3 KPI’s Guaranteed To Double Your Website Revenue

Sara Nay (00:00): This episode of the agency spark podcast is brought to you by monday.com, a powerful project management platform. I personally am a big user and fan of monday.com and spend most of my day working within their platform. Learn more about how to set your team up for success@ducttape.me slash Monday.

Sara Nay (00:25): Welcome to the agency spark podcast. This is your host, Sarah and I have challenged my guests to come prepared with impactful, actionable insights they can share in just about 10 minutes. So you can walk away, take action and give back to your busy day. I'm Michael Bazinsky president and CMO of buzzworthy integrated marketing and is a lifelong entrepreneur digital marketing thought leader and bestselling author dub the visionary marketer by the American marketing association. Michael's sole mission is to help entrepreneurs avoid the time drain and frustration of managing profitable digital marketing campaigns. So welcome to the show, Michael,

Michael Buzinski (01:06): Thank you Sarah, for having me. I've had my coffee and my tea this morning. So you are in for a treat.

Sara Nay (01:13): I am so excited. I'm drinking coffee as we speak. So we're on the same page so far this morning. nice. And the top, the topic I wanna dive in with you to do, and our short time together is the based on your best selling book. The rule of 26, which I understand narrows the number of KPIs, service based business owners need to focus on with their digital marketing efforts down to three. So you have my attention with that. The show is yours

Michael Buzinski (01:41): So the, yes, the first thing I always get asked for about is like why the rule of 26 and a lot of people think, oh, there's 26 steps or there's 26 things and all these other things. And it's no, it is exactly what you talk about. It's boiling down all of these confusing key performance indicators or what us pros call the KPIs in marketing. The there's HubSpot, a online marketing, uh, platform that a lot of people use. They have 38 KPIs. You can track your digital marketing with Shopify has over 70. And when I was doing my research, cuz I've been in the business for a long time. And one of the things that I've run into with digital marketing and small businesses and service based business specifically is that they don't trust that their website can make them any money. They say we're to mouth in referrals.

Michael Buzinski (02:29): That's how I built my business. And I was like, I don't know different when I started. That's where you gotta go because no, you don't just build a website. And all of a sudden, everybody finds you. There's all these other things that have to go into building that as a revenue stream. But talking to some who doesn't even believe in website marketing about KPIs, you might as well just talk to a frog about running a marathon. It's not gonna happen. Okay. All right. Why don't we look at KPIs that move the revenue needle, cuz all business owners love revenue. And if I can show you how that works, then maybe you can start believing in your website. So the rule of 26 creates a goal, which is doubling your website revenue. Now if zero, okay, I get it. But it's infinitely more, but we'll create a baseline and you can go from there.

Michael Buzinski (03:17): But if you have have some coming, then we can double that. Right? And we use these three things to do that. We increase your unique traffic by 26%, we increase your conversion rate by 26%. And then we increase the average revenue per client coming from your website by 26%. Now you go that doesn't equal double that's because it is a compounded effect. And don't ask me how it happens and don't ask me how I figured it out. I stumbled on it. Okay. But it doubles it, it doubles it . So there's a compounding effect about a hundred percent more revenue coming from your website than before. And the wonderful thing about it is each of the KPIs by themselves increases revenue buy 26%. So by the time you're two thirds of the way through you already have 52% more revenue. And that last 26% just pushes you up the other 48% more revenue. And the gorgeous thing about that is you can do it again and you'll have then quadruple the revenue. So I wanted to get that out to the world because if can show people that, and now, especially with COVID, everything's been pushed online, even face to face stuff is happening more and more online. That's why the rule of 26 is so important for service centric businesses.

Sara Nay (04:33): Yeah. We teach a lot about the customer journey. I know it's something you focus on as well, where, you know, in, in our mind, in our world it's how do you get people to know like trusts, try by repeat refer. And oftentimes, especially in like small business space, they're like, I just need more traffic. I need more people to know about me. And it's, that's one piece of marketing. , it's not the whole piece of marketing and oftentimes especially love your last metric in terms of revenue per client. Oftentimes they're not thinking about that at all. And if you've already have a, a relationship with these people, you already have trust based in with these people, like is there opportunity to expand revenue to that market versus getting in front of hundreds and hundreds of more people. So I love,

Michael Buzinski (05:10): Yeah. You, if you wanna grow yourself broke, just keep your prices the same and serve more people. That's what I tell people, I'll say. And they go, what do you mean? I says, I know from experience, I did it for 15 years. I built a multimillion dollar ad agency that grew itself broke. Yeah. And if had I got it any bigger, I would've actually gone broke. Like I had to basically put the thing down before it swallowed me. So we, our success was our downfall because we didn't focus on that revenue piece. Yeah. We didn't understand the value we brought to people and what resources it took to bring that value. And a lot of service centric businesses. Don't, it's just not taught to us. It's not in the business books. It's not in the marketing books. I very rarely do you read a book? I don't know. The last time you read a book that had, uh, let's look at your average revenue per client. I nobody's talking about that. They're talking customer service, uh, story, brand traffic generation, all these other things, but nobody's talking, are you charging enough?

