[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
I want to share with you an important concept that one of my very first Facebook ad clients taught me.
This client went on Facebook live every. single. day…
For an entire year!
Not only did he never miss a day, but his content was also extremely valuable.
Because he prioritized showing up every day on video for his audience, he grew a massive, dedicated, die hard following.
His commitment to providing high quality content was the foundation of his success.
This is something that a lot of successful people have in common:
They PRIORITIZE GIVING VALUE.
And that’s what I want you to focus on, too. Way before you build that marketing strategy — consider how you can provide consistent and valuable content for your audience.
Tune in for a quick lesson on how to:
- Build trust in your audience
- Stand out from your competitors
- Increase your brand awareness
(If you have something to add to this conversation, head over to Instagram Stories + share with your people! Tag @emilyhirsh so I can listen, too!)
If you prioritize value and you’re ready to build your following, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast or welcome to the podcast. If you are new, I’ll tell you guys a quick story. I’m sitting here recording podcasts and my office is in the front of our house. So I see out to our front yard and I can see the street from my house. And five minutes ago, there was a huge rattlesnake going down our street and into our grass. So yeah, it’s summer in Texas guys. My favorite time. In a couple of weeks, I’m taking my kids to California for five weeks to try and escape the heat, because I love Austin and am grateful we moved here and it was a great decision. But summers are rough for me because they’re so hot, there’s rattlesnakes, there’s scorpions. Like I just can’t.
So I’m excited to be back in California and I can’t believe it’s June and I haven’t been in California’s it’s Christmas. And I don’t know where this year has gone. It’s actually insane. Like I’m like, how is it the middle of the year already? I don’t understand where 2020 is gone and man has 2020 been insane.
So today content wise, I want to dive in with you guys about something and this icon I titled, if you care about your business, you’ll prioritize this. And I am so inspired to do this podcast because I have spent the last three weeks doing a ton of avatar interviews. So I recently did a podcast that was about knowing your customer and inside of that podcast. I told you guys how I am personally doing interviews with all of our ignite students. And I’m asking them, you know, their biggest frustration with marketing, asking them about their experience and Ignite, why they joined Ignite, where their business was, who they follow, getting a really, really deep understanding of my ideal customers so that we can improve our messaging.We can improve our product, we can improve the way we connect with our audience.
And it’s been super powerful. I get on a lot of them and people are like, Oh, I didn’t realize you were personally doing these, but I want to, because even if I had somebody else do it and they gave me the notes, it wouldn’t be as powerful as my experience interviewing these people. So I’ve done about 20 interviews and I plan to do it with our one-on-one clients too, in the coming months. So it takes a lot of time. My schedule has been packed with calls because of them. So I’m doing a 30 minute interview, about 30 minutes with each person, but it’s been an amazing experience, but this podcast was actually inspired by these interviews because I can tell you probably 90% of all of the people I talked to mentioned that either this attracted them to my brand or when they got inside, they realized how important it was.
And it was never on their radar before when they got inside the course, and that is prioritizing visibility, valuable content and brand awareness. And you know, when you are such an expert and you live in your world all day, that you think things are obvious that are not, this is one of those things for me. Like I remember probably four years ago when this concept was introduced to me, when I started realizing the people that were successful were doing this. And I had a client, one of my very first Facebook ad clients that I ever managed. He did a daily Facebook live for an entire year. And he just, every day he did a Facebook live and he had never run ads. He built pretty much a million dollar business organically. Then he found me and I personally did his ads because he was one of my first bigger clients.
So I started as ads and we started running these ads, I actually wrote about him, my book too, cause it was the coolest experience, but he made so much money from his ads because he had built this insanely loyal following, that he’d never actually been strategic with his marketing with besides just putting out value, putting out content, putting in time. So we started a funnel that, I think it was like an opt in to a $47 tripwire to like a $97 upsell and a $297. And literally he was getting 10 times his ad spend the first day, like we turned it on and it was insane. It was like, we turned on the ads and he was getting thousands of leads, all these sales. It was like things that you would think that’s not even possible. And it’s like so rare to see it happen in marketing.
