On this week’s episode of The Render Podcast, Cam sat down with Tayler Cusick Hollman, Founder of Enji, a soon-to-launch tech startup that will provide marketing tools that are specifically built with small business owners in mind. Having a background in Marketing Consulting, Tayler started Taylrd Media and Designs and pursued this endeavor because she realized she did not fit into that ‘corporate box’. One thing led to another and as her client list grew, so did her consulting business. 

Tayler assists in creating marketing strategies, copywriting, implementing those tools, and figuring out how to pivot in your small business as those marketing metrics circle back to your business. We all need marketing when it comes to our businesses, but how can you tap into expert marketing support? Tayler is doing this with her startup, Enji. Join us to learn more about how Tayler is changing the game and helping us have access to these resources. 

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Numbers vs. Trusting Your Gut

Trusting your gut is a crucial way of life, and we will never tell you to stop listening to your intuition, but when you own a business and are needing to expand efforts whether that be seeing a higher revenue number, or scaling your marketing, the numbers, in this situation, may outweigh your gut. Knowing that something is working and beneficial for your business because it is the money that is keeping your business…in business. Think about the time that you are putting into your business — yes, even your time has a dollar value to it and we all want that to pay off as well! Time, money, or effort…is it working?

This is where being a business owner as well as a creative who is emotionally invested can blur the lines a little and you can get distracted. There is a fine line between trusting your gut and the numbers; if the numbers are not coming in, something has to give. Leaning into your gut can feel safer rather than looking objectively at whether or not your creativity is turning into money. It is super important that you can balance both. 

Are your marketing efforts turning into sales? Again, are you able to look at this objectively and say hey, this creative skill of mine is bringing in money? Or are you struggling to separate emotionally from the business owner and the creative? Recently read by Cam, Donald Miller’s ‘How To Grow Your Small Business’ talks about how to think of your business like an airplane. He has these six different pillars of a business and can verbalize how you should be thinking of your business. 

Leadership — Your cockpit & are the ones leading the airplane 

Marketing — Right Engine

Sales — Left Engine

Products & Services — Wings 

Overhead — Body of the Plane

Cash Flow — Fuel Tank

Your marketing and sales team can also act like the engine. If one part of your engine is not working well, your plane (business) is going to go down. Your products and services that you are marketing and working on selling must be products that are shown as valuable to consumers and your audience. This is where the money side of your business is going to come into play. Because of your marketing efforts, it is directly tied to your sales. When marketing dips, your sales dip. Revenue makes your craft a business, and do we really want the marketing to be relying on our intuition or should that be coupled with the numbers? It is a no-brainer. 

Think of marketing as a habit — you have to keep at it to see the results. It can feel daunting, but the more you do it and get your name out there, the better your numbers will be. You do not feel that lull when you go into a marketing dip or lull at that moment. There is always a lag time that will follow. If you are not prioritizing your marketing efforts, your sales are going to significantly drop and those two are the keys that keep your business going. Look at your accounts receivable and gauge what is going to be coming into the business account in a few weeks from now — is that cash flow looking good or not? If not, do the work now for strategizing marketing efforts so you see that flow of money coming in. What can you implement in your marketing strategies to impact your sales? 

Visualize with us

You have a funnel for your business and it is broken up into 3 portions.

These actions are your ways to get your audience into your sales process. The widest part of your funnel has your:

1. Social media posts
2. Email Marketing
3. Advertisements 

The steps taken in the step above are the actions you can take to influence more of your mid-funnel KPI’s which are:

1. Amount of inquiries you are receiving
2. Amount of consultations being booked 
3. How many proposals are being sent out

At the bottom of the funnel are your hardcore sales steps.

1. How many contracts did you sign
2. What is your booking value?

What it comes down to are the efforts you are putting in with each layer of your marketing funnel. When you are not tracking where your inquiries dropped off, you are unable to see why you may be ‘losing’ the client. Not everyone who comes into your funnel is your ideal client, but keeping up with where they ‘fell off’, if you will, can help you see what shift you may or may not need to make. 

KPI Metrics — What do you track?

Begin we dive in, do you know what KPI stands for? Key Performance Indicator (KPI) — a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. KPI’s provide targets for teams to shoot for, milestones to gauge progress, and insights that help people across the organization make better decisions. 

Advertisements will be key for a rental company because that is a volume-based business. You need multiple events to rent out the inventory to bring in that higher revenue number. Whereas a wedding planner can only do one (most of the time) large event that weekend, the numbers aligning with that event will be more of a focus for her. Advertising is not great for the 1:1 client relationships, but rental companies are a 1:many client-based business, so it makes the best sense! For your advertisements, you need to know how many impressions your ads are getting…how many eyeballs are actually seeing your ads. Then it goes to the click-through rate — how many people are clicking from my social media (or email marketing) to land on my website? 

You can also look at what you have spent in your marketing to acquire a client. What value did you spend to get in front of your ideal audience? This is interesting because this can be valued by your time, money, self-educated efforts, and much more. Pay attention to where your client has found you so you can continue to pour into what is working and what is not working for your marketing. 

Where Your Clients Find You

You can also look at what you have spent in your marketing to acquire a client. What value did you spend to get in front of your ideal audience? This is interesting because this can be valued by your time, your money, your self-educated efforts, and much more. Pay attention to where your client has found you so you can continue to pour into what is working and what is not working for your marketing. Are you testing new social platforms to see what kind of reach you can gain through there? Last year, we tested out TikTok and did that for 6 – 8 months and posted consistently to see what that could drive toward us. We learned that no one found us there, but they did via Google, a Blog Post, Instagram, or Pinterest. These platforms actually drove numbers into our business and resulted in sales. 

Listen to us when we say this…there is social pressure to be in certain places. The bottom line is that you don’t need to be where everyone else is. One platform may work for that business, but may not be a good fit for you! Going through the effort of experimenting with that social media platform is key to knowing if it is your target audience. When you learn that something is not working, you have freed yourself of that stress that you may feel to put the work into that platform! You may see numbers from those platforms, but gauge if you are actually getting business from that.

Is your ROI hitting home with the efforts that you are putting in with your marketing strategies? Are you actually seeing a return on your investment with your marketing time and efforts? Are the results covering the expenses that you have with having that person on your team? You certainly need to stay checked in with this and make sure it is all aligned. At the end of the day, this is a business.

We hope that you enjoyed this week’s episode chatting with Tayler and have learned why Making Sense of Numbers is key to your success! Don’t forget to check out our Marketing Stats Template and see how this could benefit you and your business. We encourage you to take the time to listen to Tayler and Cam chat about numbers and all things metrics — we absolutely know you will take home some knowledge that you can incorporate into your business. Thank you for joining us today, friends!

Joyfully,

Raven Scott | Podcast & Marketing Coordinator