[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

If there’s one main goal entrepreneurs have, it’s securing clients.

The tricky thing though, is that we’ll generate leads with our lower ticket products and courses (because warm leads are the people who are most likely to become clients), but sometimes they just… won’t convert.

The key here is to create ascension within your products.

If you guide your leads through your funnel and make sure you’re building up that trust and truly set them up for success every step of the way, I guarantee you’ll be able to get them to convert into clients more successfully.

Okay, now that all sounds good — but how do you actually do that?

That’s what I’m sharing in today’s episode of The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast.

I’ll be walking you through several different strategies that I use in my signature course Ignite that you can implement in your own funnels to create ascension and convert your leads into clients.

Have any thoughts or questions about today’s episode that you want to share with me? Head over to my Instagram @emilyhirsh and drop a comment on my latest post!

Now if you need additional support with your overall marketing strategy, your ads, and building your funnels, head over to helpmystrategy.com to apply to work with Team Hirsh!

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Emily Hirsh: 

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am excited for today’s episode because I love marketing strategies that are kind of like hidden. So what do I mean by that? I have been working on actually implementing marketing strategies within my Ignite course so that we can basically send our students to become clients. So one of the core reasons that I made my course – if you don’t know what I’m talking about, if you’re new to the podcast, we have a signature course called Ignite. I launched it about a year ago, and it’s kind of done-with-you where it has online training materials and resources and videos and all of that like a regular course. But then it’s also done with you because it has live support. We have coaching calls. We have monthly trainings. And we’re kind of supporting people through their ads who aren’t quite yet ready to hire our agency and to hire done-for-you support, but they want to leverage all the tools.

So I launched that about a year ago, and one of my core reasons for launching it was obviously to still support the people who weren’t quite ready to become a client with that. I want to create clients out of the course, and I think that we create pretty awesome clients out of the course because they know our material. And we’ve learned when clients come in to work with us, if they kind of understand the process, understand how we do ads, understand how we do tracking, they’re generally set up for success. Which is actually a whole other podcast, how I’ve done that for our clients, but we have converted probably about 10% of our Ignite students into paying clients. So it’s working. It’s doing what I want it to do, but I wanted to get even more strategic with it. So I want to talk about some strategies that I did because, or that we implemented. I should say we, it’s definitely a team collaboration too to see if it gives you any ideas. 

So first of all, I think if you have multiple levels in your business and let me just first state, you don’t have to right away. And I really recommend that unless you’re at a million dollars, you don’t. So this might be future ideas for you, or you might already have and this might help you, but I have to follow what I tell all of you guys to do and that’s focus. And I didn’t launch ignite until I had been running my agency for three years and my delivery on my client service side, which is still the bulk of my business, was fully running without me. It was over a million. I was fully out of the delivery, every single piece of it I was out of. So I could put my time into launching a course because it’s almost like even though this course is attracting our same audience, just at a different level, it’s almost like a whole new business because you have to just do the marketing and the delivery and the enrollment and like all the pieces to it.

And so don’t try to do this if you have not gotten your core offer to at least a million. You don’t have to have multiple levels. However, this could also be relevant if you have like a tiny level, like let’s say you have like a $47 product, and then you’re using that to go into your upper level. Some of these things could be relevant for just how do you ascend people within your product? How do you hide marketing strategies within your product? Not really hide them, but just be strategic with it and be strategic with the pathway that you want to send your audience on even once they’ve become customers, because those customers are some of your best leads. Somebody who’s bought something from you and has a good experience. That’s a very important piece. You have to have delivered and given them a good, positive experience, but somebody who is in that boat where they’ve purchased from you had a great experience, they are some of your best, hottest leads for future purchases. Most, really big fans and people who follow you purchase multiple of your things. Like I definitely have followers who I love and people who buy everything we put out, they become clients. Like they want our slo funnel. They want Ignite. Like, they want everything right? And those are the people I want. I want more of those people. And so do you! So here are some strategies that we implemented in our Ignite course to help more people ascend into becoming clients.

The first and most important thing that I’m constantly focused on, but I basically did a refresh and an overhaul on, is that they have to get results and they have to move forward. So for me, Ignite, when you come in the first 90 days is like really heavy. That’s when you have access to the live support, that’s when you should be implementing it, consuming the content, making changes and really driving your marketing your business forward and seeing those results. And so I have to make sure people are doing that because really, if they don’t do that, the chance of them then investing in more money and spending more money on getting support with their marketing, they won’t. Because they’ll have a guilt factor of like, “well I bought the course, but I didn’t do anything with it. I need to do something with it, kind of make my investment back from the course and then maybe I’ll become a client because I don’t deserve to do that.” You know, that is kind of the talk that I hear people say is they have that guilt if they don’t consume a course, or get traction after spending money with something. They feel guilty so they won’t spend money again. So if you have a course or some sort of product and your purchase, your lead, doesn’t… the person, the customer doesn’t actually consume it and start to see results and have forward progress, then the chance of them buying something else is a lot lower because they’re going to feel guilty about the first purchase that they made. 

