#10 - Market Share Is War: KPI's Are Your Ammunition

In this high-impact episode of Over The Bull, Ken breaks down how top-performing businesses use KPIs not just to measure progress—but to win territory. Inspired by a New York-based private equity group acquiring multiple companies, we explore how strategic awareness campaigns paired with smart conversion tracking become the ultimate arsenal in the fight for market dominance. If you’re only measuring phone calls, you’re fighting half the battle.

Over The Bull is brought to you by IntegrisDesign.com. All rights reserved.

Transcript

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you're listening to over the bowl where we cut through marketing noise here's your host ken carroll

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we're talking about kpis on this episode of over the ball Welcome back. Thank you so much for listening. And I do appreciate each and every one of you tuning in. And hopefully the podcast is helping you out, giving you some additional thought as you process how your business is going to grow in the landscape. Now, among growth is something called KPIs. Now, KPIs is an acronym thrown around a bit, but oftentimes we find that some people don't fully understand KPI or the way in which they can be used. So what exactly is a KPI? KPIs, the acronym stands for Key Performance Indicator. And so basically what you're doing is you're setting up what you need to track or what you should track in order to understand how effective your marketing campaigns are in the world. So if you're looking at the wrong signals or KPIs, then it's pretty useless. If you're looking at them properly and within context, they can be very valuable. If you have the wrong expectations for KPIs, they can be very frustrating. If you understand the short and the long game with the KPI or KPIs, then it can be very beneficial to you. One thing it's not, it's not a weapon to use against your guy because certain KPIs aren't reached in a certain way. Again, our best clients are the ones who listen, we educate, understand their business, they understand our business, and what we do is work together to develop KPIs, understand, and then modify those KPIs over a period of time. Now, why I thought about bringing up KPIs today is because one of our more recent clients we're working with, it's a group out of state. And what they're doing is acquiring companies. And each one of the companies have a unique proposition in the world. So what I mean by that is some of these companies are recognized in their area. They're actively selling product. And so the KPIs that are needed for that company are one set of variables. While if we look at another company that has very little recognition and not a lot of people know that company even exists, then there's another series of KPIs that we need to look at as well. So KPIs are complicated, and it also culminates with a lot of factors that we know about people. For example, we do know that the average person needs to see a brand around six to ten times in order to trust the brand and then begin working with that brand. Now, there are factors that go into that equation as well. But you should put that benchmark in your pocket and understand that, especially if you have a young business or a new business or you're trying to gain market share from maybe competitors, then you need to understand that part of your game plan is to actually broadcast your brand, your messaging out there and get redundancy where people get to see you over and over again. And by seeing you, then they begin to trust you. And if you also look at, you know, the way people work, we're all pretty much hardwired the same way. You know, we hire a company that we work with or want to work with. Like, for example, if I hire an electrician or a plumber or whatever, and then I need them again, they did a good job. Typically, I'll call them back. And so to expect that somehow I'm going to disrupt the easy flow and predictability of a past experience by simply showing up in a keyword search on Google is really not realistic in today's world because it's a busy world. And if we have something that we already like, even if it costs a little bit more. So, yeah. In working with this company and seeing the KPIs, because that was kind of what happened, the ball was kind of lobbed over the net, and they were asking about how to set certain KPIs based on the industry and based on different variables. And I started looking at the companies, and I realized that some of the KPIs that I think that they may be trying to target were not appropriate for that company. particular business or a certain set of their businesses. Now, in your world, if you're a small business, you still have the same problem, but they're more in a microcosm rather than being each business has a different set of issues. Every business, they have issues of branding, visibility, gaining trust and recognition, but also, you know, keeping the lights turned on by making sales. So both those things are critical. It doesn't matter the scope. Now, this is a business that, again, they're going through acquisitions of numerous companies and everything. So both Their situation may be a little bit different from yours, but in practical application, it's really close to what you're doing. It's just not on the same scope. So it's really relevant. So don't tune out just because you're hearing they're acquiring different companies and you think they have a lot of money and you think all these other things. All businesses struggle with the same thing. It's just on a different level. So you can really pick up a lot from this conversation regardless of how new or old your business is. So let's talk about KPIs a little bit more. One of the things that is really interesting about KPIs, I don't hear a lot from people, are things, two definitions basically, leading and lagging indicators in KPI. So leading indicators would be basically forecasting, while lagging uses historical data. that obviously would give a little more foundational. And of course, circumstances change, but looking at historical data, a lot of times is a lot better than trying to forecast and using leading indicators. But the idea is that you want to get a baseline of what could happen under different situations. And then the more historic data you have, the lagging indicators that you can add