Metrics That Matter: Measure Your Visibility Strategy for Success

Speaker A: Welcome to the Visible Entrepreneur Podcast, Season five. I'm your host, Michelle Lewis, founder of Visibility Vixen. I've spent years studying color psychology, branding, visibility and publicity, all geared to help you hit your goals faster than anyone else. I'm a TEDx speaker, Amazon best selling author, and have helped thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide with their visual presence. I'm going to be going even deeper than I've ever gone before. I'm going to be sharing what's working, what isn't, what I'm struggling with, how I'm growing my business personally, and a lot of things in this industry that I think are simply untrue. My goal is to help you blow up your brand in the best way to attract your ideal audience subconsciously. If you're ready for growth, go to visibilityvixen.com to get started today. In the meantime, uh, let's dive into today's episode and if you think this is a topic that a biz bestie or a friend of yours, even a relative would love, do me a favor, forward it to them and let's dive in to this episode. Hey there and welcome back to the show. Today is going to be a really good episode, but it is going to be a technical one. So if you have a second, grab a pen and paper. I'm going to be giving you a bunch of different software recommendations so that you can figure out how to measure your visibility with the right tools. It's really important, as you are growing, learning, changing in your visibility strategy, that you are measuring the correct metrics. And after having been around the block for a couple of years, I think I can give you some really great suggestions so that you can maximize your visibility while minimizing your time. So the first thing I want to recommend is that you go into my Visibility Tools class and list page. All that is is visibilityviction.com tools and this is going to show you a lot of these recommendations as well as tools you may not have hear of yet that you may want to invest in to help you with your visibility strategy. So the hard thing is a lot of people work on getting their website done, getting on social media, and it's so exhausting by that point that when it comes to actually measuring your metrics, this gets lost in translation. Every time I go into work with a bigger client, the first thing I figure out is, okay, how much are we actually measuring in terms of your web traffic, your conversions, your visibility strategy, your social media? How are all those metrics doing so that we can accurately assess what needs to pivot and be changed so that it can be more successful. Otherwise, you can be investing in a YouTube channel you can be working on. Let's say you've hired a publicist and you're shelling out eight to $10,000 a month for that. If you don't know how that's actually bringing you a return, then you're just throwing money, right? And for the most part, you're probably also throwing energy away because you're working so hard on these different things without knowing if they're truly converting for you. So let's dive in. And the first thing we're going to talk about is in measuring your visibility strategy is your website traffic. No matter what you work on, in terms of maybe you're on Squarespace, maybe you're on click funnels, maybe you're on Kajabi, maybe you're on new funnel or whatever that new thing is that I'm too old to understand. No matter where you are, you need to be sure to be measuring your website traffic. And by far the easiest way to do that is with Google Analytics. So if you have not installed that yet with your site, it is very, very simple. You can Google that right now, look it up, get that on your website. This is going to show you how many visitors you have to your site daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. It's going to show you where they're coming from, where they live, what their demographics are, what their gender is. All that stuff to help you for even if you're not there yet when you do. Investing in ads, this is worth its weight in gold because this is going to help you understand if your, uh, web traffic is 85% female, then why would you waste your ads? Budget advertising to men, you know what I mean? If you know that most of your audience is already natively coming from the big five, like Australia and Canada and the U.S. then you can either start there knowing that that works already, or if you want to, if you know that's already working, you can deselect that and select other countries that perhaps speak English to see how your conversions are there. The bottom line is this is going to help you analyze your web traffic to a much greater degree than you can do by yourself. It's even detailed enough to figure out where your traffic's coming from in terms of, oh, they're coming from their cell phone, from Instagram in this country. Right. So it can be extremely, extremely helpful. And it's something that a lot of people don't do and I wish they would do. It sooner because they can in a lot of cases be wasting their time with their visibility strategy because they don't know if it's working, if it's converting or