[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
The difference between successful ads + failed marketing is not what you think.
Goal-breaking ads are NOT the result of finding the best audiences, using the latest ‘ninja’ strategies, and knowing the best technique… Those things help, of course! Otherwise I wouldn’t have a company.
But really, the foundation of any good marketing strategy is the *skill* behind pivoting + adjusting to meet your end goal.
That’s where having a skillful team comes into play! But remember, if you choose to DIY ads, these skills can be learned through practice.
So, in this episode I’m detailing the importance of urgently pivoting your marketing plan when necessary (+ the skill this requires!). I’ll talk you through a likely problem area and where to start, plus how this relates to big influencers and small solopreneurs alike.
Tune in – and if you’re a DIYer, save your spot inside my latest masterclass all about exploding your brand through paid marketing (without breaking the bank). The class is free! Sign up right here.
Key Points:
[3:16] This applies to both big + small companies
[4:28] Here’s the benefit of having a team on your account
[6:36] “Well, how do I know what to do first?”
[9:09] Here’s where I always start
[11:09] You are not a failure if something doesn’t work immediately
CTA:
Tune in – and if you’re a DIYer, save your spot inside my latest masterclass all about exploding your brand through paid marketing (without breaking the bank). The class is free! Sign up right here.
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[social_warfare]
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, everybody. Hello, hello. Welcome back to the podcast. I am super excited for today’s episode and have had just a really good week. I just feel like my team is running itself so well, and I get to be in content creation and have my full two days of just total white space and whatever I want to do, which is so helpful as a CEO. I talk about it a lot, but I can’t recommend it enough, that you build in that time, especially as your business grows.
Today what I want to dive into is, how marketing is often about pivoting and adjusting, and what I mean by that. This is inspired because, it’s totally launch season right now, so we have quite a lot of clients in launch mode. It’s just something I’ve reflected on as I watch my team kind of pivot and adjust as needed and when needed. I think it’s one thing that’s going to differentiate a marketing company or an ads manager, or even an employee that you hire, and their success in doing paid ads versus not, because marketing is not about having the most … This is a piece of marketing, but a bigger piece of marketing is the pivoting and adjusting … but, having the most, best ad, ninja audiences and a killer strategy out the gate. This is actually true for even big launches. Sometimes you have to pivot. Sometimes you think something’s going to convert at X dollars a lead, and it’s converting higher, and it’s not a matter of, “Whoa,” sitting there and just being like, “Whoa, I can’t believe it’s converting so high.” You pivot and you adjust and you get it down lower, and that’s kind of what you have to do.
In a big launch… so we’re in a couple of really big launches… it’s so, so crucial that you do this with a massive sense of urgency, because you only have a certain amount of days to promote something. So, if you have a live webinar during a live launch, you have 10 days probably… that’s how long we usually promote for… to promote that webinar before it happens. So, every minute literally counts in your advertising, and you have to have that urgency or it’s going to be too late, by the time it’s day six and you’re not hitting your goals.
Today, I was just in a group Voxer with my team who was just updating me on one of our bigger accounts, and just telling me, “Okay, cost per lead is a little bit high.” We’re only 24 hours into the ads, and I think it was like, a dollar or two over our goal, and so they’re like, “Nobody’s freaking out. We’re doing fine, but here’s what we’re going to do.” And we have somebody on my team, she’s our strategic director, and her job is to go in and just audit accounts. So we have her go in and just look in the ad account and tell us, just a fresh set of eyes… “Here’s all the things we could do, headlines I’d change,” just some more suggestions, because sometimes a fresh set of eyes is great.
There’s so many pieces to ads, especially in Ads Manager, that it’s sometimes really hard to … not really hard, but there’s just so many things you could look at. You could look at the headline or the copy or the audiences or the CTR or whatever, and you have to look at all of it. And so, sometimes somebody new sees something different, which is why we have layers and a team on all of our clients’ accounts, because one person will most likely miss things. So, what they were doing was going through and creating a whole audit of everything we were going to do to get the cost per lead down to make sure that we’re on track.
But the thing that I was reflecting on … So, I went on my morning walk this morning, and you could in one sense be like, “Aw, man, we’re not hitting our goal. We’re one day in, and we’re not hitting our goal. It must not be working.” Or… I was just instead super appreciative of my team in the sense that they had, you know, obviously without me driving it at all, this massive urgency in where they’re like, “We’re going to get rush copy from our copywriter. We’re going to do this,” and we’re not even that far off the goal, but what I’m saying is, one day is so critical in a 10-day promo period that if you’re at all under the goal, it’s urgent, because the more you get behind, the harder it gets to catch up, if that makes sense. When you’ve got 10 days to spend a ton of money and get a ton of leads, every hour counts.
So, I was reflecting on how marketing is about those moments. Marketing is about the moments where you go in and you see something and how it’s working… and it doesn’t have to be on this large of a scale, but you see something and how it’s working, and then you pivot and you adjust and you create new strategies, and you get new copy, and you try new audiences, and you shift this headline, and you turn this ad off, and you make those flash decisions based on the data, and that’s where a lot of the success comes in. And that’s where the skill comes in, which is why I was saying you’re going to need this in any ads team or ads person, if it’s an individual that you hire, because if they don’t have the ability to do this and do it fast, especially in a live launch, it’s going to be extremely detrimental to the success of the campaign.