into the equation as time progresses are going to solidify those numbers. And then what you're able to do, rather than having as wild of a guess as far as how certain things are going to perform, you're going to be able to use historic data plus other data to build those KPIs in both a leading and lagging way to where it's going to make a lot more sense and a lot more accurate readability to your business. So let's talk about some KPIs that we typically use in business. So some of those traditional KPIs obviously are conversions and revenue and how it drives immediate decisions to a business. In a perfect world, if we were automatons and a lot of factors didn't go into play, ranging from how easy it is to, you know, past experiences to just being there, you know, at the point when someone wants to buy something and magically swooping in and capturing that business, Although... That's what we all want. That's not how the real world works. And that's why a lot of times when you look at Google's data, when you run Google Ads, for example, they'll tell you that typically across the industry, you can look for a conversion rate around 4% to 5%. So 4% to 5% of a conversion rate, it gives you an idea of how important it is to kind of think through your KPIs for both brand recognition and at the same time, direct sales to keep the lights turned on. So awareness is just as important as direct conversions. And the reason being is, think of a snowball effect. So if you start off and you're trying to get direct sales, but you're also trying to gain awareness for people who are using your competitors or maybe you're a new business and you're just trying to let people know that you exist, then And part of this building trust and gaining more momentum is creating awareness campaigns that start to instill trust and gain that brand recognition in the service area that you're trying to serve. And of course, the longer or the bigger the service area, the more budget you're going to need in order to saturate that market. So you want to have both. Now, look, if McDonald's is doing brand recognition campaigns, that should show you that this is a never ending story. You want to constantly be in front of people. You want to constantly give fresh messages and you want to start to gain that brand recognition for that long term visibility so that it gains more traction. The snowball effect continues. And then those seeds that you plant in what we call an awareness campaign. Basically, again, just letting people know that you exist, gain that momentum, and then that'll equal more sales as you do gain that momentum. So as you could imagine, if we go back to this leading and lagging indicator terminology, you can imagine that as you gain more momentum and more recognition, then the more that you're going to convert long-term is going to dramatically alter Any of those forecasts that were initially there, especially if you don't have a lot of really good historic data, not just historic data, but good historic data. And so this is why, you know, one of the biggest things that people are after today, large companies is data because data is king in your business. A lack of data is going to hurt you. Obviously, more data is going to help you. So if we look at those KPIs, what you really want to do is you want to look at your business and you want to say, okay, how much of it do I want to base on awareness, you know, brand impression, social media engagement, build this foundation for future growth. And then how much of the budget is going to go into direct sales. And then what you start to formulate that equation. Now for you to formulate that equation might be difficult. And again, If you go to the wrong person, they're going to lean too heavily on, say, conversion KPIs because they know that's what you're really after and they'll play to that. And then they'll make you think that if you do this thing, then you're going to equal more sales and then put a little bit of voodoo or magic into it to try to get you to sign on the dotted line. When in reality, the idea you should take very kind of like very low-end expectations. Like I said, the 4% to 5%. We typically do a lot better, but there's different industries, and different industries have different conversion rates and performances. But what you want to definitely be able to do is be able to build this– predictable model based on very modest expectations, and then kind of have some forecasting that goes into it, which would be your, uh, your leading, uh, KPIs. And then you want to then again, go back to lagging KPIs the more you learn, but you should never take any kind of forecasting as though it's going to happen this way. There are just simply so many factors that go into what converts and what doesn't that, uh, without good historic data, you know, it is just a lot looser. There's no easier way to say that. So large companies, typically like private equity groups or people that are used to this arena, they understand that leading KPIs and forecasts and things like that, there's typically a much larger tolerance between what could happen versus what may be actually the worst case scenario with it where you've got a lot more of a learning curve behind it. And they understand that. So if you're a young business or a small business, understand that any kind of forecasting or expectations are strictly just that. They're just those expectations that are put down, and the gamesmanship could be in those expectations, again, to help you sign on the dotted line, but it's not an indicator of what truly is going to happen. No one has the magic crystal ball, in other words. So this company is really interesting because... What they have on one side, imagine one company that's already producing a significant amount of sales on an annual basis, and they have a pretty good footprint. Then imagine there's another company that is not recognized at all in the community or has very little recognition, and what they're trying to do is get this other company just on the landscape, just where basically people know that they exist. So let me give a little more meat to this conversation. What this company is, is they're in waste management. And so part of what they do are renting out containers for people to do cleanups and people in businesses and things like that. And then the other one is they also own transfer stations, you know, where you