Episode Transcript:

Today’s episode is going to be a little bit of a rant, because it is one of my biggest pet peeves that I see out there in the online space. And I also think it’s one of our really core content… or “core concepts” in The Hirsh Team, because it’s so, so important, and it’s something I have to emphasize so many times with our clients. And that is: Customizing your marketing to your ideal client.

Throw away these cookie cutter strategies, like, “So-and-so did this, that means it’ll work for me.” Yes, there are marketing templates out there and things out there that are like, general good practices or formats or templates that will work. But it is so, so important for you to keep in mind. And every time you hear marketing advice, ask yourself, “What audience and what niche was this for, was this created for?” Because, the business-to-business space is so much different than the business-to-consumer selling space.

And the mistake I see people make is they see business-to-business marketers, people who are selling to other business owners and entrepreneurs, create like, “here is how you sell this and make this much money and get this much success,” create these templated plans… And then they go and try and apply it to their business-to-consumer selling business. And it doesn’t work, it totally fails, and they think it’s them and they don’t understand why. It’s because you can’t take a cookie cutter strategy and apply it to any niche.

Even within our client roster, we work with, I would say … 80% of people are in the B2B space and 20% are in the B2C. We work with both, but because we get so many referrals in the B2B, that’s just who we work with a lot. But, even within there, there’s such a wide variety.

Every time you create a marketing plan, you can use templates, you can use best practices, you can say like, “I know a webinar is the best way for me to deliver this information,” or, “I need people to apply and get on a call with my team,” whatever it is… That’s fine, but also, don’t lose sight of who actually is your client? And what’s the experience that they will need? And – this is so important – how much nurturing are they going to need before the sale?

Here’s the example. In the B2B space, it’s a lot more money to get people in the door initially. To get somebody signed up for a webinar, to get somebody on an application, to get somebody in the top of your funnel…it’s going to cost more. But once you get them in there, they usually convert a lot quicker and faster… quicker and easier as a sale, because they’re entrepreneurs, because they can write it off as a business expense, because they make decisions in a snap of a finger. That’s who they are, right? That’s your customer, business owners.

In the business-to-consumer space, it’s usually a lot cheaper to get them in the door for your free offering, for your top of your funnel webinar/PDF/opt-in/whatever. It’s way easier to get them to sign up, cheaper as well, but way harder for them to [buy]. Your actual sales conversion will be lower, because they’re consumers, because they’ll think a lot. They’re not business owners. They’re the average American or just a consumer who isn’t like, “I’m going to write this off as a business expense and implement it tomorrow, because I’m a crazy entrepreneur.” They’re just a regular person.

Of course, there’s a lot of niches of “regular people” and consumers, but it is so different. Here’s the key thing, and the key difference, in marketing in the two areas, is that the consumers need a lot more… business-to-consumer marketing needs a lot more nurturing and time in between your first touchpoint with that cold lead and when you ask for that sale.

A lot of times what happens is someone in the business-to-consumer space throws out a webinar, and they’re like, “Well, Russell Brunson said I can convert this webinar at 10 percent.” And they throw it out there, and it does like crap, because the webinar was the first touch point that the person had with them, and so they’re not going to buy and they forget about that lead. The key here is building in nurturing. Maybe it’s, first of all having nurturing before the webinar, but building in nurturing so they have several touchpoints before they’re asked to buy the product, will win over those consumers.

In the B2B space, you can do a cold traffic to a webinar to a sale. That works still. But in the business-to-consumer space, I’ve not seen that work very many times, unless it’s a very low ticket, low priced offer. But they need the nurturing.

A really good example is, a client came to me, and she’s like, “Hey, I went to this mastermind, and this person is doing this challenge. They’re charging for the challenge. They’re charging, I don’t know … It was like, $27 to participate in the challenge, and then, they are selling to their next level, high ticket … higher ticket, I think it’s like a $2,000 offering, once somebody comes in the challenge. And it’s working great, because they’re committed! They pay for the challenge, they participate, and then [they buy] the next level (whatever they pitch them in the challenge). And it’s working so great for her!” She’s like, “You know, I’m going to do this.”

We had originally had the strategy that she was going to do a free challenge. She’s like, “I’m going to do this paid challenge. It’s way better. They’re committed.” And I was like, “Wait a second, what’s the industry that she’s doing this for?” She’s like, “Oh, business coaching. She’s doing it for other business owners who want to start their own business.” And I’m like, “Right. And what’s your industry?” She’s in health coaching, she has programs around weight loss and nutrition. And I’m like, “Too different! If you tell people, ‘Pay for my challenge,’ that’s the product they’re going to buy.

