Navigating the 50 50 Marketing Paradox: CRM Solutions for Small Business Owners
Jul 16, 2024Season 8Episode 3
Michael Buzinski
Can understanding the 50-50 marketing paradox be the key to unlocking your business's potential? Tune in to our latest episode where we reveal how continuous testing and tracking can save your marketing efforts from stagnation. We break it down for small business owners, showing you practical strategies to manage your marketing without feeling overwhelmed. Our spotlight on CRM systems, especially BuzzHub, demonstrates how keeping a firm grip on your contact database and tracking customer interactions can lead to smarter, data-driven decisions that boost your marketing strategy.
In the next part of our episode, we tackle the vital Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can make or break your digital marketing efforts. From the critical importance of understanding website traffic and conversion rates to the nuances of email marketing metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and close rates, we've got you covered. Learn how to filter out bot traffic and engage your audience effectively, with actionable tips that will elevate your email marketing game. By the end of this episode, you'll have the knowledge to keep ahead in the ever-evolving marketing landscape.
Can understanding the 50-50 marketing paradox be the key to unlocking your business's potential? Tune in to our latest episode where we reveal how continuous testing and tracking can save your marketing efforts from stagnation. We break it down for small business owners, showing you practical strategies to manage your marketing without feeling overwhelmed. Our spotlight on CRM systems, especially BuzzHub, demonstrates how keeping a firm grip on your contact database and tracking customer interactions can lead to smarter, data-driven decisions that boost your marketing strategy.
In the next part of our episode, we tackle the vital Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can make or break your digital marketing efforts. From the critical importance of understanding website traffic and conversion rates to the nuances of email marketing metrics like open rates, click-through rates, and close rates, we've got you covered. Learn how to filter out bot traffic and engage your audience effectively, with actionable tips that will elevate your email marketing game. By the end of this episode, you'll have the knowledge to keep ahead in the ever-evolving marketing landscape.
I'm doing well. You know I didn't get to say how psychedelic your background is. Very, very California of you.
Speaker 2:
It is very California. It's kind of got that beachy vibe too, you know.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, yeah, Psychedelic, beachy vibe. Yes, definitely San Francisco tie-dye. It reminds me of my old days, back when San Francisco was cool Anyhow, oh man. So today we're talking about the 50 50 marketing paradox, which you and I have talked about extensively. Right, We've got we're always trying new things with our marketing, and if we're not, we're get stagnant and the things that start working or been working will eventually end up not working. And if you're not always testing new things, you're going to be stuck flat on your feet. Right, and so you know, since you know, we've been putting together all of these DIY platforms for people to start taking control of their marketing, so that they're not beholden to any marketing firm or anybody, any consultant or freelancer. It's like they own their marketing. Right, and one of the things that I feel in the answering the question right of the 50-50 marketing paradox is the fact that people don't track what is going on with their marketing, is the fact that people don't track what is going on with their marketing Right, which is kind of scary, it's super scary.
Speaker 1:
It's kind of like not tracking. It's like not weighing yourself when you're on a diet and then not measuring your food and not watching what you eat, I'll lose you.
Speaker 2:
That's a great example. Yeah, that's a great example. I'm sure we can all relate to that one. Yeah, I do. I'm the one.
Speaker 1:
I'm like, ah crap, I got to do that. Nah, dang it, and I'm good for like a week, and then it's like, yeah, but so how do we keep ourselves on the scale Right, because we get what we focus on and we achieve what we measure right? That's pretty common sayings out there. So what is? Is there a tool that we can utilize that won't take up a lot of our time? Cause I know a lot of people use like spreadsheets and they track how many leads they got and what it took to get there and all this other thing that seems like that should take like a whole full-time job in itself. So how is it that small businesses can track everything without it taking up too much of their bandwidth?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, you know I love this topic because I can like totally geek out on this.
Speaker 1:
but when you talk about you know, why do you think I had you for this episode? I know, I know, I know.
