[social_warfare]
Very few entrepreneurs are able to have the level of focus necessary to master + scale a marketing strategy.
Because, quite frankly – it’s hard to whittle down the good ideas that keep coming, to only a few that you put every ounce of dedicated work into… for years (not months! years).
My marketing team is focused on 2 main initiatives: sign more clients + sell IGNITE to more students.
Every new idea we have goes through the question of, “Does this move us toward one of these main goals?”
If the answer is ‘no,’ we drop it completely.
In this episode I talk about why this is one of THE hardest things we do as entrepreneurs (+why it’s entirely necessary).
I’ll go into details about…
- Why most people lack focus
- Why entrepreneurs chase after quick results (even though we know they’re a myth!)
- And how my company’s incredible focus plays out in our marketing department
Honestly, I struggle with one-pointed focus for business – even now!
But I can tell you with complete certainty, your success is on the other side of FOCUS, clarity, and determination…
Now – once you’ve listened, hop over to Instagram (@emilyhirsh) to leave your thoughts on our latest post! (I always love hearing from podcast listeners.)
If you want a marketing team on your side, to keep you focused + working on the right things, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!
If you want to hear more about how I recently revamped my marketing team + created an incredible new resource (called the Marketing Playbook!), listen to episode 135, “The huge epiphany I had managing my team.”
If you want more information about how we strategize for our microwebinar, listen to episode 136, “The Microwebinar Strategy.”
Curious about what I mean by “storytelling with numbers”? I explain our whole tracking spreadsheet for clients inside episode 145, “Let your numbers tell a story.”
Key Points:
[4:34] My marketing team is focused on our 2 main initiatives…
[6:13] Here’s why most people don’t have this level of focus
[10:11] They either get distracted or take on too much…
[11:38] How does this 2-initiative FOCUS play out in my marketing department?
[15:14] And P.S. here’s what I do when I start to feel like my company’s not doing enough…
[social_warfare]
Episode Transcripts:
What’s up everyone? Hello. I hope you are all doing amazing and having an amazing first month of 2020 and just crushing it. We are doing amazing things here at Hirsh Marketing. Truly it’s going to be such a good year. I spent the last really quarter in my marketing department and I’m super excited about everything that we’ve worked on, and I just feel like I’ve gotten that department is such a good place and I’m pumped for it. I’ve also … You might still hear it in my voice, spent the last week and a half honestly sick, which sucks. I really am not good at resting, so I would be sick one day and then I’d start to feel better, so I’d do my normal routine. And then I would get sick again, even more sick the next day. So super frustrating and I couldn’t record any podcasts or do my normal schedule, which I really struggle with. So I’m feeling better, but I don’t sound all the way better and it’s just won’t go away 100%. But I’m getting there. So I hope you guys are having an amazing first month.
Today I was inspired to dive into this episode just based on a lot of the work that I’ve been doing in my own marketing department. And it’s cool because I get to experience not only my team, from the perspective of a client … because I do. My team treats me basically as a client, all the same processes from our weekly calls, to our weekly reporting, to the actual implementation of the ads. My team treats me as a client, so I get to experience it as a client. And obviously I give feedback because I’m always critical of our delivery, but my team is amazing. It’s so amazing, the best team out there to have on my ads obviously. And also though I’ve been able to kind of experience this from our client’s perspective and what they go through with their marketing. And so I titled this episode, Very Few Entrepreneurs Are Able to do This. And what it is that very few entrepreneurs I believe are able to do is have the level of focus and dedication to mastering a marketing strategy and then scaling that marketing strategy because it takes a lot of patience.
I’ve spent the last 90 days basically overhauling my marketing department. We broke everything down. I literally … It was like I went in with a sledgehammer, broke everything, tore everything apart, found all the holes and the gaps and then rebuilt it. And so from our organic strategy, to our email marketing strategy, to our paid traffic strategy, to our funnels, to our website, you name it, I broke it down with that sledgehammer, rebuilt, it re-documented the processes. We have this marketing playbook. I talked about it in a previous podcast episode, about what I learned with my team and we built this marketing playbook. It was like a documentation of everything in our marketing, and all of our strategies, all of our process in marketing, our goals, everything. It’s like a 36 [inaudible 00:03:17] and growing all the time because we add things into it page document. So I broke that down, hired a new awesome marketing coordinator, rebuilt my marketing team, and then we launched these funnels. And so my marketing team is very focused on what our marketing and initiatives are. We have really two main initiatives. One, sign clients into our one-on-one services.