And he got 10 times his return on his investment for that low price of a product that’s literally unheard of. And then we grew his email list by like 7,000. And then we launched his membership site and over the course of a couple of launches, he ended up getting like 10,000 members in his membership site. I’m not even kidding. These numbers are like unreal. And I remember that experience. I’ll never forget that because that is when, that was one of the moments for me that I realized the reason he’s so incredibly successful is because he prioritizes showing up every day on video for his audience. He never missed a day and the content was extremely valuable. And when he started his intention was just, “I want to show up, I want to connect with my audience. I want to provide value. That’s what I’m going to do.”
He didn’t have a funnel. He didn’t have a marketing strategy. He didn’t even know exactly what products he was going to sell yet. Like you just started there from a place of serving and providing value to his audience. And then he did it so consistently and for a year went on video. And that was the experience that was like, wow, that’s what made a difference in his success compared to so many other people. And from then on out, I knew that was a key with marketing. So since then I have really prioritized brand awareness and visibility. If you know the Hirsch process, you know, that’s a whole step, step two of the Hirsh process. And my recommendation is you put out consistent content every week, once or twice a week. And you choose a source of giving that content that, that speaks to your zone of genius.
So if you love podcasting, it’s a podcast. If you’re really good at video, it’s either a pre-recorded video or a Facebook live. If you’re great at writing emails, you can get people to opt in and, and send out regular emails, like whatever it is that you excel at and how you want to connect with your audience, you choose that medium and then you do it consistently. So, as I was doing these interviews with people at least 90%, maybe more said the reason why I either came to you, there’s two different situations. They said, the reason why I bought Ignite, or I started following your brand and listening to what you had to say was you introduced me to the concept that visibility and brand awareness is important. And that you have to look at your marketing from a holistic view and not just about that one top of the funnel, you know, webinar or opt in funnel.
And then the other part, you know, another form of a person would say, I joined Ignite thinking that I just needed the how-tos of Facebook ads, like how to set up an ad, how to place a pixel and those technical aspects like that was the problem I was solving. But what I really got was a whole like marketing lesson on why brand awareness and visibility is so important. And that I think is so crucial because I really believe this is one of the keys to not just having successful marketing, not just having a successful funnel, not just making money online, but what we’re all really here for. And what is a priceless thing to do that will change your life, change your business and make selling easier forever is creating an audience of people who listen to what you have to say, who get value out of what you have to say, who whose lives change based on content that you put out there. I mean, that is powerful.
So if you are able to connect with your audience and put out valuable content for free, that connects with your audience, that builds trust with your audience, that improves their life, that solves their problem, you will build an audience, a loyal audience of followers of true believers. Russell Brunson, I remember him saying this that, you know, it was a couple years later after I had started my agency and I knew how important brand awareness and visibility was. But he had said, if you build up an audience of 100 true believers, like superfans and people who, whatever you put out, they will buy. And they’ll talk about you, they’ll consume your content. Like they’re true believers, diehards. If you have a hundred of those, you’ll have a business forever. And I think that’s so powerful because I’ve talked about this before, but you know, a Facebook shut down tomorrow, or even if your email list got deleted, or you like something that your account got shut down, something big happened.
You had something taken away that you were using in your business strategically. If you have that audience of true believers and people who love the content that you put out and trust you and follow you, it doesn’t matter what’s taken away. It doesn’t matter if your website goes down and breaks. It doesn’t matter if you get hacked. It doesn’t matter, any of those things. If you have an audience of true believers might set you back a little bit. But, if you have that audience selling becomes so easy, launching something new becomes so easy, they start talking to people about you and then you grow even more. They’ll share your content in their stories on Facebook, Instagram, whatever they’ll reference you like, you know, there’s people I follow like that, that I referenced in this podcast. And then maybe you hear it one time and you’re introduced to them and you go over to their brand. And so that level of dedication to growing your audience, connecting with your audience, building trust with your audience and providing value to your audience is priceless.
The reason why I think people miss this step, or they don’t put a lot of effort into this step is two reasons. One, because it’s a lot of work because creating really good, valuable content takes a lot of time. And I recognize that. And if you are a current, you know, CEO who is a solo-preneur, you don’t have a team, you don’t have a lot of support. You’re stretched for time. I totally get that. Like when I didn’t have a team, you know, there was no way I could, could create this caliber of content consistently in terms of podcasts and emails and videos and all of that. I get that. But you have to look at, “Where is my time most valuable?” and maybe there is something more tactical and technical that you should take off your plate.
