Make Marketing Suck Less

Michelle Mazur: How do you know what's really working in your business? How do you know if that last launch really worked? If your Facebook ads are profitable or you're setting your money on fire? And how do you know if your email marketing is effective? You know when you look at the numbers. Oh, numbers. I know many of you are not like me. I'm a researcher. I revel in numbers. It's giving me feedback on whether or not my efforts are paying off. 

However, for you, numbers may feel like an abyss of anxiety and uncertainty. What do all these numbers mean? Am I looking at the right numbers? What do I do with these numbers now that I know them?

And this is exactly why I invited Rita Barry on the show to talk about the numbers in your business so that you can translate data into confidence (and P.S. that's her three word rebellion).

A bit about Rita: she is a measurement and marketing expert and the founder of Rita Barry & Company, a digital marketing optimization consultancy. For the past 10 years, she and her team have been helping women-led online businesses get clarity about every aspect of their marketing funnel and paid traffic campaigns.

Now, if you're about to run away from this podcast because we're talking about numbers, please don't. Rita makes data approachable and even fun. So take a deep breath in with me and out.

Let's dive in and I will see you at the end of the show.

You’re listening to the Rebel Uprising Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to helping passionate business owners become recognized leaders who make more money and impact the world by turning their messy, complicated ideas into thriving thought leadership businesses.

I’m your host, Dr. Michelle Mazur, and I’ll be your no-BS guide in the art of building a business that gets noticed. Each week, I share strategies, tools, and insights into how to turn your complicated ideas into great messaging and solid business structures. Are you ready to create an uprising in your industry? Let’s do this.

MM: Welcome, Rita, to the Rebel Rising Podcast. I'm so happy to have you on the show. 

Rita Barry: I'm so excited to be here. It's going to be an awesome chat. 

MM: Yes. Yes, it will. So why don't you tell everyone a little bit about you and your business to kick it off. 

RB: Awesome. My name is Rita Barry. I am the owner of Rita Barry & Co. And I guess the easiest way to explain what I do is that all that marketing stuff that online businesses do, as far as to get attention around emails and social media and webinars and basically every kind of marketing thing that you do online, I help businesses measure the effectiveness of that. And then once we know how effective their online marketing is, then we often support them with Facebook ads as well.

MM: One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because 3 Word Rebellion, marketing, that's all my jam. And we often don't know what is working. It's just this huge black box and I think we're scared to find out. So with that, why don't you tell us what you're rebelling against? 

RB: Oh, for sure. And it's true. This is absolutely the guessing piece. The biggest thing that I noticed in working with people originally in web design, and this has evolved over time to really specialize in these two areas, is that you would see that there was so much of the proverbial “throwing spaghetti at the wall.”

There was trying everything that you saw everybody else doing, if there was someone in your space that was doing marketing thing X, and you're like, "Oh, that must be what I need to do too.” And so all of these business owners were trying all of these random tactics and just guessing and guessing and guessing.

We didn't have the tools. There were so many different reasons why. It was coming from the best intentions, but they didn't have the know-how, the tools, the technical implementation skills, all of that, to be able to really look at what they were doing objectively with data and decide what is it that I should be doing? What isn't working? What is working? What should I stop? What should I do more of? Because those are the answers to being able to scale your marketing because when you know what's working, you can broadcast that bigger and louder.

That's the same as having your Three Word Rebellion dialed in is that when you know what's working, what's resonating with people, that's the message you can take to the masses. When you're still fiddling with all of these things, and you don't really know where to put all your eggs in which basket, you don't get any traction because there's no focus.

MM: The throwing the spaghetti against the wall is always such a problem because then you're just spinning your wheels and you're never getting anywhere.

RB: Right. That's the best way to put it. But most clients have the problem when they come to us, is they're like, "I am literally spinning my wheels. I've been doing the same kind of marketing thing for the last year.” Or they feel like nothing's working, or something that used to be working isn't working now. And they've got all of these problems, and they know that if they just had the data. They know the piece they need, they just don't know how to go out and get that. And that's really where we come in and help them out.

MM: So what do you think holds them back from  getting the data? Because that seems like such a simple thing -- just get the data, get your numbers.

RB: Oh, so many things. We have some clients that say, "If you show me a spreadsheet, I'll cry.” We get that sometimes. Some people, they don't even know where to start. They're so busy and they'll open up Google Analytics because they think that's the first place they should go and look to find all these answers, and then they realize they have no idea how to read that.