And two, sell our Ignite course. Everything we do from organic efforts, podcast efforts, email marketing efforts, paid traffic, Facebook ads, Instagram, all of it supports only that. And so having that level of focus is so clarifying for you as a CEO, also for your team. Because what happens is you start to think of project ideas and you’re like, “Oh, we could build this funnel.” Or, “We could do this website update.” Or, “We could do this idea that I heard about.” And every time that happens you ask yourself, “Does that drive my main initiatives?” If it doesn’t, you don’t work on it. You don’t do it, you don’t put effort, you don’t put time, energy, money into that type of a project or that project itself. So that’s been really helpful to have that clarity. And so we basically rebuilt and really updated two main funnels. So we’ve got our funnel where people come in and we’ve got a micro webinar. Did a podcast episode on that strategy, if you want to go back and listen.
With a micro webinar, it leads to our application that leads to clients. And then we’ve also got a more standard evergreen webinar funnel that is selling our $2,000 product ignite. Those are getting traffic run to them. We follow the Hirsh process, we also run traffic to these podcast episodes to grow our brand awareness and visibility. That is our strategy, we are so focused on that strategy. Here’s why very few entrepreneurs are able to do this, because honestly, they lose patience. And here’s what has to happen, here’s been the process. It’s been about, I’d say, six weeks of solid running traffic to these funnels. And so I have solid ad data from my ads team and that Intel is so powerful. So both of these funnels were profitable for us out the gate, but that’s because they’re proven products, proven services. They were already existing funnels. I’ve done that Ignite webinar and a live launch a couple of times, so it was an already converting webinar and then we took it and turned it into this evergreen funnel.
That it was to our benefit, you don’t always start out that way with a new funnel when you’re launching something. But still takes time to optimize this, and it still takes time to find the gaps and the holes and gather the data and figure it out. And so we have a tracking sheet that my ads team fills out and it has … We just redid all of our tracking for all of our clients so that it’s like this, it basically tells a story in the tracking. So each step of the funnel is in there and it has every [inaudible 00:06:20]. So for my evergreen webinar funnel, we’ve got webinar show up rate, webinar completion rate, the sales conversion from webinar opt-ins to sales. And looking at all of those metrics, I can easily see where do we need to dive deeper. And so I’ve spent the last six weeks of us running ads, every week rinsing and repeating the process of be strategic with the traffic, run ads, continue to gather data, review that data, make decisions based on it.
And so some updates like for example, that we made is our evergreen funnel is profitable, but where it could use improvement? Is the sales conversion. I want to get it up a little bit higher than where it is right now. It’s a $2,000 product, we have a 90 day nurture sequence attached to it. It’s a solid funnel. So I know as we get leads in, it will start to get that snowball effect, and it probably will get the purchase conversion up. But I’d like to get it up even more when I look at the numbers. So we dove in this week to all of our sales emails, and we looked at so far the data of about 700 people that have gone through it. What does do those sales emails look like? What’s the open rate of everyone? What’s the click rate? And I went through … I actually wanted to do this. I could have had a copywriter do it, but I went through and just with a critical eye. I was like, “Which ones need some improvement?”
And I made some small tweaks to them. Now we continue to track those, those email stats, and we just rinse and repeat that. Look at data, make decisions off of the data, get more data, do it again. And very few entrepreneurs honestly … because I see this firsthand, are willing to have the patience to actually go through this process and that’s why it’s so hard for them to have success. Because I’m going to say this until I beat it, until it’s dead, say this statement. But marketing always works. It always works if you follow the process. I watch clients either get distracted with a new funnel, or a new product, or a new launch, and really try to do too much so often. Even myself. Even myself too, I have to cut down and cut back and be like, “No, that’s not possible. We can’t do that.” Or, “We got to cut that project out because we’ve got to focus on this.” Or, “We got to cut that project out because it’s not driving our main objectives.” So that is an often one. The other one is people lose patience, they want those immediate results.
And of course, everyone immediate results. So I want to … When I say that like, “Don’t expect immediate results.” I think it sounds obvious to people like, “I shouldn’t expect immediate results.” But they don’t truly grasp it, and so they’re still expecting immediate results. Even myself, in an ideal world, I want to turn on those funnels and spend a couple thousand dollars a week on each of them and be able to scale fast and get the results that I want, exactly what I want right out the gate. But that will never happen. I’ll always have tweaks and updates and things that I need to be doing, and that’s the reality. So if you can stay focused when you have those, you will gain so much more momentum and see success. And so what does this look like in my marketing department itself? I want to explain because here’s how this boils down. First of all, we do monthly planning across my whole team. But the marketing department specifically, when we look at monthly planning now we really are so focused. So we’ve got these two main objectives, every single project has to drive those objectives.
