[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
At this point in time, even with everything that’s going on in the world, I’m so happy to say that I’m having the best business growth to date in my company.
After celebrating, this made me stop and think that now is the perfect time to go back to the basics. Why? Because honestly, most success in marketing comes from mastering the basics.
In fact, I’m positive that my marketing strategy is doing so well because it is built off of a strong base of foundational marketing strategies.
In this episode, I’m going to go over the three things I’ve found to better market your business. I guarantee that these strategies will:
- Improve your marketing
- Lead to positive growth (and more sales!) in your business
- Start that upwards momentum you’ve been craving
And guess what? The best thing is, you could start implementing all three of these foundational processes for your business RIGHT NOW.
P.S. These are really, really important basics that are often overlooked in the quickness of online marketing – so if you love what you hear, share this episode with your best business friends! (Tag me on Instagram if you do!)
Key Points:
[4:29] Today I want to dive into three things that you can do to better market your business
– They might be like foundational basic things, but I really think they are very important to focus on.
[11:11] Brand awareness. This is the first thing out of the three things you can do better to market your business, put time, effort and energy into brand awareness and visibility
[12:21] The second thing that you could do today, to better market your business is audit your numbers
[17:19] The people who are committed to that process of test, refine, repeat in their marketing are the ones who see so much momentum and they’re not getting distracted and they’re staying focused and they are constantly improving.
[18:13] The third and final thing that you could … is to test and improve your messaging.
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are all doing fabulous and having an amazing week. I am feeling so much momentum right now. I swear having kids, it’s the weirdest thing. Like I don’t know exactly what it is, but every single one of my kids, all three, has resulted in massive business growth for me when I’ve had kids and it’s, I don’t know exactly why like it’s part, it has to be partly like energetic, but it also is maybe because of all the work I do leading up to having my baby. It’s like I nest in my business and then it pays off once the baby’s born. But I mean with my son five years ago I started my business. Then with my daughter, I started growing my team and my business was exploding, and right now I’m kind of feeling the best business growth to date because I’m fully out of the day-to-day of my company, a hundred percent out of sales, marketing, delivery, everything right now. I don’t feel like I have enough to do sometimes, honestly and I feel bad about it, but at the same time we’re experiencing massive growth. So that is so cool too to see. But I swear the catalyst of it is having babies. This is my last baby, so I’ve got to figure out another catalyst to massive growth in the future.
Today I want to dive into three things that you can do to better market your business. They might be foundational basic things, but I really think they are very important to focus on. They’re going to be a good reminder for you. The reason I’m inspired by this is we are seeing incredible success right now in my own marketing. So we’ve been running live webinars that lead to an application. We have split my application so we are selling, both our done with you and our done for you offers.
We’ve just done a lot, really over the last six months, of following the process. If you listen to the podcast episode, the formula to successful marketing, the process of testing, refining and doing it again, and just testing, refining, fixing again, and repeating that process over and over again. It’s really cool to see how when you stay so focused on one end goal and like one main strategy, one main audience, all that you can do to continue like adding and optimizing and improving it over time and how that pays off. That’s what we are experiencing right now.
So this episode is inspired by that experience. I’m going through my own marketing and seeing the massive momentum and success we’re in. So these are three things that you can do to better market your business, to improve your marketing right now today, and most likely need to be reminded of these three things because they are basic, they are foundational, but honestly, most of the success comes from the basics and the foundations. You know, most of the time that is what you have to come back to to find your success if you’ve lost it or if you’re feeling out of momentum, go back to those foundational pieces. So you might think these are obvious, but I want you to think deeper if you’re really doing them when I say them because most likely you’re missing parts in it.
So the first thing is really putting time, energy and effort into brand awareness and visibility. I have said this since the beginning of my business because it is so true and I’ve watched it over and over and over again play out with clients, with myself where people who consistently put time, energy and money into their brand awareness and visibility see so much long term success. What exactly does this look like for you?
