There are so many analytics that you can get for your business, but which ones are going to make a difference for you and your bottom line? To help bring clarity to this I invited my friend Christie Osborne to join me for a conversation about business insights. This isn’t about Google Analytics, at least not very much, and you’re going to want to hear the business metrics that you really do need to know.
Listen to this new episode for an enlightening conversation with a really smart friend.
About Christie
Christie Osborne believes you should make money from your marketing. Her Agency, Mountainside Media, specializes in data-driven marketing, advertising, and research. But she’s more than just a nerdy analytics gal. Her sessions and workshops help service-based business owners get clear on their marketing numbers. Because once you get clarity around what’s actually happening (rather than what you think is happening) you can make strategic decisions in your business… and of course, make more money than you spend on marketing. As a top event industry educator, Christie frequents the national speaker circuit and is a regular contributor to top industry publications, including NACE, WIPA, The Special Event and Catersource. She is also a highly sought-after podcast guest.
Christie’s pronouns are she/her.
IG + FB: @mtnsidemediaco
Christie’s pronouns are she/her.
Find out more about how Christie can help you: https://mountainsidemedia.com/go/alan/
If you have any questions about anything in this, or any of my podcasts, or have a suggestion for a topic or guest, please reach out directly to me at [email protected] or visit my website Podcast.AlanBerg.com
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– Do you want to make sense of your business analytics? Listen to this episode and this guest, you’re going to want to hear. Hi, it’s Alan Berg, welcome back to another episode of The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast. I am so happy to finally have my friend Christie Osborne from Mountainside Media on to talk about business analytics. How you doing, Christie?
– I’m doing quite well, Alan, how are you?
– I am well. And we have known each other for a number of years and I’ve threatened to have you on here a few times, so I’m glad that we’re finally getting to make this happen. And you had suggested talking about analytics, and I love this. And we’re not going to talk about Google Analytics, although we could a little bit, ’cause it’s part of this. But you wanted to talk about business intelligence, right? So tell me what your thoughts were, like, “I need to talk about this with Alan and his audience.”
– Yeah, so what brought it up was, as you know, I talk a little bit about analytics, actually a lot. It’s my first love. And sometimes I feel like it’s too specific. And honestly, I have a little bit of a GA4 hangover at this point. And so I’m like, “What does analytics actually look like in my day-to-day when I’m working with clients?” And I just had something recently happen that I thought was really apropos, where client comes to me and says, “We need more traffic and inquiries.” And I was like, “Okay, what makes you say that? Because I’m doing the monthly reports and everything looks healthy.” And the client says, “Well, inquiries are down.” And I say, “Okay, and so what? What does that mean? What is the actual problem here?” And finally we get to the actual problem. The actual problem is not traffic, it’s not inquiries, it’s revenue. And what I do every single day when I’m dealing with analytics is I’m constantly looking at revenue and profitability and backing up from there. And I thought to myself, I said… You come from wedding industry royalty and I’ve seen you talk on the stage and you come from sales, right? Which is revenue and profit. And I thought, if I could talk to Alan Berg about anything, as a friend and a colleague, what would I want to talk to this guy about? And this is it. It’s like, “How do you take those numbers that are the most important in your business and use them to take action in all of the other parts of your business you have to make a decision on?”
– Right, and there is the key. So first I’m going to step back, ’cause you, you slipped in there G4. GA4 Hangover, for those of you don’t know, that was Google Analytics came out with their new thing called GA4. Go back and listen to the episode I did about the only three things you need to know on Google Analytics, which are how much of your traffic is mobile, what pages people are looking at, where your traffic’s coming from. The rest of the stuff is like fireworks; interesting, but maybe can’t take action. Which brings us back to what you just said. There’s so much you could know about a business, but how much of it can you actually do something with? So when somebody comes to me and says what your person said to them, I totally agree. I actually did an episode about this, I think it’s come out already, which is do you really need more inquiries? And your client needs better conversion, they don’t need more inquiries. Because most people tell me they’re getting too many inquiries and they can’t follow up enough and they can’t keep up with them, right? Are are you seeing the same thing?
