Think of Marketing Data as a Story with JJ Reynolds | MP 105

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On this marketing podcast, JJ Reynolds talks about thinking of marketing data as a story.

How do you build more traction on your website and increase client interaction? Do you look at your website data and stats? How can you use these numbers to measure and create predictable success?

In this podcast episode, Sam Carvalho speaks about how to think of marketing data as a story with JJ Reynolds.

Podcast Sponsor: Therapy Notes

An image of Therapy Notes is captured as the sponsor on the Practice of the Practice Podcast, a therapist podcast. Therapy Notes is the most trusted EHR for Behavioral Health.

Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try TherapyNotes! It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and telehealth a whole lot easier.

Check it out and you will quickly see why TherapyNotes is the highest-rated EHR on TrustPilot with over 1000 verified customer reviews and an average customer rating of 4.9/5 stars.

You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support 7 days a week, so when you have questions, you can quickly reach someone who can help, and you are never wasting your time looking for answers.

If you are coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. TherapyNotes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away.

Use promo code ‘JOE’ to get three free months to try out TherapyNotes, no strings attached, and remember, telehealth is included with every subscription free. Make 2022 the best year yet with TherapyNotes.

Meet JJ Reynolds

A photo of JJ Reynolds is captured. He is the head of marketing and analytics at Mediauthentic. JJ is featured on Marketing a Practice, a therapist podcast.

JJ Reynolds, from Mediauthentic, started working in the field of marketing as a videographer who would create marketing videos and other assets. However, he quickly learned that organizations didn’t really know what to do with these things once they had them. Now he focuses on assisting businesses in measuring and acting on their marketing data.

JJ believes that what most digital businesses need is someone to provide reliable consistent data to take action.  Understanding that being online takes a lot of work, he helps eliminate the “Guess Work”.

Visit Mediauthentic and connect on LinkedIn.

In This Podcast

  • How to find out what is and isn’t working with your website
  • Boost your customer interaction
  • Measure consistent growth
  • JJ’s advice to private practitioners

How to find out what is and isn’t working with your website

Whenever you receive a number about your current stats, either from a company that manages your website or someone that you’ve hired, ask them; “What are we going to do about it?”

That’s where you want to add context … add context to any number that you are given and ask [why] it exists because then you can … [ask], “What are we going to do about it?” (JJ Reynolds)

Get context for the stats around your website, and ask questions. Then you are better able to decide which route to take by considering the best option moving forward based on your goals.

Boost your customer interaction

The best thing that you can do to increase customer interaction on your website and social media platforms is to speak to who they are.

What you want to try and do is [to] define what the intention is [behind] your marketing story. (JJ Reynolds)

Change your perspective on data analysis. It is a tool that you can use to measure the success of your marketing and the success of your website by encouraging customers to interact with you and your product.

If you see that something is not working, change it.

Don’t think of it as data, think of it as a story. (JJ Reynolds)

Measure consistent growth

Measure your numbers and metrics on an ongoing basis to track growth.

  • Start at the top by simply looking at the page views of your call-to-action page.
  • Track how many start the process by either coming to the page or clicking the button
  • Keep track of transactions and purchases

People who saw the page could be 100% … I would estimate that probably about 30% initiate or click to do something, and usually between 6 – 12% of people will take the action. (JJ Reynolds)

Now, use these numbers and measure your success as it develops.

[Use] these numbers to help [you] predict what next month’s revenue’s going to be … the gold standard is for you as the owner … to say, “How much revenue are we going to bring in next month?” The closer you can predict that, the more valuable you are. (JJ Reynolds)

JJ’s advice to private practitioners

Just knowing your numbers is going to put you 90% above the competition. Then, being able to influence those numbers is where you can talk with a lot of marketing companies to boost your business with you being involved in the process.

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Check out these additional resources:

Meet Sam Carvalho

A photo of Samantha Carvalho is captured. She is the Chief Marketing Officer and Designer at Practice of the Practice. She is the host of the Marketing A Practice Podcast and helps therapists successfully market and brand their private practices.Sam Carvalho is a graphic designer living in Cape Town, South Africa, with over five years of experience in both design and marketing, with a special interest and experience in the start-up environment.