It looks like two things. I want to make sure that you’ve committed to a way of putting out content. So whether that is a podcast, a blog post, a video, you have some source of your content and you are consistently putting out, you’ve committed to it and you have also committed to a frequency. And that also means that you say, I want you to say to yourself like, let’s say you choose a podcast. Okay, your, your commitment is I will release a podcast, you know, once a week or twice a week, whatever it is forever, you know, or for now, no matter how many downloads I’m getting, no matter how excited I am, like obviously you should be excited about it, but you’re, you’re committing to it no matter what. And you’re removing the like, I need to see results from this podcast in the first month or in the first two weeks or even in the first two months.
You’re just putting out the content to create that snowball effect and you’re going to commit to that and you’re not going to break that commitment. And if you ever did break it, you have to replace it with some other sort of content. And that’s what I want for you because it is so crucial and you will rise above all the competition, all the noise in your market. If you are the one consistently showing up with your visibility, with your brand awareness and with your valuable content. So that’s the first thing you have to commit to is the source of your valuable content and the frequency. So is it podcast, blog, post, video, whatever it is, and is it once a week, twice a week? What is it now? Don’t over commit yourself and say every day and then last for one week and vomit and stop doing it.
Do a realistic commitment that you can do for the next year and you’re going to put time and effort into making sure that content is really valuable. Now I said, my company runs on its own at the beginning of this podcast episode. The one thing that nobody else can do is what I’m doing right now: recording a podcast episode. So much of my effort goes into the content that I create for my brand because that is the one thing that only I can do, and my podcast feeds so much else. It feeds our emails, it feeds our, our ad copy, it feeds our content, like my team learns my voice. It feeds everything and so it’s worth all the effort I put into it, but I probably spend the most amount of time strategizing, brainstorming for podcast episodes and then actually recording the podcast episodes and that is my one commitment month after month to my team and to my audience that I never break.
We’ve had the podcast for almost two years. We’re close to 200 episodes and we’ve never missed a day of releasing our Tuesday, Thursday podcast episodes. So I want you to commit to that sort of a commitment for your audiences. That’s the first thing you have to do and I want you to make sure you’re making time to put in the effort of creating the content. It’s not surface level content. You go deep, you make your content. I just recently did an episode that your free content should be worth paying for. You have to go deep for this to work. It cannot be surface level information that people already know or they’re going to ignore if they hear it. They have to have takeaways from it. They have to build that trust, build that following. That is what this is for, okay? That’s the first thing you’re going to do.
The second thing you’re going to do is you’re going to actually spend money on that content so you’re consistently reaching new people. Even if it’s $10 a week, you guys, even if you have barely any ad budget, I want you to spend some money on your content so that new people see it and so that you’re able to get in momentum. Right now we spend about $350 a week on my own marketing, just marketing my podcast and we have a goal every month to increase our downloads by 10% and those are metrics we are tracking. Those are metrics I’m looking at and I don’t see direct ROI like it’s not like, Oh, podcasts and then they opt in and then they become a client. I can’t track that, but I know that if my podcast downloads increase, our call applications increase, the trust my brand has for us increases, and my overall following of loyal customers increases potential loyal customers.
So when people think about a following and they have download numbers and likes and all of that, they get wrapped up in those numbers of what that means. None of that matters if that audience isn’t a quality potential customer. So what I’m doing with my podcast is giving out amazing value consistently because I’m creating potential customers and it’s worked time and time again. People who listen to the podcast and get on the sales call are always easier sales, and so you’re doing two things. Brand awareness. This is the first thing out of the three things you can do better to market your business, put time, effort and energy into brand awareness and visibility by creating a commitment of what you’re going to release and how often putting your energy into making it so valuable, people could pay for it and then spending money to market it so that you’re reaching new quality people every week.
If you start doing that today and you’re not doing that right now, you will instantly start to see better results with marketing your business. Now I did mention, I want to clear something up because I just realized I spent $350 and you can spend $10 a week, if you’re wondering like what should my ad spend be for this type of thing. We typically recommend 5-10% of your monthly budget. So wherever you’re at with your monthly budget, you should be spending about 5-10% of it. We follow that for our clients. We follow that for ourselves. Sometimes I increase that. Sometimes I decrease it because I want to put more into something. But that’s the average where you should be spending. So that’s the first thing.
The second thing that you could do today, to better market your business is audit your numbers.