They’re not going to keep on buying right away. Maybe eventually, yes, they’ll work up your value ladder, but they’re not going to sign up for that challenge and then go ahead and buy something else, because in a consumer’s mind, they already made that purchase to that $27 product, and they need to consume that and get results from that before they’re like, ‘Yeah, now I’ll spend $2,000.’ Instead, we need to get them in a free challenge, nurture them, build a relationship with them, and then sell your $500 product,” which is what she had. She was like, “Oh my god, that totally makes sense, because it’s a totally different market, business-to-consumer.”

It’s so important for you, if you are trying to getting marketing advice, or you’re seeing things online and you’re watching webinars, or you’re consuming material, that you also stop and think, “Who is my ideal audience?” Because sometimes … You know who your ideal audience is, so not only stop and ask that like, “Who is my ideal audience?” but [also], “Is this the customer journey for my ideal audience, or do I need to customize this?”

Another example is, we have a client who sells to teachers. Teachers will convert super cheap into the top of the funnel. Like super cheap, $1 leads to get them to watch a webinar. But usually, a lower sales conversion, and you also can’t say like, “Here, you’re a teacher, buy this $1,000 product.” They don’t have the money to do that.

You have to build in the nurturing, and you have to have lots … Usually, the clients who have success have a few different, lower-priced products to offer teachers, but same thing … When we were building out this funnel and this ad strategy for this client, who we knew was targeting teachers, we knew like, “We’re not going to throw a bunch of marketing emails and spammy-seeming emails” … I mean, we never want spammy-seeming emails, but … For example, our sales sequence is usually 5-6 emails, right? For teachers, we’re going to make it 3-4, because they’re probably going to read their email and open their email, but if they get five or six, you’re on the verge of super annoying to them.

Those emails also needed to have some value in them so they actually connected with the teacher and started to build a relationship through the emails, versus just going straight to the sell, which … Entrepreneurs are like, “Cut to the chase,” and they don’t read all their emails, so if you send 5-6, they’ll probably see one or two.

You have to think about, “Who is your customer?” … but not just think about it, be like, “Is this the journey for them? Is this the customer journey that they need to go through for this to work?”

Another example is, we have a client who it’s working [for] to sell a high ticket on their webinar without a sales call. That’s rare, right? But then, they are trying to … [the person] who helped them with that strategy, [the one we’re] running the ads for … is trying to say, “Everyone can do this.”

We have another client, and she targets photographers. And I was like, “No way, no way in any planet is it going to work for a relatively broke photographer to go on a webinar and then buy a $3,000-10,000 product without that sales call, without that touchpoint.” I was like, “No. There’s just no way it will work, and it will waste your money trying.”

That is the key, is … There’s way too many cookie cutter strategies being taught out there by marketers, because it worked for them and a few of their clients … and [it’s] trying to be applied to several different industries. It drives me crazy. And that’s why it’s super important … Step One in The Hirsh Process is to strategize, and to understand those customers and understand your customer journey and understand how you’re going to achieve success with your marketing, before you move onto the next step.

If you want help with that custom strategy, if you feel like your strategy needs to be analyzed because it’s not working or it doesn’t exist, go to HelpMyStrategy.com and book in a call with the Hirsh Team.

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Episode Transcript:

[In] today’s episode, I’m going to share with you guys an ad that produced 10,000 (yes, you heard that right!) ROI in one of our client launches recently. And this is such an easy ad to implement, such a cheap ad to run, and such an effective ad to have running in your funnel.

So, it’s a very small audience. And I will share with you the ad in a minute. But, it was $1,100 ad spend to run this ad during the course of this live launch. It was a video, and it was going straight to a sales page, to then buy. And out of that ad, we had 612 purchases at a $2,000 cost product – so over $1 million made off of $1,100 ad spend. Like, literally jaw dropping, amazing, amazing results.

Now. Here is what this ad is. (And I’ve talked about it when I went through The Hirsh Process before, because it’s in Step 4 of The Hirsh Process, which is your sales ads.) … And that is an abandoned cart ad. That means an ad that you are directly targeting to somebody who has landed on your Order Form Page of whatever you’re offering, but has not landed on the Thank You/Confirmation Page after buying. So they have not bought essentially.

And the reason we set it up that way versus like, an email list is you’d have to constantly update an email … Well, you can’t even do an email list of people, unless they’ve come in from your webinar or something. But this way, if you set it up on the Pixel … I guess you could do an email list of purchasers … But the easiest way to set it up is [there’s] an audience in Facebook of people who have landed on the cart, but not landed on the Purchase Confirmation Page. And that way you can either ongoing run this, if your product is always available, or have this ad running during your launch.