She has been working with Practice of the Practice since 2016 and has helped over 70 therapist entrepreneurs take their practices to the next level by enhancing their visual branding. She loves working with a variety of clients on design-intensive tasks and is always up for a challenge!

Follow Sam on Instagram to see some of her work. To work with Sam, head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding.

Thanks For Listening!

Feel free to leave a comment below or share this podcast on social media by clicking on one of the social media links below! Alternatively, leave a review on iTunes and subscribe!

Podcast Transcription

[SAM CARVALHO] Welcome to the Marketing a Practice podcast with me, Sam Carvalho, where you’ll discover everything you need to know about marketing and branding your business. To find out more about how I can help you brand new business visit www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. If you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. JJ Reynolds from Mediauthentic started working in the field of marketing as a videographer who would create marketing videos and other assets. However, he quickly learned that organizations didn’t really know what to do with these things once they had them. Now he focuses on assisting businesses in measuring and acting on their marketing data. Understanding that being online takes a lot of work, he helps eliminate the guess work. Reynolds helps his clients using Google Marketing Cloud, where he’s able to predictably increase MRR while measuring each channel step in the marketing journey. With his team they take all of their clients’ data from their CRM, Google Analytics, and Card Platform, then turn it into a real-time data dashboard for you to take action. JJ believes that what most digital businesses need is someone to provide reliable, consistent data to take action. He is eager to share with listeners how they can better understand and utilize data to improve their business. Hi, JJ, thanks so much for joining us today. [JJ REYNOLDS] Hey, thank you so much. Yes, I’m excited to be here. [SAM] As with all my guests, the first question I always ask is, what’s your backstory and how did you get to where you are now? [JJ REYNOLDS] All right. Well, I was born in Hawaii. That’s my, my unique selling proposition is I was born on an island in the middle of the Pacific. Yes, I was actually, I had the privilege of being born and raised in Hawaii and so it was a great experience, would recommend if you’re going to be born, do it there. I basically went up through university in California and sort of dabbling like on the side when I was in university in marketing, like just in general, the broadest sense of the term of the word marketing you could think of. I was, basically I loved videos, loved creating stories and things like that. I started actually shooting wine videos for wineries. I would shoot on the weekends or during the week. It was a university, so it was pretty flexible schedules and slowly got like a pretty large client base of like videography just shooting videos. But then I realized, hey nobody knows what to do these videos. I’d get requests left and right from people who wanted to make something random or shoot an interview with the owner of the winery and I’d be like, “What are we going to do with this 30-minute-long interview about these really rich people who own a winery that is so unrelatable to like 99% of people who drink this wine? So basically, I started to realize, hey, people don’t know what to do with this. Let’s dabble in the world of Facebook Ads. I ended up getting a job at an actual ad agency, mostly running Google Ads. So now I have some Facebook Ads knowledge, some Google Ads knowledge. The same questions I find come up quite often with like traffic agencies is is it working? Everyone wants to know is, “Hey, we’re spending, whether it’s $1,000 or $100,000 on ads that use the question of like, is it doing what it’s supposed to? So I ended up moving from that just strictly into understanding that user journey and how to track, how to measure the difference. Like, this is the core of what it is. It’s measuring the difference between what’s happening versus what you expect to happen. That is at the core of it, of like when you’re having a conversation with somebody and you expect one thing and then you get something else, you have to course correct. But we forget that online. We have conversations with people and then we’re very good at humans as humans of like, oh, this person doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Let me change my language so that I can speak to them. But online, what we often do is we think that we know everything and go for it, like with what we think, and then we don’t check in with our people to see if it actually landed. I fast just skipped over a whole bunch of years, but now we’re at a team over at Mediauthentic, and we just do this, we just measure the story on a website and your entire user journey from start to finish and give you hopefully actions to take as opposed to numbers to look at. So that’s this spiel from beginning to end. We can now hop into anything you’d like