wanted to make a 100,000 and you looked at what the numbers were for your business around, how many leads are coming into my business? What rate do those leads off my email list, turn into sales? Right. And every business seems does a pretty consistent value for that kind of the conversion rate off their list. And it’s quite different from business to business. But once you learn what yours is, I will help you project it and understanding how much traffic do you get that comes to your site.
Conversion Rates
Rita Barry:
Where is that traffic coming from? And how does that traffic specifically convert then into leads and into sales? It really doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. It really can be, you can go down rabbit holes doing this for a million years, but when you just getting started and getting your feet wet with the whole measurement marketing thing, there is no reason to get more complicated than some of those big macro goals and to figure out, how is your business currently working? Because once you have those benchmarks, you’re going to see where the bottlenecks are. Where maybe is the conversion rate on your email list, really low. You can focus on that rather than just the whole spaghetti on the wall approach where people know they’re not getting the sales they want. Therefore, they try everything when it might be that your business doesn’t need everything.
Gillian Perkins:
So the first step here is just to create this plan, to set your goals, and actually, I can’t not mention right here, if someone wants to learn more about this part of the process, I just created a new it’s about 20 minute long free training called how to predict your profits for the next 12 months that walks people through exactly that. Just analyzing how their business makes money and plugging in the numbers to figure out how much money they’re going to make in the next year. So we’ll leave a link to that in the show notes, if you guys want to check that out, but so let’s keep going. After we do this planning, then what is the next part of the process?
Rita Barry:
So when you know the numbers that you need to collect all the time, then after that, it’s just finding the place that those numbers live. Now, that sounds really simple, but you can build out, say like a Google Analytics, you can go in and pull it there, but you don’t necessarily need to. If you’re focusing on say sales and email driven sales and traffic, you can get those from your website dashboard, you can get those from your email service provider, you get them from your shopping cart. The point is, is that when you’re collecting numbers, you just need to consistently take your numbers from the same source every single time. Right? Because just as we talked about in the beginning, they can all be different, right?
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah. That’s a problem I’ve run into so many times where we look at sales on one platform and it says one number and we look at on a different platform and it’s a different number. And then it’s this whole ordeal to figure out which number is actually right and why are they different.
Rita Barry:
Right. And then there’s some validity to, obviously it was like a sales number, getting to the real answer. But when we’re coming from the marketing side of things, often States you’re looking for a useful truth. You’re not looking for the absolute truth, because you will really just drive yourself insane with trying to do that time and time again. So it’s really just pull the numbers from the same place every month or every week, however often you’re pulling your data and just put them in a really simple spreadsheet. It does not need to be fancy graphs and all of that craziness, as long as it’s something that you can understand and you can maintain, potentially give to someone else to do every month. Because it’s not like it’s fun, right? Pulling all this data, it could be a little monotonous and that’s it. Just keep track of them over time.
Gillian Perkins:
I swear my integrator thinks it is the funnest thing. It’s her favorite part of her job, but I could never consistently do it because I didn’t find it very fun. So I can’t agree with that enough, just finding someone else to do, even if it’s just a virtual assistant or someone who can go and check those things for you and plug them in a spreadsheet.
Rita Barry:
Exactly. You videotape it once, right. Do a screen share, and then they can just pull it over and over again. And I love the numbers and digging into and I don’t like pulling data. It’s just not my favorite thing, and then we have other people on the team that do that. So it’s always nice if you don’t like it to find someone else to do it, if you can, just so that you can maintain that consistency because we all know when we hate stuff, what happens to the consistency level that we have.
Gillian Perkins:
Right. Okay. So we’ve got them numbers in a spreadsheet and what are we going to do with them?