I really don't think that people really feel like they have a great starting point and a lot of clarity around how to do it. And then they'll look at their email marketing platform, and then their Facebook ads, and then their Google Analytics. And everybody's showing them a different number for what looks like should be the same number.

And then everyone gets confused (because that is confusing, let's not pretend it's otherwise). Then how are you supposed to make decisions when number A is a hundred, number B is five and they're like, “This doesn't even make any sense.” So then often people just give up because they don't have the mental capacity. These folks that are our particular clients, they're usually running quite successful businesses already. And they don't have time to be wading through all of that stuff to figure it all out. 

MM: I often think sometimes they don't even know what numbers to be looking at. It's like, “My Instagram following's growing…”

RB: You're like, "That's awesome." And that's so often why we get called in is because people are like, "I have a hundred thousand on Instagram," or, "I have X amount on Facebook," or, "I have this big of an email list," but those are just the surface numbers.

The numbers that we look for and we dig for that ultimately are what we present at the end of the service, are all actionable metrics. And that's usually the separation that people have is that they're looking at numbers that inherently don't have an action built into them. It's like an Instagram of a hundred followers or a thousand or whatever, what is the action inherent to knowing that number? Is it to make it bigger? That's not really very clear.

But when we're looking at, say, a different number, like a cost per acquisition with a Facebook ad, if a client has a CPA of $250 and that's how much it costs to acquire that customer, and they can spend $500 to acquire that customer, that's a very clear indication that the action we would then take is to spend more money because they're all within their margins, they can scale that campaign. So there's certain numbers that have that action built in, you can do something with them. And those are the most ones to pay attention to.

And it's that understanding that's not in any online marketing course that any of us take. People just talk about art of the marketing and doing the copy and all this stuff and the images and how you brand yourself, and nobody talks about how do you build a marketing funnel and how do you measure its effectiveness? So when you launch that new messaging, how do you know if it's working? Because that's the whole point that's always been the part missing from the conversation in the greater online marketing space.

MM: Yes, because I'm sure we've probably already scared some people with this conversation.

RB: Probably.

MM: Well, and I think that's the problem. Because if you're going to be a serious business owner who is making money and who knows what is working, what is not working, what stops working, is that you've got to know some of these numbers, or you've got to be able to hire someone who knows these numbers.

RB: True, because it's not in some people's best interest to spend a lot of time getting good at this, quite frankly. It's just really not. And then if a newer business owner, because I know a lot of people can get scared and put off by it. But when you're looking at a number and you're like, is this number important? It's literally as simple as saying, “Can I take action on this number?” Conversion rates are an excellent place to start because you can take action on those. If something's converting at X, you can affect that by doing different copy, different image, testing, all of those things. And it's really starting small.

If you have, for example, a direct response funnel in your business, or you have a landing page for a lead magnet that goes to a thank you page and maybe there's an offer of some sort, maybe for sign up for a call or sign up for a small product or your large product, what have you, those sorts of funnels, whether you want to call them funnels or not, I know some people will get turned off by that word, but basically, those pages in your business exist.

Those are a great place to start with measuring how well is that page working at turning people into leads? Because you can once again affect that by changing the pages and testing different things. How many people are signing up for a free call to get on a discovery call with you? You can test that as well. Those are the kind of metrics you want to be looking at.

And the stuff like likes, I would say those are the things that you worry about later, when you have the luxury of time to worry about padding all of those stats that are really the vanity ones, because you can make a very successful, profitable, amazing business and have zero vanity metrics around like that, that look fancy at other people. But if you really dial in your actual, important, real, juicy metrics in your marketing, you can be doing wildly successful things, and nobody's even going to know about it because it's like a whole lot quieter.

MM: Yes. And I think that's a really important point is that, yeah, if you're paying attention to, "Oh, I'm trying out this new call to action or this new..." I talk about this with my clients when we're looking at their Three Word Rebellion and the different hooks I want them to try in their marketing and they're like, “How do I know if it's working?” I'm like, “You need to be keeping track of the number of discovery calls you're getting.”

RB: Exactly. And it doesn't have to be more complicated than that. And you get so much information from, if you have four hooks and you're testing them and whether you're doing them organically on social or you're doing them through email, paid ads, whatever it is that you're doing, you're going to see different people responding to different things. You're going to see which hooks are bringing in the most motivated people.