– Yeah, so, and this was so panicked, right? Because one of the things I’d love to talk to you about in your experience as well is when people come to you and there’s a problem. We could have gotten in front of this, but basically they said, “Revenue is down.” And so what I did was I started at the revenue and I started working my way back toward the inquiries to try to find out where the problem was. Now, I do a little bit of math, it’s just back of the napkin stuff, not that big a deal, eighth grade arithmetic or whatever. But I said, “What’s your close rate?” Well, they said, “Close rate’s 30%,” they’re a venue. That’s not really a problem for me. I was like, “All right, well what’s your inquiry to tour rate? And they gave me a number and then I said, “Okay, great, what’s your… I’ll look at and see what’s your traffic to inquiry rate, what’s your marketing to traffic rate and stuff like that.” And where I found when I started playing around with the numbers is I’d have to get their close rate up to 80% in order to make any kind of revenue impact to get them to where they wanted to go. And I would have to get 600 leads in a relatively small market, per month, which there isn’t even a market size for that, in order to get them to their revenue. So where we found the gap was their inquiry to tour rate was like 3%. I said, “Well, that’s where we focus our marketing on, right? You don’t need more advertising, you don’t need Google ads, you don’t need more inquiries, you don’t need to get sales training. You need to get your inquiry to tour rate up to at least 10%, and then you’ll be at that revenue goal.” And so again, it’s not… I’m not magic. You don’t call me and I say, “Get your this up or get your that up.” I did the work to work back from revenue and then just start playing with the leavers in each step of the way in order to figure out what was broken and how to fix it.
– Right, and again, it’s where are you trying to get to? And on your current path, can you get there? I remember somebody coming to me one time, they were doing 200 weddings a year at their entertainment company. They said they want to get to 500. And my first question was, why? Right? What is that going to do for you? ‘Cause I know a lot of people that have scaled up only to find out that they weren’t profiting as much, right? A friend of mine, when his company hit a million dollars, he was profiting better at $500,000 than he was at a million. So let’s make sure that where you’re trying to get to is where you really want to get to. I had somebody else who had going from part-time to full-time and entertainment, and I said, “How many weddings do you want to do next year?” And he said, “As many as possible.” I said, “Eh, wrong answer.” I said, “That’s not a target, right? We have to… How do we build a roadmap to get to as many as possible?” There’s no such roadmap, it doesn’t exist. So again, backing into it, what I see there, and you said it’s not a sales training problem. I say it’s kind of that because what they need to do is respond to their inquiries better so they can get more of those inquiries to come to tour. So to me, that’s still sales training. It’s semantics as to what part of that it is. My book, “Why Are They Ghosting Me?” it’s exactly that. Wedding MBA this year, I know you’ll be there, I’ll be there. I’m doing a presentation and this is going to come out before Wedding MBA. I will do a presentation on Monday for the venue track, anybody can come, on secret shopping. We do a lot of secret shopping in my consulting, and I’m going to do a presentation based upon my results from secret shopping. And it ain’t pretty, let me tell you, because your client is going to blame the advertising, going to blame the marketing, going to blame all these things when they’re already getting inquiries, right? And probably some good inquiries. Yeah, you got to kiss some frogs, we know that. Probably getting good inquiries that they’re not getting from the inquiry to the tour. And I would guess, if we looked, if you and I looked at what they’re sending, look at their responses, look how many times they’re following up, the problem’s in the mirror. They’ll find the problem if they would just look in the mirror. And a lot of people don’t want… They want it to be easy, right? I responded, they’re not responding to me. Secret shopping we’re doing right now. We’re shopping probably 60 to 70 companies right now. I got a response today from one of my clients. We shopped their venue. It’s three screens on my smartphone. It has links, three different links in it, to take me other places. And they’re going to say, “Well, why isn’t this working?” And I’m going to say, “It’s too long. Get rid of the links. No attachments, just have a conversation. Right?” And they’re a venue also. Don’t just ask for the tour. You’re getting ghosted because you’re just asking for the tour, and if that’s not what they want to do, they’re just ghosting you. So again, there’s where the problem is. So let’s talk about this different analytics. You ran into this. What are the different things that you would want somebody to know? So we have people listening that are venues, they’re caterers, they’re photographers, they’re invitations, they’re officiants, they’re all through. The average wedding has 12 to 14 services. In a perfect world, what are those things that you just mentioned for this customer that you would want them to start tracking if they’re not already doing so?
