[social_warfare]
Marketing that converts requires only 3 things: a stand-out offer, messaging that connects, and unique, custom-built strategy….
PRODUCT. MESSAGING. STRATEGY.
That’s it! No fancy “ninja” skills that only an ads strategist knows about.
(And notice, strategy is actually NOT at the top of the list!)
If you use this 3-part formula, it’s not about “if” marketing will work for you, but “when.”
And that, my friend, is exactly the epiphany I want you to experience!
That’s why I teach marketing tips right here on the podcast, why I speak at big + small events around the country, and why I sell my signature course, IGNITE.
But let me spell it out even more clearly:
“Marketing will work for you, if YOU do the work.”
And in this episode, I’ll explain what that means, plus…
- Why messaging matters more than strategy
- How marketing is about following a formula (NOT finding secret strategies)
- And how we ensure 40% show up rates to our own evergreen webinar…
Tune in for a behind-the-scenes look at The Hirsh Process in action! And then head over to Instagram (@emilyhirsh) to leave your comments and Q’s on my latest post.
Check out our IGNITE funnel by signing up for the webinar masterclass right here! I promise, it’s the best Facebook ads course out there – because we have access to the best of the best training resources with Team Hirsh.
And if you’re ready to work with Team Hirsh directly, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply!
Key Points:
[1:57] If you can understand this, you will change your life+business…
[3:25] There’s 3 parts to this formula
[3:49] “She went from not converting to profitable in 90 days…”
[4:56] Especially in 2020 – you need an irresistible offer for your funnel to convert
[8:26] Your messaging matters more than the strategy…
[11:35] Not a lot of people put strategy last… but it’s not the most important
[13:15] Paid challenges don’t work!
[14:43] Here’s what we did to sell IGNITE (live + evergreen)
[17:59] Marketing is not a secret strategy… it’s about following a formula
[18:55] “I thought I was bad at marketing, but I realized I can do this, too.”
[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I am so pumped about today’s podcast, because I just did a speech last night about The Hirsh Process, and about marketing, here in Austin at a local event called Internet Marketing Party.
I just get so excited when I get to see the way people comprehend marketing after hearing about The Hirsh Process and after hearing about this core concept that I always talk about. And it really helps … I’ve seen it help so many people, whether I’m speaking or they’re a student in IGNITE or even a client… change their perspective on the marketing in their business.
And that is, it’s not [about], “Will marketing work for me?” It’s [about], “When will it work for me?” That is so crucial and so key. Here’s what I, kind of, thought through when I was talking to someone… but also, on the flip side… We just, as of recording this podcast… this doesn’t come out for a little while, [from] the date I’m recording it, but… we just launched our own evergreen webinar funnel for IGNITE.
We’re not going to do many live launches anymore. We turned that evergreen after doing about two live launches last year. I’ve got a baby coming… live launches are just not really going to be doable. [But] I want to get that product into more people’s hands. We’ve had 75 students go through it. It’s amazing! I really want more people to have it and not have to wait twice a year to enroll in it.
So, we decided to launch it evergreen. What’s really cool is, we followed our exact process! We followed everything we do with clients, we followed everything I believe in, and it’s working, and it’s converting out the gate. I want to talk through that, because this is why I’m so excited, you guys! If you can get this, if you can understand this, it’s going to change your life and your business.
And that is, marketing always works! It’s not a matter of when, it’s if. And that’s up to you. I was thinking about our IGNITE funnel and then the conversations I had last night and just really reflecting on this formula that I believe is the formula to successful marketing. I want to share that with you guys today. It’s a very foundational, basic concept… except for I think we forget about them. We make things too complicated. I say that a lot, “We make things too complicated,” and it actually ends up hurting our results and our strategy.
Here’s the formula to successful marketing. We’re going to talk about each piece. There’s three parts. One, a good offer. Two, amazing messaging. And three, a unique, customized strategy. That is the formula. Let’s dive into each of those. The first thing is… and I’m going to kind of actually talk through this with IGNITE, because I think, we have clients who have done the same exact thing, and it’s so cool. We’re building out a case study right now for a client.
She came on our performance package 90 days ago, had a completely not-converting funnel… In 90 days, we implemented our process, we made changes. She was a great partner, because she implemented the changes. When we said like, “Hey, you need to update this email sequence,” or, “We need to change this in the webinar,” or, “[We need to change] the way that we have our messaging,” she did it.
She listened to our advice. 90 days, it’s converting. She is profitable… gone from a completely [non-converting] funnel to profitable in 90 days! That’s not even that long! When you think about the big picture, it’s so exciting. [But], I’m going to use this in comparison to IGNITE, because I don’t want to talk about a client that I don’t have permission to talk about, and go into detail, but just know what we did was treat IGNITE’s funnel and my funnel for that as a client with the agency.
