Sarah: Hello everyone! We’ve got a question for you. Do you know exactly how much new business your marketing dollars are getting you? Keep watching because we’re going to show you DASH (Marketing Dashboard), which is your answer to your marketing return on investment. Hi Glyna!

Glyna: Hello! How are you? Well, welcome everybody to Marketing Mix. Every week we will have a different segment and we’re going to highlight all kinds of digital marketing topics. We’re going to mix it up with some tips, trends, Q&A, and once in a while we’re going to give ourselves a shameless plug and talk about our products and services.

Sarah: And that would be one of those days today, because we want to share with you all, a very unique product that we’re really proud of. And it’s truly how customers can know exactly what they’re paying for when they hire us, so how valuable is that? Before we get started though, I want to let you know where you can find us. We do have to mention another plug about our new podcast Marketing and a Mic. It’s available, gosh, all over. And as always, you can find us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and we do our lives, which live broadcast on Facebook and YouTube so, let’s get started!

Glyna: Okay. Today we are talking about ROI, Sarah, and some people may go, “What the heck is ROI?” Most business owners probably know that it’s “return on investment” but it kills me, this is the thing, it just never ceases to amaze me. I would say it’s close to 90 to 95% of all business owners I meet with to talk about their marketing, they have no idea what they’re getting out of their marketing dollars. I mean, they’re paying this huge amount of money every month, and when I ask them, “How many phone calls did it get you?” Or “How much business did I get you?” They have no idea. So, they’re always, they will show me some big, broad schemed report that shows clicks. Everybody wants to show me clicks and everybody wants to show me visits to your website, which are very important, but I don’t know Sarah. The last time I checked, you can’t take clicks to the bank.

Sarah: You can’t take clicks to the bank. I guess what they’re showing you is visits, *like the visits they’re getting to their business online, but that’s not really telling you how many new customers you’re getting or how much new business you’re getting, which that is what matters. That’s the bottom line, right?

Glyna: That is the bottom line. I mean, unless someone is picking up their phone and actually calling you and giving you an opportunity to sell them what you have, your product or service, then no, you can’t measure how much business you’re getting out of it just by looking at clicks and visits. Now it’s not a bad thing. It’s a good thing to have that but that alone doesn’t tell you how much business you’re getting.

Sarah: No. So I that’s what I feel like is one of the many, many valuable things about DASH (Marketing Dashboard), which we’re about to jump into, is that we’re looking to bring you more calls and more business. That’s like, HELLO! Hello! That’s what you want!

Glyna: I love that. And that’s turned into our tagline since we’ve had DASH (Marketing Dashboard), but yeah, I love that graphic. It’s like I think everybody wants more business. Everybody I ask, “What are you needing? What do you want?” They don’t tell me, “I need more clicks.” They usually tell me, “I need more money. I mean, we’re a business.”

Sarah: Right. I need more people in the door. Yeah, absolutely. So we’re going to launch right into DASH and this is one tool. I mean, it really will tell you how much real business that you’re getting with all of your marketing. And gosh, I mean to me, it’s the perfect way to get a visual of real numbers all in one place and it just helps you know what efforts are working so you’re just not wasting your money.

Glyna: Absolutely. And especially these days where most of us don’t have a lot of money to just be throwing around for no return. So let me get this pulled up here for you and hopefully you’ll be able to see it. Alright. Let’s take our names out. Perfect. Alright. This is DASH and it was a long time coming and we put it together step by step. But this is something that I believe sets us apart and puts, I’ll just say it, it puts our rear end on the line every month to our customers, but also shows them what they’re paying for.

Sarah: Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay. What are we looking at here?

Glyna: Yeah. We’ll go step by step through this. This is a Marketing DASHboard that holds analytics for your business. This is how we measure what we are doing and what we are producing for our customers every month. We pride ourselves and people think we’re crazy because we don’t have people sign contracts, but this is our contract. We come to you every month and show you how many actual phone calls we’re bringing your business. In other words, how much actual money we’re bringing into your business every month. So this is a DASHboard. What we did is we put something together just for demo purposes but I want to reiterate, these are live customers. These are real customers of ours. Dead Bugs is not one of our customers, so we did change the names of some of these pest control companies. What we do, let me back up a little bit. What’s really, really good and profitable, are us working with home service industries. Had to spit that out. Had to think of that. HVAC companies, pest control companies, plumbers, anybody that comes to your home to fix something, pest control is gold for us and it’s gold for the pest control companies that we’re working for. So what we did is we took three different pest control companies that are customers of ours, and we put their live info on this DASHboard so that’s what we’re looking at.