– Profitability. Revenue, but also profitability. The thing about profit is this, I’m consulting with somebody, is a volunteer. I’m active with SBA and NSBWP and sometimes I get to do mentorship that take me outside of marketing, but I’m still looking at numbers. And the reason why you look at profit and revenue first is because to your point, marketing is not always the answer. And if you’re not profitable, if you don’t realize that you’re only making $10 an hour as a business owner for your time and you turn up the volume and go from 250 to 500 events in a year, you are going to go out of business. You don’t understand the revenues coming in, your profit margin after you pay yourself, you pay your staff, you do all your overhead. If you have cost of goods sold like prints or food or anything like that, all of that gets accounted for. And then what is left over in the business? Because if you are subsidizing your business with your time, especially, or your gas money or your mileage or whatever, A, you will never get out of that business, right? Because once you want to go on vacation or retire to Jamaicas, whoever takes your place has to have that car and the gas and the time and all the things and they’re not going to give it away for free. Or worst case scenario, you can’t subsidize the business at scale as you start scaling and you literally go out of business. So the very first thing is just making sure that your business is profitable. Just because you have money coming in does not mean that you are profitable.
– Right, and-
– And from there, you can start making some decisions about what needs to be done, whether it’s marketing or something else.
– So if you haven’t read “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz, I recommend that to anybody listening to this. ’cause you want to not just look on a spreadsheet or a statement then see a profit number, you want to actually see the money. So “Profit First” by Mike Michalowicz, definitely look that book up. What I look at is every day, and this is my time management thing, the first thing I do when I open my laptop every day is QuickBooks. And I go into QuickBooks and I download the transactions from my bank, I use Chase. Downloads the banking transactions, downloads all my credit card transactions. And it takes me about five or 10 minutes to do that. But because I’ve been using QuickBooks since 2011, I can also do a year to year comparison, year to date of my profit and loss this year versus last year. I had a retainer client that I lost that did not renew for this year. So I knew I would be behind on a year to date basis. I’m actually even, or ahead, which means I’ve made that revenue up without that client. I can look at that, but I also look at the net number and say, “After expenses, where am I?” And I look at that because you can be better on the top line and worse on the bottom line. Funny thing happened during COVID. Isn’t that a funny way to start a statement? Funny thing happened during COVID-
– It is not a funny way to start a statement. It’s like a trauma response for half of the population, at this point.
– But a funny thing happened on my PNL during COVID. One of my biggest expenses is travel. Guess what I was not doing during COVID? So although my top line revenue went down, my expenses to income percentage went down. Meaning I was keeping more money that I was bringing in as a percentage basis than I was before. So the bottom line actually looked better than it would have with the same revenue before COVID, because I wasn’t spending as much money on hotels, airfare, rental cars, meals, all those things, which is by far, if not my biggest expense, it’s certainly one of my biggest expenses during the year. So looking at that again, I’m looking going, “Hey, what’s happening here?” Not a bad thing, I’m keeping more money, but what is that? And I can see, well this year I spent this on travel, last year I spent that. Well guess what’s happening this year? I’m traveling more than I did last year. My expenses are up, that line is up, I can see that thing there. Can I do anything about it? Maybe, maybe not. But if I only looked at the bottom line and go, “What’s happening here?” I might freak out, but it’s like, “Well yeah, I’m flying more, I’m eating out more. I’m staying in hotels more. I’m renting cars more. Well of course, I’m going to be spending more money over there, but I’ve made up that other difference.” So P and L. So you look at the profit and loss statement, I look at two things, basically, Christie, my calendar and my P and L. And if the calendar looks good, with enough gaps in there for me to have time for content creation, time off, things like that, and the P and L looks good, I don’t really care about any of the other numbers.
– I 100% agree with you. There’s two things I want to call out about your system. I’m willing to bet that you’re not using some sort of fancy spreadsheet or custom dashboard or anything like that. You have your system. And it could be as simple as you jotting down on a piece of paper, like, “Hey, I need a beat on my business.” Now, at a certain size, that’s not going to do anything for you. Yes, right, right, right, right, exactly.
– Those of you listening, I’m holding up little note cards, index cards that I write notes on, on my bedside. That’s what I do.