How to Analyze your Data
Rita Barry:
Right. And the biggest piece with analyzing your data is the trends over time, right? And so often it’s really fun to look at the big peaks and valleys, right? When we have huge surges in traffic or bumps or feel really bad when things go the other way. But when we’re looking at marketing data and we’re trying to make informed decisions and create better, more accurate plans, we’re really looking for the trends over time. And so that’s the piece with the consistency, which you covered that when you’re tracking these numbers, it’s not so much the absolute number for like May that you’re going to be worried about.
Rita Barry:
You’re trying to look at how is this being maintained over time and how are the things that I’m doing and the tests that I’m running and the changes I’m making to my overall marketing plan? How are those affecting those individual numbers? Because that’s ultimately what we’re trying to do. So just not to get hung up on the day-to-day stuff, it’s really your trends and your patterns. That is where all the gold is in this stuff.
Gillian Perkins:
And so to clarify, you’re not even so much talking about the numbers for big periods of time. It’s not like this year versus last year, as much as it is, is what direction are these numbers going in? Is that right?
Rita Barry:
Exactly. Right. You’re looking going, I now know what my baseline is. So say for example, we’re measuring the landing page conversion rate to an email list. And once you know that you’re converting say at 56%, and you’re seeing, I’m making changes, I’m testing headlines, I’m doing these things. How is that trending? Because you knowing that number is far more important than if you say an industry benchmark is say, for example, 20% conversion rate on the landing page, if you consistently have a much higher conversion rate, that’s fantastic, right? Nevermind the benchmarks, if you know what your own benchmarks are, those are a lot more powerful because then you can see if you’re actually trending in the right direction when you’re doing different tests and trying out different marketing channels.
Gillian Perkins:
And that is exactly what I love when we run those A/B tests, especially we’ve been doing so many of them on landing pages lately on registration page for different free offers and things like that. And it’s so nice to get those clear numbers and to be able to just compare A to B and C, okay, this one converted at a slightly higher percentage rate, and then we can iterate from there.
Rita Barry:
Exactly. And you just use… The traffic is coming to the page, you’re making so much better use of everything. Right. And it’s always so gratifying, especially when it’s a huge win, when you double the conversion rate on a page just by doing a small change or even a big change really, and just iterating on it. And the fact that you now know that twice as many people are going to be able to come into your world and learn about what you do. And it’s not like you’re doing anything differently, right. You’re not marketing more. You’re just being more efficient with what you’re doing, which is why I’ve always loved and kicked out about measurement marketing, because it just makes everything you do more efficient.
Gillian Perkins:
Yes. Yes. I think that’s why I love it too. We’ve recently tested the color on landing pages. The color that some of the text was the color of the button was we changed it from one color to another and it literally doubled the conversion rate on that page. It was like, I wish I did this last year. Right? How many more leads? How many more sales?
Rita Barry:
All the traffic. Absolutely.
Gillian Perkins:
Okay. So walk me through a few different things that we could be testing.
Traffic
Rita Barry:
Well, depending on your business model, but we’ll go for most of the time, there’s a lead generation aspect, and then there is some sales aspect. So always landing pages, I’ve mentioned landing pages. Landing pages, it’s one of the biggest things to test and iterate because it’s like that big door that gets people into your business. Especially if you’re sending people to your landing pages from any paid traffic, social media, anything, you can literally double the amount of people that come into your world just by paying attention to that. So industry benchmark is 20% for cold traffic, warm traffic should be substantially more than that. But honestly, if I’m paying for the traffic, I don’t like it to be less than 35% on landing page just to make sure we’re actually getting our money’s worth.
Rita Barry:
And then some people with warm traffic convert like 80% and higher, right? And that’s the important part, just knowing your space and knowing your people really makes all the difference. So that’s a huge one. Email sequences, right? Because usually it’s just like picking apart that path that people take after they get onto your email list, testing that welcome sequence. They will never be more excited to be on your list than the moment they have signed up. And it’s usually one of the… Well, people get in their head about it because that welcome sequence is so important and sometimes it doesn’t exist or it’s halfway done or it’s not as good as it could be, but really setting up the value and all the expectations in that first little bit of testing different subject lines calls to action, different types of content.