Sarah: So, I see call statistics at the top. So essentially you said that you’ve changed the name, but these are real customers and real numbers.

Glyna: Yes.

Sarah: What does that mean when we look at call statistics and real numbers?

Glyna: Yeah. That’s a great question. Real numbers to me mean we are bringing you real phone calls of people that are searching for what you do, so that would translate into new business. Obviously we can’t sell it for you, but if you’re seeing and you know for sure that we are bringing you these X amount of calls a month, then you can definitely figure out real quick if you’re getting your money’s worth or not.

Sarah: I have to jump in for a second here because I noticed that this, the date range of this was April, which correct me if I’m wrong but was that not right smack dab in the middle of this Coronavirus? So, I guess me just looking at this, that means that we’re 753 answered calls that came in in the month of April during Coronavirus. That’s unbelievable to me!

Glyna: Yes. And it’s divided among these three different customers and I’ll show you the different customers. We wanted to give you an idea of different populations, different areas, how this can work for you no matter what area you’re in, but you’re right. In the thick of it, of the Coronavirus, April was it. And again, another shameless plug is that we were still able to deliver business to our customers during all of that mess. So yes, to answer your question, this was reviewing the last month of April. All right.

Sarah: Well, that’s great.

Glyna: Yeah. It is amazing. So if you’re a company with us and you have several locations and we’ll get into that in just a second, what you end up seeing, and again, this is available to you if you’re a customer 24/7. You can look at this at any time, but what you start out seeing at the top here are all of the call stats for all of your locations. So in this instance we show answered calls, how many calls were busy that didn’t get answered, unique callers, and then the average duration. We love looking at this huge number here, the 753 and that’s awesome but the big number we really want to concentrate on our unique callers. “Unique” means those are first-time callers. So that would indicate that they’ve never called you before, so that to us would indicate that that’s new business.

Sarah: Yeah. Okay. So I see average duration on the side. How would that be useful to know?

Glyna: Yeah. If you have callers that aren’t taking time to talk to you or you see that average duration is 10 seconds, I would say that you probably weren’t able to schedule an appointment in that amount of time. So anything over one minute is usually you can count on that to be a pretty good phone call and you were able to take time to get a service call scheduled. So the next thing it’s just a graph really repeating or breaking down all of the call stats here by day. And as you hover over them, it shows you for Monday we had 163 calls, Tuesday and so forth. So it shows you what days and how many calls came in on each day.

Sarah: Wow. That’s good too, it tells you what your peak days are.

Glyna: It does and it helps you in a lot of businesses. They could say, “If Monday’s busier, maybe we need more people answering phone calls on Monday.” So it lets them gear their staff depending on how many phone calls come in. So that’s what you would see when you first log in. Now, if you only have one location or you have many locations, I’m going to break this down and show you three different scenarios of real customers that we have. And again, this was during the munch, month of … Munch. The munch or month. I guess I’m hungry for lunch. The month April. So the first one here, again, this is a real customer of ours. Again, it’s not Dead Bugs, it’s a different pest control company, but this is someone we’re working with that is in the Birmingham Metro area. The population that we’re covering or marketing to is over 200,000 people. So again, if you have more people to market to, you’re probably going to have more results for people to be calling you. So just in this instance, total calls for this customer. And again, this is a real, in 30 days Sarah, we brought them 488 phone calls.

Sarah: Golly.

Glyna: Yeah. 458 were answered, so that means we do have some work…Some of them went to voicemail, some of them were unanswered, so we have a little bit of work to do there but look at this unique number. 382 of these calls were unique, first-time callers.

Sarah: Boy, that’s impressive! That’s really impressive.

Glyna: It is.

Sarah: How were you able to track the calls? I’m curious about that.

Glyna: That’s a good question. What we’re able to do is we have a call tracking system, where we’re able to pull a call tracking number and put it on everywhere, all over the Internet for our customers. So that means if someone calls into that number, we know it came from our efforts, because the only place you’re going to find that tracking number is on the Internet. And that’s what we’re doing for that customer’s increasing their presence on the Internet and making sure people can find them when they search.