Sara Nay (06:14): Yeah, that's honestly so true. I, and, and that's, especially with people, consultants getting started or agencies getting started in the small business space marketing space. That is the biggest thing where I see people struggling with in order to be able to scale and grow and even have the confidence to charge what they're worth. That's another piece of the whole story is when you're new, you're like, oh, I can only charge X amount. I'm like, but you're delivering so much more value X amount. So absolutely raise your

Michael Buzinski (06:38): Prices when we start that's, that's a tried and true fable, right? We start, we get all the business we possibly can. Cuz we gotta pay the bills. We actually work out of a mindset of scarcity versus abundance. I have a client who is a fractional CFO. Okay. And he worked as a O in multiple companies and help them scale their businesses through their finances. And when we first started talking, he was like, yeah, I think I'm gonna charge like $1,500 up front and then maybe $1,500 every month type of thing. And I'm like, okay, who are you talking to? He's like, I, I work with contractors who do 10 mil a year in revenue. It's like so hundred. You think that's enough for them to consider the impact that's gonna have on them. And he happened to have a sales coach, uh, which I loved.

Michael Buzinski (07:25): I was like, thank God you have a sales coach and a marketing coach. You know how much we can do here. And we have in the last six months, we've figured out that he can charge $50,000 for the first 90 days. Wow. Shows them how doubled their cash flow. And then after that he charges $5,000 a month to keep it going. He's sold that thing in the, in the last, he has only been pitching it for two and a half months. He's already sold three of those. He doesn't have to sell another client for the rest of the year. And he's sitting at $365,000 in revenue. He just started.

Sara Nay (08:02): Yeah. It's

Michael Buzinski (08:03): Amazing. And it all came from that today. He actually, I was on the phone with him this morning. He's I got my first lead from my website and I told him, I said, this is gonna take six, 12 months for it to organically happen. Yeah. Cause he didn't, we weren't at that point where I'm like advertising to me is gas. And if you don't of the, the, the pilot flame going right, putting gas on it is gonna do nothing, but put out the flame and waste. And so I wa I was pushing back. I'm like, no, we're not advertising yet. We gotta get the frameworks. We gotta get your customer journey figured out all the other things. And they go there. But at the same time, we're doing some SEO in the background. We only do an SEO for three months. And all of a sudden he's getting leads organically. And he's so excited. I'm like, yeah, but guess what? While we were doing that one lead, you

Speaker 4 (08:46): Just sold 365 for the stock.

Sara Nay (08:50): no, I love that example in terms of the gas and everything like that makes complete sense. I, I couldn't agree more based on everything with the customer journey. It makes so much sense, but that's a really great example. Thank you for sharing that. I wanna cuz we don't have a ton of time dive into starting with the, the no side, the traffic side of things. Any specific strategies that you recommend, if that's someone's initial problem is they first need traffic log. We just talked about, they have to have all the conversion stuff in place, but let's say you're gonna help someone with generating traffic to begin with. Do you have any recommendations on how someone can get started to ramp up

Michael Buzinski (09:24): The traffic? Yes. So website traffic is not this thing you drill for. Right? You literally have to farm it. Okay. You're either hunting or farming. You, you, you know this, when we are looking for inbound traffic, organic traffic, we're farming when we're advertising, we're hunting. Okay. In both cases, the first thing you have to do is be very clear of who you want on your website. Yeah. And the book I talk about, not all traffic is good traffic because not all business is good business. So many people just want a thousand people coming to site so they can get one sale. Yeah. Not to think that maybe that one sale is gonna suck the living life out of you. And you're gonna hate doing business with that person because you attracted the wrong person. So instead of really feeling out the tactics, which is a thousand tactics out there to get traffic, networking, getting on directories, all of those things, you can Google in two minutes.

Michael Buzinski (10:26): That's not what I would focus on. I would focus on who get the strategy down of who you want on the website so that you can talk SP specifically to them. So if you are a brand new business, you are gonna wanna look at just more hypotheticals. What would a perfect client look like? What would they be interested in? How do they value my service? Would they pay, how much would they pay for that service? What goals am I helping them achieve? Or what problem am I overcoming? Because as a service centric business, that's the only two things you're doing. You're either solving a problem or you're attaining a dream for your client. That's it. That's all you can do. There's nothing else out there. Okay. So if you start with a website talking about you, then you are the only who's gonna be. So the, the strategy of getting more traffic is less about doing the SEO and all the other things you can do.

