[social_warfare]
If you ask me about the 2020 goals for my business, all I have to say is… I want to simplify everything + make it even better!
(I know that sounds boring, but playing the long-game in business means staying focused.)
Here’s what I mean:
Last month I broke everything in my internal marketing department (not the people! just the structure) and re-built everything.
Ironically, my own marketing has taken a backseat to clients’ lately – so I had a lot of work to do in following my own advice…
“CONNECT what you have first, before starting anything new.”
Basically, I connected every opt-in, funnel, and email sequence (silo-ed projects previously) and put them together strategically, so now…
- The people who opt-in to our Hirsh Marketing Report will also be sent to our application funnel
- The ‘Thank You’ page for our application will link to my mini 5-step training
- And “Denied Applicants” will be sent to our IGNITE course page
If you do nothing else to prepare for next year, I highly recommend taking a look at what you *currently* offer with your marketing… and connecting everything FIRST!
That’s how to simplify your marketing strategy (+remember, simple marketing strategies often work better than complicated ones!).
Tune into this episode for why + how I broke everything to put it back together. And then tell me below if this inspires you to make a big change in your own business!
If you’re ready to work with Team Hirsh in the new year, head to HelpMyStratey.com to apply.
For more about the 90-day nurture sequence, listen to episode 37, “How to get 15-25% more sales from your webinars.”
Key Points:
[2:05] Here’s how I’m simplifying my customer journey
[3:58] ATTN content creators: What if you combine all those silo-ed projects…
[5:29] Here’s how I connected every piece of my marketing
[7:38] Our “denied” applicants will be supported with “nurture emails” for 1+ years!
[10:31] You think you need a new project… but you actually just need to connect what you have (FIRST)!
[12:21] You can’t create a strategy in a month… it takes time (and constant improvement)
[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast if you are a regular listener, and welcome to the podcast if you are new around here. I am excited about today! It’s funny, when you record podcasts and you create content like this as a content creator, everybody kind of gets a taste of what’s going on in your business and your life, even if the content’s not necessarily directly about it, because that’s what I’m inspired to share. A lot of what I’m sharing is about simplifying your marketing right now, and really doing that house cleaning, “let’s fix the foundation,” because that’s what we’ve been doing in our company, and that’s what I’ve been spending a lot of my time doing. I think it’s because I’m a super pregnant lady right now, and I’m “nesting” in my business, [that’s] what I keep joking about is like, cleaning everything, getting rid of the old, fixing the foundation.
[I] definitely do that in my house, but also in my business, too, before having a baby. So today I want to talk about with you guys simplifying and connecting everything in your marketing, and really in your customer journey, and in your whole marketing [strategy]. And I want to start with just sharing with you what I just did for our company, because I think it will be helpful. Just listening to what I did might spark some ideas, my hope is it’ll spark some ideas for your own business and your own funnels and customer journeys and like, everything we have out there that we create, because we’re content creators, and just kind of connecting it… and how that leads to simplifying it, because I think we overcomplicate things a lot. So, what I recently did was, literally reset my entire marketing and sales.
Not all the people, but just reset like, our processes, what we’re doing… I went and questioned everything from our website copy, to our regular funnels that are just on our website lead gen, our podcast pages… literally everything. I broke it all, and then I was like, “We’re going to rebuild it like this.” It took me two or three weeks, and I couldn’t stop until I was done doing it. I was obsessed with it, because the deeper I went, the more holes I found, and I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Because we’ve grown so fast that I’ve put so much of my energy and effort into, honestly, our delivery, and our client delivery, and processes, and getting [myself] out of that, that I haven’t paid attention to our marketing and sales very much, our own, in our business.
Which is ironic, because of course… Whenever you offer a service, your business always gets the [least] of that service, because you’re so worried about the clients. So I was so happy that I had… pretty much my whole time that I work all week was focused on this for a couple of weeks, and I broke everything to rebuild it. And one thing I did was, a lot of us create content. We’ll create an opt-in. We’ll get this great idea, and we’ll create an opt-in. Or we, maybe, have a really old opt-in that’s just out there on our website, or we have a way that we’re connecting with our audience… like for me, it’s my podcast. And we have all these things, and we kind of just get on autopilot with them, and they almost become little silo-ed things.
