Love Is The Most Important Marketing Metric

I was listening to a talk by Jadah Sellner from Simple Green Smoothies, and she was talking about love and marketing metrics and a conversation she had with Seth Godin, marketing genius extraordinaire.  He told her that it isn’t love over metrics, it is that “Love is a Metric”.

I know it is easy to get caught up in all the other metrics we measure in our business.  How many people are on my email list, how many followers do I have on Facebook, what is the conversion rate on my opt-in page, the list goes on and on.

These are all important things to know and track, but the love metric is infinitely more important.  How do you care for and serve your community?  

This is so much harder to quantify and put down on a spreadsheet and measure, but still, something that we should spend as much time, if not more than worrying about all the numbers. 

In order to have a successful business, I have heard it said that you need 1000 true fans.  Kevin Kelly coined this term years ago, but it is still relevant today.  He was talking about musicians, but it is relevant to any small business I think.

He says:

A True Fan is defined as someone who will purchase anything and everything you produce…

Assume conservatively that your True Fans will each spend one day’s wages per year in support of what you do. That “one-day-wage” is an average, because of course your truest fans will spend a lot more than that.  Let’s peg that per diem each True Fan spends at $100 per year. If you have 1,000 fans that sums up to $100,000 per year, which minus some modest expenses, is a living for most folks.

One thousand is a feasible number. You could count to 1,000. If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years. True Fanship is doable. Pleasing a True Fan is pleasurable, and invigorating. It rewards the artist to remain true, to focus on the unique aspects of their work, the qualities that True Fans appreciate.

So how do you go about creating these true fans?  Fall in love with the process of serving your tribe.  Don’t focus only on building your list, getting clients and making money.  Focus on giving value, serving and nurturing your tribe. 

Of course, you need to learn how to build a list and a community, I am not trying to diminish all the stuff we always talk about.  You absolutely need to know your niche, have an amazing free offer, and a way to make money. 

In fact, you need to really work on having a well-developed sales funnel and strategy if you want to be successful.  But, if you just focus on the marketing and the numbers, you will lose that heart connection with your tribe, which is where you will find those true fans.

This is a huge mistake I made early in my business.  I thought I would just hide behind the computer screen, build a list and make money.  While I suppose this can lead to some level of success I know this was very short-sighted and really not a very rewarding way to build a business.