go drop stuff off that you no longer want. And so you can imagine it's dramatically different because the container rental is something that people could purchase directly. But there's also a lot of competitors who already have a lot of brand recognition and that trust of customers. If you go to the transfer station, that's something that kind of fits into the osmosis of the region. Meaning that, hey, I need to go drop off a couch. Where do I go? Oh, there's a transfer station down on Main Street or wherever it's at. And so you could imagine that in the first situation, you can have direct sales because they already have momentum. But then you can also see the benefit of doing awareness campaigns that will be there at strategic points. And then you could also see how that the transfer station campaign would be completely different. It's one of those where it just has to get into the psyche of the people where it just kind of rattles off the tongue. Hey, use these people. And then also having a very concise message in that branding as to why that other location may be better. Maybe it's pricing. Maybe it's convenience. Maybe you're not waiting in line for 17 hours to drop off. So as you can imagine, if we're trying to forecast how many people are going to go through a transfer station by running a campaign, the metrics would not really fit that puzzle right now. Right now, what we're trying to do is gain that brand recognition, and by doing that, the KPIs that we're going to target in that situation are going to be more about how much the brand and awareness is saturating the market, which means there is a lot there about making the brand look better, making it more appealing, and making those call to actions more strategic in expectation that as we do that and saturate the market, it's going to increase exposure. which will increase traffic, which will increase use, which will increase the size of the business. While if we jump back to the dumpster rental guys, our containers and all that junk that they do, Then what you're going to do is you're going to see that we got to do the direct sales to keep the business moving in its current trajectory. But we need to gain momentum and we also need to gain more visibility and then take market share away from competitors. And that's done through long term awareness campaigns and cultivating that with direct sales campaigns. And so you can see that the KPIs there are significantly different just within two companies. Now, if I were to flip this script, let's take tourism, for example. And let's say that people travel to a location, but they don't go to that location year in and year out. They're just simply going somewhere unique. And that particular destination doesn't have a lot of repeat visitors, but it has a lot of traffic. Now, if you look at something like that, you could imagine that awareness campaigns on the same scale as a transfer station would not be as feasible because the long-term acquisition of new customers is not practical. Basically, you really want to go heavy conversions, heavy clicks, heavy visibility from the moment that that person begins looking for that information. destination tour or whatever they're looking for. And then you want to really look at your KPIs more, less on awareness necessarily, and more on actual conversions, clicks, and those traditional metrics that you do bookings, phone calls, you know, those just typical kind of things. So as you can see, if you don't have the right person working with you, you could be chasing KPIs that are kind of meaningless or worse, you could think you're doing really good. And in reality, you may be doing good, but you could do a lot better if you cultivated that with an awareness campaign to further gain momentum. And then keep in mind, your competitors, if they're good, they're thinking about these things. Luckily, not a lot of businesses are really good about this stuff, so they don't think about it. But the ones that do think about it, they're also looking to do the exact same thing to you. And so there is this kind of constant battle and constant adjustment, which is why you always want to update your offerings, look at market trends, and keep your hand on the pulse of what's going on in the business with your competitors to make sure that they don't overtake you or start cannibalizing your customers. So how do you kind of digest this for your business and properly put everything together in a way that's going to make a model that makes sense for you? For me, when I work with especially new young businesses, the challenge for me is, is getting the owner in the right mindset because this, this, um, myth of the internet that somehow you just drop money into it and then it's going to magically increase your business magically make competitors go away magically do all these things is is unrealistic and so the idea is to understand especially if you're a young company that your goal obviously you do want to sell but part of this is an investment to get your brand into the community to where people see, recognize, and then begin to trust you. And then you do get exposed to them on a 6, 10, 12, 20, constantly in front of your target audience. And so once you get your mindset right, the next thing is to understand your target audience. It doesn't matter if you're doing KPIs of awareness if you're targeting the wrong audience. And you'll be amazed at the number of companies that we speak with, agencies and everything, that are in the same market as us, but we basically are paid to qualify those agencies. And what you'll find... is that they know very little about audiences and trying to segment out those audiences. And so they kind of blanket an environment without fully quantifying it. So, for example, if you primarily serve homeowners and they blanket your services to renters and other situations, then it's going to be less effective to that audience. And now you're blanketing. Sure, you're doing that. And there are arguments that one day renters become homeowners and dot, dot, dot. Yeah, that's true. But if you're a young business and you're trying to hyper focus on the most viable customers, your audience would want to target, say, for example, homeowners. So the next thing you really need to do is understand your audience. And if your answer is, well, we can serve anyone. then you're barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, anybody