And all that information is so important to collect because we often ignore it and then start doing things again that didn't work or repeating stuff, or we're almost stopping stuff that's working. I've seen that happen quite a bit too, where people get distracted by a new, shiny marketing thing. And they forget that there was this really successful thing that was happening in their business with a funnel or a certain product, or whatever. But it's just that they didn't focus on it. And there was nobody that was pointing to it on the team because there was nobody there going,"Oh, why did we stop doing that?”

And that happens more than anyone would like to admit, but we see it all the time because when we go back and measure things, we're like, "This was working really well. Is there a reason that this stopped?” because often there's a very legitimate reason.  And then oftentimes, though, it's the other side of that, “Oh yeah, that was working. No, we just started doing this other thing.” Then it's like, “Oh, then how about we try this again and see what's going on with that?”

Because we don't always need to invent stuff. Because human psychology, and the marketing, and the work that you're doing, and the work that I help people do, it's all the same. We just make decisions in a certain way as humans, and that's all that marketing is doing, is helping us make those decisions. So humans haven't evolved that much. We don't need to be terribly creative if we don't have the basics down of how to talk to our audience, what are the messages they're resonating with, what do they want to hear from us? We start getting way too fancy before we have the basics handled. Usually the vast majority of the time, that's usually a lot of folks' struggles.

MM: Oh my gosh. And I know you and I've talked about this, is that we skip the whole messaging part and we go, “We want the fancy funnel!” And it's “No, you're not quite ready for that yet.” 

RB: You're like, “Where's my evergreen webinar that's timing down?” and all these sorts of things. And they don't even know what to say yet. 

MM: You don't know what to say in the webinar.

RB: But I have all the software and I'm spending three hundred dollars a month to support all of it. Exactly. It gets pretty crazy, but yeah, people often skip that beginning, foundational messaging work, and in my work, that's something that we see come up time and time again, is that the products are great, the offers are really, really strong, but that front end, how you talk to people that don't know about you yet, that awareness, problem, pain, awareness stage of marketing, people don't know how to handle that because often it's totally missing or they don't spend the time to really get to know their clients because client research and all that stuff, it's just not the sexy marketing topics.

The second you say, "Have you done customer research?" And people are like, "No, why am I doing empathy maps and all these things?” Because that's where the gold is. Because when your messages resonate with people, we see all the metrics improve. You can have a really clunky marketing system, but if your message is resonating with people, you can't help but sell products.

And that's what we see with so many clients when they know their people so well, that they accidentally message really well. Maybe they're not marketing people, but they know their people often because they are their people. They all of a sudden have these nine, ten percent conversion rates on sales pages. Which obviously is not the internet norm of the one to two percent. And it's not that they're unicorns, it's just that they know who they're talking to and they know the words to use and the phrasing and then the rest of it, even though it hasn't been QA’d by some kind of MBA, they're still doing so well, and they have conversion rates and margins that a lot of people would be jealous of, but it's just because they did the front end work. However they came to it, they still did it, and so much of it. It solves for some of the other problems down the road.

MM: Oh my gosh. Yes. So what change do you want to create in this world?

RB: Oh, all the things, Michelle. All the things. Can we change everything?

MM Yes! 

RB: Let's just change it all. The biggest thing for me is, I only work with female entrepreneurs and that's really helping women that traditionally haven't been as market math and data-driven, as some of the more traditional buttoned-up businesses before the internet business boom. That, for me, has just been such an incredible gift to be able to go into a business and help a female business owner feel empowered and confident in the decisions they're making based on their data.

Because oftentimes, just like I said, they were their people, they did these businesses on purpose accidentally. They had no idea. They weren't trying to build these multimillion dollar companies. And something happened along the way. And then they got to where they were and now they feel like they're guessing, but they're also guessing with a team of ten people depending on them, and they don't feel good about that.

And traditionally, my role in analytics has usually been a male role. I’m still pretty much a unicorn as far as digital analytics in the marketing space. There's not nearly as many women that do this. And I remember one of the first clients that actually said when we were talking to her, she said “I am tired of trying to hire for this and being talked down to by a teenager living in his mom's basement. I have a multimillion dollar company. I know what I'm doing. I just don't know how to set this stuff up."