If it doesn’t, we’re not going to do it right now. It’s not the time to focus on it. So if someone on my team came or I came to that meeting and I was like, “I think we should launch a lower price product.” Or something random like that, the answer would be no because does it drive those two objectives? And one month, two month, even three months is not enough time to be focused on something and then you can launch something new. Three months in the perspective of business is not that long. You can do a lot in three months. It goes by fast and a lot can happen, but it’s not that long. And so I can tell you for the entire year, this is our focus. That’s it. Get more clients, sell more ignite. That’s how simple it is. Everything we do in our delivery, in our marketing, in our implementation, all of it is driving that growth. And that even means focusing on the delivery of our course because we want retention rate into the ongoing support that they get. And so everything drives out.
If you can have that level of clarity where it’s so clear to you and your team, it is so powerful. So that’s how it happens with our goals. Everything is driving that, which makes it really powerful because every month we make a lot of progress towards these goals. The second thing is with the numbers and the tracking. We have very clear tracking around success, around both of these two funnels and so we have very clear tracking like what’s every step of the funnel? What is our goal that we’re trying to achieve there? Are we hitting it or not? And what’s the actual data? And then that tells us exactly where we need to focus to hit our goals. And so every week we look at that. I look at it, my team sends me my weekly report on Friday. And then we do a weekly ads team and my marketing coordinators on that meeting on Tuesday and we review it and we talk through like, “Okay, what are the initiatives we’re going to take this week?” It’s usually added in some retargeting ads or nurturing ads.
It’s just looking at all the numbers, and it’s just putting those numbers in front of you so that you always know the story, the reality, and what everyone needs to do to improve it. So I’ve got my ads team who works on it, my marketing coordinator and our funnel team who works on my strategy. Me who does videos, or content, or these podcast episodes, things and everything is driving that. It’s true, sad but true that very few entrepreneurs are able to do this and really stick with something with this level of focus, determination, and clarity. If you’re able to, you will see so much success. If you can … and when we’re still early in 2020. If you can get that level of focus and clarity in your marketing, and be willing to play the long game, and stick with a funnel, and look at that data, and just rinse, repeat, keep on doing that week after week, you will see so much success and marketing will become so much easier for you. It’s been interesting when I’ve been in this place because I’ve noticed myself wanting, feeling anxious to do more.
And so it’s like, “Okay, well, we should … It feels like we’re not doing enough. It feels like I want more projects. It feels like I want to launch something else. It feels like I want to do a flash sale.” And it’s like I just have to shut all those things off because we are so focused. And sometimes I feel like, “Emily, just get up and go for a walk and let your team do their work and stop trying to derail it, and get in the way, and come up with new initiatives and new projects.” Which I always will struggle with because I’m an entrepreneur. So it’s not like you can get rid of that urge, or get rid of those thoughts, or get rid of that feeling of like, “I got to do more, do more, do more, and add more projects and ideas.” But you can be aware of it so that it doesn’t derail your success and your business. And it’s super powerful when you do that. So my marketing’s in such a good place.
We had our weekly marketing meeting yesterday, which I didn’t even run and I just sat there and it was like the team was so focused, and the data is so good, and we’re making money off of what we’re spending, and all of it is good. It’s been really fun to see it myself go through … We go through this process that we take clients through and that we support clients with. So I wanted this to be a reminder of successes on the other side of you being able to do this, truly. Have you been able to get focused, get clear, and stay determined to stick with it? Success is on the other end of that, honestly. I know you guys can do it and I wanted to be that inspiration for you today. If you guys want support with your marketing, we really truly are an amazing team for that because we provide not only the implementation, but the consulting around this. I actually coach a lot of my ads team around this focus idea and around pushing back on our clients to drive this focus idea and helping them see success by achieving this.
And so I’m teaching my team throughout all of this, the Hirsh process in doing this and the power in doing this. And so it’s a different level of support and partnership that I believe you get with our team because of that kind of relationship that I have with my team, that bleeds down to all of our clients. So if that’s something you want that done for you, that marketing strategy, but also implementation and focus this year in your marketing, you can go to helpmystrategy.com and apply to work with us and I’ll see you guys all next time.