Rita Barry:
Just pure value, some driving things to sales, some not. Just working with all the different options in that welcome sequence space, if there’s any funnel to a purchase that you’re working on, obviously testing all of that as well. But just looking at like, when you really look at it like an email sequence, if nobody’s opening the email, then don’t really worry about focusing on the body copy yet. Right? So often people are like, I’ll just rewrite this whole email series. You’re like, well, if no one’s opening it, you don’t actually know if the body copy is any good yet. Right? So really don’t swing for the fences when you just have a little tiny problem. So try to focus in on those discrete tests, more so than anything, sales page testing, the same way as landing pages, carts, just clarity of things.
Rita Barry:
So often when people have sales pages, they’re often missing a huge sections of things that people could really use to make the decision over-complicating purchasing. Like there’s 75 options available, right? All the different payment plans. And there’s just so many different things you can test around simplifying, clarifying and making those just a really seamless experience, testing it on mobile, especially if you’re running paid traffic, all of those things are worthwhile test to do. And you’ll be amazed at just something that maybe you didn’t see, that is really aggravating your customers endlessly and losing out on sales.
Gillian Perkins:
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Gillian Perkins:
You’ll also get business coaching directly from me during our live monthly coaching sessions. During these sessions, you can ask any business questions that you have so that you can make sure that you get the answers you need in order to be able to keep moving forward and not get stuck. As a member you’ll also be invited into our membership community where you can connect with other online entrepreneurs who are crushing it so that you can be inspired and make some lasting connections. If you’re interested in becoming a member of Startup Society, then there’s no time like the present to make that happen. To sign up, just head to gillianperkins.com/startupsociety. Again, that’s, gillianperkins.com/startupsociety.
Gillian Perkins:
And as a listener of this podcast, I have a special offer for you. You can become a member of Startup Society for $10 off every single month. Just use code EARNMORE when you are signing up. Again, that code is EARNMORE, all one word and it will give you $10 off your monthly membership costs. If you want to turn your online business into a success as quickly and as strategically as possible, then I would love to work with you to make that happen. And now let’s get back to the episode.
Email Sequences
Gillian Perkins:
You mentioned email welcome sequences. And I think one of the toughest thing about testing with email welcome sequences is that there are so many different things going on. There’s so many different things you can test, even just in that one sequence with the open rates and the click-through rates, and you could be changing the body copy. You could be making the emails significantly shorter or longer or changing the subject line. Where should you start with that?
Rita Barry:
So that I would start with are people even opening it? Because that’s the same way as if people aren’t opting into your landing page, then you have to work on your landing page and don’t even worry about the rest of the stuff. Right? But with the welcome sequence or with any email sequence, if someone isn’t opening it, work on the subject line, add more curiosity, do all those, just try. There’s a million things you could Google around really good email subject lines to test that. If you’re getting a solid open rate, and once again, you’ll know your benchmark, right? I’ve seen anywhere from 50% to 15%, depending on the size of the email list and the type of business.
Rita Barry:
So there’s also really good industry benchmarks that you could Google and check, just to see if you’re really unfamiliar of whether you’re really bad or really good. And you just want to have an idea of where you fit in the world there, which can be very useful. You can Google that and check, because it does vary based on industry. But after that, you’re looking at body copy, short, long call to action. Are there multiple calls to action and people getting confusing? Can you simplify it to just one? What is the whole point of that email? Right? Testing content only versus calls to action, to things.
Gillian Perkins:
Something that trips me up sometimes is the fact that what you have done in the past or what you do today affects what you do in the future. So from the outside, you might think that only the subject line affects whether or not someone opens an email, but in reality, it’s the subject line plus whatever you sent them yesterday and whatever you sent them last week, right? Is there any way that we can include what we did in the past in our marketing daddy? You have any tips there because sometimes I’m just not quite sure what to do when it comes to figuring out the real reason why maybe an email doesn’t have as high of an open rate as I would like it to.
