Conversion rates. Analytics. Measuring growth. Lifetime value. There are so many business buzzwords that get thrown around that can feel really intimidating to the average creative business owner.
However, knowing this information is super crucial to your profits, your growth and the decisions you make every single day in your business.
Keeping track of your business’ numbers allows you to make strategic decisions instead of just saying, “Well, I feel like this is going well, so I’m going to keep doing it” or “I feel like this new thing could really help, so I’m going to try it.”
Honestly? We’d rather make business decisions rooted in facts and data instead of basing everything soley of feelings. We love us a good “gut instinct” and we like to back it up with cold hard facts.
Knowing how much weight a product or service is pulling for you or if it’s time to let it go, the rate of growth across all of your channels, and your overall progress is so important in order to plan and set goals realistically in your business, both short and long term.
So how do you find this information (or sexy math as we like to call it)? Where do you begin?
It all starts with your analytics.
Google processes over 40,000 searches every second, which is 3.5 billion searches a day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.
My guess is that you can’t go very long without asking Google for an answer. Well guess what, neither can your clients. They are searching for your business right now, but the real question is, can they find you?
If you have ever tried to search for your business by what you do, e.g. wedding photographer or what you want to be known for, e.g. natural light wedding photographer Boston, Massachusetts, and have been disappointed as to where your business ranks on the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP), then you are probably in the market to hire an SEO consultant.
SEO consultants research and analyze the trends and best practices online to develop a strategy to improve search engine rankings.
Hiring new consultants, contractors, and team members is a big step in your business, but once you’re ready to take it your workload decreases and your business is able to improve in multiple ways, leaving you to work on your strengths and be the bad-ass lady boss you are (instead of the boss, chief bottle-washer and Jill-of-all-trades).
A blog editor may not have made the top of the list when you dreamed about bringing someone on to help you. But…
You only have twenty-six small letters and a handful of dots and dashes to wow, inspire, share, create, and convince. Surely you want to combine these in the best way possible?
Need to prioritize building your email list as a small business, but struggling to pin down which platform to start with? During the last ten years, I’ve been with four different email marketing software companies, and Flodesk by far the longest. If I had to start over and choose again, I’d STILL pick Flodesk.