I stayed out of a lot of the strategy, and we followed the process. We came back to The Hirsh Process and to these core pieces, and it worked. Within the first week we had sales, it’s converting. Let’s dive into that, using that as a good example. First one is your offer. I think this is especially true today. It might’ve been [that] a couple of years ago when digital marketing was not as huge and there [weren’t] as many influencers selling courses and digital products and doing webinars…
You could get away with having not as great of an offer. But [now] you have to have an irresistible offer for your funnel to convert. It has to be something that people want and that solves a problem for them that they really need and something that is better than anything else out there. I don’t want to say that and you feel like … because everyone doubts what they sell, like is it good enough? But I just want you to remove ego and look at your offer and the way it’s also being positioned.
Sometimes, it’s positioning. Sometimes, there’s an amazing offer, but it’s not being positioned that way, like it’s not focusing on those pain points and on the problems that it solves, so it doesn’t come off as an amazing offer. [But] your offer has to be amazing. It has to be better than what’s out there. You have to be able to compare it to what’s out there, why it’s different, why it’s better, why should somebody choose you when they have all these other options? All of those things, your offer has to be so obvious about why.
For me, IGNITE, two things. One, we proved the offer through the live launches. We did two live launches, and we converted great. We sold it for $2,000 and $2,500. That’s pretty high with no calls. We converted over, about 1.5 percent of the total list.
On one webinar, it was like a 7% conversion on the webinar, of live attendees. The other one was like 3%, when we raised the price, but it converted. It proved to us that it converted. We took that offer, we proved that it converted. Then second, it’s a really amazing offer. I truly, with all of my being, believe that it is one of the best, if not the best, marketing course out there, because of the data and Intel and resources and spreadsheets and checklists that my team has access to with clients that we put into this course.
It’s also not just a training material, it’s also done with you. There’s the live support calls. All of those components, like when I built out the offer, I built it not in like, “How can I make the most money?”
Obviously, I knew it was going to be profitable, I knew it was going to be something that we were going to make money with, because it’s a good offer. But I also built it on like, “How do I put everything in here that will allow somebody to go from either a non-converting or non-existing funnel to a converting one in 90 days? What do I need to put in there content-wise to make that happen?” That’s what we did.
We have an entire like, webinar script, funnel templates, everything possible. It’s not just a Facebook ad course. The offer is amazing, and that is key. The offer is also proven. I know people want it. We’ve already had over 75 people (and counting every week right now) going into the course, getting results. We’ve got a refund policy. Nobody’s asked for a refund.
It’s a good offer. That’s the first step, I believe, to getting it to convert and having a funnel and a marketing strategy that’s going to work, because I think the offer is so important. People have a lot of choices of where they could spend their money. If your offer is not so convincing and going to actually solve their problem and hit on a pain point for them, it probably will have a hard time converting.
The second part is your messaging. And these are in order, in my opinion, of importance. The first is your offer, second is messaging, third is strategy. Strategy is not number one. It’s the bottom of the list. It’s important, but it’s not number one. Second one is messaging. Your messaging is so important, and we’ve been having conversations in my team a lot about messaging being more important than strategy, messaging driving the ad results right now. It is a saturated place on Facebook and Instagram right now, and you have to stand out.
Your messaging has to speak to an ideal client or customer or whatever. It has to speak to them. It has to speak to the problems that they feel. It has to speak to the experiences they’re going through. It has to emotionally connect with them. You have to stand out! Your messaging from A to Z in your funnel, your Facebook lives, your podcast, your visibility, your opt-in, your webinar, your lead magnets, and then your sales, your emails, all of it has to be amazing.
People skimp out on this [because] writing copy is hard. It’s really hard. I have copywriters write all my copy. We have copywriters write all of our client’s copy. That’s what they do all day long, and they are experts in it. I am not actually an expert in copy, but I know when I read good copy. I read good copy when I know I’m emotionally connected and convinced in what I’m reading!
All of your messaging has to be on point. In order for it to be on point, you have to first have that foundational understanding of, “Who are we trying to attract? What are their objections? What are their pain points? What is keeping them up at night? Who is this person? Let me write this out in as detailed as I possibly can be about who this person is.” Then, “What are their problems and how do I solve that? Am I so clear on that?” It sounds… Every time I say this I’m like, “People are going to think this is basic,” but so many people don’t have this down.
Successful, million-dollar business owners that I talk to don’t have this clear enough. They’ve still made it, because they probably have a really good offer. But they could do so much better if they did this part. Your messaging has to be amazing. When I look at IGNITE, we tested different messaging. We tested different webinar titles. We tested different landing pages, and with different messaging on it.
