131- The difference between cold, warm, and hot traffic

[social_warfare]

You know the difference between cold, warm, and hot traffic. But do you know which marketing strategies work best for each?

This is an important detail that too many business owners neglect.

Because really, it just takes some thoughtful strategy before you get started.

Let me break it down like this…

COLD traffic doesn’t know anything about you – so your goal here is to “make contact”
WARM traffic doesn’t understand how you can help them – so your goal here is to “give context”
HOT traffic is close to purchasing – so your goal here is to “close the sale”

So, what’s that mean for your marketing strategy?

In this episode I’ll simplify every step!

Plus, I’ll explain how these 3 key steps fit into The Hirsh Process – so you can avoid the most common MISTAKE we see at Hirsh Marketing.

Tune in for a detailed explanation that simplifies “the basics” of your 3 types of traffic.

And then tell me in the comments below, How can you make your current marketing strategy even better? Which traffic source needs some extra thought right now?

If you would like this strategy Done-For-You, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh! This cold, warm, hot breakdown is a CORE part of The Hirsh Process, which means it’s included inside every marketing strategy we create for clients.

Key Points:
[2:42] What’s your “goal” with cold traffic?
[4:03] How to build relationships with warm traffic
[5:46] Your hot traffic is *this* close to purchasing… what’s your strategy for closing the sale?
[7:02] How does this fit into The Hirsh Process? Let’s review steps 2, 3, 4…
[8:56] The KEY is – your strategy serves all 3 types of traffic in different ways
[10:41] Here’s another way to think about this with your webinar content
[12:25] So, what to do now? Start by looking at your current strategy.

[social_warfare]

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Episode Transcripts:

Hello, everyone. I hope you are all enjoying your December, making the most out of the last month of the year. I’m pretty pumped for 2020. It’s going to be a big year for me. One, because we’re having a baby in February, but also I just think business-wise, I have an insane amount of focus and clarity on where we’re going. I cannot wait to watch it unfold. I think I will take our company to 5 million plus this year, and I can feel it. I can feel it. We’ve done so much foundational work, and now it’s going to really pay off. And just things are feeling … I just have such an amazing team, amazing clients, and I love what I do. So today I want to dive in. It might be a little bit more basic of an episode, but I think that going back to the basics and simplicity is also sometimes really important.

And I’m also an expert in marketing, and so I forget about some of these basics being so important for people to come back to and look at in their own marketing. So I want to dive into the difference between cold, warm, and hot traffic, and how you should look at them. So not just like defining them for you, because that would be like a three minute podcast, but really defining how you should look at them. And I flush this out in one of my days off. I was thinking about this and just kind of like working through. I think about podcast episodes a lot on my days, like free space, white space time. And I was thinking through this because I think that you hear these terms a lot, but it’s like, “Okay, cool. Cold traffic. Like how do I be strategic with the fact that they’re cold traffic or hot traffic? What am I supposed to do?”

So I broke it out … So first of all, let’s define them and let me show you what I did or tell you what I did when I broke them out. So first, cold traffic is somebody who has not had any touch point with your brand. They don’t know who you are. They don’t have any trust there with you. They obviously don’t know what you sell, but even more importantly, they don’t know what problems you solve, what you can do for them, why they should even not only buy from you but pay attention to you. Okay, so cold traffic. Then the goal with cold traffic is to just make contact with them. Is to get their attention, get them to play a video, get them to listen to a podcast, get them to somehow consume some of your content.

And that’s your goal. So each one of these I’m going to define, and then I’m going to talk to you about your goal and then we can talk about how that plays into the strategy. So this is very much also integrated in with the Hirsh process, which is basically leveraging ads and strategy based on how warm your lead is, and driving them through your customer journey or your funnel. So cold traffic has no idea who your brand is, no idea who you are. And your goal with cold traffic and targeting cold traffic is to make contact with them, is to begin to build that trust, is to get them to consume something of yours just to make that consumption. Next one is warm traffic. So warm traffic might’ve consumed a little bit of something of yours. Maybe they’ve watched a video, maybe they’ve listened to a podcast.

Maybe they might’ve downloaded like a basic PDF, but they really don’t have a lot of information about you and your brand. And most importantly, the problem you solve, what you’re going to do for them, why they should pay attention to you and buy from you. And so your job with warm traffic is to give context, is to really go deeper in your nurturing and in your relationship and trust building with them, to build that trust to ultimately convince them to buy. And so during this period, you might be getting them to watch a webinar. That would be a great one, because they might’ve already had a little bit of contact with you so they trust you a little bit, but they haven’t really gotten deep. And if they watch a webinar, they’ll get deep enough to be able to hopefully convert.

So your goal with warm traffic is context. How do I give them content? How do I strategically … And when I say give them, I’m talking about how do you put this into your customer journey, into your funnel and into your strategy so it’s hitting these people. So how do I give them that context? How do I get them to understand the problems my company and my brand solves, my product solved, and build that relationship with them? And so this usually happens in something that they’ve signed up for. They were cold traffic and maybe they saw a little bit of content, signed up for your webinar, and now you’re going to give context in that webinar, or in that challenge or in that video series. Or maybe it’s on a call, like in some cases, but that might go into the next one.

