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SHOW NOTES
This is a common misstep by so many entrepreneurs… near constant switching from one thing to another.
I’m talking specifically about your marketing strategy here (but head back to episode 26 for more about how this relates to your whole business!).
Here’s what I mean: Let’s say your new funnel isn’t converting yet – at least not in the way you’d planned. How long do you wait to re-strategize?
It’s tempting to start completely over almost immediately, right? Because you’re a problem-solver!
But marketing doesn’t always work that quickly. You need to give yourself + your marketing some time… but how long?
I’m answering this question (plus quite a few more!) inside today’s episode. In 15 minutes, you’ll learn:
- How to make tweaks to your funnel without losing momentum
- What to do if you’re BORED with your own strategies
- Whether or not to change your webinar topic (+how)
Tune in, and then hop over to Instagram (@emilyhirsh) and tell me, is this the pep talk you needed today?
NOTE – check out episode 26, “The importance of focus in your marketing,” for more about the importance of NOT switching from one thing to another, over and over again!
Key Points:
[2:56] This is a common misstep by so many entrepreneurs
[4:07] If your funnel isn’t converting, how long do you wait to re-strategize?
[5:30] Be careful not to change too many things at once
[7:25] What to do if you’re BORED with your marketing strategy
[9:43] But, can you/should you change your webinar topic for the next launch?
[12:51] Save the innovation for your front-end marketing!
CTA:
If you’re ready for support with your ads, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!
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Episode Transcripts:
Emily Hirsh: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention innovators, influencers, creators, and game-changing entrepreneurs: your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launch multimillion dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind-the-scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success. Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.
Hello my fellow podcast listeners! I am pumped up today about this episode. I threw this episode in, because I have like 10 [episodes] that are in the queue that I need to record, but I moved this one up as soon as it came up. And it’s inspired from a team meeting we did earlier this week… the one I talked about when I talked about the mistake I made in my company, where I talked about how I need to step away from … [or] stop being more of … like telling everybody what to do and putting my input in, and stepped away [episode 99]. And so, we have this all ads team meeting. So it’s all my ads managers, senior strategists, our head of the ads team, our ad specialists who help with the reporting, everybody’s on this meeting. We do it every other week on Mondays.
And it’s amazing, because what we do is, we just literally have open-ended questions about like, “What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Where do we feel uncomfortable? What do we need to change? What processes are messed up?” And it’s a huge collaboration. And if you have a company like… Oh, I can’t recommend it enough, because it’s so powerful when you as a leader step away and just let people collaborate and give their own ideas, because your team who lives in the day-to-day knows more than you. You don’t live in that, and so you don’t know the problems. And if you don’t create the space and the platform for them to share those problems with you, you’ll never know, and you’re going to feel so stuck. And so it’s just so powerful. We come out of it with [so many] more amazing things we can be doing for our clients and processes we’re going to change and information we’re going to give our clients.
And so one of the things that came up in this meeting was how a lot of people kind of want to constantly change their strategy. And this has been true since I started my company and I started working with people with their marketing. And it’s because it’s such an entrepreneur trait to do this. And that is, even if something is working or if something is starting to work or you haven’t given it enough time, they just feel like they’re not doing enough. And so they’re like, “I’ve got to change everything, and I’m going to do this instead.”
And so I have personally, when I worked with clients in the past, have spent a lot of time kind of coaching that and have realized I need to support my team more in doing that, because you know, as me, as the CEO, I exactly know the answer and don’t have any hesitation, but my team gets stuck in between like, wanting to make the client happy and change the strategy for them and accommodate, and then also knowing like, that’s actually not a good idea.
And so one thing I really push my team [with] is like, we are the experts, and you can say, “Hey, I don’t think that is a good idea, and instead we should do this.” And that is our job. And so I’m constantly kind of working with my team to make sure we do that, because it’s so necessary. But today I wanted to talk about why you have to stop constantly changing your strategy. You have to, because… many reasons.