Rita Barry:
Right. [inaudible 00:22:05] exactly past experience. That’s always something to look at whenever you’re doing any marketing measurement at all is the past experience. And what somebody’s exposure to you has been previously is always very important to consider with what they’re doing currently. Right? So usually if someone’s having just email open rate problems in general, it’s always, what came before was that interesting? Are we giving people enough value? And that’s once again, why that welcome sequence could be so important because if you set up that I am a person who delivers incredible content, I know what you need, I’m very in tune with what’s going on for your audience and you’re really, over-delivering. That’s sets people up for much higher open rates going on into the future, into launches, all those things.
Rita Barry:
Where there’s only so much you can do, right. If you haven’t been doing a really good job with that email list in general, then there’s only so much you can do to a subject line to get somebody to open it. And it really is all about over-delivering and standing out in your space and paying a lot of attention to copywriting.
Gillian Perkins:
I think that’s why running some re-engagement campaign or sequence before a launch is a great idea. If someone hasn’t been consistently emailing their list, it is a band-aid solution. It’s not going to completely fix the problem, but it’s better than just live launching to a cold list.
Rita Barry:
Just live launching cold. Yeah, exactly. That’s usually a recipe for 10 and 12% open rates. Right. Which it can be really, really sad.
Gillian Perkins:
Yes. And potentially damaging your list long-term as well.
Rita Barry:
Well, completely you’ll just cannibalize it eventually, our people are just like, Oh right. I’m hearing from them again. I guess I know what’s coming now. Right. And that’s never how we want people to think about us. So it can be hard sometimes when in the rush of all the things that we have to do to remember do some of those foundational things, but it goes an awful long way to keeping that list active and healthy.
Gillian Perkins:
So often when I’m doing different testing in my own business to get to this data so that I can make these more data informed marketing decisions. I am so surprised by the results that we get, where we’ll be testing one landing page it gets to another. And the one that I thought would convert much higher performance, significantly worse, two examples off the top of my head, where one, we had an ugly landing page that had our old branding and it was very, I would say, just unprofessional looking and we polish it up. We made it look very nice. And the old ugly one performed better, which is that it was like, well, what did we do? We don’t want to be putting this image out onto the internet. Right. We want to have this professional looking brand. And then another one was we have a landing page that I started out with this super short landing page.
Gillian Perkins:
It’s for the registration, for an event that we do. And it literally only says the name of the event and then enter your name and email. And that’s all it says. And it was converting really well, but we thought there’s always room for improvement. So we started trying to add things to it, like testimonials about how amazing people said the event was and more details about the event and everything we did made it perform worse. And we finally just decided, okay, this page is converting at 80%. We should just leave it alone because we can’t be with anything. Right. Do you have any examples that you could share with me and with the audience about some surprising results you’ve gotten on tests?
Doubling Conversion Rates
Rita Barry:
We’ve doubled conversion rates from changing button copy. Not even color, that’s always fun. And we’re like, Oh, awesome. But it makes sense. It’s being more informative about what the button meant and what would happen after you clicked. Right. So it’s not just changing it from sign up to enroll now, it was making it actually quite long, more conversational button, just because people-
Gillian Perkins:
A conversational button. Okay.
Rita Barry:
A conversational button. We’re really informed people, actually we changed the button copy and then added some mice type, really small underneath the button that really just round up this is what’s going to happen after you press it. Because we were thinking that people might… The hypothesis was that maybe people were unsure and hesitant about the next step. And therefore that was impacting things. I’ve seen the short copy, really basically headline call to action button do really, really well changing a picture from one piece of say a group shot of a whole bunch of people promote an event that a client had to switching it to a stock image and having the stock image do better.
Rita Barry:
When of course we all assume that smiling people and everything else like that, it does better we’ve split test, happy images, more aspirational because that’s the train of thought rather than the marketing spaces that you want to show people in the more aspirational after situation rather than sad and gloomy, and that really serious pictures of this business owner did much, much better where she looked mean versus really happy pictures of her.
