Riding Tandem

Vivian Kvam (00:00.706)
Hello, welcome back to another episode of Writing Tandem. I'm so glad to have you here today. I'm Vivian Kavam. I am the co-owner of Tandem Works. And I'm here just to help encourage business owners, entrepreneurs, even nonprofits who are just doing the work and really have awesome things that they're trying to accomplish but often feel so alone on an island. And that's everything that we're about here at Tandem Works and through this podcast of ours, Writing Tandem.

is how to help folks just like you not feel like you're alone. How can we come alongside you and encourage you in all of the incredible things that you're doing in the business that you are creating? And we're in the middle of a marketing mindset, excuse me, a marketing mindset shift series. That was a little bit of a mouthful. And this is episode number five of that. So I'm gonna encourage you if you're just diving in, by all means give this one a listen. It's gonna be a great one.

But do go back and listen back through episodes one through four as well. And that will help you with so many marketing mindset shifts that are helpful for your business and for your organization so that you can really start to see marketing that works for you. And that is one of the biggest things that we help people with here at TandemWorks is helping people with their businesses, with their organizations, be able to get a message out that is impactful and really drives the needle.

And that is why I love the topic of today's episode where we're talking about ditching the vanity metrics and measuring what actually matters. Because at the end of the day, all of the storytelling that you're doing and all of the marketing that you are doing and communication you're doing, it is intended to drive a result. Whether that result is revenue, launching a product, awareness, people coming to your event, selling tickets, et cetera.

Your goal with everything you're doing as an entrepreneur is to drive people to take action. So let's talk about something that might sting a little. Those shiny feel good numbers that look great on the outside, but do very little in the end for the actual health of your business and organization. I am super passionate about this one. And as you'll hear me a couple of times, I am more than happy to dive in side by side with you as you're figuring this out.

Vivian Kvam (02:19.106)
Because this is an area that many businesses and organizations can get stuck in and be just a little too close. And so it can help to have an outside perspective. All right. So let's break this down. I'm talking about vanity metrics, the follower counts, likes on social media, maybe it's story, views, real views, downloads. And we often chase these metrics because they're easy to track and they give us kind of a quick dopamine hit, if we're honest.

And they can look good on a chart or they may not look good on a chart, right? But the question really here is, are those numbers, are the things that you're actually tracking helping you make better decisions in your business? Are they giving you clues about your business that help you make decisions that have an impact? So for example, are the metrics that you're tracking, are they bringing in revenue?

Are they building client relationships? Are they giving you clear direction in these areas? And so often we find that people are tracking metrics that just feel good. And that might be because you're seeing lots of hearts or lots of likes. And one of the reasons why these metrics get tracked so much is because the platforms that you post a lot of your content on, social media as a for example, really guide you to look at these metrics.

And the reason for that is because those business models of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, even to some degree, email platforms and things like that, they really are driven by those metrics. That's what makes their algorithm tick. That's what makes them money in the end. And that's especially true on social media. And that's why we call them vanity metrics because they may not be metrics that are important to you.

They might just be more metrics that are important to say Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, know, whichever social media channel, LinkedIn. And you need to be evaluating throughout this entire episode as we're talking, is this an important metric to me or is it just important to the platform that I'm on? So today's mind shifts, I'm going to just like, I'm going end up saying a swear word here today for sure. Today's mindset shift is all about letting go of the

Vivian Kvam (04:43.362)
the surface level metrics and focusing on the ones that truly move the needle. So I'm gonna walk you through today how to figure out which metrics actually matter for your business at a high level, how to track them that you wanna use through it like a simple scorecard of some kind and why this is one of the shifts that could truly unlock clarity and growth that you didn't even know you were missing. And this is an area too where full disclosure, right?

Michaela and I, my business partner and I, this is a thing that we have been working on and perfecting over the years and we're still working on these. We still find at times on our own scorecard that there are metrics that at one point maybe were important and they're not important anymore within our business or that we're just tracking them for the feel good sake. And so we still are always evaluating and adding and dropping things off as it makes sense. And as our business changes and grows, these metrics change as well. Okay.

So the main thing here is if you're tired of feeling like you're doing all of the things, but you're not seeing results, this episode is gonna be a fabulous one for you. So let's go ahead and dig in here to the meat of this. All right, so let's talk a little bit about the lie of vanity metrics. And let's paint a picture. So a bit of a story. Like I think a lot of you can relate that you've done this. You're scrolling through, let's say Instagram, and you see someone's post went viral.

