What if your business didn’t need more leads—just clearer data to make better decisions with the leads you already have?
In this episode of Smart Growth Secrets, we sit down with Joshua Lauer, a marketing analytics strategist known for helping businesses cut through noise, confusion, and vanity metrics to uncover what’s actually driving growth. Joshua specializes in turning scattered marketing data into clear, actionable insights that allow founders and leadership teams to confidently scale without guessing.
We explore why most businesses are flying blind when it comes to attribution, how poor tracking quietly drains profit, and what it really takes to build a measurement system that aligns marketing spend with revenue outcomes. From simplifying analytics to building systems that support long-term, sustainable growth, this conversation is packed with practical insights for leaders who want clarity—not complexity.
If you care about smarter growth, better decisions, and building systems that scale with integrity, this episode is for you.
Episode Highlights Here:
Brett
Before we jump into this episode, I want to invite you to join our community to help you become a better steward scale to billions and ultimately give more or all of it away. All I want you to do is to click the subscribe button right now. I love your support. It’s incredible to see your comments, and we’re just getting started. I can’t wait to go on this journey with you. Thank you so much for subscribing. It means the world to me. Welcome everybody to the build to billions podcast where you guys, successful entrepreneurs and investors on the journey from millions to billions. Believe the key to scaling and compounding your wealth and life start every single day with the mindset and practice of stewardship over ownership and applying billionaire biblical principles. Our ultimate goal is to have you scale and compound your wealth and life so you can give more or all of it away to help end the piece. My name is Brett Swarts, and every episode, we’re joined by some of the world’s best entrepreneurs, millionaires and billionaires, where they share their stories, secrets and wisdom with us, so we can all level up in business and in our life as well. I’m excited about our next guest. He’s out of Minnesota, and he is an expert when it comes to all things like when it comes data, market, market, marketing, intelligence and basically figuring out ways to make sense and build our businesses with data and marketing. In particular, we’re going to be speaking about how to do that. This, this, this gentleman has helped hundreds of businesses turn their marketing chaos into clarity, and he’s going to help us do that today. Please welcome the show with me. Joshua lower, Joshua, how we doing good? How are you? Brett,doing? Well, thanks for listeners. Get tonight for the first time, would you give us just a little bit aboutyour story and then your current focus?
Joshua
Yeah. So, spend most of my 20s being a songwriter in my parent’s basement, not making much money and was reading a Rolling Stone and came across Full Sail. University had a program for internet marketing. I felt like that was sort of the missing ingredient in my skill set at the time. So, I went back to school and kind of finished in 2012 and started in this sort of digital marketing world that we’re in today. I, for the first four years or so, was working at an agency, and I kind of became the default in house guy for all the analytics projects for all the various websites that they were pushing out. And then in 2016 I moved on to lead pages where I was kind of an interesting sort of marketer on the marketing team for a marketing product. And it was kind of a cool sort of, you know, perspective, as far as you get to see all these sort of small businesses and the things that they’re trying out, and they had acquired a company called drip that was in the process of kind of rebranding around the time it went from marketing automation that doesn’t suck to like the E commerce CRM that you maybe hadn’t realized that you needed yet for your E commerce business. And then from there, I ended up working at a company called every which is a woman’s clothing retailer, fashion clothing with about 100 plus locations across the United States on an e commerce website, moved on to a company called telesign. About a year later when the pandemic strike. And then a few years after that, I decided I had enough friends that were hitting me up from all these different places I’d worked over the years, asking for tracking help. There was a launch of GA four, which is kind of the newer version of Google Analytics. And I thought to myself, you know, I could, I could probably go full time freelance with this stuff. And here we are now,
Brett
awesome, fantastic. And so, let’s start right into the topic at hand, which is using data to build your marketing, you know, marketing, marketing engine, or just get great insights to grow your business with, to do marketing. So, what is the number one secret Joshua to doing just that?
Joshua
I think the biggest secret is that if you ask me a question after something happens, and I didn’t know it was going to happen before that, it’s going to be hard to answer that question. So, you need a tracking plan before you launch your marketing campaign. You know, a lot of people think about the creative. You know, whether it’s video, various talents, the whole vision of the, you know, marketing, brand and what is that brand message, those things are all super important. We have no brand campaigns, nomarketing campaigns without them. But at the same time, launching a campaign without a properstrategy is going to make it really hard to understand how that's actually doing in terms ofinfluencing potential new customers and all sorts of things.
Brett
Makes sense. Okay? So make sure you have a tracking plan in place before launching campaign. Whatis and by the way, before we go into secret number two, how do you is that what you do is that whatyou help people set up is being able to set and get all that in place.
Joshua
Yep, yeah, I kind of come in check out your site. Usually ask the question like,
Brett
so, if you like this little, short clip of the interview I just did, click over here to watch the full interview. And please don’t forget to subscribe. Thanks so much, everybody. You. You.
Watch the episode here:
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About Joshua Lauer
Joshua Lauer is a marketing analytics strategist and the founder of Lauer Creations, where he helps businesses make smarter growth decisions by bringing clarity to their data. Known for his ability to simplify complex systems, Joshua specializes in turning fragmented marketing metrics into actionable insights that directly connect marketing spend to real business outcomes.
With a deep focus on attribution, tracking, and analytics infrastructure, Joshua works with service-based businesses and professional firms to eliminate guesswork, reduce wasted ad spend, and build scalable systems that support long-term growth. His approach emphasizes practical implementation—aligning tools like analytics platforms, CRMs, and reporting dashboards so leadership teams can confidently understand what’s working and why.
Joshua is passionate about helping founders and executives move beyond vanity metrics and into data-driven decision-making that fuels sustainable growth. When he’s not working with clients, he’s often speaking, teaching, or creating content to help business owners build marketing systems that are both measurable and resilient.
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