could do anything. Sure, why not? But who's more likely to use your services in your area? And that's typically based upon your position in the market. You know, are you trusted? Would you be better serving an older community because they don't want to have certain styles of people in their home? Would it be better to serve the younger community? You know, would it be better to serve people that... or dog lovers or whatever, you want to understand your target audience to the end. And if you've got some historical data about customers, if you've got a sales department or you got whatever, then you can kind of do the same thing with these lagging KPIs by kind of looking retroactively into whatever you can get. Like, for example, one thing we do is we typically ask for historic data and we break it down according to zip codes. And then if we can cross-reference that with with the average cell per zip code, we can kind of see which zip codes are more viable than others. So that's a very high level, one thing you could look at as well. So once you understand that and you understand your target audience, the next thing that you're going to want to do is you're going to want to understand that both, you're going to need both the KPIs that we're all after, you know, conversions, phone calls, booking, things like that. But then also, we need an awareness campaign as well. And again, You know, in between that, there's where I would put probably something like emails and things like that. So you want to be able to balance the two and you want to understand that your awareness campaign where you're going to look at is my traffic increasing? Am I gaining more visibility on social media? You know, those kind of things. If I'm seeing those things beginning to trend in the right direction and I see that that's going in the right direction, then I can then Then I can start to assess whether or not the awareness campaign is effective. And basically, I know that those seeds one day are going to equal crops, which will equal food, i.e. equal real customers in the long term. And then you'll also begin to start to take a little bit of market share away from competitors. If they drop the ball or if something happens or they become busy and then the door opens up for you, then that gives you an opportunity to take that market share from competitors as well. But that's not something that's just going to happen magically overnight. Someone's not going to drop somebody just to drop somebody because they saw a good ad. Now, if your offer is really competitive, you may compel someone to take you up on your offer if it's a throwaway item. But again, those numbers, convenience and trusting someone else, That also goes a long way, and all that ties back into demographics. So you see why you've got to kind of really process everything that goes into that decision-making tree. Now, if you've not had this conversation with your Google Ads guy, your marketing people, and this has not come to where they're asking these questions and you're collaborating on this, then you need to sit back and you need to ask them, well, what are you doing and how are you making these determinations? What are these indicators? And don't let them just throw some indicators at you and tell you how many impressions that you got or something like that, and then kind of get away with that. Because that's really not how this game is played. So once that's done, then you've got to think about a realistic budget. So every campaign has to have its own budget. Uh, what I mean by that is your awareness campaign is one budget. And then your, uh, your, uh, Your traditional KPI campaign will have another budget. Awareness campaigns. So a little footnote on awareness campaigns versus the other style of campaign, your traditional, is an awareness campaign typically is what we call higher funnel, meaning that if you go to integrisdesign.com, we have some little layouts. And what those layouts do is they show you exactly the buying cycle of a person. So let me deviate on the buying cycle here for one second, and then I'll come full circle. So in the buying cycle, what you have is people, typically they start off by identifying that there is an issue. Traditionally, what I use in the example is a new movie comes out and you see the trailer for the new movie. Okay, you've recognized the problem. You're at the top of the buying cycle. At the bottom of it is going to the theater and seeing a movie. So in between that is, well, what theater? What are the offerings of the theater? What times and availabilities are there? Are my family, are the people that are going to attend, what is their availability? And then there's a booking. And then you also have all the noise of how people traditionally buy movie tickets anyway. And so what they're used to or accustomed to, those apps and all those things. So all that kind of goes into the buying cycle process. So at the top, you recognize there's a problem. And at the bottom, there's a purchase. Everybody wants to be at the bottom of the funnel. Well, in awareness campaigns, typically they're more higher to mid funnel, meaning that you're trying to hit people a lot with messaging up there. And those messages in awareness campaigns are a lot more cost effective, i.e. they're cheaper to broadcast. And the lower funnel is the one where conversions happen. So if you can imagine your traditional KPI should be more lower end of the funnel, and then your awareness should be higher end of the funnel. And basically, the bigger the area... that you're trying to blanket. Like, for example, if we're doing Asheville, North Carolina, we would have one budget. If we were doing Buncombe County, it would be a bigger budget. If we did Buncombe and Henderson County, it'd be a bigger budget. And if we did North Carolina, obviously a bigger budget. And so to understand exactly what you're trying to market and who you're trying to market to can make your budget where it's more predictable. And With all that, so once you get all that down, once you've communicated everything, you understand your geographic outreach, and again, yeah, you might be able to reach that person in three counties over if you're a small business. But remember, what you're trying to do, especially if you're new to the game or you've not had really detailed help, is your goal right now is to hedge your