[social_warfare]
SHOW NOTES
There have been drastic changes in marketing lately with everything going on in the economy and with COVID-19.
But not everyone has struggled – and that’s because they’ve already begun to pivot their strategies rather than just trying to “wait it out.”
I have some predictions as to what is really going to make a difference for your ads and high ticket items right now, and that’s what I’m exploring in today’s episode of the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast.
Tune in to learn why I made the following predictions, and why you need to tie them into YOUR marketing strategy right now:
- WARM traffic will be more important now than ever
- Micro-offers will be BOOMING
- Those who sit back and wait for things to pass will struggle for YEARS to come.
If you want to add to this discussion, head over to my Instagram page @emilyhirsh and leave a comment on my latest post letting me know your thoughts!
If you want support with paid ads, suggestions for impactful content marketing, creating a killer marketing strategy and more, head to HelpMyStrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!
PS – I’m hosting a free LIMITED podcast pop-up series next week from July 21st-23rd where I’ll be teaching you how to build your very own micro offer that will pay for your ad spend, generate tons of high quality leads, and make BANK for your business!
It’s super exclusive, only the people who sign up will have access to tune in, and the episode will only be available until July 27th!
If that’s something you want in on (and it SHOULD be!!) you can sign up at monetizemyads.com!
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Emily Hirsh:
Hello everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. How are you all doing? I am recording this in California. We’re here for the whole month of July and it’s kind of like vacation, except I’m working. I have help with my kids during the day and I work only until about three, and then we play on the weekends and in the afternoon go around, and I’m just grateful to be out of the Texas heat. So there’s that. And I’m super excited because if you haven’t heard, I am, we are – I should say we because it’s such a team effort – but launching our popup secret podcast series next week where we will launch on the 21st of July we will release one of three podcast episodes that will come out one each day, the 21st, 22nd, 23rd. And they will be through a private podcast URL, and then they will be up through July 27th and then they’ll come down and you can’t consume it anymore.
And so we’re kind of testing this strategy and I think it’s going to be really awesome and a cool way for people to consume content that’s not a webinar, or a challenge or a video series or any of those things, but its actually a podcast and can be, you know, right in your ear and there for you. So if you want to sign up for that, the topic of the podcast series is actually is self-liquidating offers. How to have successful micro product offer, all about what offers to choose, how to set up the offers, the upsells and all of that, why you should have it, how you could strategize it in your business with the bigger picture, and then how you actually run the ads for it and make money with it.
So you can sign up for this secret podcast series at monetizemyads.com and the whole series drops on the 21st, the first episode, and then we’ll do one a day. It’ll be up for seven days. So I’m super pumped about that. What I want to talk about today now is just have like a check-in on the economy, what we’re seeing with ads and what this means for actually high ticket sales right now, really what I think kind of the marketing world is going to look like for the next probably year, just with the economic turmoil and the way buyer behavior is right now. Of course, I’m predicting and I never know exactly how it’s gonna play out, but just kind of what we’re telling clients and what we’re looking at from a strategic standpoint and everything.
So what we’re seeing, bottom line, is that people in order to buy are really heavy on the warm traffic. So selling, especially high ticket, especially something that requires an application or a phone call, and then you sell something higher level, it’s working if it’s warm traffic. The people who have had some sort of touch point with your brand one or more times in the form of watching a video, consuming a podcast, going to a webinar, purchasing a smaller price product, are the ones who are becoming customers and actually buying those higher ticket sales. And even same thing with webinar funnels that go to, you know, a $997 product, we are seeing that the warm audience is working really well.
So what happened is right now, specifically the clients and the people I see who have worked consistently to build a warm audience and they have a solid base of a warm audience, are having really awesome business months. And then the ones who haven’t are still doing okay, but what’s happening is they don’t have time to wait for cold traffic to become more traffic to then buy. And so it’s causing a little bit of stress and in some cases where, if you’re not consistently building your warm audience base of your email list, video viewers, people who are consuming your content, maybe even buying smaller price products, then when it comes time, when you need to push something to them or you want to push them through a funnel, or to the next step or to the next offer, it gets really hard because you don’t have anybody to go off of. So you have to go find the warm audience, build the warm audience, build that trust, and then push them to the thing. And that just takes time. It takes time for it to get to snowball, which is why it’s so important that you are prioritizing value and brand awareness and building that warm audience. I just did a podcast, Podcast number 192 “If You Care About Your Business, You’ll Prioritize This”, is all about that is all about value and creating that brand awareness strategy so that you have that warm audience. And that’s what’s working really well right now.