– And that is part of my ministry, especially for smaller event businesses, folks just starting out, folks that had to contract a little bit and then expand and then contract again after post-post-COVID. If you start simply with a few metrics, you’re going to be a lot better off than if you think you need to scramble to get your Google Analytics and a custom dashboard built by me or some sort of crazy spreadsheet that you saw for sale on social media or whatever. If you just organize yourself so you understand the relationship between your revenue and your business’ profitability, and then also marketing and sales. It’s like peanut butter and jelly, right? So you know what your marketing and sales are, I like to step back from that. So the most important number is profit and profitability. After that is revenue, because you have to have a certain amount of revenue coming into be profitable. After that is sales because you got to close all of that great inquiries and leads and consults. And then marketing, which sounds counterintuitive coming from a marketer, but unless everything else is healthy, again, marketing is just going to mess you up. And then the second thing that you said that I want to kind of call out that I think is really important when it comes to accounting for or measuring important things in your business is accounting for time. So many business owners don’t account for their own time or they have time leaks with their staff. If you start to assign that a dollar amount and account for that time in a dollar amount, you will see where you can get free money in your business, in terms of profitability, because you’re not account… You’re not equating your personal time, as the owner, with money, or you have some sort of leaks within your staff. Again, none of this is in my wheelhouse. But when people come to me and they think that the solution is marketing and I look at some of their numbers and I’m like, “That is not the solution,” they get a little disappointed. But this is where the rubber meets the road.
– Right, you want easy fixes, right? Everybody wants an easy fix, that’s what it is. So for me, I have a CRM. I really hardly use it. I have a light version of Salesforce, I forget what they call it, but there’s a light version of it. When you fill out the contact form on the sidebar of any of the pages on my site, it goes right into Salesforce, sends me an email. This way I don’t have to enter the data. That’s really all it does for me. I don’t do a lot of prospecting because I don’t want to overfill my calendar. Been there, done that. Any of you listening, your 2022, that was my 2019. Don’t want to do that again, let’s not do that. So one of the things I’ve spoken about, I know I wrote about it in the new book, “Stop Selling and Help Them Buy Weddings and Events,” ’cause it’s something I spoke about on stage, which I don’t think I told you this before we got on here. My new book is things that people ask me at conferences, and they said, “Hey, you just spoke about your A dates and B dates and C dates, which of your books is that in?” And I said, “It’s in the next one,” ’cause it wasn’t in any of the books. So this is the next one. But I just had somebody email me, thanking me for this concept, which is, when you’re looking at profitability, well, when do you have pricing power? Supply and demand, first rule of economics, pricing power is when the supply is low and the demand is high. How many Saturdays are there in October? Four? Okay, well there’s low supply. How many weddings can you do on a Saturday? Some of you one, some of you more than one. Everybody’s got a limited, finite inventory. Even if you’re doing invitations, even if you’re doing dresses where you’re not there at the event, you physically can’t handle more than X number of customers. So when I’m helping people with pricing, profitability, things like that, I’m saying, “Well, when do you have pricing power? And are you taking advantage of that?” I had a venue who was doing like 40-person weddings on a Saturday. Like, “Why?” She said, “Well, it’s one of the things on my offering sheet and if they wanted to buy it, I sold it.” I said, “Well stop offering that. You don’t have to do that. Or your revenue minimum or whatever you want to do there.” And then the opposite is, let’s face it, it’s summertime right now when we’re recording this. It’s pretty darn hot in Texas. And nobody’s beating down your doors for a wedding on a Friday in August in Texas. So maybe you don’t have pricing power. And then do you either leave the lights off or are you willing to take less because you would have zero versus that, right? This is again, profitability. So knowing… How many of your clients that you work with, would you say know what their inventory, their calendar inventory looks like, that they’ve actually looked at something like that?
– I think that very few, actually. I wanted to say, “Planners or…” And I’m like, “No, not really.” And then I wanted to say venues, and I went, no, not. Caterings? no. What I get, and this is a little tangential, but it’s still on point, what I get is a lot of panicking. Every quarter there’s some month in the quarter that’s the panic month where it’s like, “Our revenue’s down or our inquiries are down.” And oftentimes I think, and this is the point you’re making about saying summer in Texas, oftentimes if you look at the year over year, they’re up, inquiries are… Everything’s coming up wonderfully. And so again, it’s like there… There are certain questions that you can start asking and being sort of a detective or inquiring your business analytics or your business information about that will help you get to this faster without the trauma and the drama and the panic. And one of those questions is, why do I think this is happening? Revenue’s down, why do I think this is happening? Well ’cause we’re not getting enough inquiries. Great, go and look at your inquiries and see where they’re at. Look at the inquiry to tour and look at the month over month and look at the year over year. And really explore everything you can about that hypothesis that inquiries are a problem, or marketing is a problem, or traffic is a problem. And by slowing down a little bit and getting very curious and looking at something from all of the angles, oftentimes you will stumble upon the fact that you’re actually up year over year or you are having a profitability problem, not an inquiry problem, or whatever it is. But I think to your point, which you said a couple of minutes ago, instead of looking for the quick fix, put your business owner cap back on, take fiduciary responsibility for your business, and get really curious and beat every single bush, trying to find the answer to what you think the problem is. And oftentimes you’ll find a solution somewhere. And many times, it’s not where you expected it to be, but it’s a solution, so yay.