Because most of the time, even in huge launches of successful influencers, you get success, but then there’s some things that you didn’t know…. You didn’t know how that ad was going to convert, because it’s a brand new ad, and you didn’t know if Facebook was going to be weird about spending a budget. There’s so many factors, like literally hundreds of factors, and so you have to have the skill set to pivot and adjust. I’ve trained my team a ton on this, and a lot of it comes from… because I know people are thinking, “Well, how do I know what to do? How do I …” I think that’s where a lot of the overwhelm with ads comes from is like, “How do I know what to tackle first?” A lot of my students ask me that, “Should I look at my copy? Should I look at my audiences? Should I look at this?”
And there is no one right answer. That’s why it’s hard. It’s not like, “First look at your copy, then look at your audiences.” It comes from experience, I think. And so I think the reason why my team is so awesome at this is, we’ve done it so many times. And myself, too. I’ve done it so many times, and so we know how to respond when we have to quickly pivot and adjust. And I think that… what I want people to realize is that the true skill in a marketer and in marketing, and especially in paid traffic and running Facebook and Instagram ads, comes down to can you pivot and adjust strategically? Not necessarily… I mean, this is obviously, like I said, a piece of it, but it’s not all about putting out the best ad and the best audience initially, and then whoever does that wins. It’s about the pivoting and the adjusting.
And this is also true … you know, I talk so much about buying data and people at smaller levels in their company where they’re only spending maybe $1,000 a month or less, you still have to pivot and adjust. You still have to make [these] decisions. Not maybe with as much urgency, especially not [without] the live launch and the urgency with that, but you still have to pivot and adjust, and you still have to be able to say, “Okay, I spent $500. Here’s my results, and here’s what I’m going to do about those results. Here’s what I’m going to change.” And that’s where the true skill comes in. That’s where the true results come in. That’s why people hire us. If it was literally as easy as just creating a cool ad and putting in your same audiences every time and then just throwing it up on Facebook, we would not have a company. The skill comes into the pivoting and the adjusting and the tweaking of the strategy and the ability to do that on the fly.
Because you cannot predict everything, and I’m especially talking about live launches in a 10-day period. You can’t predict. You can’t predict always how it’s going to convert. You have data, you have things that you’re going off of if you’ve done previous launches obviously. But there are a lot of times going to be new ads, and I don’t always know which one’s going to do the best. So you have to have that mentality and that skill to be able to pivot and adjust.
Now, because I know people really struggle with … and I know this from my students, people really struggle with, “Where do I pivot and adjust? And where do I start?” Here’s how we do it. First of all, my strategic director does a massive audit. And we’re dealing with a really big ad spend, so there’s a lot of data for her to go in and look at in a 24-hour period. So, she goes in and looks at, in the ads account, like every metric. But here’s where I usually start, in my gut… a lot of times, if it’s a high cost per lead or a high cost per click or something’s off with the ads at all and we’re not hitting our numbers, I go to the messaging.
Because the messaging is so crucial. And a lot of times, you at least found some quality audiences. And so, for a lot of my students, when they come to me with ad results, and they’re like, “I don’t know if it was the audience or the messaging,” I usually, not every single time, but I usually have them fix the messaging first, try it again, and then see what happens. There’s probably audience tweaking that we always need to do, too. But it’s a lot of times the messaging, and you have to nail that. Nail the headlines, nail the images, nail the body copy. Those are all super important things. And so, if you’re struggling with this, and you’re struggling [with] where to start, I would always start with the messaging. I mean, just make it easy and say that. It’s not always [that] the messaging is bad, but a lot of times it is. Like, 70% of the time that is actually the problem.
You know, in this case that I’m referencing, my experience today, the messaging is not bad. It’s just that we need more. We need to look at now, “Okay, we’ve had five or six ad versions. Let’s take these two out of the mix, keep these three going, put two new ones in that are killer, fire, so good, and see how that does.” It’s [about] making those decisions. So yeah, I just felt inspired to share, and so that you guys have that perspective, because I don’t want for you… or you to feel like somebody else is ever a failure because out the gate, something didn’t work to your expectation. Where the fun and the magic happens is when you’re pivoting and you’re adjusting and you’re tweaking and you’re optimizing and you’re fixing it to get it to where you want to be.
That is where the magic actually happens. And so don’t ever feel like, “Man, I launched my funnel and spent a couple hundred dollars, and my ads didn’t work.” You’re playing the game! That’s part of the process. Now, what are you going to do about it? What decisions are you going to make, and how are you going to fix this and update this, and what tweaks are you going to make, and how are you going to optimize it, and how are you going to look at the numbers? That is part of the game. You cannot avoid that. And that is why strategists exist, why my team exists, why we do what we do, because the true skill comes into how quickly and strategically we can do these things for the success of a huge launch.
All right, you guys, this was a short, quick episode. Hopefully you found that helpful. I’m really all about changing that perspective of marketing for you guys, because I think that people just have the wrong, sometimes, mentality of how marketing works and how Facebook ads work. I’ve experienced this time and time again, between students, between potential clients, and clients, just kind of realizing where the magic actually happens. It happens in the pivotal moments and the adjusting. If you guys want support from Team Hirsh to do this all for you, because it is a lot of work and it is a lot of strategy… we are very experienced at doing this with both big and small budgets. You can go to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with our team.
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. If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review, so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.