Now here’s the keys with this ad. So, the mistake people make is they just put up an ad… First of all, the mistake people make is they don’t do this. They don’t run this ad. The second mistake people make is they will have a very generic ad ran to these people. But the key here, and why this ad did so well, was it was a video ad. It was shot straight with an iPhone camera, very organic, connecting-looking, not like this overly-produced ad that doesn’t make somebody want to say, “Hey, I love her. I want to be her friend.” And it was directly talking to this person.

So we know, because this audience that we’re targeting, we know that they were so close, on the fence of buying our product that they made it to the Order Form. They’re very close, right? They’re about to pull the trigger, so what we want to do is speak to that in the actual ad – and ideally with a video. So the actual ad copy we had was super basic, maybe two lines.

And then the actual video was also super basic, but it spoke to exact paypoints of … Like for example, this was a course, so: “Hey, I know you’re right on the edge! You want to join [such-and-such] course, but you haven’t pulled the trigger yet. Trust me, I’ve been there.” Maybe small, short story about how you were there or how a client of yours was there before, and wanted to pull the plug and didn’t. And then, “BUT if you take this chance,” we have either a guarantee or whatever the guarantees are, “But if you take this chance, you’ll be able to change your life around, grow your business,” whatever your promise is.

Also, then remind people, “And don’t forget,” and then whatever the urgency is: doors close on this date, or doors close in a few days, or registration’s closing, or the product’s going to sell out, whatever it is, so they take action. Because the goal with this ad is to connect with them, to build the final step of trust that you might want to build with them, because they are on the fence. They’re almost a sale. And then, to show them urgency so that they pull the trigger and essentially buy.

And I’ve used, in the past like, if you have stories around either yourself or… I’ve also had a client use a story where she had a student… We had a testimonial of a student who, in the testimonial said, “I pulled out my credit card three times, and I would type it in, and I just wouldn’t press “submit” on the Order Form. Then I finally did, and now I’ve quit my job, and I have this business of my dreams!” We cut the video so it was like, her talking … to sell, saying, “You’re right on the fence. You’re almost there.”

And then we had a little clip of that student, “Maybe you’re like Jesse” … I’m making up names, because I don’t want to say any names … “who,” this is the story, and then we showed that video, because it could be exactly what that person is experienc[ing].

So first of all, regardless of like, if you have a product, service… This can apply to so many things. Like for this, we do abandoned cart ads; but let’s say your goal is for somebody to go and fill out an application, because you do high ticket sales – do abandon the application ads. Wherever someone steps in your funnel, tie an ad to it. And it’s so cheap to run this, because you’ve already paid to get the person that far, right? Like … maybe not even paid, but you’ve already gotten the person that far, so the audience is super small. You don’t have this crazy big audience who you need to target. And that’s why we were able to spend $1,100 to make $1 million off of that ad.

Now obviously like, they may have come in from other places to ultimately end up on the cart page, so you have to take that into consideration, but that could have been 612 sales that we wouldn’t have had if we weren’t running that ad to stay top of mind. The other thing is, it was a live launch, so no matter where they were in the process of the launch, like… if they had watched the webinar or not, or if they had been to the sales page or not, or the order form page or not … they were seeing ads that were tailored to them.

That literally gives me goosebumps, because it’s so powerful! Like if you really think about that …. Based on actions people are taking, we showed them ads that [were] tailored exactly to what they needed to hear to take the next step. Like, how freaking powerful that is… And the huge thing is, here it’s like, you don’t have to spend a lot of money for these things to be successful, because the audience is so small that you could reach them with a small, small budget. And if you do it right and your messaging is right, you can really, really nail this and make a lot of money.

So the key is, one, having this set-up, whether it’s a product, a service, or whatever it is … I mean, you’ll see Amazon do this all day long … Have it set up, but then for a lot of people, where there’s emotion involved, make it very intentional with what you do – whether you use a testimonial, whether you film a very connective video, you want to knock down any objections that the person is having to buying. And then put in your promise – remind them of your promise, and then the urgency. Those are the key things, and if you can do … Don’t overproduce a video. Video is the best way to do this, and I like it just straight on the phone, because you don’t want it to be overproduced, because then they feel like, “Oh, this is an ad.” They won’t feel like it’s an ad if it’s a video from on the phone.

That is our highest ROI ad we have ever had, that we ran to date in the agency. 10,000 percent ROI is insane, $1 million made off of this one ad with $1,100 ad spend. So if you’re not going to run over and create those abandoned cart and abandoned sales page ads right now, I don’t know what else you would be doing!

And if you guys want strategy like this, analyzed on your funnel, and ads created for your funnel that [are] very intentional, with our strategies of how we do retargeting and how we specifically tailor the messaging in our retargeting ads to be insanely successful, go to HelpMyStrategy.com and book in a call with the Hirsh Team.