Gillian Perkins:
I think I like that one.
Rita Barry:
Yeah. She’s like, I’m serious and I mean business. And then we’ve also had the opposite to be true, right? Because so much of the conversion rate and the success of any page depends on who’s landing on it. So that is really tricky because sometimes we do a task, we’re running a certain kind of traffic there and it does a certain way. And then if we change traffic sources or we change the warmth of that traffic, or even when we change the types of cold audiences, then we always have to make sure that we’re looking at it. And that’s why the trends over time are so important.
Rita Barry:
Because even when you do an A/B test, it’s a snapshot in time that is showing you the results of this specific traffic source and where traffic comes from and who that person is and what they know and where they are in their buying journey with your particular type of product is going to make all the difference. And it makes it tricky. You just don’t want to drive yourself insane with it. It’s more like once it’s good enough and you feel you have a really solid conversion rate, then it’s time to go on to other stuff because truly you can do it endlessly. And most small business owners do not have nearly, you just don’t have endless time to be doing it.
Gillian Perkins:
I personally find this stuff so fun. And so my challenge is to not spend too much time because it is fun, but to make sure that I’m always working on A/B testing or some iteration on the weakest link in that sales process. So there’s going to be one metric that is performing worse than all the other ones, and that is where I need to focus my testing. So beyond the simple A/B tests with landing pages or email copy or things like that, what else does data driven marketing include that maybe people might not be aware of?
Data Forecast
Rita Barry:
So the last few things that we work on when we’re doing a workup for people is that you use your data to forecast. So it’s something we talked about. It really goes back to the plan, but it helps you make your plan better, once you have all that data, right. That you talked about, that people can really dial in and get their forecast. But the second piece is just overall optimization. Because when we’re thinking about those discrete tasks, there’s also the changing traffic sources, different marketing channels. For example, with YouTube, you have that huge presence there, does that one perform better? Does YouTube perform better for some people than say Instagram? But yet they’re spending all their time on Instagram. So there’s some of those just macro decisions where you see how you’re spending your time, whether you’ve got your email marketing, your social, all of that SEO, what all makes up that inbound awareness type of traffic.
Rita Barry:
And how is that all converting? Because some of it’s going to work a lot better than others. And what’s often really shocking is when you go in and people are like, well, but I love this one. It’s like a pet project that people have, but maybe there’s literally no evidence that, that pet project has ever sold anything. And that doesn’t mean you don’t doing it, right. Because if you do have the time and et cetera, like that’s something you love to do then knock yourself out. But most of the businesses owners that I work with are at a point where they’re trying to eliminate all of this extra and really focus on everything from the most successful marketing channels right down to I have four different funnels that are associated with four different lead magnets and offers, which one of those four for example, is actually working the best?
Rita Barry:
Where should I really be sending my traffic? And how do I amplify what’s already working? Which is where the paid traffic comes in. Because once you find out what’s working, you can actually do less work because you’ve already done the work, right. And a lot of those optimizations and those tests, then all of a sudden, you know where to send people. You’re using your time to its best advantage and you can see much better results with it as well, which is ultimately what most of the clients I work with are trying to get to.
Gillian Perkins:
That ties in so perfectly to the heart of this podcast, all about figuring out how to work less and earn more. And every month I do these income reports to talk about the different sources of income that my business has and our different expenses. But then in the second part of them, I talk about where I spent my time. And so I can see how the time that I spent relates to these different income sources and which one is really the best use of my time. But I love the added elements that this brings, where we’re also bringing in things like conversion rates to figure out where strategically it makes the most sense, like you said, to direct most of our traffic. Because if we have two different opt-in offers, for example, and one of them converts twice, as well as the other, then it would make sense to be sending most of our traffic to the one that converts a lot better.