Sarah:

Okay. Perfect. And I noticed there with the voicemails I was thinking would that, I mean, that could help in a way to know, hey, my staff that I’m hiring is not answering the phone.

Glyna: Yes. You’re exactly right. In fact, a lot of companies use this for training. Training purposes for their staff, for the receptionist. You can actually go into the call tracking system and look at every single day and what happened on every single day. This is just a broad overview but yeah, you might say, we prefer, if we’re a service company, I don’t know. What would you do? If I see a mouse running across the floor and I call somebody and I get a voicemail, I think I’m just going to go down to the next person.

Sarah: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You need help now.

Glyna: And then the unanswered calls, I mean, that to me is unforgivable. You should have a backup or something. So again, it helps us help our customers in other ways than just bringing them phone calls. We help them be more organized and just streamline what they’re doing.

Sarah: Yeah. Absolutely.

Glyna: So average duration on these. I mean, this was huge. Four minutes. Over four minutes is ridiculous. So you know for sure that these phone calls were people wanting something or they were asking questions.

Sarah: Yeah. Absolutely. So can you do more than one location? Is that possible in DASHboard?

Glyna: You sure can. Take for instance, and I can go down through here. We’re going to go just through two more examples but we have, most of our customers start off with one location. And then once we get them profitable and we start making money, the first question they ask us is, “How can I do more? How can I get more calls?” So then we can put them in other locations and we can put, I mean, we can put as many locations on here, all in one place for them to look at their metrics and yeah, they can have it at their fingertips.

Sarah: How invaluable is that?

Glyna: I was going to say and I think you even coined the phrase, something about 30. Did you say, “30 days in 30 seconds” or something?

Sarah: Oh yeah. 30 days of stats in 30 seconds.

Glyna: You literally can have it at your fingertips. I mean, if you are in charge of marketing or you are in charge of reporting these numbers and answering to your boss about, “What are we getting for what we’re paying?” You can have this at your fingertips and take it into your meeting Monday morning and be able to show them. So, obviously Birmingham’s a large city, and so you’re going to have more opportunities there, but this, our SEO product in DASH is for all size communities. For instance, here’s a different company that we have in North Alabama. Again, we just named it Dead Bugs but this is an actual company. And this is amazing. For the size of this area, which is only about 140,000 in population, we delivered them 240 calls. And then we were able to say, “187 of those were unique.” And then average duration again, well over what we would expect to find with a real customer calling in.

Sarah: Gosh. I mean this is so telling. They were able to just stay busy during such an unusual time.

Glyna: Yes, and not lay people off. And like I said, our home service industries did not miss a beat at all and we’re really proud of that, and being able to keep them moving through the Coronavirus. And here’s a really small area. So this is South Alabama and I’ll tell you, this as a pretty new customer. Obviously it takes a little bit of time for us to get going, but this is a pretty new customer and we still brought them 56 calls and 41 of those were unique. I mean, I don’t know any business who wouldn’t like to have 40 new calls.

Sarah: No. Absolutely not.

Glyna: And so again, it was almost a minute, so that just tells you that people are calling in. So I could go on and on and on about these call trends. I geek out over it but at the same time, it’s exciting to me to be able to show our customers this. And usually they know because they’re the ones answering the phone. We don’t really have to tell them this but it just assures them again, that they’re getting the best bang for their buck.

Sarah: Well, and it’s so great because you had mentioned earlier, this is so valuable for a customer and a business and then for us as well, because it’s putting our work out there. Like you said earlier, “It’s putting our butt on the line.” So this is, these are numbers that we are trying to produce for them. So I mean, it’s for both that benefits, very much so.

Glyna: You’re exactly right. And again, I think shameless plug number three or four. I’m not sure what I’m up to.

Sarah: We don’t have to count!