So first, let’s look at this situation of, you haven’t gotten something to convert yet. So you’re trying new strategies. And if you don’t give it enough time, like you’re going to constant… it’s like a reset button. Every time you change your strategy, you’re resetting, because you have all these variables and things that you have no idea how they’re going to convert. And so when we talk about buying data and we talk about getting people through your funnel to prove it and then optimize it, every time you change your strategy, you’re restarting that process. And so, if you run with a strategy for a couple of weeks, and maybe it doesn’t take off the way you thought, but you’re getting some leads and you’re getting a little bit of traction and then you change everything, you’re going back to square one. And so it will be really frustrating for you in the long run, because you’re never going to get anywhere.
So if you haven’t found something that’s converted before, you need to decide on a strategy and commit to it for like, 60 days… 30 days minimum, but more like 60 days. And you can tweak that existing strategy. So let’s say it’s a webinar funnel. You can obviously tweak the webinar and add to the email sequence and play with the messaging and all of that. But it doesn’t mean like, go from a webinar funnel to a challenge funnel to a video series to an opt-in and try all these things. That will just kill everything.
And even when you change the existing funnel, you have to be careful not to change every variable, because then you don’t know what’s working. So, for example, if, let’s say you have a webinar funnel, if you change the title of the webinar, from evergreen to live, the product you pitch on the webinar, and the price of the product… that’s changing the whole strategy, because there’s so many huge variables there. Just alone of changing the product that you pitch or the price of the product is a huge variable. That’s one thing that you should only change just that if you’re going to change it.
So every time you do that, you’re going back to square one, and it’s going to kill your business. It’s going to cost you a ton of money and time. It’s going to waste a ton of things. So that’s kind of one camp that I see people doing this in is when they haven’t necessarily gotten that like, really successful funnel, and so they keep trying to restrategize it. And if you do this, you are so not alone, and there’s nothing wrong with you for doing it. It’s a natural thing for you to want to do, because we’re entrepreneurs, we’re fixers, we’re visionaries. If we’re not seeing the success we want, we just like, solve the problem all day long and put in solutions. But sometimes you have to say, “Okay, I’m going to let this sit for X amount of time, get the data, get the information before I make a massive change.”
Because what most likely is [happening is] you just need to change small things and keep changing small things and have some patience and stay focused on that funnel, and then you can… and then it will scale eventually, like then it will start working. But sometimes it takes 60 to 90 days to get a single funnel to convert, so if you’re changing things, you’re restarting that 90 days over every time you change it.
So let’s say you spend three weeks on one strategy and you change everything, well you have to restart over… it could be 90 days until it works, until it converts.
The other place that I see people do this is when they have a successful strategy and they get bored of it. So they have a really successful strategy or they had a really successful launch and they think, “I can’t do the same thing, because everybody will know if I do the exact same thing,” or “I have to change my strategy, because it’s going to get dull.” And so they change the whole strategy, and it really affects the results. And I’ve seen that happen, too.
I’ll never forget a conversation I had with a client where… This was when I was doing client calls. This was a couple of years ago, and we had a massively successful launch. It was a seven-figure launch with not a lot of ads. I mean, it was one of my most successful, as of a couple of years ago, when I was working in ad accounts and it was just me and one person, and it was so successful.
And the format was a webinar that we did. And the webinar crushed it, converted so well. And I think we did two webinars in the launch. So we get on our launch recap call, and I remember presenting all the information, and I was like, “Okay, so for the next launch, we’re going to build the list this much. We’re going to do this again, but we’re going to increase the amount of people that get on the webinar, blah, blah, blah.” And the client goes, “Well, what else have you seen work? Like we should try something new. What about challenges?” And I was like, “No, we’re going to do the same thing. You can change your webinar topic if you want to do that. If you want to put a fresh webinar topic in there that you know people will love, you can do that.” But actually I’m going to talk about that in a second, too.