Speaker 2:
I'm like, hey, okay, hand over the mic so you know we talk to businesses about tech stacks, right, like what tools do you need in your business? How can you utilize systems and tools to operate more efficiently and to work better within your business? Make more educated decisions. And one of those specifically is the CRM system, and a lot of people have.
Speaker 1:
CRM real quick. I don't think a lot. Everybody knows what CRM is. Yes.
Speaker 2:
So CRM, client relationship management, and so there are tools out there. There's lots and lots of tools out there, but not all of them are great right. There are tools out there. There's lots and lots of tools out there, but not all of them are great right. So you've got to be careful in the tools that you utilize for the CRM or client relationship management resource that you're looking for. We obviously have an amazing tool called BuzzHub, which we're a little, you know, partial to. Might be a little biased.
Speaker 1:
Which we're a little, you know, partial to I'd be a little biased.
Speaker 2:
A little biased, but you know. But the purpose of these CRM tools is to tell you exactly what you don't know. Like you said, 50-50 paradox, right? What are you doing that's working, what are you doing that's not working? And how do you track that, other than kind of, like you know, covering your eyes, pointing a finger and figuring out what sticks? It's like spaghetti on a wall.
Speaker 1:
But CRM systems especially, oh, but wait a second. You don't actually turn around to see what's stuck on the wall.
Speaker 2:
True, that's true. You just keep moving.
Speaker 1:
You just throw it over your shoulder and go. Oh something's stuck I don't know what it was to what it was.
Speaker 2:
But so if you find the right CRM tool, which is what BuzzHub is, it not only helps you to keep track of your contacts right, so you have to have your database. Database is king, queen, whatever you want to call it. If you don't have control over your database and ownership over your contacts, your business is not going to be moving forward. So you can keep track of the contacts that you have. Make sure you have current contact information. On top of that, you utilize it as a marketing tool for email marketing, social media marketing.
Speaker 2:
We can track website visits. We can track advertising organic interactions within your website. Relay over to the CRM system. You can see what people are doing when you're not there. So if they've gone to your website, clicked on a form, filled out the form for more information, then all of that detail is in their contact record where you can see the interactions that they've had. So that makes for you going in there as a business owner to see hey, I'm going to call this person. They've been on my website, they've clicked on this thing. They must be an engaged user. I'm definitely going to call them because I can see that they're interested in what we have to offer, so I mean yeah.
Speaker 2:
I think that's the tipping point.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, right, right, it's like you have, if you're a, you're a B2B marketing, which is where we usually play. You know, we're we're always looking at the fact that B2B marketing has a longer sales cycle, and so what Tori's talking about here is the fact that it might be that somebody does download a form. Now, just because they download one form or maybe a white paper maybe it's a case study that they wanted to look at those types of things those are indications of interest, but not indications of commercial or transactional interest. They might still be in the information gathering mode, right, and so they're not ready to make a commitment. So if you pounce on them too early, you could scare them away, right, right.
Speaker 1:
And and when she's talking about like social media and tracking, like when people like things and if they're in your database, you know, can you track? You know how many times somebody likes you Well, if you have the right tools, yes, you can. But yeah, the um and the email marketing side of the stuff she's talking about, it's the automation of like oh, they did download this and now we're going to automate an email after that to say, hey, did you know that when you were looking at this? Here's another, maybe another case study. Here is another uh use. Here's another statistic from the checklist that I gave you. Here's a bonus dot dot dot to get them continually engaging. So a CRM is not just, like Victoria is saying here, that not just a tracking mechanism, but it's also an automation tool in marketing to help you in your sales cycle. So, and then you can score them.
Speaker 2:
So if they do.
Speaker 1:
You know that if, like you were talking about the tipping point, so you know that if they do this and then they do this, then we need to give them a high score. And once they get this certain score here, we know we need to either send them an email Maybe it's a text, maybe it's call them ourselves, maybe it's sending them a care package saying, hey, thank you for consuming our data. Here's a couple other things we'd love you to have dot dot dot. And then giving you an excuse to call, saying, hey, I just want to make sure you got my package Right. Yeah, so what are the? I think that the you know, people know like, oh, yeah, I need to track things. That's that'd be totally cool. Like, yeah, we should track stuff.
