Today I’m sharing how you can create a scorecard around your own individual podcast so you can track your input and output metrics and the overall success of your show.
Join me in this episode to learn how you start a podcast on the right foot, track your show metrics and measure the ROI of your podcast.
In this episode, Danielle also discusses:
- Creating a scorecard around your podcast 2:36
- Making sure you have a goal for your show 4:25
- Using podcasting as a thought leadership tool 6:20
- Determining your hourly rate in your business 7:54
- The metrics you need to track 11:24
- Measuring the ROI of your podcast 16:09
Connect with Danielle:
Website | https://www.kickstartaccountinginc.net/
Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/kickstartaccountinginc/
Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/kickstartaccounting
Twitter | https://twitter.com/KickstartAcct
Things Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
Book your FREE Discovery call: https://kickstartaccountinginc.com/book-a-call/
Test your Financial Health: https://kickstartaccountinginc.com/checkmyfinancialhealth/
Learn how to pay yourself as a CEO – https://www.kickstartaccountinginc.com/getpaid
Full Episode Transcript:
Intro 0:00
Welcome to entrepreneur money stories, the podcast for women entrepreneurs who want to dig into their money stories so they can break free from limiting beliefs around money once and for all. Hosted by Daniel Hayden, owner of kickstart accounting, Inc. This podcast is a series of real conversations about money mindset with valuable and action packed takeaways for the entrepreneur who's building their abundant empire. Danielle is a reformed corporate CFO who's on a mission to help real freakin female entrepreneurs understand their numbers and gain the confidence to create sustainable profits. And now here's your host, Danielle Hayden.
Danielle 0:40
Welcome back to entrepreneur money stories. Today we are answering client questions. Client recently submitted a question to us asking what numbers can we track outside of the p&l? The p&l is the first indicator of success or the first opportunity to see warning signs. So as we see our costs increase in a specific category on our profit and loss statement, we as the business owner can take a step back and create other metrics, KPIs or scorecard in order to understand the success of that expense category, so that we know if that's something that we want to continue to maintain in our business. If we just look at the numbers and see that an expense line is increasing or decreasing, without taking the time to really understand what opportunity or what that expense line is serving, or how that expense line is serving our business. We'll never actually learn from it. So we won't know if we need to actually keep that expense in our business, or are we just doing it to do it? I hear so many of our clients talk about social media or their podcast guesting and paying the individuals to help them within that marketing initiative. However, they don't understand if it's actually working for them. They don't know if they need to keep the expense line in order to be successful in their business. Remember, we're not replacing the profit and loss statement. But we are elaborating on the profit and loss we're taking the profit and loss and continuing to build on it continuing to create additional metrics and additional scorecard to use to support our analysis of the profit and loss statement to support our decision as a business owner, whether or not to keep the expense line in our business. We had Julie Frey on the podcast recently, you can go back and listen to her episode, she talked about creating a scorecard for being a guest expert on other people's podcasts. So this is if you are paying a firm or doing it yourself or you are looking to guest on other people's podcasts. This can be an amazing marketing tool. That's how we got our start here at kick started counting. So go back and listen to Julie fries episode on how to build a scorecard if you are being a guest expert on other people's Show. Today, I want to talk about how to create a scorecard around your own individual podcast. Now you don't need to hit stop. If you don't have your own podcast today. These metrics can be used to brainstorm other metrics within your p&l. So this doesn't have to be just for your podcast, you might hear something today that you can use in another expense line. We're going to keep on going down the list of the profit and loss statements line by line and creating scorecards to help you understand each expense line. However, in the meantime, you might hear something today that you can apply to another line, or if you're thinking about doing a podcast for your company in the future. Now when we build out the podcast, we have created a podcast scorecard that you could download by going to kickstart accounting inc.com/podcast To follow along and use as a tracking tool for your business. The first question I want you to ask yourself before we start digging into all the different metrics because you don't need to track every single one. You might however you don't have to. So the first question is ask yourself, what is the goal of my show? There are four different categories of goals. So as you think about what is the goal from your show, you can think of it as in one of these four different categories or these four different buckets is the primary goal of your show to bring in leads and close sales. The number one goal of your podcast is to close more deals to bring in more clients into your business, whether that be services or sell additional products or say, Write Your goal is to sell. Number two, the second bucket. The goal is relationships. During your interviews, you're having human to human conversations, and you're able to connect in a way that doesn't require the black tech Senate glowing screen podcasts are a beautiful, rare form of media that cut through the formalities of a typical business, a business protocol, and allow you to create the strategic relationships and a really genuine and personal way. I always hated the saying when I first started my business, but it's true. It's not what you know, it's bleeding out. And a podcast allows you to know practically anyone that you want to know by