So I said, “No. If we do that, we have no idea how it’s going to convert. We right now have this gold mine of a strategy that did amazing in this way. We built the list. We launched live. We did a webinar.” We had, I think it was seven-day open cart. We did an encore webinar. We did a cart reopen. Like we had this whole model, and I was like, “We’re not going to change that whole model. We can tweak a few things, but what we’re going to do is get more people in. We’re going to get more people signed up for that webinar. We’re going to build your list more, and we’re going to know going into it now, if we get X amount of people signed up for the webinar, we’re going to get this many sales, because we have that data. If we change the strategy, we have no way of guessing that, no variable.”
But, on changing the webinar topic… because I do agree to an extent, you can’t literally do the same thing every single live launch, [because] people will stop paying attention. But you will be surprised how many people are not paying attention when you think they are. And so if you keep saying things, you’re going to get people that are like, “Wow, that’s amazing!” and you’re like, “I’ve said it a hundred times.” And they just heard it for the first time, because maybe that is when they needed to hear it or they just watched the right video at the right time. And so you’re going to think it’s really boring, because you’re living and breathing it, but your audience is not. And if you’re doing it right, you’re constantly building a new audience of people.
So just remember that. And on changing the webinar title. So be careful with this, because you can change the webinar topic… but one time I had a client… and this was a huge learning experience, and it wasn’t negative… but he totally changed the webinar itself. So it was like, I can’t even remember exactly what it was, but one was teaching you something really hot, like social media strategies. And then the other was teaching you more like… gosh, I think it was more like time management or something. And he addresses both of those things in his course, in his membership that we were selling. But the social media strategy one killed it, because that’s what everyone wants, in his audience. They wanted social media strategies. That’s what was really hot, that’s what attracted them. And then when he switched to time management, it just converted way worse, like worse signups, webinar converted worse.
And it was a great learning experience for him, because then he was like, “Okay, I’m never going to do a webinar like that.” But just switching the whole thing like that, even though we kept the same webinar strategy, also had a massive impact on the results. And so, when you’re trying to put fresh webinar content in there, make sure that you’re still attracting people in the way that you know works by solving the problems you know that they have and getting them to have the epiphanies and the realizations during the webinar that you already know works if you’ve had a successful webinar.
So whether you haven’t proven your strategy yet and you’re constantly restarting and putting that restart button, it’s wasting your time and your money, and you have to stop… or if you’ve had a successful strategy, a proven strategy, and you are bored of it, don’t change everything and put in all these variables and sabotage your results.
And so many people, probably including me, could do this, because it’s like, sometimes you don’t even know you’re doing it until you’re doing it, and you need somebody to say like, “Stop!” And so that’s what my team has started doing is, it’s like, “No, we cannot change the strategy! We have to go at least for ‘this’ long on this strategy,” or like, “We can’t change those variables.” And I think it feels like it’s not innovative or it’s boring. And so that’s why people do it. But save the innovation for the front end marketing. Put that innovation and that visionary and that creativity in the videos you create, and the Facebook lives you do during your launch, or not in your launch if it’s not a launch model… put that time and effort into that, because that’s what kind of always needs to change, the way you’re attracting and bringing people into your brand.
The actual strategy on the backend really doesn’t have to shift all the time. And once you find something that works, don’t shift it until data is telling you it’s saturated and it’s not working, which does happen at some points, and then you do need to shift gears. But until like the numbers are telling you that, don’t just believe it for yourself and decide that’s the case.
All right you guys. So I really wanted to do this one, and I’m actually going to have my team use it for some cases with clients, because I think it’s so important to have that person just give you that thing that you don’t want to hear, which is “Don’t change your strategy. Don’t change it if it’s working. Don’t change it if you need to test it a little bit longer. Don’t change it until you have data or numbers to back that you should change it.”
If you want support, to work with Team Hirsh, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com. We’ve got a couple spots open for clients. Submit that application. We have a great process to make sure you’re the right fit for us, to make sure that we know we can support you, and we won’t take you on unless that is the case. And I hope you guys have an amazing rest of your week. I will see you next time.
Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind-the-scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com.
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