Speaker 2:
Let's do it.
Speaker 1:
What do you track?
Speaker 1:
You're always like track everything but if somebody is just getting right, and they don't know how, to you know, put pixels in places and UTMs and I'm, I'm, I'm speaking a bunch of of garbage here. Yeah, technical gibberish, industry jargon, um, but, but that's the thing. Like you know, a lot of people don't know what any of that is. So what are the like? The first, let's say three things that somebody who's not advertising everything's organic social media they might be doing, maybe some YouTube just doing the normal networking and stuff like that. What are the three KPIs, the key performance indicators that they should at least start with, even if they don't have a CRM?
Speaker 2:
Yeah well, I think gosh well, I mean email marketing. You should be doing some email marketing. So email opens would be a KPI that you should be tracking. You should be tracking websites.
Speaker 1:
I'm going to step us through that though. Okay. So email marketing. So if you're sending out mass emails and if you're not, you should, as she said. I second that. So okay, so they send out a hundred emails say they only have a hundred people on their list. What is a good open rate and what is?
Speaker 2:
an open rate.
Speaker 1:
Oh gosh.
Speaker 2:
Yes, so an open rate is when you like exactly what it means. Click the email to open it and view it. That's what you're considering and open, okay. Um, and typically there's different industries have different standards, but kind of a base industry standard anything around 20 to 30 percent open rate and above is really really good yes, I think.
Speaker 1:
uh, across the board, if you're above 21%, you're doing decent, and for every 5% above 21%, you're doing even more decent. So if you get one out of two, so 50%, you're doing awesome. Yes, I definitely. All right. So what's the second one? What if they're not doing email marketing? What was another one they should be looking at?
Speaker 2:
Oh gosh, I mean, website traffic is one should be looking at. Oh gosh, I mean, website traffic is one, but that's kind of hard to track when it goes to specific contacts. Right, so you can see as a general level the traffic on your website. So are people engaging with the content that you have? Do they even know that you exist? So, being able to track. You know what your website traffic looks like. That is a good indicator of how well your content's performing, and your visibility Exactly.
Speaker 1:
I love that. I love that. So website traffic, and I would probably piggyback that with a secondary KPI with it, which is your website conversion rate. So not all traffic's good traffic. So if you're getting a thousand people that are coming in and nobody's converting to reach out, to download whatever your lead magnet or any of that stuff, then it's all for naught, right, and so you either have one of two problems either a bad call to action or you have bad traffic, right. So I think that let's call that a joint KPI, that people should be looking at your unique traffic and they make sure that you're filtering out the bots. Anybody who comes to me and says they're a solopreneur, they're like.
Speaker 1:
I get 1500 visitors a month, I'm like, yeah, and 90% of them are bots. You got like 50 people coming to your website. Come on now and when you're so, when you're looking at that so, and actually, man, it's in my book I actually tell I show people how to do that. But anyway, long story short, if you got, you know, if you got a hundred people coming to the website, if two anywhere between one and two people do anything that you would consider a profitable step towards a sale, or what we would call conversion, you're doing. Well, it takes thousands of people coming to your website because some people land there by accident because they're looking for one thing and you're offering another, Looking for what you do, but in an industry you don't serve For an echelon of business that you aren't, or maybe you are past those types of things like that.
Speaker 1:
You know for us, we know we, we do startups up to about 10 million is usually for professional services, consultants and and fractionals. That's, that's our sweet spot. Do we have some people who are above that? Yeah, but we, we got them there.
Speaker 2:
It wasn't that they go into the website.
Speaker 1:
These guys work with eight figure professional enterprise services. You know that's. That's not who we are. We're the, we're the the privately owned, so I think those two there. So if you're doing email marketing, we're looking at the open rate, making sure people are actually reading our content Right, and the secondary one to that one would be then the click through percent, what's it called? Yep.