And so to be able to come in as that thought partner and someone who also had been in businesses for 11 years, to help them feel confident and empowered and like they know all the information they need to know, it's amazing to see how they take that information and then explode their businesses with it because it really is so much the key. No matter what marketing tactic you're using, you'll always need the data.

MM: Yes. Tell everyone what your Three Word Rebellion is.

RB: Oh, yeah. We haven't even talked about that. So my three word rebellion is translating data into confidence. So that's really infused into everything that we do, whether it's the Facebook ads or actually the data data. It's really helping people feel empowered about the decisions that they're making based on real numbers and not the guesses and hunches that rule so much of the online marketing space these days.

MM: And that's what I love. I think you're right. Especially with women business owners, it's that story that we tell ourselves like, “Oh, I'm not that good at math. I'm not good with numbers. I'm not good with math. So it's too complex.” And the fact is that the story is in the data, we just have to have the confidence to interpret it. 

RB: Exactly. And to be able to sit with a client, and we've built a dashboard, and they're looking at a funnel and the fact I actually know what I'm supposed to do. I know whether this is working or not. For them to be able to say that back to me or to send me a Slack message going, “Oh, I noticed an issue with conversion rates on this funnel,” it is the biggest moment of joy.

Because just think of all the power that gives you. You can monitor your outside vendors if you have people doing funnel builds for you, or you have copywriters doing things or ads managers, all of that stuff. If you had the data so that you weren't sitting there waiting for somebody to serve you a report, you're going in there and saying, "You know what? This number is not where it needs to be. I know what it needs to be and I can see what it is right now. This is what we need to have fixed.” It opens up everything because even though you don't need to micromanage everybody, obviously, it still gives you such transparency into your business.

It's really transformative to see the difference between a before client and an after client in how they talk about their business and how they talk about their marketing. That's just the coolest thing.

MM: Yeah. Because for all of the things we talk about, being a business badass, being able to make those kinds of decisions, like, "Oh, look. This is working really well and we should spend more money here because it's going to make us more money." That's what makes you a business badass.

RB: Totally. And you can look at it, and instead of feeling like, “Oh my gosh, should we spend something on Facebook ads?” I had this conversation with a client in the middle of January where she has an evergreen funnel that people can purchase any time and it's working really, really well. And she's like, “Okay, so what do we do now? Do we add more of this? Do you add more of this?” I'm like, “No, we spend more. This is what we do.” Because she was so used to trying all these different things all the time and adding campaigns and tweaking things.

I'm like, ‘There's no tweaking. There's testing, obviously.” Because there's always this level of that, especially with ads and things are always changing, but when you need to make a certain amount per sale and you're spending less than that, when all the numbers are working, that's how you scale Facebook ads or whatever marketing it is you're doing. 

And it was so neat, where she could just look at the numbers and she'd be like, "Totally, let's double it then." And then in the confidence that came with that instead of, “Am I going to be losing all my money? I don't know,” because she knew her numbers were solid. And it was so cool.

And also as the vendor on the other side, with Facebook ads, especially when you're getting paid on a percentage of ad spend, the clarity it gives me (because basically the more I spend, the more I make -- icky situation -- personally, I've never loved the feeling of that), but when you can show people how much more money they're making, and how well the numbers are working, and how the forecast, and the optimizations, and the scale is going to work for them, it's wild. And then they also trust you so much more because you've got this data and you can speak data to them and they understand it too. And then it's not just them blindly trusting somebody like before the printing press where all of the religious leaders were just passing this stuff down because no one could read. It's just making sure we're all reading from the same book and then it just makes it all so much easier.

MM: Yes. Speaking the same language. I love it, being a former researcher.

So if everyone acted on this change you want to create -- translating data into confidence -- what do you think the business world would be like?

RB: I think the online business world would probably sell a lot less courses because people wouldn't need to constantly be chasing stuff all the time. To be able to see people just doing what works and really dialing in more into what their customers are telling them, both directly and indirectly, honestly, I think we'd see so much less noise because there's so much of that big broadcasting that's going out, that isn't working very well. And since people aren't able to measure it right now, they don't realize that. So you can just be more artful with your communication. So I think we'd be hearing a lot more really wonderful deep marketing messages because that's what people would be putting out there because that's usually what works.

MM: I would love to hear more wonderful and deep marketing messages.