10,000 likes, hundreds of comments, and it really can look like they're crushing it. And it's easy then to compare it to your own recent posts that got maybe 37 likes. And now you're spiraling, right? You're like, gosh, my marketing isn't working. And I know we've all been there. I know we have all said these things in our heads, if not out loud. But here's the thing, that viral post that you saw,

It might not have resulted in a single sale. Meanwhile, your post that didn't air quote perform might've sparked a meaningful direct message or a conversation that led to a discovery call. So you have to be really careful about deciding which metrics are more important. Is it important to be tracking the likes and the follows or is it important to be tracking what the results of the content is?

Vivian Kvam (07:05.858)
And there's different ways to look at this and there's different stages in your business where different metrics matter the most. But this is where we often get stuck. We start believing that success looks like big numbers. But in real life, success is often much quieter. It shows up in conversations that you're having, in consistent income, in returning clients, not necessarily in the public praise of

what a vanity metric shows us. So perhaps that sounds a little bit familiar to you. Maybe you've been chasing content performance and wondering why it's not translating into clients. And it could be because we're so stuck on getting the likes, the hearts, the shares that we're not actually putting either one, we're not putting out content that people are connecting with, which drives to the result of say an inquiry or

Interestingly, you might be putting out the perfect content and it is driving the inquiries and you just don't need to worry about those other metrics at all. So maybe you've been told by experts to focus on growing your follower count, but you're not seeing a return. Maybe you're spending hours making beautiful content, but haven't sent a sales email in weeks. So this is the moment to pause and...

evaluate and consider because if you're measuring the wrong things, you're steering your business by the wrong map. And you have to be careful about that. It's so easy to get down this path and then be like, where am I? How did I end up here? So one of the things that's interesting with this, a story I have is I teach a class called the social engagement method. And we've taught it online as like an online live hybrid a couple of times, about four times with that. And then we've taught it twice.

in person and I'm starting to take that class now and break it down into just classes rather than the whole course. You can just purchase one class at a time. So I'll put a link into the show notes here for this. One of the classes is out called Scroll Stopping Images and Graphics. And the thing about the class though that I like to bring up is I had a woman once in class who said, know, Vivian, I'm really frustrated.

Vivian Kvam (09:28.822)
with my metrics, I am not getting good engagement, I am not getting the likes and shares that I want, and it's really frustrating me. And as we dove more into that, because the class is geared towards how do we create more engagement, interesting thing she said is, so Vivian, I'm frustrated, I'm not getting the likes, I'm not getting the thumbs up, the hearts, nobody's commenting on my posts. She said, all they're doing is just messaging me, they're getting into my messages.

And they're asking me a lot of questions about my business, but no one else sees that. Like that's not public. And so then my post isn't getting much traction. And I remember sitting there and I think the whole class kind of like turned and looked at her like, my gosh, right? It was a perfect example of how we can get so caught up in the public facing side of metrics when in fact her content was actually doing incredibly well.

Who wouldn't love to have somebody reach out to you and ask you about your service or your product, what it is that you're selling. And then, and she was on the pipeline then of helping those people get connected with her services. And that really, that's the result, right, that we want. That's the result that we're looking for. But she was stuck, and understandably so, no judgment here, she was stuck on the fact that, you know, when she looked at her metrics on that social platform,

The bars and graphs didn't look good. The percentages didn't look good and she felt really down and like she was doing everything wrong. And so it was just interesting to pause and go, hold up, what are we trying to accomplish here? Are we trying to drive the social media platforms algorithms or are we trying to create business for ourselves? And you are trying to create business for yourself and your posts are being highly successful in that because people are reaching out to you. So that's really the metric that matters.

And the other ones don't. Okay. So the shift here, let's talk about this next part. Tracking what actually moves the needle. Great segue there. Here's the mindset shift to think about. You want to stop letting social signals tell you how your business is doing. Just like the story I just told. Start looking at what actually leads to connection, conversion, and growth. So let me say that one more time. Stop letting social signals tell you how your business is doing.