simply asking them to be a guest on your show. So Podcasts can be a really beautiful way to create new relationships. It is the goal for your podcast to create new relationships. And ultimately, you're going to be sales, but we're doing it through relationship building. And you can when you look at the scorecard, you can track the KPIs in both areas, I just want you to understand where your number one focus is. Number three is podcast growth, right making money through your podcasts. And this might be done through ads. Your goal is to grow the podcast. So number three is to be able to earn money through your podcast. The last one is thought leadership. So is the goal of your podcast to create a brand to showcase your expertise, and to be a thought leader in your industry. The other way to think about podcasting as a thought leadership tool is how you can waterfall your content. By recording a podcast. It can help you write and optimize your blog posts, create YouTube videos, create micro videos, create text only LinkedIn post LinkedIn carousels, quote, graphics audiograms, engaging emails, Instagram Stories, Facebook stories. So when you create a podcast as a goal of thought leadership, you might also have the goal of using that as a tool to create your content management strategy. Once you've done some reflecting on the goal of your show, we can start walking into the metrics. We have two sets of metrics, we have our input metrics, and our output metrics. The input metrics are what goes into creating your podcast. And I do want you to know and understand this because this is going to help you understand how much time it's taking you on the back end to create the podcast. Too often we focus on the output of our marketing and the output of our efforts. But we don't think about what the input is? How much time and energy are we putting into the podcast first? So the first step in creating your input metrics, if you aren't doing the podcast on your own, we will need to determine your hourly rate as a business owner. This is an exercise you might have already done with your money team or your bookkeeper. If you have not contacted a bookkeeper, contact your money team to help you determine what your hourly rate is in your business. An easy way to determine this is if you were to hire somebody else to do your job in the business, what is the salary that you would need to pay them? What is the reasonable salary divided by the number of hours worked, assuming you work 40 hours a week in your business, if you're working 60 or 80 hours your business, please do not divide your reasonable salary by 80 hours per week, you're gonna come up with a really, really low number. So ideally, I would like to see that number at 40 hours per week. That gives you a really easy way of determining your hourly rate. There is a more complex way of determining your hourly rate by looking at how much you pay yourself through salary distributions, the operating expenses divided by the number of clients and your revenue. Again, contact your money team to dig in deeper to your hourly rate. So there are four input metrics. And once you've determined your hourly rate, again, this is if you are handling your podcast on your own. The first one is what are the number of research hours that are required per month? If you multiply it by your hourly rate, if you're paying somebody to do your research for you, it might be the research cost rather than the research time multiplied by hourly rate. Number two is what are your scheduling hours? So how long does it take you to schedule your time and your guests' time multiplied by your hourly rate? Again, if you're paying somebody else to do this, it would be their hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours. How many hours are you spending recording? So your number of recording hours multiplied by your hourly rate? Or if you're paying somebody else? How much per hour are you paying them? And lastly, our production time. This is the fourth input metric. So how much time are you putting into producing your podcasts multiplied by your hourly rate? Or if you're paying somebody else to do this task for you? Want you to add all this up to create your monthly input costs. First, right, so this is something you're going to track on a monthly basis. So you're going to look at each of these buckets and allocate your time multiplied by the hourly rate or the cost, you're paying somebody else. And then you add all that up together to create your monthly input cost. And I want you to track this over time. This becomes something that you're tracking on a monthly basis. And this is a gut check. If you track it and walk away from it and you never dig any deeper, it's going to be a task for you to do, right we have to reflect on this. Is this reasonable? How do we compare our input to what our output is? Hey, podcast lovers, I hope you're enjoying another amazing episode of entrepreneur money stories, I had to interrupt to tell you about an exciting new tool we
recently launched. If you've been wanting to learn how to start managing your business finances, but don't know where to start, then visit Kickstarter accounting inc.com/bootcamp. To receive our new five day video bootcamp series, you will receive a video each day that will take you from accounting overwhelm to money powerhouse. So you're ready to kickstart accounting inc.com/bootcamp. All right, that's the episode. Alright, next, let's dig into the output metrics piece of the scorecard. Again, we have four buckets. So once we look at what our goals are, we're going to walk through the scorecard metrics to keep track of each of these gold buckets. Our first bucket is sales conversion. So if our number one goal is to bring in leads and closing sales, we're going to track three metrics, our inbound leads. So what are the number of leads coming into your business from your podcast? How many leads become customers or clients? So close deals? Number three, is promotional codes used so if you are selling an online course or a webinar, anything that requires signups? What is the conversion per promotional code right per opportunity? Now, we do have to set up our systems in order to be able to track these metrics, I could do an entire podcast on that so I won't go down the rabbit hole