– Right, and are you moving forward? I mean, that’s the best thing about any analytics-
– Are you moving forward.
– Right, trending. I always tell people with Google Analytics and things like that, you’re looking for trending. To know how many people visited my website, today on mobile versus desktop, is a useless piece of information. But to know over the last six months versus the six months before that is a useful piece of information, especially if I’m redesigning a website or making a new website, right? The inquiries, I think one of the problems we have now is the year over year, this year especially, 2023 versus 2022, is a not fair comparison. And 2022 to 2021 was a not fair comparison. Oh, and by the way, 2021 to 2020, it was a not fair comparison. 2020 to 2019 was not a fair comparison. So here we are in 2023, trying to compare it to 2019 or 2018, or as we like to call it here, 1 BC and 2 BC, before COVID, right? That’s what we’re calling them now. So 1 BC was 2019. If I look at this year versus last year, my business probably a little bit better to compare than most people listening here, because 2022 for so many people was just slammed, proving that you don’t want to do that much business, that you don’t want to do that many events. Well then, is that a fair comparison? No. Christie, I heard a client last year, a wedding venue who said something that you and I will never hear again ever in the wedding and event industry. A wedding venue, she said, “Alan, I’m running out of Thursdays to sell.” We’ll never hear that again, right?
– We’ll never hear that again.
– Right, so what happens is, the reason a lot of people are freaking out now is ’cause they are comparing this year to last year, when last year people would take whatever you had available. People are begging you, “Can you please do my wedding or event,” when you didn’t want to do one more and now you add one more on. And we’re not there now. We’re at a at least pre-COVID level, if not for some people down from that. And you know what? It’s not order taking anymore. It’s selling, it’s marketing, it’s all these things. So when you look at this, I think if a lot of people would look at your inquiries to your conversations. ‘Cause I talk about the four steps to more sale. Get their attention, get the inquiry, have a conversation, make a sale. Doesn’t matter what you do, it’s going to be the same thing. If you’re invitations, flowers, officiant, transportation, doesn’t matter. So marketing is getting their attention. Advertising, marketing, networking, referrals, all that. Having a… I’m sorry, getting the inquiry, right? That’s, I was reviewing somebody’s website yesterday and there just weren’t enough calls to action. Just like, “You’re not asking them to do it.” Then you have a conversation, then you get to make the sale. And it doesn’t matter whether they have to come in or you do this over the phone or you do it through Zoom or you do it through email or whatever. And it’s like passing the baton in a relay race, right? I give you the baton from marketing to inquiry, from inquiry to conversation. You look and see, all of our pipes are leaking. Yours, mine, everybody listening is losing people at every one of those steps. The question is, where’s the worst leak? And let’s fix that and then let’s find all the other leaks, right? That’s your working backwards from profitability.
– 100%. I also want to make a point because there comes a point where your own business analytics aren’t going to be enough to tell you the full story. And I know you and I have been around in the industry long enough to see different things get glutted. We’ve seen photography get glutted, planning get glutted, adventure photography get glutted. Venues got glutted because everybody either made sourdough bread or bought a barn somewhere. It’s just, we’ve seen these gluts in the market. And what I would say is sometimes it’s really important to also explore market trends. And you can do this a couple of different ways. If you’re advertising on a company that offers directory listings, that does really comprehensive, large-scale market research, you can ask your salesperson what they’re seeing in terms of trends up and down, month over month, year over the year. And they want you to be successful, so they will give you that information. You can go to another resource like Shane McMurray’s The Wedding Report, and he surveys couples and takes Bureau of Labor Statistics and runs it through. Anyway, really smart guy. You can also ask your contractors and freelancers who are doing things like social media or web development, are they seeing trends going up and down with other clients in the industry? Sometimes, and this is really unfortunate, but sometimes there’s not a lot you are personally going to be able to do in your marketing or sales to get you to whatever profit or revenue goals. And you’re going to have to understand that market forces are not moving in your favor. And you might have to make some really hard decisions, based on that context, that you cannot control, unfortunately.