Vivian Kvam (11:52.782)
They're just metrics. They don't know how your business is doing. Instead, look at what actually leads to connection, conversion, and growth. So let's imagine a few common situations here. So there's the content creator trap. This is one where you post every day, you get solid engagement, but you've never gotten a single client from your content. Why? Because you're measuring content performance, not

content effectiveness. It's important to remember, likes are not leads. Likes are not leads. Okay, the next example I have is the busy but broke cycle. This is one that we could get trapped in for sure. You feel like you're doing a ton. You're posting, you're engaging, you're tweaking your website.

But when you look at your actual business, there are no new leads. There's no sales. This is super frustrating. And I'm gonna raise my hand and say, like we have been there in this as well. And there are so many things to evaluate when this is what's going on to make sure that your business is on track, the offer you have is on track, the content you're creating is truly honed in. But here's the shift here when you think about. The thing to think about here is,

activity does not equal productivity. Okay? So just because you're doing a bunch of activity doesn't mean it's productive. And you need to measure again what leads to results. And when you're doing that, when you're measuring what is leading to results and what is not, it helps you make decisions about your business. It's not always, my friends,

about whether or not your blog post was great or your email was great or your social post was great. Sometimes when you're tracking your metrics and you're really tracking the ones that matter, what you start to realize is, yeah, the content actually is spot on. It's great. It's my offer that's wrong. It's the price point I'm at that's wrong. It could even just be the product itself isn't quite the right fit and I need to go back and tweak the product. need to tweak what my offering is.

Vivian Kvam (14:11.904)
And that's the beauty of tracking metrics is it helps you be able to evaluate these things rather than getting stuck in the trap of, I'm just busy, busy, busy. I'm doing a lot of activity. Activity does not equal productivity. So you need to measure what leads to results. Okay. Another great example with email lists. This is one that comes up for sure. The growing but confused email list. You're getting new subscribers.

but no one's replying, no one's buying, your open rate is dropping. So the vanity metric here would be the list size. It is good to have a good healthy size list, but I know people who have list sizes that are considered quite small, but they're doing a lot of business out of that list. So the metric that matters here in the end is open rate, reply rate, click through rate, and conversions.

Those are the most important things to be tracking. And then of course, as you want to scale, then you want to scale your list size up. Okay, so what metrics do matter, Vivian? Well, here's the thing you have to think about. Depending on your business and the stage of your business and your goals, what you want to accomplish with your business or your organization, your metrics that you are tracking,

can look completely different than the metrics that someone else is tracking. So I'm gonna give you some high level things here to be thinking about with this, and then you have to apply that to your own business and how you wanna use those. So here are a few that often tell the real story about what's going on. Leads generated. So tracking the number of leads that you're generating is a good metric to follow. It is not a vanity metric.

These are new qualified people who are entering your world. How many? And you wanna be tracking the frequency of those. Conversion rate, always a good metric. How many of those leads are actually becoming clients? That's an important one. Sales per week or per month, it might be a different cadence for you, it might be quarterly, but really at the end of the day, revenue tells the truth.

Vivian Kvam (16:32.064)
So it's always a good metric to be following. In fact, one of the metrics on our personal scorecard for Tandem Works and our Mcinvie photography business is the very top of the scorecard we put the weekly revenue in. And what that does is it helps us quickly diagnose whether we're on track or off track because the revenue doesn't lie. We can feel really busy doing a lot of things, but at the end of the day, the revenue doesn't lie. Okay.

Another really good one for tracking is client retention and referrals. Are people coming back? Are they sending others your way? Those could be good ones. Meaningful engagement can often be a good one. Direct messages, replies, actual conversations. One of the things that we track right now on our scorecard for TandemWorks and MacNV is how often we're having a conversation about our one-to-one mentoring sessions and our marketing and communication roadmaps.

So that's important if we want to be engaging people with those services that we have with those offerings, we need to make sure we're talking about them. And so that's one of the things that we're tracking right now. So even simpler, at the end of the day, you want to ask yourself, what actions tend to lead to results in my business? And that's what you want to be tracking. Okay. So how are we tracking these, right? You want to build your business scorecard. So let's talk about that next.

How do you actually track what matters without getting overwhelmed? It is easy to add too many things to your scorecard. And we have done that in the past ourselves, and then we've realized we need to pair it back and pair it back. We've made it more and more simple. So you don't need a complicated CRM or analytic software to get started. You certainly can use things like that. What you really just need at the end of day is a basic scorecard, something where you can keep a weekly snapshot that keeps you focused.

