[00:00:00] More is not always better. In a world where everyone is talking about more, more followers, more subscribers, more likes, more downloads, more clients, more money. More, more, more. I think it’s important to take a step back and ask the question, why is that? And do I really need more? Or do you even want more? And in some cases we think we do, but if more really came, would you even be able to handle it? Like I know for most of the clients that we serve at Brand Builders Group, if they got even a dozen more clients, they would be full, right? It’s like they can’t handle 10, 20 incoming prospect calls a day. They can’t handle hundreds of clients. They’re not set up to do that. But yet we still live in this world where everything is about more. And what it’s not about is how do we actually just serve the right audience in the right way [00:01:00] at the right time. I recently just had a conversation with a guest on the Influential Personal Brand podcast who’s a super close friend of mine, and his name is Lee Pepper. And we kind of had this side conversation about the difference between vanity metrics. And real metrics and what it means to chase vanity metrics versus having an intentional focus on real metrics. And we’re gonna talk about what those are in just a second. But before we do that, I think it’s really important in a world that is selling more, that you realize for you, for your personal brand, for your business, for your team, is more really the right thing. And instead of trying to get bigger. What if you just focused on getting better, better serving your clients better, honing your craft, better targeting the right type of customer that will get the right type of results, the type of [00:02:00] customer that will attract more customers for you, right? Is it really always about. More because for many of us, more doesn’t lead to more peace, often more pressure. It’s often more pressure, it’s often more responsibility. It’s often more time, more hours, it’s more money, and that’s not what we’re all after. And I’m not saying that it’s bad to chase those things. I think it’s great to have a bigger impact. I think it’s great to make more money. I think it’s great to grow your team. I think those things are great. For the right person at the right time. ’cause we can do the right thing at the wrong time and it blow up in our face. So my question to you is simply is more really the right thing for where you are right now, and instead is better or more focused, really the path that you should be [00:03:00] taking. So let’s talk about these metrics. In a conversation about more, or not necessarily more, but in this case better. What do we really need to be looking at when it comes to metrics, when we think about our digital space, the dig digi, the digital reputation in which our brands are living in the ecosystem of social media, blogs, podcasts, YouTube. What should we really be focused on in order to reach that right client at the right time, at the right place and it, and really in the right season for both them and for you and your own team. So here’s some of the vanity metrics that we talked about that do not necessarily lead to the right things all the time. A lot of us we think we need to go viral. And what do I mean by that? That just means more views. What a lot of us are chasing is more followers, more likes, more fans, more subscriptions, like more [00:04:00] subscribers. We’re, we’re chasing a lot of that more, but really what it is, is we’re, we’re chasing eyeballs. And those are called, in some cases vanity metrics because they don’t actually lead to anything. Like what does it matter to you if you have a hundred thousand Instagram followers, if you have. Not enough money in your banking account to pay your bills. Something we refer to at BBG is Twitter rich and dollar poor. Like why do you need hundreds of thousands of followers if you can only take on dozens of clients? Or why do you need to go viral? What is it about going viral that’s somehow gonna help you grow your business? I’m not saying it’s not. I’m just saying, do you actually have a goal, a plan, a strategy in place that going viral would actually convert into something to help your brand, to help your business? Right. Why are, why are we chasing more views, more followers if we don’t [00:05:00] actually need it? Why aren’t we instead focused on, hey, for the followers that I do have, right? For the people who are engaging with me, what can I do to serve them better? What value can I provide to them that would convert them from someone who’s making a comment to someone who’s actually buying my services? So it’s not always about more eyeballs. Often it’s about how do I serve them in a deeper way, provide more value so that I have more conversions? And that isn’t just as necessarily about adding more to every single platform. More often it’s about doing less in a le in a more focused way, but in front of the right audience at the right time. So those leads us to the real metrics, right? How can doing, how could doing less actually lead to more customers? Well, here’s how you do less platforms, but more intentional [00:06:00] posting. I. Right. You do less of the trending and the fad, and you do more of the strategic and more of the focused, intentional work that it takes to convert a customer, not just gain a follower. So sometimes doing less can actually lead to more customers. Because you focused your intention and attention, you focused your resources in less places, which naturally allows you to go all in and provide more value, serve people in a deeper and more meaningful way. Actually work to serve the people you already have that are already giving you their attention instead of always trying to just get more. So, some of those metrics would be things like emails. How many emails are you converting? From your different lead capture forms, your different lead magnets, social media, and ask yourself, do you even have a way to capture email addresses? Because that’s step one, right? Why are we trying to grow social [00:07:00] media if we don’t even have a way of taking those followers or those fans into actual email addresses, contacts in your own database? Right. So email addresses could be one. Engagement is one. So that’s comments, dms, but it’s not how many people are following me. It’s how many people are engaging with me. Following is a vanity metric. Engagement is a real metric. Calls how many of the people that I am engaging with are actually converting into calls, right? People on the actual phone with me, that could become a customer. And ask yourself this, if you don’t have a way of catching an email address, do you have a way of actually turning a follower, a fan into a phone call? Because that’s conversion metrics. Those are real metrics. That’s what actually helps you move the needle, not posting a hundred new reels or a whole bunch of new carousel posts, or redesigning your graphics in Canva. That’s not it. It’s what is the value that you’re providing [00:08:00] that’s gonna make someone engage with you, request a call with you and buy from you. And that comes from real value. And you know what guys? To provide real value, it takes real time. And if we’re just trying to throw something up there, it doesn’t provide real value and you’re not giving it the time that it needs, which means you’re not getting the customers you need. And you know what happens when that happens? You run outta steam. You run, you run out of runway, you burn out, you run out of time, energy, and money to continue this thing. That was a mission, that was a passion for you, that gave you purpose and you give up on it because you’ve been doing so much stuff to get more, you haven’t actually focused in on the things that actually create real change for you and for your customers. So, as I said, to begin with, more is not always better being. Better is always more important than being bigger.