today. But make sure that double check that in your CRM system or however you are having leads come in the door to you that you are asking the question, why are you here? How did you find me? Ask if they have found you from your podcast, please make sure that you understand how leads are coming in the door so that you can track the number of inbound leads per month, and then number of closed leads per month. And then promotional codes are used. So we have three very simple metrics to calculate each month. And I would love for you to do this, regardless if your goal is to close sales or not. Because you might have done this to become a thought leader and expert in your field, your closing sales, and you want to know that you want to do more in your business and what's working and less of what's not working. Alright, the next bucket is relationships. So our goal of the podcast was to create relationships. And there's several different ways to be able to track relationships. This is a softer metric, we don't always know when there's going to be a podcast guest that you've had on your show that is really impactful. So I'll give you an example. I had somebody on the show. Her name is Brandy gar, and she has a podcast, the wedding pro CEO, and she was on our show while I was on her show first, then she was on our show. And then I went back to her show. If you would have asked me the day that I met Brandy, we were going to have a long term relationship. I wouldn't have known that answer to be yes, I would have said I want to she's great. But I don't know what's going to come out of this relationship. So this is a softer metric that you might go back and update as relationships come to fruition. But there's a few suggestions on how you might track this. So number of new connections, how are you connecting with your relationships? This might be not people following you but who you are connecting with on LinkedIn. So number of new relationships built on LinkedIn that you are able to connect with number of email subscribers, number of referral partners, so if you have any type of affiliate or referral program in your business, number of podcasts or speaking invites, lastly, number of industry influencers and then you can keep track of number of new customers or clients from your new connections, referral marketing. Again, we can do a whole podcast on this referral partner. Affiliate marketing is a powerful tool when you find people in your community that you enjoy doing business with. You want to do business with other people in their community. This can be really, really powerful and I don't want you to miss out on this metric. Right if our goal is to just grow the podcast our number one goal is to make this the most successful podcast possible here to eventually possibly grow into ADS and bring in revenue in from our podcasts, there is a few metrics to be able to to keep track of here, number of downloads per month downloads per episode so we can learn what's working right. What do people want to hear? I am surprised by this every single month. My audience, your lovely listeners, keep us here at Kickstarter, counting on our toes, and then listen by source. So you don't have to pour your energy into every single source. Where are you directing your listeners? Where are you directing your audience? And how are you growing that one specific source? If you have any ads that you are running within your podcast, another metric would be the amount of revenue per partner relationship that you are receiving on a monthly basis. All right. Lastly, we have thought leadership. Again, these are softer metrics that are not as easy to track. But I want to give you a few ideas on what you can track to understand your success as a thought leader. So when you podcast your goal is to be an expert in your field. And to create brand content. Our metrics can be the number of hours saved, or cost saved by waterfall in your content. So this might include number of blogs, written number of engagements on social media through repurpose content, and a number of hours saved, right? So how much time are we saving by showing up here on the podcasts and speaking, and then letting either using our magic or letting our team work their magic to repurpose that content into all the other beautiful places that we might be sharing it? And then what is the ROI of our podcast compared to our other channels, so is the podcast growing and helping you increase your brand. And so we might compare our podcasts growth, to the growth of our email list, social media, blog, and website traffic. So how's our podcasts compared to the other channels that we have in our business? Again, these are all the key performance indicators to create a scorecard to use to understand the performance of your podcasts and determine if it's worth your time and energy. Alright, lastly, I want you to have a final metric to help you understand the return on your investment. So this metric is called the return on investment. This is the reflection of income to measure how this ROI changes over time, we need to analyze the biggest impacts on our ROI. And should we be investing more money in any one aspect of our podcast business. So in order to calculate our return on investment, it is our total cost per month divided by total revenue created from our business. Now you might be saying, I have no idea how much revenue or that's not the goal of my podcast, it might be total cost per month divided by total cost saved. So again, if your goal is thought leadership, or building the podcast to have ads in the future, it might be total cost saved today. However, both of these are beautiful metrics to keep an eye on and watch over time. I hope today's episode was really helpful. Again, I want you to think about your p&l your profit and loss as a gateway to further analysis as a gateway to further understanding your business. If you have any questions you can send us a DM on Instagram at kick started counting you can send us an email at support at kickstart accounting inc.com And if you enjoyed today's episode, I ask you to take a screenshot and share it in your Instagram stories and tag us so that we can continue to share this message with the world. Until next time. Thank you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