any of that stuff. Measure your web traffic. This is going to be the most helpful thing for you and it does not take a lot of time. All right, now let's talk about SEO, otherwise called search engine optimization. For this category, I'm going to call it search engine rankings. Figuring out how are you ranking in your SEO strategy? Now you usually are going to have SEO in something like a blog, a sales page, a homepage, and then when it comes to video, especially like on YouTube, now that it's tied into Google, what you're saying in the video, etc. It can be a lot and it can feel confusing. But the bottom line is when someone is search in Google, Yahoo, whatever search engine they're using, we want you to rank as quickly as possible in the results, right? So the only way you can do this is by sticking to specific terms in your language on your pages. So of course visibility Vixen is a little bit different, a little bit easier to find. You can put that into Google and it's going to come up on page one. But let's say you do social media strategy and you're really wanting to rank for that and you've decided to really niche down on Instagram video, uh, reels, then that is a term that you can really try hard to work for by putting it throughout your website and you know, YouTube and all that stuff if that's what you are using. So some tools that you can use to measure your search engine optimization is ARFs, SEMrush or Moz to track your search engine rankings. This is going to show you how your efforts are doing and give you other suggestions in case that might be more helpful. And if you're panicking going, wait, wait, how's that spelled? Don't worry, just go over to the blog and all of it is going to be right there for you. If let's say you notice that you have a huge drop in rankings, it happens. Maybe that means that a pivot needs to be made, right? Maybe like for example, if I was ranking for visibility in 2015, it would be easy. Not a lot of people said the word visibility. But now in 2023 as we all know it is so commonplace that uh, that is not a term that I can try to rank for. I can try to rank things that involve visibility, but it needs to be much more specific. So it's always great to revisit this strategy probably like once a year, once every six months in terms of not monitoring how things are going, but figuring out where there needs to be a pivot. Right. Okay. Web traffic. We talked about, we talked about search engine rankings. Now let's talk about social media engagement. Social media, of course we want to grow our following, we want to grow our engagement, our interactions and it's really important to monitor how that going. So the first thing I'm going to cover are the dinosaurs because some of us still use them. Hoot sweet. Sprout Social. Uh, well Sprout social isn't really a dinosaur, but buffer is a dinosaur. Socialbe, uh, is the one that I used before as well. I still really like them for a lot of things, especially content repurposing. But the tool we're going to focus on the most today is going to be Metricool. This is something that I moved to about six months ago and it has been fantastic. And what's great is even on the free plan you can schedule up to 50 posts a month. So it works fantastic. Really easy for multiple people on a team to get in there, work on the copy scheduling, get all of that set to go. So I think that it is a really, really great platform. To my knowledge they don't do content repurposing yet, but we'll see if that happens down the line. Uh, the great thing about measuring your social media engagement is for uh, when people want to invest with you, of course they're going to check you on social, make sure that you know what you're talking about, see if you have a following, etc. That's true. So it's really great for conversions in terms of making money on uh, your products. But the other thing that I wanted to bring to your attention that it is vital for is your press strategy. Down the line. When you start building your press page or your press kit, one of the really important things is to show your stats. Now this doesn't mean that you have to have a crazy huge email list. Let's say you have an email list of 1500 people. But if you have an average open rate of uh, 75% and an average click through rate of 49%, that's something that's going to be taken much more seriously than someone over here who has a 15,000 email list with a 5% open rate and a 1% click through rate. You see what I'm saying? So in that same way, if you're able to put in there, oh well, my social media engagement, I usually get this many likes per post. Uh, I'm usually growing my engagement rate by 38% a month. You know, I got this many clicks on stories. Those are all really valuable things that can really come into play when it, when you start pitching yourself for PR opportunities. So if you haven't yet, at the very least, connect your accounts on Metricool because they have beautiful reports, very detailed, pretty much like, uh, Google Analytics, but for your social media. So if you're smart, you'll do this now, even if you don't plan on scheduling posts so that you can get the most accurate reports that are even more