to. [SAM] That’s amazing because I think, I mean that’s such an awesome service that you offer because I feel like people who get into, like you say Facebook Ads or any promotion on online very seldom actually look at the numbers of how things are doing because it can seem overwhelming. But so can you give some tips and advice on keys to identify what is and isn’t working with your website numbers? [JJ REYNOLDS] Yes, like the biggest thing to think about, is if you, the listener are sitting at your computer and either you got a report from an ad agency or you got a report from an ad platform, if you’re do or you’re DIYing it, or if you have a person who’s giving you a report who’s managing these things, is if they give you a number, ask what are we going to do about it? I like to use the acronym of like, why die, like what are you going to do about it? Not the best thing, but why die? What are you going to do about it, with that number? Here’s the perfect example, is if I say, hey, 4% of the people to your application page are filling it out, cool, great. That does nothing for me. 4% is that 4% of our Facebook Ads that are going to coal audiences, is that 4% of our email list who is already active paying, like our active engaged people and that we’re just saying, hey, buy again or book an appointment again and like, only 4%? That’s terrible. We have a list of a thousand clients. That’s where you want to say add context in on any number that you’re given and ask why does that exist? Because then you can do the why die of what are you going to do about it and you can say, hey next month, this is where one I get to, in the ideal world is you can say next month if this number is above 5%, we’re going to spend more on traffic, or we’re going to add more SEO play or whatever it might, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Whatever is within your wheelhouse of doing and if it’s below that number, we’re going to focus on figuring out why on God’s green Earth, it is below that number and we’re going to fix it. That way it’s a lot more actionable as opposed to just getting a report from someone who’s telling you. Because people who run ads and run, like are technical as far as marketing, like doing the thing love numbers and to them it’s not like, it’s nothing like, oh yes, we’ve got a roaz of 3.2, and you’re like, what is a roaz? I’ve never seen that animal before. I don’t know what that is. So yes, that’s my hopefully action packed right up front. [SAM] Yes. That’s great because I feel like these agencies also hide behind the numbers because they know that you don’t understand what they’re saying half the time. So it’s easy for them to just be like, this is the report of what you’ve spent your money on, but then actually you don’t even understand what’s going on. So what in your opinion, is the best way to engage with customers and get them to take action on your website? [JJ REYNOLDS] Yes, I think the biggest thing is speaking to who they are. This is like what you, the examples can come out any which way, but at the core of it is you have numbers and so what we have to do is we have to use measurement of website, of listening for things. Most people just measure page views and transactions, like that’s it. You’re supposed to get a story about that, but that’s not story-worthy. That’s nothing, like page views and transactions, it’s like as if I told you we’re going to have a conversation and you’re going to only know whenever I say the word, the, and if I shake your hand. That’s all you’re going to get is the word the, and if I shake your hand yes or no. That’s what we’re doing on the website, is we’ve got page views and purchases. So what you want to try and do is define what the intention is of your marketing story, of like, hey, we have this really sweet why we’re in business page. It’s awesome, it’s great page. We spend a lot of time, money, and effort to make it like super personable, to make it super relatable and to make it very informative. We have this page and that’s like our core, like “About Us” big button. It’s the top right corner. So if you have that page views, not going to give you a story, but let’s just say we added on page views plus people who stuck around for 10 seconds and 20 seconds and 30 seconds and 40 seconds and then also people who scrolled down the page of like actually reading the thing. Then the people who clicked the button, right, of like, whatever your call to action was like, hey this sounded like a plan for you pushed this button, book your appointment. So in an ideal world, you’d say, hey, of the people who saw this page, 90% are going to stick around for more than 10 seconds, 70% are going to scroll down 20%, 50% are going to even see the call to action and 30% are going to push the button. That’s our new benchmark. Then now if we wanted to go add it to our story or build a better story, go for it. We can see if it improves those numbers or not and see where the drop off is. Because if that first step is the drop off, you’re above the fold or the top, what loads the page, it’s probably broken. It’s not working out because no one’s sticking around because they’re like, I don’t need this in my