We have a really great template that we use with our clients to help them get started with that. And then we tweak it for them so that it works in a way for their business. But having any way that you can keep track of these and look at them on a weekly basis is going to be really important. Okay, so here's a basic example. You want to be thinking about, let's say that this is on your scorecard. What you wanna be thinking about is a metric.

Vivian Kvam (18:56.95)
a weekly target and an actual, right? So your metric might be new leads, your weekly target is say five and the actual is four. You had four leads. Your metric might be discovery calls, your weekly target is three, your actual is two. Your email open rate is your metric, 40 % is your target, 43 % was your actual. You could do referrals, request sent, two is your target and you had zero that week. Sales closed, your weekly target's two.

you had actual one. So it gives you an idea of a couple of ways that you could set up a scorecard. You wanna keep it simple and you wanna make sure that you're actually measuring it so that you can quickly make decisions and adjust. At the same time, one of the beauties of keeping a scorecard is that over time you will start to see patterns. So there may be seasonality within your business. There could be ups and downs based off what the economy is doing.

It can also be based off of things happening in your life. So you might look back and go, you know, I notice a dip in things when, you know, X, Y, Z is happening. I notice a rise in things when these things are happening. And that helps you be able to either one, duplicate the things when you can that are working, as well as anticipate for, there will be times where you can't control everything going on around your business.

And so you can anticipate and go, I know that we tend to have a dip when these types of things happen. And so I can plan ahead accordingly for those, which is huge. So huge for a business. Okay. So these are some of the things that you can be tracking. These are ways that you can think about it. You can customize this based on your business type, but the goal is the same. Measure what leads to growth. Measure what leads to growth. So if you're not sure what to track,

Ask, what's my main goal right now? Is it leads? Is it conversion? Is it retention? Ask yourself those questions. You'll start to figure it out. What actions create results? Hint, it's usually conversations, not Canva, that create results. What do I need to do more of to hit my goals? Thinking that through. This could be a board that you keep track of. It could be a spreadsheet. It could just be a sticky note.

Vivian Kvam (21:23.736)
The point is to focus your energy on what works and stop obsessing over what just looks good. Okay, so let's wrap this up here. We'll keep it short and sweet today. Vanity metrics might feel good, but they don't tell you what's really happening in your business. And if you're only tracking what looks good, you're probably missing what's actually working or you're missing what's not working and you're continuing to do it, which is a waste of time.

So the shift here is to start tracking what matters, leads, sales, true engagement, retention, and use a simple scorecard to stay focused on the right numbers, the right metrics. So my challenge for you out of this episode is to create your own business scorecard this week. Pick, you know, three, maybe just three, three to five tops, key metrics that reflect your goals and track them for seven days. And just watch how much clearer things start to become.

and then add another seven days and another seven days. And you will start to see how this has an impact on your decision making and even can have an impact on your mental health in a sense, right? Because you're like, I do see that this is working or, I see how that's not working. I'm gonna let that go or I'm going to double down in that area and I don't have to worry and wonder anymore. So I would love to have you let me know. One, are you starting a scorecard?

to what is it that you're tracking? What's one vanity metric you're gonna let go of and what is it you're replacing it with? I'd really love to hear how you're shifting. So you can get ahold of me through direct messages on our TandemWorks Facebook. You can join our TandemWorks Circle for Marketing group. Love to see you in there where we have discussions on things just like this with real other business owners, just like yourself.

or send me an email. You can always subscribe to our weekly email where you get a bit of encouragement from me. You know when the podcast drops and you can always hit reply. It does go back to me and I am happy to converse with you that way. So I would love that. Okay, so next week we're gonna be diving into mindset shift number six, which is gonna be a great one. So it's really gonna build perfectly on today's conversation. And again, if this episode helped bring clarity for you,

Vivian Kvam (23:46.862)
please share it with a fellow entrepreneur who's maybe stuck chasing the wrong numbers and feeling frustrated. Be sure to also leave a review, hit subscribe. That way can keep riding tandem with me on this journey. And I look forward to seeing you in the next episode and hang in there. If you're feeling stuck in this area, it can be a little complicated, but once you start practicing it and getting in the rhythm,

it becomes so much clearer and I'm just very excited for that for you. All right. We'll see you in the next episode.