How can you measure the success of your personal brand using analytics?

Begin by monitoring your online presence, including website traffic, social media engagement, and follower growth. Analyze the reach and engagement of your content, such as blog posts, videos, or podcasts, using metrics like views, likes, shares, and comments. Assess the growth of your email subscriber list and the click-through rates in your email campaigns. Utilize tools like Google Analytics, social media analytics platforms, or email marketing analytics to gain insights into audience demographics, behavior, and preferences. Track your influence within your industry by monitoring mentions, collaborations, or speaking opportunities.

Take time to plan as part of your launch strategy. Use notion or Google docs so that you can request feedback from a consultant or mentor in real-time. Ensure you have about 2-3 months carved out in your time line in this activity to avoid frustration around expectations and goal setting outcomes.

Establish a baseline with SMART metrics. Then execute or your strategy and track from that baseline toward your goals. The way to see growth is to track it. It takes time and is one of my least favorite things to do but it's critical to success.

Clearly articulate what success means for your personal brand. Establish specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) objectives. Are you aiming for increased visibility, engagement, conversions, or authority in your niche? Your goals should guide your analytics strategy.

Select metrics aligned with your defined goals. These might include website traffic, social media engagement, email subscriptions, content shares, audience growth, or conversions. Metrics should directly reflect the success indicators you've set for your personal brand.

Followers ... likes ... comments ... engagement ... reach ... etc. For me, the most critical KPI of personal brand is engagement. How many people thoughtfully engaged w/ my content? >>> Likes are vanity :) [and some even pay for them!]

Many people will focus on downloads and listeners. Downloads show how many devices grabbed the podcast and listeners count is for time spent beyond one minute. Yet, you can look into total listener length of time too. Also known as a drop-off rate. Understanding more data like demographics and age range will help you better understand your target audience. Especially helpful to leverage in SEO or targeted ads.

Leverage analytics tools tailored to measure your chosen metrics. Utilize platforms like Google Analytics, social media analytics, or specialized personal branding tools. Dive deep into these analytics to extract insights into audience behavior, preferences, and interactions with your content.

The way this is listed out can be very overwhelming, so here's a more fundamental breakdown of some of what we look for when giving our clients their annual reports: We review the podcast hosting platform for essential downloads, locations, players, etc. This information is basic because your hosting platform cannot access user data for security reasons. From there, we look deeper into the top two performing apps. For most of our clients, that is Apple Podcast and Spotify. Both of the podcast manager sites for those platforms give detailed information and dig deeper into the demographics of the listeners and how much of the episode is actually being listened to. This is exclusively looking into the podcast stats and analyzing the data.

A podcast is a great top-of-funnel (buzzy marketing term, ik, sorry) asset for your personal brand. Give consumers somewhere else to go if they want more content / more of "you"! A solid strategy includes a back-end offer / pitch to further engage w/ your most devout followers / listeners. This could be a pitch for them to get further info from an episode or more content from a newsletter / website / etc.

Analyze the collected data to refine your approach. Identify patterns, understand what works and what doesn't, and tweak your strategy accordingly. Adjust content, posting schedules, or engagement tactics based on analytics-driven insights.

Measure the growth of your network in terms of quality and quantity. Track your audience expansion across platforms, engagement rates with new connections, and the impact of these connections on your brand visibility and credibility.

Keep an eye on emerging trends, be open to adopting new analytics tools, and consistently revisit your goals to ensure they align with your evolving brand strategy. Regularly reassess your metrics to adapt to changes in your personal brand's journey and adjust your measurement strategy accordingly.

In addition to your podcast analytics, also consider the exact words that your target audience uses. For example: 1. Which specific episodes resonated with your audience? (ex: Which episode got the most reshares on social media? Which episodes do your audience DM you about most?) 2. What are the specific topics, concepts, stories, etc that your audience resonates most with? (ex: Is there a particular personal story of yours that others tend to reference when you're having a conversation with them?) 3. What were the specific objections, hesitations, or questions you’ve gotten on sales calls with clients?