Glyna: I’m sorry. You’re right. We have to brag on ourselves because I don’t know many if any, other marketing companies that are able to show this, or if they’re not offering contracts, they are showing proof and bringing real business, real stuff to their customers. And this DASH is a powerful product. Normally if somebody sees DASH, it sells itself. So it’s a great product. Now calls, that’s the bottom line, Sarah, pretty much. We have to have phone calls coming in, otherwise, we’re not getting new business but we do like to measure website stats. We do want to see visitors coming to the website because the way we design our websites is that we always have contact forms and different ways that you can contact the customer or the potential person that you’re buying something from, so website stats are very important. They’re just not indicative of measuring how many phone calls and how many opportunities you had but we do have some great stats on here. We do report user sessions and page views.

Sarah: So, what’s the difference in all that? So there’s user sessions, page. And then I see too in that pie chart that it’s new users versus returning users. What’s that?

Glyna: I love this chart. I love this chart. I tell my customers, I’m like, “You always want to see blue. We want to see blue.” Normally you want to see green, but you always think of that as muddy. But in our world, our DASHboard we want to see blue. Blue is new users. That’s going to tell you that those are new people that have never come to your website before, so they were bound and determined to have found you on the Internet.

Sarah: So you’re saying in the month of March, and I know we’ve put those three pest control companies together but we’re looking at 1,812 users and of that, 1,713 were brand new?

Glyna: Yes.

Sarah: That’s awesome.

Glyna: Yes. So that, I mean, that’s really great. And actually I should have said, these website stats, I believe these website stats went with the second customer that we showed from North Alabama. So this is traffic that midsize range business could expect. And yes, users and page views. Oh my gosh. We had 1,800 users but they stuck around. They went and looked around the website. That tells you that you have good content and they like what they see. So there’s so much that we can read into these analytics. And like I said, I can geek out about, and we really want to get them down deep into them.

Sarah: Oh but I mean numbers, they are so telling. Right? I mean, at the end of the day when you look at the numbers, it tells you what’s going on with your business. Geek out away, Glyna.

Glyna: So let’s move on over. Another thing that we can show them is where we have them plastered all over the Internet. Basically any place they can be, people can find them on the Internet. And so this is really awesome. Again, backs up that what we’re doing is producing for the customer and what they’re paying for. So direct and organic search is telling us people found them on the Internet. Someplace, somewhere they found them on the Internet and they came to the website. Social media, I’ll give a shout out to you and the girls in the social media team. Bringing 89 people to the website from what you guys do, for one customer in one month, amazing. I mean, look at the jump. I mean, this is crazy.

Sarah: That is awesome.

Glyna: Previous period, 584%. We must have hit some viral posts in that and then referrals a weird thing. I think it’s weird, but I can explain a little bit. If you’ve ever been on the web and you are looking at some website and then it comes up in the search, you may like this website or you may like this information and you go to it, that’s called referral. You were referred by another site. So just breaking it all down.

Sarah: I have a question and yeah, I should correct myself that this was one customer down here, so that’s even more incredible. But so if you’re talking about website users and going onto the website, I mean, is there, can you be someone that would just go to the website 50 times and does that count in the numbers or are they able to differentiate that?

Glyna: Yes. I’m glad you asked that because the users and sessions, that’s how you measure that. If you went to the website 50 times, it measured you once. So it can tell if you’re revisiting from your computer or phone. So the users would be the first, the unique calls. They’re in unique visitors. And then the sessions, if you came back 50 times, that would be in the sessions. So, that’s a great question. And then we can even, I mean, this was cool, I think. And it depends on what business it is, whether we see more mobile or more cell phone usage versus desktop, and you could even tell what device it came from. And this is really important to us because we need to make sure that we have their website optimized the best we can. So to make sure it’s a great user experience, whether you’re on desktop or mobile or tablet, which is not as big of a number.

Sarah: Right. Okay. That’s really cool!

Glyna: And then-

Sarah: This goes to show that people are looking just, yeah, the numbers are very close, desktop to mobile. I mean, you’d think just mobile, but truly this isn’t the case.

Glyna: And it depends on what type of industry we’re talking about. Again, this is a pest control industry, but again, we have to remember this was during the Coronavirus. So I think a lot of people may have been sitting with their laptops, that kind of thing. That’s counted in the desktop area, so they may have been sitting at home, but that’s a pretty strong number for mobile as well.

Sarah: They better remain at home if they’re going to follow the guidelines.

Glyna: Yes. They should have been. They should have been looking for our customers. Yes. And then I really love this next thing is that users by city and again, this is to the website. So, we can actually tell where the person was sitting, what IP address they used, and what area they came from.