Then we also, maybe, have funnels. Like for us, we’ve got an application funnel to work with our agency. And then we’ve got our webinar funnel to sell IGNITE, so we’ve got that funnel. And we have a few different, core ways that people can come into our world. Well, I feel like what we do is, we silo those, and so it’s like, “Okay, over here we have our application funnel, and then we’ve got this opt-in, and it’s over here. And then we have this other funnel over here, this webinar,” and they’re all these silo-ed strategies. So what I decided to do was, first of all, I re-did all of our core things, like the pages, the emails, everything. I took down stuff, too, because it was old, and somehow people would find it and buy it, or they would… so it wasn’t redirecting to the most up-to-date thing, or they would download something, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even want to know what those emails sequences are, attached to that.”
Come on, you guys all know what I’m talking about! But I connected everything. So for example, here’s for my business, because I’m hoping this gives you ideas for yours, because I obviously don’t know your exact business if you’re listening, but we’ve got levels that people can come in and work with us. So they could either be at the lowest level, iGNITE, buy our course and want to do it themselves, and not be able to pass off their marketing yet. Or they want to hire a marketing team. Then we have two different levels in our done-for-you services with our Performance and our Premier packages. And so I started with our core funnel, which is our application funnel. That’s how everybody comes in, they fill out an application, they get approved or not approved, and then they’re going on a call, and then hopefully [they’re] sold into being a client.
Well, if they’re not approved on the application, it was not very strategically sending them to what I wanted to send [them to], which is my webinar funnel for my course as the downsell. And so I very strategically connected… “Okay, if they come into the application funnel, they’re approved, and they go here. They’re denied, and I’m going to link over [to] this other funnel very strategically, and send them there.” So I did that. And then we have our two opt-ins on our website. We have a Hirsh Marketing Report and case studies. Same thing, they opted-in, they were getting some nurture emails, they were out-of-date nurturing emails… but why would I not send them to our application funnel? So on the ‘thank you’ page, I updated that. And now, you guys can totally go stalk me and go to the HirshMarketingReport.com and download it, or on the homepage of our website, and see what I did.
And then on the ‘thank you’ page, I connected the application with this video that we have, this little mini training I did, with the application, so that if anyone comes onto our website, and they opt-in to one of those core opt-ins that we have, where I was getting random opt-ins from my web traffic, without running ads to those, and not capitalizing on those leads, now I’m sending them somewhere strategically. So I connected them to our application funnel, which then, if they’re denied there, they’re going to go to the webinar funnel, and now it’s connected. And so I basically just connected everything we have, so it’s like this very strategic journey where, instead of being all these silo-ed strategies, or silo-ed funnels, they really all support each other. And so, I added nurture sequences for… if an application is denied, that’s going to check on them for the next year.
That’s amazing automated followup that I just didn’t have fully in place yet, at least not strategically. And then I added… if they’re denied, [here’s] all these resources, go check out the podcast, the Hirsh Marketing Report… these things that we’re putting effort into. We release the Hirsh Marketing Report every month, but we were not capitalizing on it. And so, I really connected everything in my marketing so that, if someone comes in from anywhere, they’re going to go on the right journey, and they’re going to go where I want them to go. And I think that we [often] jump to a new strategy before we do that, where, my advice would be, if you have a funnel, let’s say you have a webinar funnel and it’s working, instead of going to create a brand new funnel, or launch a new product, or do something totally new and kind of start at ground zero…
Instead of doing that, what you should do is just add to that funnel, like, “Do I want to sell something higher? Or lower?” And serve the people who are already coming into that funnel, but maybe for some reason, they’re not a fit for that product, because obviously a percentage of people coming in are not going to buy. How do I want to serve them? Because that’s already traffic we have, that’s already traffic that we’re either getting from ads, or organic, or both. And so how do we capitalize on that further? And I think if you focused on that instead of going to create something new and kind of starting at ground zero, you’d see so much more traction and success. And, entrepreneurs, we just don’t do it. We like the new thing. We think we need the new funnel or the new strategy.