Your hot traffic is people who are very close to purchasing from you, and they’re very hot traffic. They probably have trust with your brand. They’ve consumed some of your content. They have that trust with you to the point where they can buy, and your goal with hot traffic is to convert them. And so in a webinar funnel, this would be happening at the end of the webinar, after you’ve given them all that context. You’d be then pitching them, and then it would also continue to happen in your followup emails. And so your goal is to have conversion. Hot traffic, your goal is conversions. So let me recap this. Cold traffic, people who don’t know you, don’t know your brand, don’t know the problem you solve, what you offer, your goal is to just have contact with them. To just get your brand in front of them, get your message in front of them, and really make that context so you can begin building the relationship.

Second, warm traffic, your goal is context. So really starting to nurture them, getting them to understand your process, your thinking, why are you different than other companies who do what you do? Why should they trust you? Why should they begin to build that relationship? And ultimately, then they move into hot traffic where your goal is conversion. Now let’s look at our strategy. Everybody should have a piece in their strategy where this is where you have all of these. You have cold traffic, making contact with them, warm traffic, giving them context. And hot traffic, converting them. So in your customer journey that you build out or in your funnel, you should either be building this in or restrategizing this so it is in there, so you have all of these things. And so this might look like … Let’s wrap it around to the Hirsh process here.

So if you don’t know the Hirsh process, the first five episodes of the podcast actually go through each step very in-depth, so you can listen to those. But the second step after you strategize and set your foundation is visibility and brand awareness. That’s contact. That is really targeted towards cold traffic, towards people who don’t know about your brand, and it’s putting out content that’s just value-based to make that contact. It might be podcasts, it might be Facebook lives, it might be videos. It’s putting that content out there to make that contact. Then we move into step three, which is lead generation, which is your context. That’s where you’re trying to get them to go a little bit deeper. A lot of times for our clients it looks like a webinar, but it’s something they’re signing up for that they’re going to consume that’s going to give them the context about your brand, about your beliefs, about the problems you solve, and really build that trust on a next level with them.

And then the final piece is … Or the fourth step, not final, but the fourth step is sales. And sales and selling, and so that is your hot traffic and that’s conversion. And a lot of that times that comes down to retargeting ads, your email followup sequence, anything that’s actually making that pitch. The key is that you have all three of these. The key is that you have a strategy that does all three of these. So what you should look at is when you draw out your customer journey and when you draw out your funnel strategy, do you have all three of these things? And I like the way of looking at this, of tying in the Hirsh process with cold, warm and hot traffic because that’s ultimately what it is. It’s layering in ads, but also strategy to reach these different levels, and to reach people who are going to need different things.

And so why do we do this? Because you can’t talk to somebody who’s a completely cold lead like you could somebody a hot lead. Like if you just went up to a cold lead and you were like, “Buy my product,” they wouldn’t do it. In eCommerce, arguably sometimes it works, but even then they have to have five to seven touch points with a brand in order to convert. So it’s super important that you build your strategy so that not only you have it worked in there, but the way you talk to people at the different levels is for those people. So the cold traffic, the visibility and the brand awareness and making that contact is very value-based. There’s really not any pitching, it’s got content. It’s like giving away some of your best stuff to really share your thinking, your brand’s strategies, and why they should trust you.

Then as you get into warm, you can get deeper in the context. But one mistake people make is they will go too quickly into the context in the warm traffic. And even getting someone to sit through an hour webinar, they have to be convinced that it’s worth it. One interesting way you could also think about it too, is let’s say you do successfully get cold traffic to your webinar. Well, in the first 10 minutes of your webinar, you’re giving contact to them and you’re appealing to those cold traffic people because you got to get them to stay. And then in the next 30 minutes of your webinar you’re giving context, and you’re going into detail with the content going deeper. But if you just started with the context, you’d probably lose a ton of people on your webinar.

And then the final piece of your webinar is conversion. And so you could even break it out into that simple of a strategy on your webinar itself, and you probably do. But then also let’s zoom out and look at our full funnel strategy and our customer journey. Do we have content and steps targeting our target market, our ideal person that we’re going after that’s hitting cold, warm and hot traffic, and talking to them in those strategic ways? So everybody should have this in their strategy. Everybody should go through, and actually … I would suggest that you guys sit down and you write, “Cold traffic, what do I have for them? Warm traffic, what do I have for them? Hot traffic, what do I have for them?” And where’s the gaps? Where do you need to improve it?

And where do you need to add in some more content or some steps or more nurturing? Because that’s where once you layer it in, that’s why I created the Hirsh process, is because the layering in is so important. And if we just focused on one of these, we would lose so much money because we would be missing out on the other two groups. And so the layering in, talking to people depending on where they fall in these categories is so crucial and so important. So, look at your own strategy. I want you guys all to do that. I think it would be helpful for you. It’s something that we do with clients. It’s something that we do with ourselves.

Something to constantly come back to, too, because there might be places where you’re like, “Oh, we’ve put so much effort this last quarter into our hot traffic and our conversion that we kind of have let slip the cold traffic and the content we’re creating for cold traffic. And so we need to go back to that and look at that, and kind of beef that up.” If you would like this done for you, you can go to helpmystrategy.com and apply to work with team Hirsh. This is all part of our strategy. A core piece of our strategy is the Hirsh process, which incorporates all of this. And we do this for all of our clients, all the brands we work with, and are so excited about the next year roster that we have. So if you’re looking at getting marketing support from I would argue the best team out there in the digital marketing space, then go to helpmystrategy.com and apply to work with us. Thanks so much for listening, guys.