– And again, that’s where profitability comes in. So when I talk about your A dates, your B dates, your C dates, I throw out to the audience, do you know what your break even point is, right? You have fixed expenses, you have rent or mortgage, you have car payments or truck payments, you have staff and things like that. Do you know how many events you need to do until you’re making money? And what if you only did your A dates, your most popular dates? And for some people that’s going to be 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, whatever that number is. Could you be profitable by doing fewer events? Therefore, when you’re getting less inquiries, but there are only four popular dates which you know you can fill, where you have more pricing power, then maybe you could be more profitable and not have to kill yourself by doing these more events. And do you understand who your audience is? Are you targeting… So many people are just throwing money everywhere. I mean just, they’re throwing money at TikTok, they’re throwing money at Threads now, I guess, whatever it is, right? Just throwing money around. And they really don’t understand where their business is coming from. Your biggest source of traffic is not necessarily your biggest source of revenue. I think I hit a nerve with Christie. Those of you listening cannot see her face. Those of you watching saw it. Okay, tell, do tell.
– Okay, so quick story is I have this love-hate relationship with Pinterest. And I can’t tell you how many times people have come to me and said, “Do you run Pinterest ads?” Which I don’t. I don’t want to, I don’t want to have anything to do with Pinterest at this point. But they’ll see a lot of traffic coming in from Pinterest and they will think that they need to advertise there because the traffic’s coming in. But to your point, looking at just three core reports in the analytics, if they’re only looking at free blog content and you’re in Maine and they’re in San Francisco and they’re just consuming your free content, it’s never going to happen. So you really need to understand, where’s the most qualified traffic coming from? How do you understand that? Are they looking at one of your core pages that indicate booking interest? So your About page, your Services page, your Contact page, your Inquiry page. If they’re all over your blog and nowhere else-
– Every-
– You’re not doing yourself any favors.
– Right, every time I look at Google Analytics, which is not that often, but when I do for myself, again, I said there’s three things. So how much of my traffic is mobile? It’s important for me because it’s always been 25% to 30%. When I say always, I mean for the 12 years since I’ve had a website, since I left the Knot, it’s always about there. It’s not trending up. That 25% to 30%, that’s a pretty tight window, it stays within that. My site is fully mobile compatible. It works very well on mobile. But I do design it more for the desktop laptop user because they’re 70% of them, 70% to 75% of them. I do want to know which pages people are looking at. And every single time, within my top five pages, is a blog post I wrote about seven or eight years ago, called, “What’s Your One, Three, Five-Year Plan?” And here’s what Christie is talking about. The bounce rate on that page, which means people enter on that page and leave without looking at anything else on my site, is about 98%. Which tells me they’re not interested in looking at anything else on my site. They’re not going to the pages, like you mentioned, Christie, my sales training page, my website review page, my consulting page, my mastermind page, my podcast. Nope, not looking any place else. So what that tells me is that is not my audience. But if all I looked at was that, I’d say, “Well, write more blogs like that.” No, no. I am casting such a wide net because it’s not what’s your wedding and business, one, three, five-year plan, it just says, “What’s your one, three, five-year plan?” And people are googling that. And I guess I have good Google juice because that’s coming up, right? That shows that for that phrase, I rank very high. But it’s not bringing me any business.