accurate than within the app themselves. All right, Metricool, check social media engagement. Now let's talk about brand mentions. You of course can set up a Google alert for this, but it's really a great thing to figure out as you're growing in your SEO, your press strategy, et cetera, if you're being mentioned online. And it's a really hard thing to keep track of if you're not being like tagged on a social media channel. So one way that you can get around this is by setting up alerts for certain keywords. So for me it might be visibility Vixen or the color cure. For you, it might be your name, whatever it is. Now I am going to warn you if, especially with Google alerts, it's not necessarily super accurate to the exact name. So of course I get alerts for the color cure, but I also get alerts, uh, for so and so cured that this. So do what you will with that information. Try to make it as specific to your business as you can. You can also use tools like mention and brand 24. That's going to be able to give you really great strategies in terms of, okay, it's going to send it to my email once a week or, um, once a month to show where your brand mentions are. This can be very helpful for you to figure out, okay, where am I being mentioned the most? How can I capitalize on that for the next opportunity? And even tailor make your PR strategy for the future. So really, really great. So I remember back in the day I was looking, working with a company and they were trying to figure out, okay, how can we move forward in our PR plan? Here's the problem. When you Google their brand name, yeah, their website came up, but then about 15 different places with negative reviews came up, up. Unfortunately, before I could do anything in terms of positive pr, I told them the first thing we have to do is damage control. And we have to reach out to all these people who have personally reviewed your products and see if they will give it another chance and try to get them to change that narrative. Otherwise it didn't matter. Anything I wanted to do in the future would not outrank all of these, uh, Google SEO results with these brand mentions that would tank their brand. So really important to do so that you know what's going on in your business. Right? Alrighty. So let's talk about backlinks. Backlinks can be really helpful, especially as you're starting to push your brand out to become more popular. A backlink essentially is where you're able to have your business mentioned on other people's sites. So every time you are on a blog, uh, a guest podcast, a publication, all of those things can create really great backlinks to increase your SEO ranking. So for example, if you go to visibility Vixen. Sorry, if you go to Google and you type invisibility Vixen, you're going to see my pages, but you're also going to see me being mentioned on a lot of other pages. That means backlinks. And that's amazing. Now don't do this. A lot of people, they go to Fiverr, they put in backlinks and they pay someone to create like 500 backlinks for their business. This does not work. Google is smart. It's going to penalize your website. It's not something that you want to do, so please don't do that. You can use certain tools for this. Ahrefs again, Semrush Moz. This will help you track your backlinks and where you're mentioned. I also sometimes just go to Google, take notes, figure it out. Did I forget about any features? You know, writing them down. So whatever way is going to work best for you. But it is something to highly consider. And this is the biggest thing I talk about when people say, well, I don't really need pr, it's like, well, if you want the SEO for Google search, if you want the backlinks to improve your visibility on Google search, then yes, you do. You do need a PR strategy. So that's how it all ties together. Alrighty. So so far we have talked about search engine rankings, social media engagement, brand ment backlinks. Now let's talk conversion rates. This is going to really help you figure out if that blog you did, that podcast episode you did, that video you did was worth your time. Or if you need to pivot your strategy, your title, your platform moving forward in the future and that is your conversion rates. What are the people that, how many people visited it, how many people clicked it, how many people listened or watched all the way through, how many people clicked over to the sales page, how many converted to sale, how many opted in? These are all things that we need to think about in terms of measuring our metrics. So think about how you can do that specifically on your platform. Certain things of course are going to come to play on, for example, YouTube itself, where they're watching the video, but a lot of it's going to kick in once they get to your site and start going through your funnel. Now if you're using a software like Kajabi, Click Funnels, high level, whatever, you're going to have pretty great metrics to look at and they're all going to be in one place. However, if you're using something like Squarespace and Constant Contact and you know, lead pages, etc. You're going to have to figure out a way to get all of that information in one