life. I’m going to go do something else. I’m going to watch TikTok videos. [SAM] So, I mean, I think you’ve already spoken so much into this for most of the episode already, but what would you say is the best way for people to change their perspective on data analysis? [JJ REYNOLDS] I think the first thing is just don’t think of it as data. Think of it as a story. Think of it as if you were having a conversation with like five different people. This is like the basic of marketing. The basis of marketing for most people is like, okay, we’re going to talk to our BFF, who knows, likes, and trusts us. That’s like your engaged purchasers or previous clients. Then you’re going to have someone who maybe knows about you a little bit and how do you talk to them? Then how do you talk to the person that you just bumped into at a Starbucks and were like, “Hey do you want to buy this thing?” And like, I hate to be like the person who’s like, oh yes, the dating analogy of like, you don’t want to ask for marriage on the first date. But that’s true and online, we often do that. I’m like guilty of it as well. On our agency website you can see we have like, we are actually completely rebuilding it right off of all these pieces. It’s like we have the “Apply Now” button everywhere, like it is everywhere on the website. I was looking at this with our latest hire and I was like, can we fix this? This is so bad. There’s a button that says apply now every single frame of this website. Again, that was us being like, hey, you want to apply now? You just need a little bit of coffee. How about apply now? Watch this video, then apply. That’s terrible. So now we’re like shifting a lot of it to like, obviously everyone knows if they’re actually looking to become a client. Just go to the menu, there’s probably going to be one of those links that’s like book a call. That’s very hopefully a very practical way that obviously we’re doing it wrong right now, but that you can start having that steps towards betterness using data. [SAM] I think that’s, yes, and I think that’s also where it’s been a learning curve for everybody because I feel like maybe once everybody initially started setting up websites and stuff, it maybe wasn’t obvious enough what people needed to do. Then it became about call to action and everybody was like, okay, cool, we need to make it super obvious what it is that we want people to do. So I think exactly like you said, that’s maybe where everybody went over the top of the call to action and now it’s more about like, I think we’ve realized exactly like you said, we need to actually be telling stories and get to know our audience a bit more before we expect them to take action on our websites. [JJ REYNOLDS] Yes, exactly. The best concept for you to test this on yourself is go down to your local grocery store, the biggest grocery store you can like Walmart, if you’re in the US. I’m not sure what they are like in Europe or the other direction, but whatever your biggest grocery story is, the biggest chain you’ve got. Walk into there and see how they have, like, you walk in, there’s usually some big banner thing in the front. It’s like, oh, the sale, 10% off this stuff or like, hey, this is all marked down. So that’s like very apparent. You’re like, okay, cool, but that doesn’t follow you around the whole store. It’s not like every single, every single little card in the aisles is like, hey, did you know at the front of the store there’s 10% off? Like no. They changed. If you want the bargains, you either go to the back of the store for the stuff that’s about to expire or the front of the store where the good deal is right, or what they’re trying to get rid of. So that’s what we want to emanate is where the person on your website knows where to go. They know where to go. But at the same time, you’re reminding them in the aisles of these other little bonuses of like, hey, if you buy avocados, you get some free chips or whatever it might be along the way. Or like you’re in the chip aisle there’s also salsa that is right there. It’s not the salsa aisle, but there’s salsa in the chip aisle because people, they know that, hey, you buy chips, you also might want some salsa. Let’s not make them walk to the salsa aisle and get salsa. Let’s put it right here. You can use, again, marketing data to make sure that we’re doing that and not just saying hey, 10% off of this thing that once you walk in the store, we’re always going to ask you for that. So that’s the most practical, real world to online analogy that I like to use. [SAM] That’s really good. [THERAPY NOTES] Is managing your practice stressing you out? Try Therapy Notes. It makes notes, billing, scheduling, and tele-health a whole lot easier. Check it out and you will quickly see why it’s the highest rated EHR on Trustpilot with over 1000 verified customer views and an average customer rating of 4.9 out of five stars. You’ll notice the difference from the first day you sign up for a trial. They offer live phone support seven days a week so when you have questions, you can quickly reach out to someone who can help. You are never wasting your time looking for answers. If you’re coming from another EHR, they