We really talked to the students. We did testimonial videos with the initial students who got in… understood what it was that drew them into the course, and listened to all of that Intel and data, and then crafted that into our messaging. We’re getting like, $4 and $5 cost per lead webinar registrations right now, in a market that’s so saturated… a Facebook ad webinar, there’s so many! To get $4-5 webinar registration costs is pretty incredible, because our messaging is good, because our landing page is converting.
And because we took the steps to look at all the data, make the changes. I’m just following my process here. This is step 5 of The Hirsh Process, optimize. Looking at the data, making changes, making decisions, one foot in front of the other. Follow the process, and marketing always works.
The third thing, the third piece to the formula of success for marketing is your strategy. I think not a lot of people are going to put strategy last. I think in our minds, we think strategy’s first. If we can just have the perfect converting marketing strategy, then we’d have the converting funnel, then we’d have the big business, then we’d make the money. That’s how people see strategy, because strategy… it’s fun. It’s usually fun to implement. It’s exciting to hear about … I love coming up with new, innovative strategies, but those strategies do not matter if your messaging and your offer is not good and is not on point and is not going to connect [with] the people that you want it to.
The strategy [won’t] matter! We first have to have an amazing, killer offer. Then, we have to have amazing messaging. Then, we can have the strategy. Because, for example, let’s say you have a webinar strategy, which is what we’re doing with IGNITE, but your messaging sucks… so that means your webinar’s going to suck, and your pitch is going to suck. Or you have a webinar strategy, but your offer is either not what people want or not positioned what people want, so you’re going to pay to get all these people on your webinar, they’re going to listen to your webinar, and then they’re not going to buy.
What is the point in that? Let’s first build the foundation of offer and messaging. Then, we can do the strategy. The pieces with strategy, you have to consider two things. One, the audience you’re targeting, and, two, the offer that you’re selling and the price point of it, because depending on those two things, you’re going to have different strategies. And I’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, but for example, business to business marketing is different than business to consumer.
We’ve had a lot of people come in and be like, “Well, paid challenges are all the rage, like everybody’s doing paid challenges. I’m going to do a paid challenge.” In fact, we just had this happen. Someone in the fitness and health industry came in. She like, had her funnel, I’d say, 75% built with a paid challenge. As soon as my team saw that, we were like, “That’s a terrible idea,” because there’s way too many free challenges in the health and fitness space that a paid challenge is going to take so much effort to get somebody to sign up for that $27 challenge…
They’re not actually going to buy the next steps, and they’re not actually going to buy whatever it is that you actually want to sell in that challenge. So we flipped it around for her, and we pushed back on that. But the reason that she thought she should do it is because she had people who were targeting business owners, and were having success with a paid challenge. And that might work… [but] even then, like, I don’t know, maybe I should do a podcast episode on the paid challenge, because it works with people who have big audiences, like Russell Brunson.
It’s really hard if you don’t have a big warm audience. You’re still asking somebody for a sale up front. So, thinking through those things with your strategy, like, “What’s the price point of my offer? What’s the experience somebody needs to go through in order to purchase my offer? Who am I targeting? Are they going to convert on a webinar? Are they going to watch a webinar? Do they need a challenge? Do they need an opt-in? Do they need to call?”
All of those things is how you decide your strategy. For us, we already knew webinars converted for IGNITE, because I had done two live launches and they converted, so we obviously went with the webinar. But we padded in things like a 90-day nurture sequence with flash sales. So we’ve got all these webinar registrants coming in. We’re immediately profitable with the initial sales from those webinars. But then, we also have a 90-day nurture sequence with flash sales that I know we will sell more people on.
And I play the long game. Those people are going to start going through that 90-day nurture sequence, [people] who don’t buy. I’ll get sales in a month, two months from now from those initial leads that came in two months ago, or one month ago. So we thought through our strategy, one, with what we already knew was working. What we know is working in the industry, obviously, plays in… like, webinars do work, when done right.
Webinars work when the offer and the messaging is good, honestly. That’s the truth. If someone tells you a webinar doesn’t work, it’s because their offer or their messaging is off. Webinars do work for most audiences, if you have the foundation in place first and if you’ve thought through your strategy to your audience and your customer audience. So we did what we knew worked, we did what we knew works in the industry. And then I made an incredible webinar, because I knew my messaging, I knew my offer, and I already knew what’s working. Those two things are solid. Then, we just started driving traffic to it, and we watched all the metrics: the cost per lead, the landing page conversion, the actual webinar conversion. Are people watching the webinar?
We have like a 40% live show up rate on our evergreen webinar! That is so hard to do… [but it’s working] because of retargeted ads, and because of good messaging, [and] because we give away something in that webinar that, if they actually watch, they get the link to this free resource. It’s helping with the conversions of the webinar, of the actual live show up rate, because that’s really hard in an evergreen webinar, to get above 20% live show up rate [and we have a 40% show up rate].