Hopefully you have some numbers. Now if you don’t have numbers, maybe the only reason you wouldn’t have any numbers is because you’ve never marketed anything before and you haven/t run ads and so you don’t have data. But if you have data, creating some sort of report to be able to look at all of the major metrics and then do an audit on like where could I improve, will instantly improve your marketing. Let’s say you’re running this evergreen funnel and it’s been running for a while. You’ve got a webinar, it’s automated, you’ve been running it, it’s working. It’s kind of working like it’s working enough to run the ads, but you don’t really remember the numbers and you haven’t really looked at it in a while. It’s amazing how many months can go by. Since we looked at something and like haven’t made a change to it.
I experienced that too. It’s like, wow, it’s been six months since I audited that, I definitely can find some improvements there. So, the first thing you can do is audit your numbers. Look at whatever your major metrics are for your funnel. If it’s a webinar you’re going to be looking at obviously cost per registration, landing page conversion, your webinar sales conversion, how many sales you’re getting, your ROI, your show up rate. All of those really important metrics that tell us are we successful or not. And then, or, let’s say you have an application funnel. You’re looking at cost per application, your sales conversion, your sales show up rate, your cost per call books, your overall ROI, like all of those important metrics. If you have them right now, you could go look at all of them and just do an audit and ask yourself what is one thing I could do to improve these numbers?
And what that’s going to do is tell you your numbers. Let’s say it’s, let’s use the webinar funnel as an example. And you look at it and you’re like, “Wow, over the last couple of weeks or a couple of months, my webinar’s show up rate has gone down, or my cost per click has gone up or my sales conversion has gone down.” So any of those things are indicators. They’re like red lights, like, stop here. This is where we need to make an improvement. And so if you do an audit and you look at everything that you first do, the audit, you look at the numbers because you can’t make any decisions without numbers. So you can not just guess on these like, “I think I should re-record my webinar,” data will tell you that. So whatever you’re doing, even if it’s just organic, if you haven’t run traffic, you still have numbers. You still know how many people you know opted into something and then took action in that opt-in or how many people from your sales call then you know, went and bought. Whatever the scenario is for your business. You have data. If you have any activity going on in your business, you have data to look at. And so today, this week you could take that data, do an audit, and find the first red flag you find and ask yourself, what’s one thing I could do to improve that? Then move on to the next one. This is probably the most important thing you could do. Out of the three things I’m going to tell you today. This is what we’ve been doing for the last several, several months in my own business. This is what we do for clients because with marketing, you’ve never just like “made it.”
You’ve never like, alright, I’ve got a perfect funnel now I could sit back, I can let it ride for a lot of years, that never happens. There’s always an improvement. Even if you have a profitable funnel, you should be asking yourself, “Where could I improve this? What is one thing I could do to improve this?” Ideally you make those monthly goals so you have something, one thing that you could do to improve it and that becomes like a project that you work on that month. We do this all the time in our company where we look at all the data and we look at where the gaps and the holes are, where those red flags are, and then we make a project out of that to improve that the next month. And we just repeat that because by the time you finish fixing one thing, there’s another thing that you need to fix or another thing you’ve found as you move down the funnel.
So today, audit your numbers this week, audit your numbers, get some sort of report taking into consideration all way a few action items at least one of one thing you could do to improve your funnel. And if you want to get really good at this, like you should just do it week over week, month over month. Because the repetition here is where the success comes in. The people who are committed to that process of test, refine, repeat in their marketing are the ones who see so much momentum and they’re not getting distracted and they’re staying focused and they are constantly improving. Because like I said, there’s no such thing as funnel that’s perfect and you just, you know, are able to sit and let it go. Even funnels that I have all the time that are converting, I’m always like, well, we could do this and improve it and it’s like it’s almost like a game.
I love it so much because the data just tells you the answers. You just make a few changes and then you’re like, that worked or that didn’t work and you do it again. So that is the second thing. Audit your numbers. Find a one action item right now that you can go do to improve the where the first, you know, red flag is that you found with your numbers.
The third and final thing that you could do that I’m going to talk about today to better market your business, installing something you can implement this week is to test and improve your messaging. Messaging is so important. I’ve talked, I just recently did an episode about marketing, what your audience wants and how important messaging is, and I’m constantly reminded of this because it’s amazing how an idea or a concept or an angle with your messaging can so quickly become irrelevant.