So the first and most important thing you can do to get your audience to ascend and your customers to ascend when they have come into your first product, or one of your products, is to make sure they get results. And a lot of that comes with just making sure they consume the content and implement what you’re saying, and do what you’re saying to get results. That’s the hardest part is getting students who buy courses to actually, like, watch the material, make time for it, and implement what you’re saying in their business. And even if I buy courses, I’m guilty of this, like making time for it is very hard. So what I recently did was we’ve already, you know, we’re very focused on this, but I made for each – in our course there’s student pathways. So you come in and you choose your pathway. That gives you all the training you need to go through and then that’s based on where you’re at in your business today. 

So we’ve already tried to customize it so it’s as easy as possible, but I went to the next level with the new idea that I had, which was creating like a whole content plan for them. So we have three different pathways and now each one has, here’s your content plan week one, you’re going to watch these videos and you’re going to implement this, this, and this. You’re going to check it off. Week two you’re going to do this. And I do that for 12 weeks for all three pathways. And I tell them like, “you can customize this, you can change this around, but you have to have a schedule. You have to have this to make sure you’re moving forward and seeing results.”

And then I tied into our Facebook group some new engagement posts that I’m going to do to basically hold people accountable. How far are you on your checklist? What are you committing to next month? What are you getting done? What questions do you have? Where are you stuck? Because my main goal is that they move forward, that they consume my content and they move forward with their progress to achieving their goals and making their marketing, you know, have progress with it. So I do that by clearly laying it out for them as clear as I can possible. Here’s the resources you need to go through. Here’s the material, here’s the implementation. And what I think is an important piece, and it’s actually, you know, I’m fortunate because it’s how my brain thinks – like I’m very much like, “Okay, consume information. Information is great. Now I need the implementation steps.” Whenever I read a book or I consume any type of material, I don’t really get anything out of it unless I know what I’m going to actually change and implement in my life or my business from the information. Information is great, but implementation is everything. 

So combining your material and making sure you’re not just like, go watch all this stuff and do what I say in the video. But you break it down for people and you’re like, “Okay, here’s the trainings, and here is your implementation, like action items that you have to take with these trainings because implementation is everything.” So just watching your trainings will not get your students results. So that’s the first thing is that I am making sure our students, as much as I can and doing as much as I can, making sure they are moving forward and seeing progress. And what I don’t want is like six to eight weeks go by and they haven’t even opened the course or started consuming the course, because then the chance of them getting their momentum and becoming a client goes down, right? And when somebody first buys a course, like that’s their highest momentum. They just spent the money and they’re like, “let me dive in, let me come to the calls, let me get going,” and it just slowly kind of wanes off. And so we have to keep that going and keep that momentum up. 

So the second thing that we have always had, but I kind of updated, and this is also if you have a course something to consider, is we have an onboarding email sequence that’s pretty solid and it’s actually scheduled out for 90 days. And so it has, first of all, the whole first month is just supportive. It’s like, here’s your to do list. Here’s your reminder of what you need to do. Here is you know, your links. How are you doing? Checking in, getting them to fill out our onboarding survey, it’s all just about getting them to, what I’ve been speaking about. Take action, move forward in their to do lists, not feel overwhelmed, feel like they have a plan. 

So that’s the whole first month, and then as we approach the 90 days at about, I’d say 60 to 75 days out, so two and a half months. We added in some emails for somebody to go and schedule what we call their level up call. So they can go from there, our core inside the course. And now we’re actually saying like, “Hey, why don’t you get back on the phone with us, or get back on the phone with our team, or get on the phone if you haven’t been on before with us and just talk about your progress in the course, what’s next for you, your goals, your plan” and just getting them to get on a call with our team.

And I have to shout out Aandra Bohlen. She is our client accelerator specialist, and this was actually one of her strategies so I can’t take credit for it. But these Level Up calls was something she recommended. And so we crafted the emails and put in the link and we added that in so now it’s automated for all my students when they’re at the point where I feel like is most critical that they consider becoming a client or taking action on that. We have emails that will go out that will suggest that they get on this level up call. And it’s not just to sell them like, honestly, it’s to serve them. To check in – how are you doing in the course? Have you made progress? Where are you stuck? And now what’s next for you? So you can keep the forward momentum.

So we created those emails and now those will be automated within our 90 day sequence so that people don’t just kind of fall off, which is where, you know, a lot of people will within that 90 days. So I’ve made sure that people get results, they move forward. And then we have these level up calls and the calls won’t matter if the people didn’t make any progress. They’re not going to get on a call and be like, “Hey, I didn’t make any progress in the last 90 days.” So it’s crucial and critical that my students make progress and that they go through my material. So I’m doing everything I can to support them in the course and in the Facebook group. And so I can’t stress enough how critical and important that is. 