– Last story about that. So I had an officiant, Ming, all this traffic. A lot of it’s coming from Pinterest, huge blog, hundreds of blog posts, hundreds. Did an analytics audit for her. She’s like, “I don’t… I’m not making any money off of this. I have all this traffic, how do I monetize this?” Well, we found that they were just going to the blog posts, right? So we asked ourselves, and this is how you work your analytics or your business information, you start asking questions. So we asked ourselves, what are they looking at? Well, they were looking at how to write vows, ’cause she’s an officiant. Where are they coming from? They’re coming from the South. Hmm, okay, who are they? They’re dudes! They were dudes! And so I’m having this conversation with this business owner and we’re brainstorming, like, “What is the story? We’re getting all of this data in. What is the story here?” She says, “I bet that these guys were told to write their custom vows for their wedding. They don’t know what to do. They’re Googling. I have a bajillion blog posts about this. I have a bajillion pins and now they’re all coming to my website to find information. Okay, well what are we going to do about this?” Well, we can take all that content down and do 301 redirects and try to change the audience. Or we can leverage those 17,000 visitors that were coming to this little main officiant’s website. She ended up making like a $17 workbook and putting a call to action on every single blog post for that category, for writing vows. And started selling it. Now was she going to retire off of it? No, she’s making a few hundred bucks a month. But she was monetizing that. And so even if your stuff isn’t making money, if you have enough traffic and you have a specific enough audience, you can start brainstorming ways to create some sort of passive product around it. But it all starts with why is this happening and what can I do about it? Those are the two questions that are going to bracket your data journey.
– Right, another thing would be getting an affiliate link to someone who can do that. I’ve had Brian Franklin on, who is company vows and speeches, that’s what he does. He might be very interested in all these people that need people to help them with vows and speeches. And I don’t know if he’s got an affiliate program. Brian, if you’re listening, reach out to Christie and have her connection with her main officiant, and there you can go.
– I’d happy to, yeah.
– But again, here’s the thing, it’s like, “What can I do with the traffic?” It’s like on YouTube, what was it, “Charlie Bit My Finger,” or whatever that was, how how much money did YouTube make from that because people wanted to go and see that? They’re making that. Remember, on all these social platforms, we, the users who are using this for free, we are what they’re selling. They’re selling our eyeballs, right? So what you have to decide is whose eyeballs do you want to be in front of? And I always say, “Three things with your advertising.” Geographics, where are these people? Demographics, what do you know that you can measure about these people? Age, income, race, education, different things like that, right? And then psychographics, which is more like, “Why you?” I have a client who had a working horse farm that they do weddings at. Well, what if you put it in front of people that follow horse things on Facebook, right? Equestrian pages and things like that. That’s the psychographics part of that. So if you know that, you can be way more targeted with your advertising, spend a lot less money to get the people you want. But I think pretty much everybody listening, and I would venture to say everybody listening, could tighten up the process at some point. Marketing, getting inquiries, responding to inquiries, following up better. Following up better. Following up better. Following up, oh, I’m a broken record. Following up, yeah. And then upsells. I mean, that’s the other thing is upsells. I was just talking to this one client. I said, “Send me over the upsells so when I come for the sales training, I’ll know what to teach.” They said, “We really don’t have any.” I said, “Okay, here’s a missed opportunity, right? The people that buying from you already will probably buy more as long as they want the results of what those things are.” So I’m looking at the clock and we could go on here forever. So what I’m thinking is that I need to have you back and we need to hone in on some other part of this so you, the listeners, can tell me what part you want to hone in on. But if somebody wants to find out more about you and what you do, give me a little bit. So what is Mountainside Media and what do you do?
– Yeah, I do… As an analytics and market research for event pros. So a lot of people come to me for ads. I know that you’ve had Mark Chapman on. I just found out Mark lives in my town, that’s so random, since it’s two square miles with 10,000 people in it. So going to be hanging out with him. He is brilliant, owns the I Do Society. I know that I’m plugging somebody else now, but just, the reason why I am doing that is because people come to me for ads, but I’m starting to shift more into analytics, building out dashboards, doing market research and whatnot. So I do ads sometimes, but mostly market research and analytics. I’m at Mountainside Media. And I do not like social media so much. So if you want to find me, you can either find me on a podcast, search for me on your favorite podcast player, or you can see me speaking at one of the major conferences, including Wedding MBA. Or just check out my website and see if it’s for you.
– And in the show notes, we will have all of those links so you can find Christie there. So thank you so much for coming on. I do hate that I have to cut us off here, but I’d like to keep these to a certain amount of time. But it is so much fun and we will talk again. We will definitely talk again. We’ll figure out how we can dive a little deeper into this. So thanks for joining me.
– Thanks for having me.
I’m Alan Berg. Thanks for listening. If you have any questions about this or if you’d like to suggest other topics for “The Wedding Business Solutions Podcast” please let me know. My email is [email protected]. Look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Thanks.
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