So what does this mean for ads and high ticket sales and other product sales right now? It means one: you really have to prioritize your warm audience and building your warm audience, and you also have to be a little bit willing right now to continue to look at your marketing as an investment and commit a certain amount of money every month that’s going to go to brand awareness, visibility, growing your list that you may not immediately make back directly from that, but you’re committing to it. Because what you’re measuring is “Am I growing my warm audience? Am I growing my list? Am I growing my followers? Am I growing people who watch my videos? Who download my podcast?” You want to see all of that continually trending upwards. And if that means you have to invest, you know, $500,000 a month going towards just growing that, then you will do that.
I always find it interesting how people… like anytime we’ll invest in a course or even hiring someone to do something for them, but then when it comes to investing and actually like growing their warm audience and their following, they have a hard time with it if they can’t connect the ROI from doing that. And it’s hard because so often when you have somebody who actually came from some original piece of content that you put out – your podcast or your videos, or even on your list, they signed up for an opt in or something – and then they actually bought from you in six to twelve months from then. So it gets a little bit hard to track and measure that, but if you’re consistently doing it, you’ll begin to experience a snowball effect of just consistently growing that and consistently seeing that grow so that you have that base audience to pull from.
So also, what does this mean for ads and high ticket sales? This is why I’m doing the popup podcast series next week on self-liquidating offers, because one thing that we have seen work really well and we’ve implemented in our own company is creating some sort of low priced self liquidating offer. Because then you’re able to grow your quality – your audience of quality leads while kind of mitigating that ad cost. And so the goal all with a SLO funnel, micro, tiny offer, whatever you call it, is to pay for the ad spend, hopefully be a little bit profitable with the upsells, but really to getting quality leads. And so we’re using that type of a funnel for our own high ticket sales funnels, because we’re getting people into our SLO funnel. We’re actually making about two to two and a half times ROI on the actual funnel itself. So the funnel with the upsells, it’s our Facebook Ad Toolkit, that is our SLO funnel basically and we’re making money off that. But the end goal of it is I want people to have such a great experience with those tools and those things I sell and trainings I sell, that they become clients and they apply. And so out of that, we’re also trying to get applications. Now, the benefit of that is if we get an application through that funnel, they’re a much more qualified lead because they’ve actually purchased something from me and they got value out of that. They were most likely, I would hope, impressed out of what they purchased and the tools they purchased and thought, “I don’t want to do this myself. I need to go get support in implementing this in my own business.”
And so that’s kind of our idea with the SLO which is why in the popup guest series, I’m going to walk through how you should set your slow funnel up and consider the content, because one important thing to note here is that I was very intentional with the content that we chose to put in this SLO funnel so I could have made it. So we made a toolkit that was the Facebook Ads Toolkit. You might’ve seen it or heard it even on the podcast commercials on here where inside of it is our projection calculator, our campaign planner, our ad copy swipe file, all our tools, our ad tools. And then on the upsell is video training on how to use those tools.
So one thing that would have been a mistake is if I made the toolkit, like how to set up your first Facebook ad, how to place your pixel, how to do your… how to find audiences to target. I was very basic with it, because what that would have done, while I could help people with that and I could create a training – and honestly the SLO funnel would probably be profitable doing that – it’s going to attract not the right customer for our agency, which is people who really want to take their ads to the next level. They already have the foundational knowledge of ads of funnels, of marketing, and they’re ready to scale, or they’re ready to just get serious about their marketing and hire the experts to optimize all their ads. Because what they’ve done is really not correct.
We get a lot of people who try to do it themselves and they did okay, but then they didn’t have the time and the bandwidth to put into ads cause it can be like a full time job. And they did that for a while and then decided to go hire the expert. So that’s why I’m going after. Whereas, if I had the toolkit be like “ads 101 and how to set up ads”, I’m going after people who have literally never touched ads manager before, which is okay. That’s fine. I have our Ignite course for them, but that’s not my ideal avatar for our agency. And so I had that person in mind because I knew my end goal with this funnel was to get applications, to get agency clients, to impress people with our products and our tools that we use with our clients and then get them in and then hopefully get them to apply and become clients. And so what you should be considering right now for between now and the next year is if you don’t have a form of a lower price product, a self liquidating offer, something like that, it’s just something to consider.
