Why is it that when new things are released on social media, big brands don’t jump in with two feet and adopt them straight away but many, many small business owners do?
For example, when Facebook Stories came out, lots of small business owners are jumping on it, and trying it out, and just going for it. Whereas, we’ve seen a lot of big brands be much slower on the uptake. That is not because of their hierarchy and internal structure and getting approval. It’s because of analytics.
When big brand companies decide to put time and money behind something, they test it first. They actually make sure it’s going to work for them. They make sure it’s in alignment with their strategy and the plan they have for their business. They’ll try out something, they’ll evaluate, they’ll tweak it, and they’ll try again if it is in alignment with their strategy. But if it’s not strategically aligned, they won’t do it at all. If it is strategically aligned, they evaluate, they tweaked, and they go through the cycle again and again until they get the perfect formula for them, the way that works for them. But these are things that small business owners really don’t do.
Most small business owners don’t do this at all because they have no feedback loops to evaluate if a strategy is working at all and that is even if there is a clear strategy in the first place, which helps them make the decision whether they should try the new thing or not. Often, there isn’t even a strategy in place. The thing is that most small business owners are terrible at tracking, and monitoring, and tweaking, and changing, and making sure that the platform works in a way that is working for our business. That is not a criticism, it is just the way that things are.
This isn’t even the case for startups, or five-figure entrepreneurs, or even low six-figure entrepreneurs. I see this in seven and mid-seven figure businesses too. There’s not enough tracking and monitoring, and it’s causing a huge amount of wasted time and money, and in all honesty, energy as well. We need to really understand that our actions generate results. We need to understand what actions are going to generate us the most leads and then most clients. We need to know what those actions are and without tracking and monitoring of results really closely without being clear on the data on what that is telling us, we can’t understand that and make decisions off the back of it.
What posts get engagements?
What posts get conversations going?
What posts get conversion events happening?
What posts move people forward in the sales cycle with us?
If you don’t know the answer to these questions, you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
All these things are things that big, successful companies and small, successful companies are tracking and monitoring really, really closely. They’re making sure that they are completely on top of the stats, and that is something as small business owners, we really do neglect. So what stats do we need to be on top of? Well, there can be different kinds of analytics in our business, and we need to make sure that we’re looking at those that align to our goals for the quarter. That is a real key one, which statistics, which pieces of data are aligning to our goals and which do we need to look at and track to ensure we are moving closer to those goals? So they can be financial analytics, things like website analytics, social media analytics. We can actually look at them broken down into each areas of the business.
So sales, marketing, delivery, finance, and so on.
But we need to be clear in our business that the ones that we are starting to look at are in alignment with our goals. That way, we can make sure that we spend time doing the right things, we are doing things in a way that are helping us grow, and scale our business, and actually drive our business forward. For example, you know in terms of the web analytics, you’ve got things like visits, unique visits, exit pages, pages per visit, average duration time. These are all stats around our website analytics that we can monitor and we can be on top of if those align to our goals if those are lined up with where we want to be. We’d understand the trends so that we know if we drive traffic to someone on our site, what effect that will have on our sales? What does that mean for our bottom line?
In terms of things like social media analytics, we can understand how we’re performing on the platform so we know if we should keep doing what we’re doing or if we should stop doing what we’re doing. What activity is driving our business? And ultimately, this makes us more efficient if we understand this data. Once we know, for example, the best types of posts to post for our audience or the best times of day, then we’re not wasting time and energy creating content that doesn’t work for our business. We know that we need to put out things that actually convert to our clients, so let’s understand what that actually means.
Understanding these stats gives us a real grasp, a much better and stronger grasp on our business and actually then can help us grow, and scale, and understand which way we need to go, understand what our likers and commenters want, and how to get them to convert into clients. When we think about our financial analytics, we’re not just speaking about understanding the profit and loss statement. We’re speaking about understanding things like the cost of acquisition of a client, the lifetime value of a client, and those types of metrics. Again, incredibly important to understand and track so that you can make business adjustments based on the trend in data.
I hope that this episode has been useful in understanding a bit more about why big businesses make sure they really understand the data and what we can learn from that as small business owners. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, let’s find the clarity in your numbers, increase your wealth, and get more money in your pockets.