And then the other thing I did was just create a very clear direction within the course itself. This is something easy that you could probably do if you have some sort of backend in your course where you’ve got material you’re going through. Just reference the next thing that they should either buy, or getting on a call, or whatever it is. If you’ve set your products up right and your value letter up right, the next step for them is your product and you’ve been strategic with that. And that’s how we have it. Like the next step is once you realize that you either don’t want to do this yourself, or you need more support and you need to up-level, your product should just make sense. And so that, that has to be correct in the way that you’ve set it up, but make it really easy and clear for them to buy the next thing or apply or whatever it is.

So we do this in all of our products. If we have some sort of upsell or next step, we want people to take, we just clearly lay it out. So even in, you know, a small price product, that was just one video training, you can add something within the course content itself that sends them to the next place. And so within the course content, I put “become an agency client” and information about it, and the link to book a call with our team. And they get to kind of shortcut and skip the application because they might’ve already come through or we might already know them, and so they get this kind of like shortcut special call. But just, you know, you’d think that everybody would think of this, but just simply putting a button and putting a way for people to go and explore the next level. 

And I mean, that could be a sales page. If you have a low price product and you’ve got a members area or a log in area where somebody logs in to access the content, you can simply put a button to that next step for them. And just knowing they’re going to be in there, consuming the content, and ideally the content’s really good and it gets them excited and they want more, and so make it very easy for them to go to the next step, whatever that is. Whether it’s a sales page, a call that they book a webinar, you want them to watch, like, what is that next step? 

So I think this is really crucial,and that’s why I wanted to talk about this with you guys is sometimes we only see our marketing from external and we’re only seeing how do we get more new, more and more and more people in cold traffic? And we’re so obsessed with that, which is obviously really important for growth, but a lot of times we’re leaving money on the table and opportunity on the table where we could be optimizing all the work we’re already doing, all the people we’re already getting into our world. Whether it’s their free experiences and funnels. Whether it’s your paid products. Whatever it is, and actually creating that journey more clearly laid out for them. 

This is where I want you guys to remember and go back to like marketing is a journey for that lead, and so everybody in your sphere or your world is on some sort of journey with your content. They’ve consumed a little bit of it. They’ve consumed none of it. They’ve consumed a ton of it. They become a customer. All different scenarios. And so for all of those people, how do you create a very clearly laid out journey that serves them, and that really gets it so that they know what the next step is that they need to take, and they know how to get more support from you? And you have to look at it as that as serving them, as not just trying to  be in their face and sell them, but they need what you’re offering. If they’re the right audience, they need what you’re offering and you need to make it very easy for them to kind of self diagnose and move on to the next step and know what that next step is and not be confused. 

I think a lot of people forget about this and it’s really simple. And it’s honestly, like I said, just low hanging fruit money being left on the table because you’ve already done the hard work. I mean, if you’re getting sales and you’re getting core sales and people logging into a member area. Like man, you’ve got a funnel converting and you’ve done the hardest part, now optimize on those people and get even more out of it because they’re some of your best people to buy more from you. If you have multiple levels in your business, if you don’t yet, do not listen to this podcast and then go create it just because you think it sounds cool. Make sure you’re focused and you’ve got one main thing that is doing well that has momentum, that’s making money. And then you can add either a level up or a level down. Usually within the course, you’re going level up because most people don’t want to level down once they’ve already come into a course. So I wouldn’t do that. But you’ve got something else, some additional support people can get from you within that. Now don’t just create it because you’re like, “I want to have it.” But if you have it already make sure you’re really optimizing on those leads to get the most out of them.

So that is what I’m doing. I wanted to give you behind the scenes of what we’re doing and honestly, just having content that is really good, has done a lot for me. And one thing that’s worked really well at converting people into clients already is they get into the course and they realize like how much people are doing, or we are doing like for clients in terms of like testing process and all the things that we do. And they’re like, “I don’t want to do all this myself. It’s a full time job. I just want to hire the agency.” And that was my original intent with Ignite was like, just to make sure that our course kind of portrays that. So a lot of your strategy has to come into the content itself and how it kind of portrays those next level for people, but make it easy for them to up-level. Make it clear for them and be a strategic anywhere somebody is going and you’re getting traffic, including inside of a course. Be strategic with the way that set up and how clearly that’s laid out so you’re getting the most out of that area. 

All right, guys, thanks so much for tuning in. If you are listening to this and you’re like, “Ignite sounds really cool,” you can go to helpmystrategy.com and we actually now have the option that you go through that application and it tells you if Ignite or becoming a client is a better fit for you. And so if you feel like, “Oh, I need to get in on this and I want to see this,” go to helpmystrategy.com, see if you qualify to work with us and it will tell you what capacity you qualify to work with us and which capacity is the best. So thanks so much for listening and I will see you all on the next episode.