make the transition really easy. Therapy Notes will import your clients’ demographic data free of charge during your trial so you can get going right away. Use the promo code [JOE], J-O-E to get three months to try Therapy Notes for free, no strings attached. Remember telehealth is included with every subscription free. Make 2022, the best year yet with Therapy Notes. [SAM CARVALHO] So what would you say is the importance of knowing how much it costs you to get a new customer? [JJ REYNOLDS] Extremely important. And this is where most people fall on their sword. I was working with a dentist. I was talking with him and I was like, “Hey, if I told you that if you were to give me $100 and I will guarantee you that you’ll have a new first appointment booked, guaranteed, would you take the deal?” He’s like, “Sure. I’ll do that.” Because most of the time people like working with him. He’s like, they stay along for a long time. It caught, usually the first appointment is like almost free or like, we’re going to lose that a hundred bucks to begin with, but if they come back with a second cleaning and blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, cool. “What if it was $500?” He’s like, “I don’t know, maybe.” I was like, “What if it was $1,000?” Probably not. I was like, why? I don’t think it would work. That is great. It’s our intuition taking place. But online, if you’re going to hire a marketer, those costs become a lot more direct where it’s like, you don’t think of your office staff if you’re a dentist of your marketing costs, but it is. You have a nice friendly, warm receptionist person that’s like, “Hey, want a cup of coffee while you wait?” Or, that’s probably not the best thing for dentist, but, whatever their welcome message is. If we take that and we extrapolate that to online, which is what we should all be doing is like moving things online, is taking in and say, hey, we’re going to have this many people from our paid traffic. We’re going to Google Ads. If you’re in a physical location or maybe it’s Facebook Ads, if you’re more of trying to have brand awareness, whatever it might be, does not matter. Let’s just say you spend $100a day on those platforms. So now you’re spending, you have a cost, hard costs. That’s to say you have a number of appointments booked. That’s what you want to start off with at the first level one, is like, how much are we spending and how much is it costing us to get a lead or a customer there? Then you want to see is try to take that and see what are the averages for those. So if you get a new customer from a paid traffic platform, how long are they staying with you? Because it’s guaranteed not the same as like your best friend from high school who just had a daughter who then sent them to become your dental. They’re with you for life because that was their mom’s dentist who did this. Like that lifetime value is literally 60 years. Whereas with you come up to a paid traffic channel, it might not be that. So your cost to acquire someone you should look at because if you’re trying to grow or stabilize or you know that hey, we lose five clients every month, make sure you factor that in so your cost. Cost is on average about thousand bucks, 5000, 100 does not matter. But you know those as you start moving forward and you want to try to even keep consistent, not even growing. [SAM] How can people in the audience grow in a predictable manner by measuring numbers and metrics on an ongoing basis? [JJ REYNOLDS] Start at the top. Start at the top, and you can start at that as simple as just looking at page views of your application. Look at the page views of your application or whatever the call-to-action page is. How many people saw it? Start that. Write that down in a little scratch piece of paper. Then if you want to level it up, like, let’s start with that, then how many people initiated? So that’d be like clicking the button to book an appointment or viewing the little box, the little checkout bot, whatever it might be, whatever that initiated feeling is. And the number of transactions or purchases or appointments booked. You have those three numbers. Look at those numbers. Off the top of my head, here’s what the benchmark I would use, is people who saw the page is going to be 100% because a hundred people saw the page. I would estimate that probably about 30% initiate or click to like doing something and usually between like six to 12% of people take the action. That’s what I just guessed off the top of my head in general. Use those numbers right there as like what we’re trying for and then you can say, okay, if we’re cool with these percentages, if they’re close to what JJ just said, or even if they’re not close and that’s our new baseline. Let’s go get either more people to see the thing or let’s get more, like spend some time on actually proving why we’re worthy of getting an appointment booked or a transaction. That’s the easiest, most basic way of saying, hey, let’s use these numbers to help us predict what next month’s revenue is going to be. That’s the gold, the gold standard is for you as the owner or the operator or the marketer to say, how much revenue are we going to bring in next