So you can put it into the content creation and creating valuable content takes time because it’s not like, Oh, I recorded 20 minute podcasts. That just took me 20 minutes. Like I had to plan that podcast strategically by remembering what my audience wants by doing research. Like I spend time reviewing our webinar questions or reflecting on these avatar interviews or listening to what my team says based on what clients need. And then I craft the, you know, the podcast I’m going to record, the titles. Then I have to sit here and do some notes on it and do an outline because I don’t want to waste your guys’ time when I’m on here and just be like, try and, you know, free, free for all. I do just riff a lot, but I do have basic notes right in front of me for almost every podcast episode, because I want it to be very thorough. So it’s not just a matter of like a video is 10 minutes, it’ll take you 10 minutes.
The planning and the energy that goes into one, coming up with the title that you’re going to speak about, because you want that to be valuable, not just the title, but the actual content. So that might take research that might take listening that might take connecting with your audience and then two, planning out the actual content that you’re going to put in. It also takes time. And so I know that one of the reasons people don’t really prioritize this enough and entrepreneurs don’t, is the amount of time it takes. And the other thing is, I think people see it as, “Oh, it’s free and I need to put more time into my paid offer or even more so, like my webinar, my top of my funnel.” The first reason is time. And they have a hard time connecting, putting that level of time and energy into their free, valuable content, then they would, a tangible thing such as webinar opt-ins or purchases because they, this is the second reason that people have a hard time connecting.
It’s hard to have an actual metric connected to growing my list, or I’m sorry, growing my brand awareness. There’s, it’s hard to have a metric that’s like either it’s working or it’s not working and you don’t feel that kind of reward that you feel when you grow your list and you’re like, “Okay, I got a hundred people on my list for this amount of money and you’ve got the cost per lead.” Like you have that correlation there where it makes it a little bit easier for you to feel like it’s working and you’re making movement and you’re moving forward. But I really encourage you to still prioritize brand awareness and visibility by putting out regular consistent content. Even if in your head, just be like, “You know what? I might not know if it’s working. I probably won’t for a while, but I’m still going to stick to this.” Because it takes time to start to see a snowball effect of people who are like, “I listened to your podcast, or I watched your videos, or I read your emails” and I’ve done this consistently.
I mean, we’re coming up on two years since I launched this podcast, before that I did regular Facebook lives. I mean, we’ve for the last two years, emailed our list. I mean, I’ve never missed a podcast episode except for in early June for blackout week. When we shut off all our ads and our podcasts, which is like never heard of like, I’ve never missed an episode, I’ve been super consistent with it. And now all the time I hear people say, you know, I listened to your podcast. And then I signed up as a client, or I read your emails. And then I signed up as a client. Anytime we go, we go, every time we sign a client, what we do is we go through our, our CRM software and we look at the customer journey. We look at when did they first join our list? And what were the actions they took? And then what was the action that was like the final action that pushed them over to buying, to becoming a client. And I mean, just today we were, I was looking at this with my marketing manager and we had somebody who signed up for our evergreen webinar that we’re not even running anymore. Our evergreen Ignite webinar, four months ago from a Facebook ad, she was cold traffic since then, she’s gone through our whole nurture sequence on the back end of that webinar and then got our regular podcast emails. Then we sent out an email that said, you know, apply, we have spaces open. Then she booked a call. Then she signed up as a client. And when she was on that call with our team, she said, how much she loved her emails and how she never opens emails, but she opens our emails.
But you see how that is in an instant, like, that’s very hard for me to track that and go back all the way, four months ago to that webinar, that was a Facebook ad. So it was ad spend that went out. And then I’ve got to add in the fact that I’ve done regular podcasts for the past four months that she’s gotten and you can see in our CRM software, she opens almost all of them. And then she finally decided, I’m going to book a call and sign up for a client. I have people who sit on my list for over a year, and then they decide, you know, now is the right time for me to hire you. And so it’s hard to tie a metric to this type of marketing, because it’s not instant gratification. It’s not like webinar ad, webinar lead, webinar sale all within a week.