Sarah: Okay. So telling the users by the city and breaking it down, how could that be beneficial to a business owner?

Glyna: Well we use it in several different ways. Number one, we want to make sure that if we are optimizing or they’re paying us to show up in the Hoover area, then we want to make sure that that’s what’s showing up and that that is mirroring what they’re paying for or what we’re doing for them. The second thing that it can do is we can take a look at this and say, “What area am I not showing up all that much?” So anyway, you can look and see in this instance, Cullman, we might want to do more in Cullman and allow them to have business in that area or we can expand them into that area.

Sarah:

So how could they expand an area? Let’s say though, “Hey, I want more business in Cullman.” I mean, would they have to actually … How could they service that area?

Glyna: That’s a great question. A lot of people think when we say, “Let’s open up another location for you,” they think we have to have a brick and mortar building and they have to go actually build a building. That’s not the case. We actually can make you look virtually in that area. Not going to give away all our secrets, but it can make people, it can appear to people online when they’re searching that you are in a different area. And that way we’re able to optimize that area and get you more business and therefore presented on DASH so that you can keep track of how well it’s doing.

Sarah: Okay. Wow. So, if I was a company and I wanted this, is it something that I’d have to have existing services with Fusion One or how is it offered?

Glyna: Well, what’s really cool about it, is that you don’t have to be a customer of ours. If you, let’s say you’re doing some sort of marketing let’s say on the radio or on TV or anything, if you want to measure your marketing and we’re able to put a tracking number on that marketing like the radio, you could just give them the number that we give you, and we would know anyone that called that number came from the radio. Same with TV, same with billboard. I mean, we’ve even put tracking numbers on business cards before, where a company has several different salespeople and each person had a tracking number. So they were able to see how much business each salesperson brought in or how many calls each salesperson brought in.

Sarah: Oh wow. How helpful is that? So you can see who’s out there actually working.

Glyna: Yes. Slacking.

Sarah: Slacking off. Oh gosh.

Glyna: Yeah. So anything that we can track, we can bring into DASH. It can be brought in. So you don’t have to have our services. We could start there. Or if you want to sign up with us to do something, I mean we can do that for you as well.

Sarah: I was just going to say, so if they have existing service or if they want to sign up for other services, do we include this?

Glyna: Yeah. Most people think, I mean, we could charge a lot of money for this, but if you’re going to trust us with your marketing and your SEO and social media, this is something that you will get. Well, let me back that up. If you have the SEO package that includes SEO, social media, all of that kind of thing, it’s included. We don’t charge extra for it, as long as they have that reoccurring service with this.

Sarah: Okay. Wow. That’s-

Glyna: I know. It’s so awesome. I love it.

Sarah: That’s so awesome. My gosh. I mean, every business needs this. I mean, truly everybody, if you really want to get a pulse on where your marketing dollars are going, you need a tool like this that just can, it’s so helpful. I mean, just to see how everything is performing. It saves time. It saves money. I mean, my goodness.

Glyna: It’s been a game-changer for us because you used to, all we could measure were the clicks to the website and how many calls came through just Google. Well, we put you in over 300 different properties all over the Internet. We want to be able to measure all of that and know that we’re bringing you what you deserve.

Sarah: Yeah. Truly. So I mean, the way I see it is if you want a better ROI, start tracking now with DASH.

Glyna: Yes. Because what do we bring, Sarah?

Sarah: More calls. I get it one more time, more calls, more business. Hello. Hello guys. That’s what matters.

Glyna: That’s exactly right. So we’re very proud of DASH (Marketing Dashboard) and I love telling everybody about it but I’ll also, I would love to give somebody a demo. And I can show them particular customers who’ve allowed us to advertise them or give us a reference. I can show them that but anyway, I would love to give a demo. And I think that’s about all I had. Were there any more questions that you had?

Sarah: No. I mean, I got you. I think that we really, we covered it. So don’t forget to catch us every single week. We do a brand new Marketing Mix. And on Friday we have our Biz Talk’s starting at 8:00 AM with an awesome guest, Robyn Gayheart from Hammer & Stain. We cannot wait. It’s going to be so much fun. So tune in on Friday guys, and thank you so much for joining us.

Glyna: Thank you. Bye!

Sarah: Bye!