snapshot. Probably one of the best ways would be something like Google Analytics where you can put in all of those specific links to track. But this needs to be in place. You need to know how your conversions are going. For example, I noticed a couple months ago my monthly opt ins cut by like 60%. Well, I know that most of my opt ins come in through Pinterest, so I was able to reach out to my Pinterest manager and say why have we had a 60% drop? So that we can investigate the issue. If I didn't know that, if I didn't know my average monthly stats, I would have never noticed. So these are important things to look at, especially when it comes to your conversion rates. Alrighty, last but not least, email marketing metrics. Of course, if you have an all in one platform, this is going to be easy. You just click into email marketing, you can see all your stats. You can also do that if you're logging in to Mailchimp or ConvertKit or Infusionsoft, whatever it may be. But be sure to monitor your stats. Go into your email sequences from your quiz and figure out how many people are opening it, how many people are clicking through, how many people are unsubscribing. This is going to give you great, uh, information so that you can pivot your email sequences, your subject lines, figure out where the problems are to make your campaigns more effective. So of course you can use Kajabi and ClickFunnels for this too. You can also use tools like we mentioned like Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc. That will help you figure out how to manage your email marketing. I know you probably have some of these in place, but I wanted to hit them all again because sometimes we have a missing link and it seems very obvious but we just haven't done it yet. So this is your gentle reminder to make sure that you have things in place, especially for your conversion metrics and your email marketing metrics. So when you're figuring out, okay, I'm a little overwhelmed with all of this Michelle, like what, what do I choose and what's going to be right for me, of course this isn't, this isn't the easiest thing to answer because there's no one size fits all. For example, you may have a 9 to 5 job and you're building this on the side. Well, if you're really short on time, but you can afford, you know, a hundred, two hundred a month, then an all in one solution. If you are doing uh, one on one coaching or if you're doing an online course, that's probably going to be something like Kajabi or click Funnels or something like that. If you're someone who is an author who just needs, you know, a landing page for their book and to sell their book, well then you're probably not going to necessarily need that. You may be able to piecemeal it with uh, something like LeadPages integrating with Shopify to sell your book and then an email marketing software like mailchimp. So it really depends on what your individual goals are. So figure out, okay, this is the kind of business I have. These are the tools I need to run this business. These are the tools I need to track my business metrics. That's going to help you really figure out like, okay, I'm going to use like in my case, Kajabi, Google Analytics, uh, and most of my stuff is going to be contained in there and maybe I'll invest in a backlinks monitoring software and maybe I'll use Google mention. Right, that's how you can do it. But I can't say exactly. You should do this and that because I don't know your exact business. Figure out what metrics are available within your business. That's also a key one to do and figure out how often, um, now that you have all these beautiful things, are you going to keep track? Are you going to monitor every three months, every month, every six months, every year? Just as long as you are doing a visibility, active visibility strategy, I recommend doing it every three months at the very least. Otherwise, every month. If you have a team that can support you, then put together an analytics report that they can send to you each month so that you don't have to go digging around and you can see at a glance how much you made, what your conversions were, what your visibility stats were. All that kind of stuff that makes this so much easier. And that's what I normally recommend every business puts together in their strategy. I hope you learned a lot. Again, be sure to go through this on your own time. I have links for everything. Head over to the blog if you're listening or watching this and otherwise be sure to watch the Visibility Tools Masterclass that's at visibilityvixen.com forward/tools if you'd like to see all the tools that I personally use in my business. Otherwise, get out there, start measuring that visibility, let me know how it goes and I'll see you soon. I hope you loved this episode as much as I did. Now we're all about building a tribe here at the Visible Entrepreneur. So be sure to subscribe, leave a 5 star review and then head on over to the Facebook group. It's a great place where you can practice your video live stream and really enjoy the community that we have built. In the meantime, I'll see you in the next episode. Now get out there and get more Visible. That's a wrap. M.