RB: I would too! Because when you hear them, like when you hear something and it’s resonating with you, and you're like, “That is just an artfully done piece of content” or whatever it is, you're like, “Love that.” Basically a lot less stuff, but have it be a lot better quality. So definitely less but better. 

MM: And if you think about it, in the last question and really the implication of that is, don't you think it would also cut down on all of the noise that is out there?

RB: It would be beautiful, then it would just set a wonderful example because so much of it, what is happening now, is a lot of “me too” stuff, where everyone's like, "Oh, so-and-so is doing it. So I will too.” And then if everybody took the time to see what works and then acted on it, they would see that these really deep, thoughtful messages that resonate with customers are really what make the sale happen. It would just be amazing. Because then we would all "me too" that, instead of the other noise that happens.

MM: Yes. And that would mean we'd have a whole lot less Marie Forleo clones or James Wedmore clones.

RB: There's a factory somewhere, I'm sure, that's shooting them all out. 

MM: Well, their programs, but...

RB: That's true. Good point, Michelle.

MM: Well, no offense to the people who do those programs. We all start somewhere, but then we have to go our own way and innovate if we're going to create something that's meaningful and deep and all our own.

RB: Completely. And that's also just the whole point of when my business opened up and just began to work beyond my wildest imagination, when I stopped trying to be like everybody else, just to own that level of how my brain likes to work and where I like to hang out in the world and to have really long, in-depth, year-long relationships, years long with clients, that's not in anybody's playbook called “this is how you grow an agency and be super profitable,” but that's so much of who I am, and meshed into my business, and that's really when the messaging resonates so much with people too, is when you infuse yourself with your customer and find that sweet spot, is when everything starts working so much better and you can't find that in cookie cutter blueprints and programs. It's impossible because so much of it is who you are and who your customers are. And that just really requires a lot of attention and self-awareness. 

MM: Yes. And a lot of tweaking and experimenting and finding out what works.

RB: So much testing. So much testing.

MM: So much testing and figuring it out.

Well, Rita, tell everyone where they can find you online. 

RB: I'm easy to find because I'm really only in one place. And that is on my website and that is ritabarry.co. And yeah, I don't hang out a ton on social media. I'm a consumer more than a poster, but the website is definitely the best place to find out about me and the work we do, if all of this geeky stuff sounds in any way interesting. 

MM: Thank you so much, Rita, for being on the Rebel Rising Podcast and geeking out with me about data. 

RB: Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

MM: How did you do with all the numbers talk, my rebel friend? Did it surprise you how much we talked about how important it is to do the foundational messaging work before starting ads or building the big fancy funnel? 

Here are a few questions that I want you to ponder and think about so that you can start translating data into confidence for your own business. 

The first question: Where in your business are you paying attention to vanity metrics? Like how many likes a post got? How many followers you have? And if you stopped paying attention to vanity metrics, what data, what numbers, should you be paying attention to instead?

Question two: Where don't you feel comfortable or confident looking at data? And where in your business do you feel confident and comfortable with looking at the numbers? It might surprise you to find that there are some places where numbers are not a big deal for you. Find those places so that you can apply it to other parts of your business so you can start looking at your numbers.

Finally, when you start looking at your numbers, you can finally figure out what's working and what's not, so you can double down on what will make your business grow.

And before we go, if you've already invested in a funnel that didn't 10x your income like the expert promised or marketing programs that didn't pay off, they didn't actually grow your revenue -- one thing I know for sure, that if you want to grow your revenue and other marketing strategies didn't work, you don't need more marketing. You need a message that resonates with your audience, and I'd love to help you craft that message. The Three Word Rebellion, your client journeys, your signature stories, and your very own visibility action plan in the Three Word Rebellion Messaging Intensive. 

Right now I only have four one-on-one spots remaining to work with me in 2020. So if you're interested in getting the message right so that you can translate data into confidence, the first step is to go grab the Three Word Rebellion Service and Pricing Guide at  drmichellemazur.com/guide. Then you can make your business and message work for you in 2021.

Thank you for listening all the way to the end of the show. Your support means the world to me. Did you know the Rebel Rising Podcast has a quiz that can help you pinpoint the number one way to build an audience of superfans while staying true to your unique personality? We do! And it’s called What’s Your Rebel Roadmap to Exponential Impact and Influence and you can take it at therebelquiz.com.

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Until next week, remember, your ideas matter. And now get back out there and cause an uprising in your industry.

You got this!