In this guest appearance on Mike Dillard’s Self Made Man podcast, AJ and Meaghan talk about how to rapidly scale your business using data and dashboards.
They cover everything from the data maturity spectrum to metrics mapping, tracking, UTMs, and how to combine these things for rapid growth in your business.
Check out the full episode below along with our summary of key takeaways.
How did Praxis get started?
Prior to starting Praxis, AJ and Meaghan created a data-driven digital marketing agency. They quickly found though that reporting on their marketing efforts was taking more time that actually implementing their strategies. Because of this, they began researching automated solutions to the reporting problem. Once they finally created a solution, they found that more people needed that solution than needed marketing help.
They decided to pivot and become an outsourced data agency, and Praxis Metrics was born.
Initially they courted enterprise-level clients because those clients were they only ones seeking out “big data” at the time. However, as time passed, they realized that they gained more satisfaction from helping SMBs achieve their potential through data. So they began to provide the same powerful insights and dashboards that they had built for the enterprise clients to smaller businesses.
What are the biggest takeaways from working with such a diverse group of clients?
SMB business owners need the same questions answered as the enterprise companies. While they may look at them through different lenses and different granularity, the questions remain the same.
The number one question that every client asks is, “how much can I spend to acquire my customers?”. Generally, the next questions asked are: “how much are those customers worth over time?” and “where and what do they purchase from me?”.
These questions all stem from the same desire: understanding your core customers, and how to best serve them.
It all boils down to what is and isn’t working in your business right now.
What are some of the biggest differences in SMBs and enterprise companies?
Enterprise companies recognize how much data they have, and the value of that data. SMBs often downplay the amount and value of the data that they already have.
Most SMBs don’t realize that even just having timestamps of when your customers purchase provides valuable insights to the business. This lets you know the times when your purchasers will be most receptive to your messages and most likely to purchase your products.
What difficulties do businesses face with their data?
Trusting your data is the key to gaining good insights. If you don’t trust your data, then the prettiest dashboard in the world will not help you.
You need to have the confidence to take action from your data; otherwise it’s like having gasoline but no car. You won’t get anywhere with that.
We’ve seen a multitude of dashboard companies that sell businesses on the visuals of their dashboards alone, but without fixing the underlying data issues, they end up providing very little value to their customers.
Time constraints
Many SMBs say that they simply don’t have the time to get their data in order; but we preach the opposite. The best time to set up your tracking and make sure that you gather clean, accurate data is before you have too much of it. As your organization scales and grows, the amount of clean-up required in order to get your data in order scales as well. If you make a concerted effort in the beginning to get clean, accurate data that you can trust, your business will scale faster. And when the time comes to transition into dashboards and advanced analytics, your data will be ready and actionable, saving you valuable time and money.
Every business has the time to sit down and set up standard operating procedures (SOPs) for their business. Setting down SOPs is especially important when it comes to UTMs. If you can lay down the groundwork early on for standardized tracking, you can gain amazing insights on how to communicate effectively with your clients.
UTMs will tell you what types of content your customers like to engage with, it will tell you the specific mediums that they like to engage with your business on, and it will help you eliminate the issue of over-attribution in your tracking. If you want to learn more about over-attribution, and how that affects businesses, visit Praxis Metrics – How to win the attribution war to read more.
How do we lay the foundation for the future?
Even if you don’t have the time to analyze the data yet, it’s imperative that you begin tracking your customers and their behavior. You can’t retroactively gather data from your customers. When it gets to the point that you want to begin retargeting campaigns, or analyzing your customer behaviors, if you didn’t set up your tracking you won’t have any information to go off.
When they begin advertising, many businesses start with a shotgun approach. They distribute their spend equally across the most popular platforms without knowing which one will drive the best results for their business. If you track your customer behaviors over time, they will show you where they like to engage with you. You can know whether you get the highest traffic from Facebook or Instagram or Linkedin.
What are some of the data success stories that Praxis has seen?
Danette May-
Danette May wanted to see the true lifetime value of their customers to see if they could scale a funnel. They knew that the funnel converted well with retargeting, but they had a hard time getting the same response from cold traffic. They had an idea of the LTV of their customers, but they wanted to verify.
We found that their customers actually had a much higher LTV than they thought. This allowed them to increase their allowable cost per acquisition (CPA) by $5. This change caused them to take an initial loss on the first product sold, but they also knew that within 30 days, these clients would return and spend much more on other products.
This change drove them from 15 sales per day on this product to more than 350 sales per day in less than two weeks. Within a month, they were selling more than 600 units per day.
If you’d like to learn more about Danette May’s journey and how this information helped them transform their business, we have an entire case study on them here.
Fancy Sprinkles-
We built a social media dashboard for Fancy Sprinkles that allowed them to drill down to see what kinds of posts received the most engagements over time. By tagging all of their posts with series of metadata: I.E. indoor vs outdoor shot, colors used, theme, etc.
Because of this metadata, they found that during Halloween the top performing posts contained purple or green, were shot outdoors, and had close-ups of the products. Naturally, this ran completely counter to everyone’s instincts, but it allowed them to provide their audience with content that they actually wanted to engage with. Because they had this data, they outpaced their competitors in engagement and attention.
What are some of the data failure stories that Praxis has seen?
We’ve had clients who utilized free shipping discounts in order to better compete with Amazon. These clients assumed that this would inspire higher customer loyalty, and create repeat customers. Unfortunately, when we cleaned and examined their data, we found that this wasn’t the case at all.
This assumption was costing them dearly over time, preventing them from properly scaling, and could have driven them out of business if it had gone on for too long.
The key to success is listening to your data.
The most viewed person on Facebook was a magician who simply did magic tricks in front of his webcam in a coffee shop. He managed to scale his brand and following by tracking the videos that performed best and then replicating the factors in those posts over time.
Data doesn’t have to include machine learning, or advanced AI algorithms. A simple excel sheet that analyzes data points can drive more success than multi-million dollar solutions.
If you don’t analyze your data to see what works and what doesn’t; your competitors will analyze that data, and eventually overtake you because of your failure to capitalize. Data has the power to topple huge organizations like Barnes and Nobles or Blockbuster, and the pace of change is only accelerating.
Who does Praxis work with, and how can they prepare?
We have historically worked with enterprise companies; so we can work with larger organizations, but our passion is working with SMBs and helping them rapidly scale their businesses.
We have brought the “big data” insights to the SMB market by finding the common threads between every implementation that we have done for these enterprise companies. By finding the common questions that everyone has, we have built out plug-and-play dashboards that can help answer those questions. Because these dashboards require very little ramp-up or custom coding, we can offer them for a much lower price than normal, and roll them out much faster.
These dashboards answer some of the fundamental business questions that every business needs to know: what is the LTV of my customers, how are my subscription services trending over time, what products drive the most revenue and value, etc. We extract this data from multiple sources, ensuring that you get the most accurate and valuable data.
Our pricing ranges from $500-$1500 per month for platform costs, and then we just charge hourly for any work to build out the dashboards and connect to data sources.
Preparation-
We meet our clients wherever they are on the data maturity spectrum. A lot of our clients come to us and they need help getting their tracking in order before they move onto dashboards. We offer services to help with that. No matter what your data needs are, we can help you get from where you currently are to where you want to be.
If you need help diagnosing your data needs, we offer free, personalized data roadmaps to clarify the next steps for your business.
