Are you tracking the right business metrics?

Episode Transcription

Den Lennie (2s):
G’day guys! Den Lennie here, host of the how to scale a video business podcast with this week’s shorty. It is Tuesday, the 9th of February, just come off a coaching call with my video business accelerator mastermind clients. And today’s training was, eh, and there was a game changer and I’m going to share why that was with you. Cause I like to, you know, share what we’re talking about in the mastermind. See if it resonates with you, but can offer you some help and guidance. And today was a big one and something I’ve been working on for about three or four months. And it’s really all about data tracking.

Den Lennie (46s):
You know, if we don’t track the right data in our business, we can end up spending a lot of time chasing the wrong data and by data. I mean, sometimes people spend a lot of time focused on vanity. He metrics, you know, how many, you know, people solve reached a post or how many people clicked on the later post-doc commented. And, and that has a, some place in overall, you know, brand awareness. But I see a lot of people wasting a lot of time focusing on the wrong things and not focusing enough time on the right things, because generally speaking, the data you want to be tracking is kind of, it’s harder to do, you know, in terms of what you’ve got to do to kind of make that data work and talking about that kind of, you know, fundamental data, you know, does do your data track how clients are coming into your business, how you’re getting them and is it tracking the number of conversations you’re having and is it tracking the number of sales that you’re making?

Den Lennie (1m 47s):
And do you know if you’re spending money on ads, are your ads actually delivering your results? Because the challenge is if you don’t track the right data, you’ll end up, you know, spending a lot of time and effort and potentially money on things that you don’t know are working. So, so how do you know what to track and pay attention to? Because, you know, if you take Facebook, for example, you know, on my Facebook page, I’ve got like number of actions on the page, I’ve got number of page views, I’ve got the page likes, I’ve got the post reach, post engagement. And you know, on one page, for example, and January between 10th, January 6th, February 36,997 post reach.

Den Lennie (2m 28s):
But that seems like a big number. And, you know, we had turned in 28 video views and 3,822 post engagements. But what does that actually mean in terms of business revenue? Well, not a lot. And the challenge you’ve got with all of these platforms is they’ve all got advanced metrics, but is it the right thing to be looking at? Because cause not all data is actually useful. You know, vanity metrics may not be E an important metric unless you’re a YouTuber who is trying to attract sponsors and you can say, well, I’ve got a hundred thousand subscribers and you know, 50,000 people watch every video.

Den Lennie (3m 10s):
That’s a different thing. But as a video production company, we’re not in that game, we’re in the content production game for other people. And so what we need to do is track weekly performance data so that you can focus on directing activity in the right places. So you want to move away from vanity metrics and into useful data that actually helps to draw at drive a sale. And, you know, there are lots of things you can look at tracking. You know, you can look at your ad spend, you can look at your click through rate, you know, number of Clinc Clayton at LinkedIn connection requests. Number of connection accepts LinkedIn conversations.

Den Lennie (3m 51s):
What’s your website, traffic doing what landing pages are getting the clicks, what landing pages are getting opt-ins. And if you don’t know what that is, then, then there’s something that you should be thinking about. You know, how do you look? Most people on video businesses, right about a contact us from on their page and nothing much more advanced than that. Maybe get a quote button. But, but what, what I think is missing from a lot of businesses is a funnel of some description, some way of converting casual visitors who stumble across your website, into prospects, people who have said, I’m actually interested in what you’ve got to offer here. So I’m going to give you my email address in return for something of value.

Den Lennie (4m 31s):
And that thing of value might be an ebook. It might be a court template. It might be a video revealing something. But, but what I feel happens is a lot of live video businesses are going to scare to do that because they think, Oh, if I make someone jump through a hoop, they might not buy from me. But here’s the big news guys. If they’re not going to give you their email address, they’re not gonna give you their credit card, simple as that. So we have to overcome this fear of marketing and actually start attracting people into our business who have something to offer. You know, I’m going to share a story with one of our clients grant who’s just rebuilt his website. And he focuses largely on the, the distribution industry, you know, haulage, that kind of thing.