And sometimes it’s a matter of just building out what we have. The other thing I did is, with our IGNITE webinar funnel, I built in… and I’ve talked about this before [see episode 37, “How to get 15-25% more sales from your webinars”], because this is a common strategy we encourage clients to do and we do ourselves, but… a 90-day nurture sequence. And so now, when people come into my webinar, if they don’t buy, they’re nurtured for 90 days with really strategic nurture content, and then flash sales worked in there, to resell the offer. But so many people don’t have something like that. And so what happens is like, “Oh, you come in my webinar, you get pitched my offer, you don’t buy,” you’re just sitting on my list. Well, there’s such a percentage of people who are going to sit on your list for a while, and then they’ll be ready to take action, and unless you’re strategic with that, you’re going to lose out on those opportunities.
And so, connect everything in your marketing and build it out fully so that you’re hitting people at all the different angles possible. So for me it was like, all the angles… they could get approved on the application, here’s their journey; they’re denied, here’s their journey. That connects over to a different funnel, and here’s that. And then if they don’t buy that, they’ve got a 90-day nurture sequence. And then everything else I do front-facing, from social media to our website to my organic funnels to the podcast, everything… it needs to connect to my end result. Otherwise, why am I putting my time into that content creation? Because why would I put my time into that if it’s not actually going to help my end result? Which, we have to be clear on what our end result was.
So I knew [mine]. Your end result should be very clear. Like, when people ask me the question of, “What are you working on in your business next year?” or, “What are your plans?” or, “What are your goals?” It’s like, I’m going to do more of this, and I’m just going to keep making it better. I don’t have all these new exciting projects every month and every quarter. A lot of what we do, honestly, is, we make what we already have better. And that’s my goal. I actually just got asked this on a call the other day, it was a mastermind I’m in, and my answer was literally, “Get more clients, sell more IGNITE courses.” That is my 2020 goal, and that is all we’re focusing on. And so, everything we have, every asset we have, is going into that goal.
And so you should be very clear about that, because when you are, and when you’re that focused, it is so insanely powerful, because you’re able to make your customer journey, and your funnel, and your strategy around that, so good. We can’t create a strategy in a week or even a month. We need the customer feedback, we need to know where to upsell and downsell them, and how to build it out, and how to nurture. And all of those pieces take a lot of time and constant improvement. And so if you can stay focused on that and focus on improving that and scaling that, that’s how you take your business to the next level. It’s not about new launches, new products. So for me, that’s my answer to people, and it sounds so boring. But again, simplifying your marketing, connecting everything, not over-complicating it.
One thing that I think we do is… I’ve got these opt-ins. I could write totally different emails for them and have different offers in them and think that I need all these things. And it’s like, why not just connect it to what I already have (that’s good) and just use that as another way to capitalize on what I already have? Instead of over-complicate it with a different offer and different emails and all these things, like, there’s no need. Simplify it, make it really, really good, and then scale it. That’s the key to success. So I hope that inspired you guys with all the housecleaning I’m doing in my business. It’s been really, really good. I’ve been feeling very good about it. So, you can go check out any of that stuff on my website, if you want to see what we’ve done.
We really did update all the copy, and I literally broke everything and rebuilt it. But one of the core things that came from that was, I ended up just connecting everything, because I felt like I had a bunch of silo-ed projects that I had worked on at one point and never fully optimized, if that makes sense. If you guys are thinking about working with Team Hirsh this next year coming up, in 2020, it’s a good time to apply and get on a call with us and just get planning for that. It’s going to come fast. We are always really busy in December and January with new clients, and so that’s super exciting. We love all the clients that we’re signing on right now, and we really enjoy creating this simplified custom marketing for our clients and getting some amazing, amazing results. So if you want to apply to work with us, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com, and I will see you all on the next episode.