You’re going to get some people like that. But, but you’re going to have a way bigger percentage of people who buy from you after being on your list or following you, or listening to your content for months and months and maybe even years, and then decide to buy from you. And if you commit to your brand awareness and your visibility without having to have a tied metric to it, I mean, you should start to see things like your podcast downloads increase or your video views increase, or you’re creating audiences, and then you’re retargeting them and they’re working. Those are all signs that it is working. I of course track things like my podcast downloads and our email open rates and our video, you know, cost per thru play of our videos. Like those are all metrics I can track, but it’s hard for me to tie an ROI to those pretty much impossible for me to tie an ROI to the number of podcast downloads I get every week, because I don’t know cause it’s different what people are doing and the actions that they’re taking. And how long does someone have to listen to my podcast before they decide to take action.
So what I want for you guys is to decide this is my recommendation. And in my book, I actually have an exercise where you commit this in my book where you say, you actually write a statement that says something like, “I will release two podcasts every week on Tuesday, Thursday for the forever future, until I, you know, until I replace it” or whatever. But basically one source. So you’re choosing either podcast, video or writing. Those are like the three main ones I would say, go with a podcast or video because voice is such a better way to connect with people than writing. Writing’s great, but it’s just not as deep. Like when someone hears your voice or sees your face, they will connect with you on a little bit deeper of a level.
So have one source that you’re going to do this and then have a consistency commitment probably once or twice a week, don’t go overboard and say, I’m going to do this, you know, seven times a week. My client did that and he followed through with it but you know, don’t set yourself up for failure. Like I couldn’t do a daily podcast. I don’t have, I don’t have the capacity and the time to create a daily podcast that would be of value to people. And I care more about quality than quantity. So for me, it’s two times a week podcasts. So you’re going to have that commitment. And I want you to have that commitment with no strings attached. Say, I’m going to do that for six months. I’m going to do two times a week, a podcast for six months, and then I’m going to evaluate what it’s done for me.
I promise it will be a game changer, whatever you commit to. And what I would also like you to do is put a small percentage of your ad spend, to promoting that content because I want new people to see it. It’s really hard to get traction organically, because if you don’t have a following, it’s hard to get that initial traction and get people to start following you and consuming your content. If you put even $5 a day behind promoting the podcast episode or your video, you’ll get so much more traction of new people consuming your content. And again, you’re doing this for six months, no strings attached, because I want you to see what it does. And I promise you that if you care about this and you prioritize this, it will change your entire business and your success in your marketing and create so much more success for you because selling will become so much easier.
The next time you have a promotion, you’ve got this huge audience that you’ve been nurturing and warming up and building a relationship with. And so it becomes easier for you than it ever was before. So that’s what I want. Walking away from listening to this, I want you to commit what’s your visibility and brand awareness strategy. And I promise you, the people who prioritize this go so much farther. And I’ve seen it time and time and time again, work. And then I’ve seen the people who try to prioritize it, but then, you know, they don’t, they just don’t prioritize it. They don’t put it in their calendar. They have other things that come up and like, it’s your choice. Like your commitment is, is what you’re going to get out of it. Put in your calendar, release the content, plan the content strategically, make it insanely valuable because people have to have takeaways and action items and trust that’s being built from this content that they can’t get otherwise. That they actually see results or have an epiphany.
You want to build that trust. You want to stand out from all of your other audience. And in order to do that, you have to show that you’re the best at what you do. You’re the best in your industry. And that can be done through this free content through brand awareness, through visibility.
All right, you guys, and if you want support with this and a holistic strategy where you’re taking this brand awareness and visibility, and then you’re layering it into a deeper strategy, driving people through your customer journey, retargeting them and utilizing this warm audience super strategically. That is what we do with the Hirsh process and my team. So if you want to go to helpmystrategy.com, you can see if you qualify to work with us in either a done for you or a done with you way. I mentioned Ignite. If you go through that application and we feel like you’re a better fit for ignite, we actually tell you, and you can get on a call and talk about that. So thanks so much for listening today, guys, and I hope you walk away really understanding the advantages and benefits of prioritizing with your audience through valuable content. I will see you all on the next episode.