Michael Buzinski (11:26): And more about being very specific about the traffic you want. Because once you understand that, then you go where those people hang out. So then you get into the directories. Those people are looking for your types of services or maybe you're a B2B and there are associations that your perfect client are part of. And then you can network with them there and be in their directories. All of those things happen regardless of how you are starting. Your business, gorilla marketing is like 80% of your traffic. And then from there, your conversion rate tells Google, whether you're saying the right things to the traffic, you're bringing to it only then will we be able to say, okay, this is where we need to really push the pedal on organic stuff versus the paid stuff. But until then throwing a 10,000 people at your website is just a waste of time, energy and money.

Sara Nay (12:20): Yeah. I couldn't agree more. We ordered a lot of clients. And when we first, one of the first things to do is ideal client personas, core messaging. Like that's our kind of first step in strategy. And when I get a client that comes out to me in their websites, like we've been in business for 25 years and here's all the great things we do. It's like, okay, this is gonna be easy, work on messaging. Like I know right away, what we're gonna need to do is it is shifting about your clients you serve and not just talking about how great you are

Michael Buzinski (12:44): Ultimately. Right? Exactly. And that's why it's funny because I wrote the book with traffic conversion and average revenue that in that order and when I can and sold, we actually go the opposite direction. don't ask me. That was my first book. So ,

Sara Nay (13:00): I can see that though.

Michael Buzinski (13:02): But it's the first thing that people ask is traffic. Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:04): Traffic

Michael Buzinski (13:04): And then conversions. They don't know. And if I told you, and in the book, we talk about the fact that, Hey, the gimme is the third one. It really is. You can literally increase your right now by increasing your prices or increasing your engagement by 26%.

Sara Nay (13:18): Yeah. We actually were doing a call with a group of our consultants yesterday. And the whole topic was like, how do you get quicker wins for clients when you're doing things like organic SEO and longer term place. And it was looking at their pricing and their structure. And if they're serving, like offering retainer type of packages, like that was a quick win, we identified because as you said, it's pretty instant in terms of results.

Michael Buzinski (13:38): The second one is to stop putting things on there that attract the wrong type of client on your website. Yeah. You're like, oh, where's your biggest time suck. Where are you the least profitable? Where are you the least passionate? Those are usually the same place. Take it off your website, but wait, wait. But then those people won't come. You you're opening up your bandwidth so that you can serve properly. The people you're most passionate about hash profitable.

Sara Nay (14:05): Yeah, absolutely. And on the topic of conversion, we haven't dove in. We're obviously talking about a lot of the stuff that influence conversion in terms of having your messaging. Right. And talking about the clients you serve in your website, anything else there that you wanted to add to those initial ideas?

Michael Buzinski (14:19): Sure. So you touched on it and I love what you said about the customer journey and the avatars and all the good stuff. I, one of the quick wins I get when it comes to conversion is taking that person who says, Hey, I've been in business for 30 years and this is my team and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And going, okay, let's take all the I MES and USS out of our website and start putting the you and your into it. So when you're looking at your homepage, the first thing you should be talking about is your potential client's dream or problem. Yep. Cause they don't give a crap of what you do. They want to solve their problem or attain their dream. People are selfish. Okay. And that's not a bad thing. It's just what we are. When we're shopping for a service, we're trying to solve a problem or attain a dream. Those are both selfish things and we, and that's fine. Okay. But now let's turn around and go, okay. I understand the problem. So now I know that you get me, the next thing you need to be talking about is do you have a solution or a program that will help me attain my dream?

Michael Buzinski (15:27): Then you can say, Hey, would you like to know more, more about me? And the only, only then when they click on, yeah. I wanna learn more about you. You can start talking about yourself.

Sara Nay (15:35): Yeah. I honestly couldn't agree more. John has a quote from our founder, from his recent book. That's something along the lines of no one wants what you sell. They want their problem solved. So

Michael Buzinski (15:45): Essentially exactly. They also say, there's another one, like you're talking about, there's another saying says nobody, nobody cares what you know, until they know how much you care.

Sara Nay (15:55): Yeah, absolutely. Let's Le let's end it on that. I think that's a great statement to end the show on mic drop right there. If people wanna connect with you online to learn more, where can they find?

Michael Buzinski (16:05): So you can get the book at rule of two, six.com. But if you're interested in some of the things we do for service centric businesses, check us out@buzzworthy.biz.

Sara Nay (16:15): Awesome. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. And thank you all for listening to agency spark podcast. This is your host Seren, and we'll see you next.