bet and your money in the places where people are more likely to use you that is best for your business. Yeah, I can drive three counties away if I'm an electrician, but look at my travel time. Look at the gas. Look at all these other things. So maybe I want to stay closer to home. I really don't need that business that's that far out. And so by concentrating more within the area, then you can saturate that market more with your awareness message, and you can also do your traditional KPIs. And then what you can do is start to gain momentum a lot quicker by doing that. Now, there's a lot of subtleties. There are tons of subtleties in this conversation. For example, if it's Google Ads, well, what keywords are you going to target? Uh, then, you know, if you're doing your awareness is, well, what message do we want to have? Uh, what colors do we want to use? What imagery do we want to use? Which imagery works the best? And then if you even look on meta, you'll see that there are indicators, which, which are really neat. Some of them are like, uh, ad fatigue indicators. And what that does is it says, you know, basically are people tired of seeing your ad and do you need to freshen that up? And so there's a what we do in building these campaigns is we try to get our clients to give us updated offers or updated information or updated something where we can freshen those awareness-style campaigns, social media posts, et cetera, to fresh offers. Now, in closing, let's talk about the email, where that kind of fits into this. So email marketing could be one of your most powerful assets. So what I mean by that is if you can set it up. Now, don't do sign up for our newsletter. Please don't use that. No one wants to sign up for a newsletter. That's like saying, well, you signed me up for a bunch of junk to show up in my mailbox every day. You want to make a compelling offer with email marketing if you're going to do it. But let's evaluate the power of email marketing, if it's done correctly, and if you're patient and willing to massage it. So if you take it, and let's say, for example, you're running a Google Ads campaign, and let's say that you are converting at 3.5%, 4% with your market. Now, the remaining, if you give them a very easy opt-in offer, they may sign up for your email. Now, if they sign up for your email, then what you can do is now you've captured a larger segment of that market who's visiting your website that normally you would miss altogether. So you captured it. Then what you could do is you could set a series of emails to go to that person. Now, you want to plan it and do all those things. But the idea is that now they see your brand in their email box. It doesn't matter if they open it. They see your brand. in the subject. You've just achieved one touch. You've just achieved one more step to gaining trust with that person. And then you send out additional emails. Well, if you send special offers, if you send things that are of interest to that target audience, you're cultivating those people to use your business in the future. And there's very low overhead when you do something like that. And so to set up email marketing, to show up in someone's you know, email box and then to get those offers repeatedly to have those additional touch points to gain email addresses, which is, which is, tough to do today. When you gain those email addresses legitimately and then they want to get your offering and then you give them something compelling without overwhelming them or frustrating them, then what you've done is you've achieved something very substantial when you do that. So don't underestimate the power of email marketing, but Also, you've got to think about what's really compelling and what's practical for people that you're trying to serve in your area. And then once you've achieved that, then that's that other leg. And to me, some people probably put that more into awareness style campaigns. I put it more probably in between awareness and traditional KPIs, gaining those email addresses and then the ability to be able to email them over a period of time. And so you can imagine that, you know, maybe you didn't gain their trust now, but if you show up in a way that's effective for them and you do garner that trust. Again, it's like planting the seeds and then waiting for the crops to come out of the ground. And so you just want to be able to do that and you want to stick to it. And so the stick-to-it-ness is kind of tough because we all get kind of tired of chasing things. So hopefully this helps you out with KPIs and gives a little bit of clarity to KPIs and gives you an indicator on if your current group is is providing you with solid marketing or if they're just kind of just doing, you know, traditional KPI funnel marketing and not really playing chess, but they're more playing checkers with your money, which is definitely not the way to go. So thanks so much for listening to Over the Bull. I really appreciate it. We have been overwhelmed with business at Integrus. And so at Integrus Design, you know, You visit the website. You're going to see that currently we're not accepting clients until at least mid-June 2025. And it's just because we've just been really busy this year. But I'll keep the podcast going. You guys can take this information. You can use it. If you are interested in working with us, feel free to drop us a line. We do have a waiting list on the website. And feel free to put your name and information in it. And as availability becomes available, for lack of a better word, we'd be happy to talk to you about your business and what you're up to. But again, you know, for the– at least through June 15th of 2025, it would be more of– you know, that availability just wouldn't be there. So, uh, thank you so much for everything that you do. We really appreciate you tuning in. We hope this helps you and your business and you growing your business. Uh, you know, business is tough guys and KPIs is one of those things. That's the lifeblood of your business. If it's done right. And if it's done wrong, it could be one of the biggest deceivers, uh, that could, uh, hurt your business. So, uh, best of luck until next time.

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Thanks for tuning in to Over the Bowl, brought to you by Integris Design, a full-service design and marketing agency out of Asheville, North Carolina. Until next time.