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Ep. 226 – Chris Mercer “What I am obsessed with is figuring out how to perfect systems as it relates to measurement, entrepreneurship and listening to customer journeys.”

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Chris “Mercer” Mercer, co-founder of MeasurementMarketing, is a sought after measurement marketing expert. Mercer (as he’s known) and his team have been helping marketers, marketing teams, and agencies measure their marketing so they know what’s working and what’s not.

First by planning out what’s important to measure in their marketing, then how to actually measure it (using tools like Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics), creating dashboards that are actually useful, and pulling actionable insights from what’s being measured to begin forecasting and optimizing future results.

Mercer spends countless hours reading, practicing, adjusting and innovating to improve his skill set. He has a knack for teaching, and is known for his ability to simplify even the most complex ideas for his audience.

He can be found speaking at conferences and events, such as Traffic & Conversion, Social Media Marketing World, Content Jam, TravelCon, Digital Elite Camp, Baby Bathwater Institute, and others.

 

Most passionate about

  • I’m very passionate about the art of systems as it relates to measurement, but also as it relates to entrepreneurship and building brands that are very customer-centric and listening to customer journeys. I think that is absolutely what I am obsessed with right now—figuring out how to perfect those things.

Mercer’s career and story

  • My main background is sales management. I come from everything managing sort of a pipeline by nature.
  • When we moved online, I created a WordPress site to show people how to do WordPress sites, essentially. It was like a membership site. That led very quickly to people saying, “This is a lot of work. Can you build our sites for us?” We created an agency and that’s where we sort of grew, digital marketing-wise.
  • We said, “Okay, we’re going to build the site and we will also help you optimize the site”—something called “conversion rate optimization.” In order to optimize, and in order to improve, like, an opt-in rate or a conversion rate for a purchase, you have to know what that rate is.
  • We set up Google Analytics for our clients. We would deliver the site with their Google Analytics and say, “Here’s how you can tell any leads you got from Facebook.”
  • Almost overnight, when we made that shift, we started getting a lot of referrals from clients, but they weren’t referrals for sites. They were people coming to us saying, “We already have a way but we need help with our Google Analytics.”
  • We wanted to eventually diversify the business because that was a great business. It’s still a great channel of revenue for us, but we wanted to be able to diversify.

Best advice for entrepreneurs

  • I think the keyword is going to be deceptively simple, but it’s listening to your customer.
  • If you take a second to listen, they will tell you, “Yeah, you’re kind of on the right track, but maybe do this instead, or do it in this particular way.” All of a sudden, it becomes a lot easier to grow a business when we listen to our market.

The biggest, most critical failure with customers

  • It was when I did the exact opposite of what we just talked about—when I wasn’t listening. I was telling the customer, “Here’s how this thing works.” The thing that comes to mind for us is that we have a certification program where we will work with agencies.
  • I think sometimes, too, ‘If it’s our idea, it’s a good idea,’ but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea. It’s just our idea.

Biggest success with customers

  • We were making some changes to one of our offers. Our do-it-yourself training program is called the Measurement Marketing Academy and it’s a just-in-time learning platform to learn all this stuff.
  • We noticed way too many people going to the cart, but we weren’t creating more sales. We saw this immediately in our dashboard, and it was weird. It was an odd behavior. So, we went back to our page. We had forgotten to put the price. So, they were going to the cart but not to purchase. They were going to find out how much. Then they were going back to the page to figure it out.
  • Our customers were confused as to what we were, why they had to go to the cart to lower the price. So, we changed that, and all of a sudden, the conversation went the way we wanted.

Mercer’s recommendation of a tool

  • Google Analytics
    • Google Analytics tells you what’s happening, and this is the key for a lot of people. They jump into analytics and can’t quite figure out what it’s trying to tell them. They have a belief that it’s trying to tell them something, but they just aren’t sure what.
    • It’s an incredibly powerful platform.

Mercer’s one key success factor

  • In my particular case, it is my maniacal belief that any results that we are achieving in our business should not be the result of a person who’s working in the middle. They should be a result of the system that that person is using.
  • When I started as an entrepreneur, it was just myself. I filled all the roles of the organization. I’m the janitor, the bookkeeper, the content person. But as I was building the business, I was creating systems that I could then hand over to my future team members.

 

Mercer’s Mountain

Since we believe that the best way for entrepreneurs to get fast, big, and sustainable success is by leading your (new) market category, and the entire entrepreneurial journey reminds me of mountaineering, I want to ask you: Is there a mountain you dream of climbing or a mountain you have already climbed?

  • I haven’t climbed a mountain in the terms of what I think about in the movies, where it’s a rock climber going up the face of a mountain. But I do enjoy hiking through the mountains.
  • We were climbing on the top of Mount Hood and went to a particular part of this mountain. It was just me and a friend of mine. Then we just stopped. It was, like, 10 seconds or 30 seconds. The quietness and the stillness, I have never, ever experienced in life again, because it was so quiet up there. There were no cars, there was no noise. There were no birds. There was no us stomping through the mountain. It was just that quiet.

 

The best ways to connect with Mercer

 

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