So we experienced this with my webinar. We had an initial webinar that we did about how Facebook ads are super cheap with COVID and how people needed to capitalize on that. And that was kind of like our angle and our spin. Well, the first time he ran it, it did so well. It was like, $3 cost per registration. It was amazing. And so we were like, okay, we’ll just do the same one again because why wouldn’t we? But the second time we ran it, our cost per lead jumped up to $5 cost per registration, which is still technically good and a business to business webinar market. But I was like, why? We had the same title, the same messaging. It was only a week later, but I believe already in that time people were kind of sick of that message of like, “Facebook ads are so cheap.”
Okay, I’ve been hearing it. I’ve been hearing about COVID now I needed a different angle. So we tested some new angles, we got the cost per lead back down. But that just shows you how there’s almost always an opportunity for you to test a new, really powerful messaging angle to your audience. Whether it’s in your webinar or it’s in your sales. There’s almost always an opportunity to go deeper with your messaging than you already currently are. And I want to encourage you to look at your emails, look at your ad copy, look at your social media copy and ask yourself like what are one or two things I could do to go a little bit deeper to connect with my audience about the struggles they’re currently having, about the desires they currently have, the pain they feel. Ask yourself to go a little bit deeper but also take some time to reflect and listen to your audience.
So one thing we do is every webinar I do, we take all of the comments from the webinar and my marketing VA organizes them into different categories and just makes them easy to read. But there’s so much gold there in what my audience is saying that impacts our next webinar’s ads.
So I’m constantly listening to the language that my audience is using. I’m communicating with my sales client specialist about what our clients are saying and what we need to talk more about, how we need to hit those pain points, how we need to hit the objections in everything we do. So there’s almost always an opportunity to go deeper with your messaging. So this week today you could look at your ad copy if you’re running ads, your social media, your podcast, your emails, whatever it is, and ask yourself, “how could I go a next level deeper and connect with my audience in a new or different way this week?”
You might just find something that takes off and blows up and it does so well. This is again where these three things that I’m talking about too are very much like what a CEO should be spending their time doing, which is the content creation and the brand awareness, which is the first thing I said, to auditing your numbers. You should be getting the reporting to you and having collaboration on that. But you should have the brain space for coming up with creative ideas.
Sometimes I find that, you know, my team really does well. My team runs my ads like I’m a client, I’m very uninvolved in it. I’m just told when I need to make videos I review my reports and all of that, but I’m not doing it myself. I’m not heavily involved because I’m treated like a client at the agency, but we always have our weekly status meetings just like our clients do and it’s so valuable to just brainstorm because I’m able to actually bring ideas. I’m also very good at marketing and I love it. So I bring my ideas to the team that they may not have thought of because you know, they’re so deep in it and I’m so up high and so I can think of some new ideas. So as a CEO, as an influencer, as the brand, you should be constantly having that space to be able to think of those creative ideas for your own marketing.
The third thing, testing new messaging, really thinking about what’s a deeper angle that I could go about with my audience and spending time connecting and reflecting and really just, honing in on your audience is something you should have the time and space for. All three of these things will improve your marketing. All three of these things or something you could do this week. All three of these things are foundational, but I guarantee that you got something out of this and you’re missing something if not from one or if not from all of these, at least one of these things that I listed out.
So why don’t you send me an Instagram message or reply and comment on one of our ways that we, however you saw this, if it was on Instagram or a blog or whatever that we released this episode. And tell me what’s one action item you’re taking away right now from this episode that you’re going to go implement and do in your marketing this week. I want to know what you got taken away.
If you want support with your strategy, you can go to help my strategy.com you can fill out our free marketing assessment. We recently reworked this application, um, to become a marketing assessment that then tells you exactly what you need to do in your business based on where you are today and what option is the best for you. At Hirsh marketing. We opened up our den with you option via this assessment. So we’ve got done for you and done with you options and you can go and go through the assessment and then it will take you through. Then if you qualify, you can also get a strategy audit where we will do the same thing, tell you exactly what you need to do in your business today based on where you’re at and how Hirsch marketing could support you best based on where you’re at. So that’s helpmystrategy.com thanks so much for listening today and I will see you all on the next episode.