I’ve learned a lot throughout my entrepreneurial journey, and as much as I hate to say this, a lot of that was unlearning things I once believed that were actually not true.
A big part of that is because as entrepreneurs, we need to have an almost insane level of confidence in ourselves and our decisions just to make it through the challenges we face. There is a positive to this, but there’s also a negative, and it’s that we’re often certain in cases where we really shouldn’t be.
That’s why it’s so important to trust and follow the advice we receive from the experts in our circle who we’ve carefully vetted. I’ve made the mistake of not doing that several times throughout my career, and every single time, it’s come back to bite me in the ass.
For example, I’m pretty knowledgeable about technology and for a long time, handled that myself for my companies. Several years ago, I hired an incredibly experienced IT consultant to take that off my plate so I could focus on running the business. Unfortunately, on several occasions, I fell into the habit of hearing what he told me, dismissing it, and doing things my own way, and each time, while my approach worked to some degree, it didn’t deliver the outcome I expected. But when I let go of the wheel and let him implement things his way, the outcome usually far exceeded my expectations.
I ran into this mindset a lot when it came to digital marketing.
We’ve worked with the same marketing company for about twenty years and they handle literally every aspect of our marketing. Admittedly, I had my hands pretty full managing the business, so I never made time to go over performance data. But we kept growing quite quickly, so I didn’t worry too much about it.
But several times every year, I’d start wondering, “Yeah, but how do I know what you’re doing is really working?”
In hindsight, that was an absurd question.
They were solely responsible for 100% of our marketing, we continued to grow year after year at a rate most never achieve, and yet, I still felt like I must somehow intuitively know something they didn’t.
I finally pushed this mindset out of existence after I had launched a few other businesses and intentionally left that marketing company out of the equation. Maybe I was trying to test something. Maybe I was trying to prove to myself that I was the sole reason my main company was consistently doing so well. I can’t say for sure exactly what drove this decision, but what I can say with absolute certainty is that all of the other businesses I launched at that time failed and were eventually closed down.
This was eye opening.
Part of the problem was that I didn’t really understand digital marketing the way I thought I did.
I already mentioned that I never made time to go over performance data, and beyond that, I was rarely involved in planning the strategies or tactics the marketing firm used. They were essentially operating autonomously. But every time I felt anxiety or frustration in my business, I thought, “Hey, maybe these guys aren’t really delivering results,” despite all of the evidence to the contrary.
That’s a trauma response multiplied by a lack of knowledge.
I expected that I could track everything we did online with a perfect correlation of action to revenue.
I would ask, “OK, that post on social media blew up, but how many clients can we directly track to that single post?” Or, “Yeah, we published a comprehensive article on this particular topic to drive search traffic, but I want to know exactly how many (and which) clients we landed as a direct result?”
Here’s the thing—while digital marketing offers the ability to track results with far more granularity than any other channel, there will never be a 1:1 correlation.
Here’s why…
Let’s say you publish an article perfectly optimized for SEO, and it’s well written and engaging, so it gets a fair amount of traffic through social media as well.
Yes, you can track exactly how many visitors that page receives each month, broken down by the source of the traffic, geographic location, and even data on what browser and operating system they used, among thousands of other metrics. You can even track exactly where a client came from—for example, if a client contacted us online, we can often track that back to which page they first landed on when they visited our website and what they did while there.
But is that where they actually came from?
Maybe. But it’s just as likely that they originated from somewhere else. Maybe they’ve been seeing our posts on social media over the last three years and finally reached out. Or maybe they saw a video on YouTube first. Maybe we’ve come up in the search results for years, and they reached out after a bad experience with their current provider. Or maybe they saw one of my features in the media or saw a video of me speaking to congress about regulations in my industry.
My problem was that I was looking for an exact correlation, when instead, I should have been looking at things holistically, as a bigger picture.
Look, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea—tracking is still important. When you’re running an ad campaign, you absolutely can and should track its performance, analyzing metrics like conversions, ROAS, and cost per lead. But that’s a bubble to some degree. What you really need to be looking at is overall brand lift.
Is your overall performance going up or down?
You can track conversions to some degree, but how do you measure the impact of an effective content marketing strategy reducing the amount of time your sales team has to spend with each prospect before converting them to clients? Most entrepreneurs would see that and think their sales team just got better instead of understanding that the content marketing meant those prospects were more educated and prepared by the time they got on the phone with the sales team.
That education, and more importantly, brand trust, directly led to the outcome, but most entrepreneurs would never connect the dots. And often, these less direct aspects take months or years of effort to deliver a cumulative effect, so it’s easy to be overlooked. That’s why many entrepreneurs often give up on the efforts that could actually provide the greatest impact long term.
So while digital marketing can be tracked with an astounding level of granularity, it will never be something where you can track every aspect of every conversion. And treating it as if it can lead to poor results and a brutal cycle of feast or famine.
Breaking out of this mindset requires you to first, not be driven by fear. If you’ve chosen to work with a particular service provider, there’s probably a reason for that, so trust them and follow their advice. Beyond that, you need to step back and look at the bigger picture. You need to get comfortable knowing that you can’t track everything with 100% certainty and that’s OK.
Yes, you need to analyze the impact of every marketing campaign as best as you can, but you also have to remember that nothing happens in a vacuum. Your content marketing efforts improve the performance of your email marketing efforts. Your PR efforts improve the performance of your content marketing efforts. Your SEO efforts improve the performance of your PR efforts.
It’s all interconnected, and that’s why you can’t track everything with 100% accuracy.
But you can track your overall performance with 100% accuracy, and you can track the performance of each element of your marketing efforts to a lesser degree. That data, when combined, will give you a clear picture of your impact as well as showing you exactly where you need to improve or scale up.
This is the “secret sauce” when it comes to dominating your industry.
And it’s something I wish I had learned a lot sooner.
So learn from my mistakes and you’ll achieve greater success more quickly than I did.