I’m not saying it’s exactly right for everybody in that every single person should have it, because I would never recommend a strategy like that. But I am saying that we’re seeing it work in several client accounts. It’s working for us, and my true reason behind why I’m pushing for it right now is over the last four months, I’ve seen a lot more people start purchasing these type of products because it’s a very low risk, high reward situation. It’s a no-brainer price. Like, they’re going to just go buy it and then they get a high reward from it. If you set it up right where they can go implement it in their business, or their life, or whatever, and they’re able to see quick results or a quick solution is created from it. And people are looking for those type of things right now, they have no problem purchasing those types of things. Whereas, they might have a little bit more of a problem buying something of higher ticket if they don’t have the real trust that you can support them, because it’s a little bit more of an uneasy time in the economy.
So it makes total sense with the buying buyer’s mentality of it and why it’s working. So in this popup series, I’m going to go through how do you look at the ads? You actually have to look at the ads like it’s a physical product funnel. How do you set up your retargeting ads so you make a lot of money? All of the strategies that we’re using in our own SLO funnel and our client’s SLO funnels. The reason I really wanted to do this topic is because I think at the least, I want you all to reflect on your business – would this funnel serve my bigger picture goal of selling my main core offer or service? Would it attract more quality leads while also hopefully paying for my ad spend, maybe even being profitable so I can get those leads in without having a massive risk? Because what’s hard is when you’re doing just lead gen ads to like an opt-in, you are spending all of that money and you know, not making it back until they get to the end result of buying your higher ticket or what never. So what’s good about the SLO funnel, and in some cases you’ll end up doing both, but what’s good about that SLO funnel is you’re able to mitigate the risk a little bit by paying for your ads ad spend. And so something to consider is would this work for your business? Is this the right fit for your business?
Then the other piece is just, how are you going to continuously commit to growing your audience, your warm audience right now and in the next year? Because I promise you – mark my words – the entrepreneurs who prioritize this and invest in their marketing, and stay in the picture, and don’t get afraid of the economy, and don’t pull back and kind of just wait for things to pass and wait for this to be over and playing it super, super safe, they will struggle in the years to come from now because they’ll pull back and they’ll lose that warm audience. The people who step up and commit to saying, “I will do well over the next year. I will still grow my audience. I will still grow my list. I will still make sales. I will still grow my business. I will be fine, because I’m choosing that and I will do whatever it takes to get there” are the ones who are going to be way better off in a year from now and actually experience growth.
And I truly, truly believe that because no matter what there’s a lot of opportunity right now. No matter what happens that we don’t know about. You know, I really think soon a lot of the stimulus money’s going to run out and we’re going to have the actual reality of what COVID has done to our economy, and I think that it’s not going to be great, and it’s going to be a little bit scary. And I’ve actually never lived through or had my business through a real recession, so I don’t have a lot of experience around that. But what I can tell you is even right now and throughout this, we’ve been having the best business months, and lot of it is because I have been very proactive in choosing to make sure that that is where we will fall. And I think that’s what our clients are doing. Those are the types of people that we work with.
Right now I want for you to choose. And one of the ways you choose that is just by continually committing to growth, no matter what happens over the next year. You will grow your warm audience. You will continue to grow your followers. And if people take a little longer to become a buyer, they need a couple of extra touch points, a little bit extra trust with them. that’s okay. And that’s actually normal right now. Especially if you’re selling something high ticket, an application or a call, this is critical to commit like 90 days to really grow in your warm audience and really, really building that up and then seeing how that impacts the overall big picture of your strategy of getting applications and getting calls and getting clients. And I guarantee you, if you commit to it for 90 days and you have a set budget and you’re like, “I’m going to grow my audience. I’m going to nurture people. I’m going to get these quality leads in” and you do that consistently for 90 days, you will pick up some serious momentum with your higher ticket sales.
So one way to do that is through self liquidating offer funnels which is what I’m going to be talking about next week in the private podcast series. So just to clarify, it’s not on this public podcast, you have to go to monetizemyads.com and register to get access to the private podcast feed. And then we will drop those podcasts on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and they’ll only be available and up until the 27th. Then they will be taking down the access. So if you want access to those, go to monetizemyads.com.
Thanks so much for tuning in today guys. I hope you consider adding in some sort of lower ticket offer if that works for you, or at the least committing to your warm audience, committing to your lead generation, committing to growing your brand. And really I’m really committed to that long game, and I want you to stick with me and stick with it with yourself and your business between now and the next year, when this is going to be really, really critical. I think the people who do that will come out on top – mark my words – I really believe it. So thanks so much, and I’ll see you guys on the next episode.