Den Lennie (5m 13s):
And he’s been having incredible success, reach out LinkedIn to his target market. And people are saying to him, Oh my goodness, I get so many people reaching out to me. And, but you’re the only one that specialized in my area. And he is securing deals already. So, you know, being specific is absolutely the way to build your video business. But most people listening to this, won’t do it because they’re scared. They’re scared to actually just trust the instinct on that. And the instinct is this is a proven process. I know this works. I’ve seen it time and time and time again. And my clients are getting outstanding results because of this and the ones who question it, the ones who don’t want to do that, they’re falling by the wayside and, and they’ll fail. The businesses will fail now is not the time to be, you know, Jack harassing around going, Oh, well I want to try and do this.

Den Lennie (5m 59s):
And I wanna try and do that. You have to be specific. You have to solve a specific problem. The world has changed. You’d simply cannot dilly dally around and kind of like hope that, you know, work will come in. It doesn’t work like that. You’ve got to be proactive. You’ve got to be clear on what market you serve, how you serve them, how are you going to help them? And, and what your unique offer is. So, you know, once you get to that, you can start to track, you know, website, traffic and landing page clicks and landing page opt-ins. And who’s completing your survey is your email list growing, how many sales calls are you doing in a week? How many sales conversions are you getting in a week? And what are your financials doing?

Den Lennie (6m 40s):
And so we, we actually launched her a score card template this morning that our members are using though to track that on a weekly basis so they can make really informed decisions. And then you can build detailed dashboards that you can actually, then I’m sure, you know, you can, you can look at it every day and see how your business is performing. And again, most video businesses don’t do this most video businesses fly by the seat of their pants and, and kind of wing it week to week. And you know what, that’s okay if that’s you, that’s fine. But you know, you’re never going to build a business to build a business. It needs structure, it needs discipline. It needs process. And you know, once you start to understand your cost of acquiring a customer, that is when the real magic happens, because you know that when you spend a dollar, you get $10 back.

Den Lennie (7m 24s):
That is the Nirvana of business and that’s for any business, not just video. And, you know, I’d say less than 5% of video businesses that are in the world are doing this maybe less than 3%. And that same majority of them are in the video business accelerator. And that’s why they’re succeeding with such a, such a rate because they’re implementing tried and tested marketing systems. I’ve been reading a book recently called scientific advertising by Claude Hopkins was written in 1927. And I recommend you go and read this book. It’s mind blowing. If you take away the language and the technology of the time, which was newspapers and direct mail, and you listen to the psychology, it’s like it’s identical for today. We haven’t changed as a human race. Our technology has changed the way in which we consume content has changed, but fundamentally we haven’t changed as humans beings.

Den Lennie (8m 9s):
And that, and that is what makes this kind of stuff so fascinating. So this is predictable. This is a way to predict how you can scale your video business, but you have to lean into it. You have to stop bullshitting yourself. You have to stop making excuses because you can make money or you can make excuses, but you can’t do both. And I’ve had some quite interesting conversations recently with people who are, you know, I am not yet in the space where they realize how big the problems are. And, and I’m going to go as far as saying, some of them are diluted and the world has changed people. You know, you just simply can’t hope that work will come in anymore. There’s just too much competition.

Den Lennie (8m 49s):
There’s too many people stepping their game up and there will be a culling of, of the weaker businesses. So, you know, don’t take the breasts, don’t take the CHADS, implement these systems. You know, if you’ve been listening to the show for awhile, how much of what you’re listening to you actually implementing? Are you still sitting there thinking about it because thinking about something isn’t executing and, and what I want you to do is take one thing you’ve learned from this podcast and please just execute, execute it, and let me know how you went on, because you know that there’s a danger of consuming too much content as danger of consuming too many ideas and never acting on any of them. And that is the number one challenge that I see video businesses face.

Den Lennie (9m 30s):
And when they come into our program and they start to focus, they start to get results. And that is what is the game changer. So guys, I’m going to run off this quickly today because I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today because it’s my birthday this week and I’m taking a few days off. So I will talk to you on Thursday. You’ve been listening to the how to scale a video business podcast with me, your host, Den Lennie, if you’re a video business owner, it’s hits a ceiling, we’ve benefited from mentorship, support and coaching and check out how you can work with me over at denlennie.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the shore over on iTunes. And we’d really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review, and don’t forget to share if you feel you’ve gotten value from this episode and you think it would be useful for other filmmakers, you know, and please do me a massive favor and share it on social media and in groups that you might be in.

Den Lennie (10m 22s):
So thanks for listening. See you in the next episode.