All of our numbers look amazing. We got sales within the first week. I was so excited! Also, I want you guys to know, I went into this without expectations. I went into it saying… we had our goal budget. We had our goal of what we wanted that budget to do, but I also knew like, “This is a brand new funnel.” We’ve never run this evergreen.
We’re selling it at […] $2,000. We’re selling it on an evergreen webinar with no call, [at] $2,000. That’s not necessarily easy, because people sometimes want a call when you get over $1,000, $1,500… but I don’t want to do calls for that. We started it, and I didn’t have the expectation, so that was also key is, I went into it knowing, “We have to gather data, we have to push as many people through this funnel as possible to see how it’s converting…
Then, we can make changes.” I went into it knowing that and being willing to invest for a couple of weeks and make no sales. I actually would have been okay with that as long as I saw the other numbers or I could find problems and then fix those problems. We fortunately had a sale within three days of launching the funnel and have had continually consistent sales coming in, and so we can start to scale the ads.
What I love about all of this is, it just hopefully… my goal for you guys in this episode, and ub so much of what I do, is that you start to shift your perspective that marketing is not about some secret strategy, Ninja tips that somebody [keeps] from you, where you have to have [this] really hard to find advice or whatever you think, whatever [story about marketing] is in your head. Marketing is about process.
Marketing is about following a formula, consistently sticking with it, staying focused, and committing to it… and then committing to the long game of buying that data and just repeating the process of driving people through a funnel, fixing the holes, redoing it, rinse, repeat, do it again. When you start to look at marketing like that, and you start to see marketing as that process, and you realize…. It was the coolest thing ever….
We did an IGNITE testimonial video, and I was talking to one of the students, and she had come in and launched a brand new funnel. She built and launched a new funnel and turned it live within, I think it was 45 days. Then, she had made $6,000 in the next 45 days, so [more than] her investment back. I asked her her biggest takeaway from the course, and it was this. It was that, “I can do this… Marketing will work for me if I follow this process, because I thought like I wasn’t good at marketing, and I couldn’t do this, and like I wouldn’t be able to build the business that I saw other people doing…
And I realized, in looking at you and changing the way I looked at numbers, and changing the way I looked at my strategy and my process… I realized I could do this with my business.” [So] yes, it was great, she made $6,000. Yes, it was amazing, she launched a new funnel within 90 days, like amazing. She’s one of our A+ students. She does the work, she shows up. But for me, getting that perspective change on someone and having someone realize, I’m not special, these people having success are not special. They just did this…
They followed this formula. They followed this process until it worked, and they were persistent about it, one foot in front of the other, and that’s what she did. [So] having her realize like, “I can do this, too,” was amazing, because that’s life-changing. That will change your life. That will change your business, because you’ve just unlocked such a massive, massive thing that you didn’t have before, because you were stuck not knowing your strategy, not knowing how to get it to convert, and feeling like you’re failing because you see all these other people who have successful webinars… trust me, they went through this, and they went through pain to get where they are…
They went through struggle to get to where they are, and frustration, and things not converting, and losing some money. Everyone went through that to get it to convert. It’s the people who stick through it who get to the point of the success. So, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I will have my team link in, actually, a link to our IGNITE funnel, in the show notes of this episode, for you [click here for more about IGNITE!].
I don’t actually have, right now, a short link. I’m going to get it after this episode. I’m going to go buy the domain. I have one for the course, but I want you guys to go through the webinar and check that out.
I would love for you guys to go through that, and you can see our funnel, you can get into our 90-day nurture sequence. And honestly, if you are thinking about joining IGNITE… This was not meant to be a sales podcast for IGNITE at all. But I think it is the best Facebook [ads] and marketing course out there… not because I did something different necessarily. Well, I did, because I have live support and training support. But, I have access to golden resources through my team, for what we do for clients.
So we’ve put all of those and more into the course, and at any time, I can go to my team and say, “Hey, I need this training for IGNITE students,” and we put it into the course. That’s why it’s pretty amazing, because we’re in the trenches, we’re digging in the dirt, doing that, and every single day doing the work and then teaching it, where a lot of people just teach it but they don’t do the work, and so there’s a gap.
If you guys want to work with Team Hirsh in 2020, you can go to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with us, if you want this formula implemented in your business. Like I said, we have that performance package… We have clients that we can now do case studies on, because it’s been over 90 days since we launched it. They came in with a non-converting funnel and are now 90 days profitable and actually moving up into our premier-level package, because they want to scale and add in other funnels. That’s pretty amazing. That is hard to do. All right, guys, I’ll see you on the next episode.