Gillian Perkins:
You also mentioned Instagram, you were talking about Instagram traffic versus YouTube traffic. And I think that Instagram, especially not to say that Instagram isn’t an amazing tool and it can’t really be used to generate leads and customers, but you’re talking about pet projects that people just really like. I think for a lot of people that can be Instagram where Instagram is a fun social media platform where you can potentially waste a lot of time, but if you’re not using it strategically, it might not really be impacting your bottom line.
Rita Barry:
Absolutely. It is the one I was totally thinking of piece. It’s the one that I have the most conversations with clients about either they hate it and they’re like, why do I have to do this? And then the conversation I was like really actually I don’t. I’ve seen every different kind of marketing configuration, and the nice thing is for those of us that like to do different things is that you can make pretty much any of them work, with consistency and iterative testing and all that sort of stuff. But Instagram is one of those where people like, does this even matter? Like, is this making a difference? So they’ll love it. They’ll spend a lot of time and it’s not impacting the bottom line in the same way that some other avenues they have are, or they hate it and they want to get off the hook with having me give them the permission to not do it at all.
Gillian Perkins:
Yeah. So that’s not to say to anyone like you have to quit Instagram, Instagram doesn’t work. If you love Instagram, then you need to get strategic with Instagram, so will impact your bottom line. If you don’t love it, fine. You don’t have to do it. You have permission.
Rita Barry:
Yeah. Don’t do. Exactly. And if that’s the thing, if you do love it and it’s a really great creative outlet, there are ways to be very strategic about it and actually measure the impact it’s having on your business. There are totally ways to do that, which is really important because it can suck up an awful lot of your time and anything can. Right. So it’s just really good to know how it is working.
Gillian Perkins:
Before we wrap this up, do you have any final advice for anyone who is interested in getting started with making more data driven decisions in their business?
Rita Barry:
Oh, that’s a big question. Isn’t it? It’s a big question with [inaudible 00:33:23] endless rabbit holes you could go down. But the biggest thing really is just to start with that plan and know that it does not need to be as complicated. You don’t need to go and use any fancy software. You probably have all the numbers that you need at your fingertips in some of the tools that you already use. And just start pulling a few numbers that are those really big picture KPI North Star Metrics that we talked about around sales, conversion rates, leads, and just start there. And don’t have huge expectations on yourself in the beginning and just do it consistently for a couple of months and start to see what you see and get curious and start asking questions about how you can improve them. It’s the best way to start.
Gillian Perkins:
Well, this has been awesome, Rita. Thank you so much for your time. And just for geeking out with me over at this topic that I love talking about and working on so much. So thank you so much. If listeners want to find out more about you and find you on the internet, where can they do that?
Rita Barry:
The best place to find me is on my website, is at ritabarry.com. And that’s B-A-R-R-Y not like the fruit and that’s it. And I don’t use social a lot because I’m a service based business and I don’t need to, and I don’t like to. So see, there you go. You can make a business work even without it.
Gillian Perkins:
Perfect. Well, thank you again, Rita. We’ll be sure to leave a link to your website in the show notes so people can find you there and thank you so much.
Rita Barry:
Thank you.
Gillian Perkins:
Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Work Less, Earn More. Now here’s what I want you to do next, take a screenshot of the episode you’re listening to right now and share it on Instagram Stories. And when you do make sure you tag me at Gillian Z Perkins, so I can see that you’re listening. Sharing on Stories is going to help more people find this podcast so that they too can learn how to work less, earn more, and take back their lives. And if you really love the show and head over to Apple Podcasts and leave a review to give it a boost. Not only will this help the show out, but it’s also going to give you the chance to win a 12-month membership to Startup Society. Each week, I’ll be picking one winner. To enter all you need to do is post a review on Apple Podcasts and be sure to include your Instagram handle so we can send you a DM if you win. Okay, now let’s wrap this up. I’m Gillian Perkins, and until next week stay focused and take action.
