Brian Kurtz 21:03
Mercer, yeah, just just a quick thing, I think you get to it. But how much of this is attribution to a particular source, like, if you have a marketing campaign, and this has been going on, you know, when Guthy-Renker spoke at the Titans event in 2014 they were on an infomercial with kiosks, with online and they were like, it was like, all the gestalt of everything they were doing, and they had to make decisions. I assume you’re going to get there, but yeah, I just wanted to know how much of this is about attribution, in addition to just getting the measurement down.
Chris Mercer 21:43
Attribution, great question. So attribution is an aspect of measurement. We will get to that. We go, okay, so we’ll talk, we’ll talk more about that there and why that’s important, and how to actually go about doing that. But it is. It’s an aspect of measurement. And the challenge is, most people jump into attribution first and try to figure it out, which is kind of swinging the hammer, hoping that you’re eventually just going to build a house from it. Why it’s important to understand measurement overall top down, is because the attribution will get easier when you understand measurement and kind of work.
Brian Kurtz 22:12
That makes perfect sense, because I know we’ve had a lot of people in this group, and a lot of people who I’ve coached who started measurement, and they get lost, and they either abandon an advertising program because they can’t attribute it exactly to that spend, and I think it’s often a mistake.
Chris Mercer 22:31
Yeah, that’s exactly right. And we’ll talk about, again, the framework is going to help solve those issues, for sure, absolutely. Okay, great. Thank you. Great question. So the other thing, when you’re switching around, how you’re thinking about this stuff when it comes to measurement, is people think that. And I did too. Again, I did too. So this is, this is an evolution of how this goes when you when I initially started, I thought, Oh, I’m just going to set up my goals in Google Analytics. And once I, like, do that, then I’ll be able to, like, use that thing. Like, measurements done, I just get to look at the reports now, right? But it’s not that measurement is an ongoing project. It’s not a pity, it’s not a one and done project. It’s an ongoing thing.
It’s an ongoing skill. The way that I think about this in my own organization is measurement is a department whenever I build out, and we have multiple brands, measure, market dial being one of the primaries, but we have measurement as a department in our organization, we are discussing a new customer journey. Measurement is at the table. We’ve got our measurement Team Lead at the table giving not because, you know, she’s going to come up with great ideas for a headline that that might be the thing that’s not her, not her job, but it’s to make sure that the customer journey that we’re building out of that sales funnel, idea, that we’re coming out of that new offer, she’s coming with measurements perspective, saying, well, here’s how we can know if this is working or not.
This is how we know if this conversation that we’re having, that we think we’re having, is the conversation we’re actually having. And so measurement helps define our customer journeys, right? Very important, because we can’t just put them out there and then look at the amount of revenue and then be like, if it worked okay, but we don’t know how it worked or how it didn’t work, we don’t know what actions to take. So having measurement upfront, like thinking about measurement further ahead in your customer journeys, when you’re actually planning things out, super important.
Brian Kurtz 24:11
Can I just put an exclamation point on that for this group? Because it’s a brilliant point. We had a guy speak who built a $100 million business indirect marketing, selling. Well, it doesn’t matter. So he has a great business, and he was talking about how he built it, and he said one of the biggest leverage points that he got in his business was the day he realized that his number two man, number two person in the company, was not his CFO. It was not his financial guy, because this guy’s a marketing guy. It was not his financial guy, but it was his analytics guy, and which, I think he’s right into measurement as a department to have a guy who’s an entrepreneur building a direct response marketing business, saying that. Number one person in his company is not the guy counting, doing the money counting, but the person doing the measurement was like it was a, it was a blow away moment for me, I don’t know about the rest of the room, and you just blew the room away with that. So thank you, Mercer.
Chris Mercer 25:18
That’s perfect. Appreciate that. The other thing is, this is a trend that started to happen. Everyone’s probably heard this by now. First party data. That’s what these slides are about. So basically that means that you’re collecting the data. We can’t. We’re very quickly moving into a world where we’re not going to be able to rely on Facebook to say, you just tell me who you want, and we’ll take it from there. We need to be able to hold that data. We can’t just rely on Facebook data, because if it because at a certain point they’re not gonna be able to share some of that, and that’s already started happening with like the Apple stuff that happened last year. So for people that have their own data sets, their own audiences that they’re building and that sort of stuff, that’s why first party data is so important. So again, just from a mindset, there’s no real actionable things you have to worry about necessarily today on that stuff. Just remember, that’s why measurement exists. So measurement is so that you can collect your information, and it’s your information, if you choose to share some of that with Facebook, that’s awesome, but you’re not using Facebook pixels to send information to Facebook.
It’s your data that you’re sending, maybe through the pixel, but you’re sending it to Facebook, but it’s your data, right? You have that control over it, and that’s what the first party data thing is, means, the other thing, and we’re going to talk a lot about this, so don’t worry about gathering this now. But I’m emphasizing it here because it’s going to be talked over and over and over and over again during the rest of this presentation, which results in how we already kind of mentioned it, where it’s like, if you throw out a sales funnel and it works like That’s awesome. Let’s say you get great results. A lot of our students and clients get that. They give Facebook 50 bucks, and Facebook kicks out $150 in revenue, and they give Facebook $150 and Facebook kicks out $500 in revenue. They give Facebook $500 and Facebook keeps it, and then they go, Well, what happened? And the problem is, they had a curse of a good offer. It worked so well. They just kept scaling. They didn’t ask how it was working or why it was working.
They didn’t understand the conversation that was going on. They were just so happy. And this is the most dangerous phrase you can ever utter as an entrepreneur, in my opinion, is the I don’t care as long as I’m making money, is the most dangerous phrase ever, because you certainly will care when you don’t. And then what will happen is you look around and say, Why didn’t it work? And everyone’s like, I’m wrong. Everyone’s like, I don’t know what broke. I don’t know because nobody was measuring for it. So yes, you got to know your results, which is revenue, number of units and stuff, but you gotta know how you’re getting those results or how you’re not right. Either way, you got to know how you’re actually making that happen. And we’ll talk about that, because the framework is going to help with that as well.
The overall idea is that as an organization, whether you’re a freelancer working for yourself, or you’ve got a team, your organization has to have some sort of measurement muscle. So it doesn’t have to be a ton, but it does have to be some, and you’ve got to be aware of that. It’s just a necessary thing. It’s like you can’t have a you can’t be an online business without hosting, right? It’s just one of those things. You have to have hosting. There’s no way around. Is how it’s done. Same thing with measurement. You have to have measurement muscle in your organization, at least it’s got to have a little bit in there. Again, you don’t have to be a specialist in it, but you have to have at least that mindset where it’s like measurements that help us.
Outro 28:19
Thanks for listening to the Timeless Marketing Podcast with Brian Kurtz. Visit briankurtz.net, and click podcast at the top of the page for a full transcript and show notes. If you’re interested in working with Brian personally inside of Titans Xcelerator, go to Briankurtz.net/help to see how Titans can help you grow and scale your business. That’s B-R-I-A-N Kurtz [dot] net [slash] help.