Speaker 2:
Click through rate. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so let's give them that one too. What's that?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, so for click through. When you're sending email content, you want it to be engaging. You want it to be informational, and so you have to have some triggers or links or pieces within your email that people can take action on, and so when you have a button to visit the website, download a white paper, whatever it might be, anything specific to your business where they can take an action to go outside of this email and go to a website, book an appointment visit your social media profiles.
Speaker 2:
That's what you consider a link, and so it's one thing for people to open and to view and to read your email, that's great right. But if you take it one step further, if they're engaging with it and they're clicking on the content within, then you know you have a really, really hot lead right Somebody who is interested in what you've got. They're clicking on something specific and you know that they're looking for what you have to offer.
Speaker 1:
Definitely. I think another thing you can do with email marketing and your click-throughs or links, just say period is teaser content to see if people are willing to click through to read the rest of something. Right, so you can test blogs, you could test videos. You know, give them a little teaser. It's like, hey, you want to see the rest of this, click here, see the rest of it, and it takes them out of the email over to something else. This is your email, so it's okay, right, like, we're not on social media, where they're trying to keep them on social media, and so you get demerits for pulling people out. This is your. You're just driving them deeper into your company, so that's great.
Speaker 1:
But testing your content of like, hey, did I say this right enough, or did I say this well enough for people to want to know more? Right, so you can test, test those types of things out, right there. So, and then from there, I think that the third one for that one would then be your close rate on the click-through rate. Right, and so now your close rate is going to be up to you. Right, because this is your list and what you're offering and all that other stuff's going to be completed. But what about that click-through rate? What should they try to get to? What's a good number on that click-through rate?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I would say anywhere between two to 5% is a good click-through rate.
Speaker 1:
Ooh, okay. So if there's a hundred? So if you sent out a hundred emails and 21%, or eight, or let's just call it 20%, 80, 80 of them, open that up Right. And now you're saying, okay, so 2%. What do you say? Two to 5%?
Speaker 2:
Two to 5%.
Speaker 1:
So 5%. So that means that four of them open it up is 5%, right.
Speaker 2:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
So that means that four of them are going to click through to something and say now, how many people are going to actually make an appointment from that or take the next step? Those are the things that right. There is that conversion rate right there, Okay. And then on your website you were talking about the traffic, and then we've got that conversion rate, which just means they're taking that, they're basically clicking through right From your website instead of an email, Right, and so then? And then it's like now what's that next step to get into that appointment or get them to sign up for something? That's your close rate, Right, and so you have that third one right there. What's another space that we could be looking at like three KPIs to help um track success in?
Speaker 2:
Well, I was. I was going to say. The third one that came to mind for me was um appointment to conversion, right, because there's a lot of times when you have um sales calls, discovery calls, any of those types of meetings that's great to do, but it can't be just hey, let's chit, chat, kind of thing right, most of the time you have those with intention, because you know time is money, your time is important and you know you're meeting with people for a certain you know intent, when, when it's those types of calls, and so what I think is tracking those calls into conversions.
Speaker 2:
whether it's an upsell, a cross sell, a referral, any of those types of things could be wins or conversions. It's just which conversion you want to measure and which one's going to give you the most success.
Speaker 1:
I love that. And how many do you need? Right? Because then you can reverse engineer everything we just talked about, right? It's like okay, so from my website I know that I have to have 10 appointments to get one sale. So if I want four sales, that means I need 400 people to come to my website. And then all of those KPIs need to be the same. As that goes right, because sometimes you'll put more traffic to a website but then you'll see your close rate go down. What does that mean? Or your conversion rate go down. That means that your traffic that you have added to it is not as good as the traffic you were getting before. So hopefully the listeners are now hearing how the numbers can talk to us and tell us what the next thing is, and then it shows us what is working and what is not working.