month? The closer you can predict that, the more valuable you are. If you could say we’re going to be 20 grand and that’s going to be a hundred people, but doing x, that’s going to be 50 people doing Y and 10 people doing Z and that’s going to get us 20 grand. Then if you are within like 10% of that prediction, like gold standard of marketing, being way above or way below is not the best because you don’t know why that happened. But if you can say, we’re going to do these efforts, do these things, this is what’s going to happen and then you have that happen gold standard, that’s the goal. [SAM] I mean, you just gave obviously an example of what people could aim for. Do you think it makes sense for people to set a goal maybe based on industry standards or would it just make more sense to just try and improve on the numbers that you have right now? [JJ REYNOLDS] Starting at knowing your numbers is better than 90% of the competition. Whoever looks at this, whoever your competition is better than 90%, guaranteed just knowing those numbers above the transactions because most people just look at transactions or look at their Stripe account or their booking platform. But if you wanted to know that, just go to your CPA and say, hey, how much money do we make? That’s not marketing, that’s accounting. So starting with that is literally going to get you so much more and if you, everyone always asks, what’s the best conversion rate for our industry. The answer to that question is better than it was yesterday. That’s literally the answer, is better than it was but let’s start with knowing what it is. Even if you kept it the same, and if you said, hey, if I spent a dollar per person to see this page, would this make sense? Then you can start playing with those numbers of like, hey, Facebook Ads person, our cost per landing page view should be about a buck 20, should be. Then now you’re looking at metrics of that, the people that are trying to get you business can understand, like, oh, hey, we make about $100 here and it’s about 10% of people, so we need to make at least five bucks per, whatever the numbers are. That way you can start predicting the future of if Susan B. Anthony of Facebook Ads can do this, then this is going to happen. If George on Google Ads can do that, or our SEO team, or we’re going to go speak at a conference or whatever it might be, that’s much more valuable than Sam. Let’s see what happened. Go check our bank account, which is again, most people start with [SAM] And JJ, if people wanted to get in touch with you, what is the best way for them to do that? [JJ REYNOLDS] Yes, if you head over to Mediaauthentic, so it’s Medi like medical, mediauthentic.com, you should find a lot of things. We’ve got some accelerators there that will hopefully get you up to speed in a shorter period of time. If you have any desires to book a call, feel free to do so. We can have a chat. Yes, that’s that. I hope that this was fun for everybody listening. [SAM] Awesome. JJ always end off with, if every private practice owner in the world were listening right now, what would you want them to know? [JJ REYNOLDS] Just knowing your numbers is going to put you above 90% of the competition. Then being able to influence those numbers is where you can talk with a lot of marketing people as opposed to going into the conversation blind and saying, “Hey, can you increase my X?” Knowing those numbers to start with is going to give you a huge advantage to weed out the people that don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t know what they’re doing and give you the people that are well, actually impressed that you know that, and then can work with you to improve that. That’s, yes, that would be it. [SAM] Awesome. Thanks so much for all the incredible information that you provided us with today. [JJ REYNOLDS] Yes, thank you. It’s been a pleasure. [SAM] Thanks again to Therapy Notes for sponsoring this episode. Remember to use the promo code, [JOE], that’s J-O-E to get three free months to try our Therapy Notes for free, no strings attached. Thanks for listening to the Marketing a Practice podcast. If you need help with branding your business, whether it be a new logo, rebrand, or you simply want some print flyer designed head on over to www.practiceofthepractice.com/branding. If you’d like to see some examples of my design work, be sure to follow me on Instagram at Samantha Carvalho Design. Finally, please subscribe, rate, and review this podcast on iTunes if you like what you’ve heard. Talk to you soon. Marketing a Practice podcast is part of the Practice of the Practice podcast network, a network of podcasts seeking to help you market and grow your business and yourself. To hear other podcasts like Beta Male Revolution, Empowered and Unapologetic, Imperfect Thriving, or Faith in Practice, go to practiceofthepractice.com/network. This podcast is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regards to the subject matter covered. It is given with the understanding that neither the host, the publisher, or the guests are rendering legal, accounting, clinical, or any other professional information. If you want a professional, you should find one.