Speaker 1:
Right, you can literally look at your, your website traffic. You can go to google analytics. You can set that up in five minutes and just from your google analytics you can figure out what pages are actually performing and which pages are not right, and which and which forms or which call to actions actually work, what color buttons actually are. I mean, there's a bunch of stuff that you can test Excuse me as far as that goes which offers which? What copy gets written? You can go to something called Hotjar dot com and it's a plug in into your website and it'll actually show you where people hang out. What buttons do they push the most of? What navigation do they hang out with? Which images do they? They hover over longer because people they look with their cursor, they read with their cursor, right, and so whatever they're doing with their cursor is where they're, they're focused on Right, and so that will tell you like, hey, that picture right there doesn't get anything. Maybe we need to pick. I mean, we get that picture out of there, right. And then, if you have a video, how long are they listening to the video? Right, did they listen to the end or they are they dropping off in the first 15 seconds? And you have a five minute video. Guess what? That video is not working for you, right? These are all the things that we're giving you, more than the three, but all of those come to the what you were talking about in this last KPI, which is your close rate, and understanding.
Speaker 1:
How many phone calls does it take to get a? To get a call a close Cause some people think you can talk to. You know some of you that are listening can get on the phone and sell what your, your product is in 20 minutes. It's either going to happen or it's not going to happen. There is no second chance, right? And there's others of you that have to have that first call to discovery and have another call.
Speaker 1:
That's a proposal. You know, get the, have the proposal and then you have another call to go over the contract and maybe another call to talk to legal or whatever it is and it's like. So you got like four or five calls. Well, if you value your time properly, on average it should be about $250 an hour. So if you spend three hours in calls, right, and it takes you 10 prospects to get a close, that means it's costing you $7,500 to close that sale. That's not including, and that's what we call the cost per acquisition. That's not including and that's what we call the cost per acquisition, and that's not including what it?
Speaker 1:
costs to get them into the first meeting in the first place. Yes, so I say this as an entrepreneur that time is money and you either have more money than time or more time than money. But the one thing you can always make more money, you cannot make more time. So be careful of how you spend your time right. And these kpis we're talking about. Most of what we just talked about has to do with organic and guerrilla marketing, networking. This is your time. Time is money. It's costing your company time Anytime that you're the one doing it. So as soon as you can get people to do the 15, 20 an hour, uh, uh tasks right, dollar tax versus your $250 an hour time, you're making money. You're making $230. If they're getting the same or better, and a lot of times, they'll do better results. So if they did 10 calls, or they did 10 prospects and three calls per prospect, and they're even if you gave them 10% of a $10,000 product, you're still only charging 2,500 bucks. That's a third of your $7,500.
Speaker 2:
I hope this is so if I-.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:
I was just going to say so if I could tie this back into our CRM conversation. Yes, these three KPIs are exactly what we're talking about utilizing a CRM system for. So within the CRM system, you can track these things. This is where you get that information. That's where you get the details about the specific KPIs for email marketing, for website traffic and for appointment to conversions. And one of the features that is really really cool about a CRM system is what we call a pipeline, and that's a visual representation of how these people flow through even, let's just say, those three KPIs.
Speaker 1:
So if we initiate.
Speaker 2:
You know the first pipeline is an email. You know piece that they get email marketing. If they open it, then that's great. We see whatever score we can add to to that contact. Then if they go to your website, we're going to see them kind of move themselves through the funnel, if you will, of engagement. And then if they book an appointment, that's even better. And then you have them to that next step where you get to you know um sale and contract proposal and then hopefully one.
Speaker 2:
And so it's really utilizing these tools and you talked about hiring somebody to you know help you offset the amount of time that you spend personally, and the tool is just going to be another asset to your team, to your tool bag for doing those types of things that you need to be successful with your business.
Speaker 1:
Awesome. So where can we check out? But you know, we're obviously privy to ours. So BuzzHub, where can people check out BuzzHub? It's a buzzhubbiz right.
Speaker 2:
Yep Buzzhubbiz.
Speaker 1:
B-U-Z-Z-H-U-B dot B-I-Z. Check it out and if you have any other questions we have, you can always email me at buzz at buzzworthybiz. Tori B at buzzworthybiz, if you want to pick her brain, cause she is the CRM queen over at buzzworthy marketing. Thank you everybody. Till next time, stay buzzworthy.
