[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

How do you attract the right clients to your higher ticket items?

Webinars are an incredible tried and true option…

But in my case at least, I’ve been having some trouble getting my ideal clients to actually sign up for webinars.

So I wanted to try testing out a new and creative alternate to a webinar. Thus, my pop-up podcast series on self-liquidating offers was born.

Not to brag, but the series absolutely crushed it.

We generated nearly $40k in revenue and got a 507% return on our ad spend. 

I just couldn’t keep this to myself, so in today’s episode I’m spilling all of the behind-the-scenes of the series!

I’m walking you through all of the strategy that went into executing the series, what worked really well and what didn’t, and all of our metrics and results that came out of this.

I predict that this format is going to be the next hot thing – I’ve already had someone replicate it!

Tune in to learn how we crushed this launch and how you can implement something like this for your business!

We’re going to be rolling these out and implementing them for our clients. So if this is something you’d like support with, definitely apply to work with Team Hirsh at www.helpmystrategy.com! 

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, everybody. I am so excited for this episode. Um, a lot of you guys have been kind of waiting for this, to where I’m going to give you 100% behind the scenes from our pop-up secret podcast series. So all the numbers I haven’t pulled up from our metric, meaning it takes me a little while to get our data because people go through our application and then they have to buy. So it just takes time to get that back and have all the numbers and the ROI. So what I’m going to do here is share first the strategy, the setup, why we did it, kind of the thinking behind it, how we’re using private podcast feeds, and then I’m going to share the numbers with you. Um, so let’s start with the strategy. So if you are new here and you didn’t see this kind of play out in July, what we did was a popup podcast series.

And so people opted in, they went from an ad to a landing page that we had on click funnels, where they put their name and their email, and then they were signed up. They were able to then get access to a private podcast feed. So you couldn’t search this podcast speed just by going publicly, um, into iTunes. You had to actually sign up to get a link. And it was a unique link that they got. And so then they could put it in their podcast player. Um, it was compatible with most podcast players, not all which really is just because some on like Spotify, I think some podcast players don’t support private podcasting. So like Apple, the main ones do, I don’t know if Spotify is considered a main one, I just know that one didn’t work. Um, so signed up and then you got access to the private feed.

And then on specific days, what we did was we launched an episode. So we had three total episodes. They released, you know, one day after another, and then they were only available for a total of seven days. So then we deleted them completely from the feed. So you had that urgency that you had to listen within that week, uh, to consume the episode. We also heavily pushed our free Facebook group with that. So on the thank you page and throughout it, I did some bonus Q and A’s and videos in there, and we were kind of supporting people as they went through the content, um, to come in and ask questions and engage in our Facebook group. So it actually grew our Facebook group by several members as well. Um, and then what we did is in each one, uh, we basically promoted my main offer, which is to go and apply to work with us.

So it was promoting the application, which from there, the application leads to all of our offers. So you get on a call and our team kind of decides, should we put you in the done for you offer done with you, offer, um, the several different done for you offers like kind of packages we have. And so we were pushing applications. That was our main, main goal and to push some urgency behind that, within that seven day time period. Um, if you got your application and there was a discount of a thousand dollars on our services, if you got your application. So couple of things to just zoom out and point out here, urgency was very big and a big part of the success. Um, because people had the urgency where they have to actually listen to the episodes cause they were going to be deleted.

And then they also had the urgency that once they’re listening and in it, they had to get their application. And if they were thinking about it, because that they have that distance, right? So we were pushing that urgency the whole time. We also were pushing heavy support and value. So my podcast episodes were about 20 to 30 minutes each and the whole theme was self liquidating offer funnels. Um, we came up with that because what was happening was I was actually actually getting on webinars in the previous months. And a lot of people were asking me questions about self liquidating offers. So is paying attention to that. I was getting a lot of questions. I’m all. I was also paying attention to the success. Our clients were having with a self liquidating offer. We had just launched a self liquidating offer funnel that was getting 300% plus ROI and leading to applications.

It’s a very popular, you know, term out there right now, micro offers, tiny offer. So I was like, I’m going to go all in with this main topic. And I am going to give away so much value. And that was really my goal because I know that my clients who I want to apply, they don’t want to do all this themselves. And so I knew I could tell you exactly how to do it and I’d still get the applications. And so that’s kind of where I came, uh, with the content creation. The reason we did a private podcast series in the first place was for the previous three months, I was doing a monthly live webinar and same, same concept, sign up, do the webinar, lead to the application. And there was a monetary incentive. Get your application in and you’ll qualify for the discount.

So what was happening is each time I was noticing our show up rate was declining. And I was like, you know, I don’t think that our clients are a lot of our clients are actually watching webinars. I know that myself, I haven’t been to a webinar in years, but I know I listened to podcasts. And I know that our podcast, this one that you’re listening to is one of our biggest drivers for applications and for clients. And so I was like, why not? And I actually, I I’m saying I was like, I have to give full credit here. Aandra Bohlen who, um, she is our client success specialist. She both consults me with my sales process and our system. And she also does take our sales calls, which I’m very fortunate. She doesn’t do that for people. But what she does do is come in and audit your sales systems.

She has massively improved, um, how qualified our leads are coming in. We’ve gone from literally, um, like 60%. I think we’re qualified leads. So 40% we’re getting declined to 95% are qualified. Now only 5% are getting declined, her our close rate because of that reason, because they’re all qualified as literally like 65%. I’m not kidding of a close rate. It’s so crazy for our ignite. It’s like 70% and for agencies like 45. So it’s amazing. And that’s because of her. So she, after one of my webinars, she’s like, let’s try a popup podcast series. And so it was her initial, like seed of an idea that I took and my team and I, we kind of shifted it from one episode to three, instead of like their original vision was one episode, like basically a webinar turned into a podcast, we decided to do it more like a series.

And then we created the content around it. So then it became very collaborative. But the original like seed of the idea was Aandra. So if you don’t know her, you should know her. Um, anyway, so we took that and the whole concept was how do we get people to consume this valuable content? Because webinars show up rates are going down. Let’s try it in a podcast series. And that’s what we did. So a lot of the stats we have are similar to webinars cost per lead, opt in page, you know, conversion. We used many chat. Um, and then instead of show up rate, we’re tracking downloads. Now, um, a lot of people are going to ask me this software. So for this actual launch, we used transistor. That’s a, uh, major software that I think like one of only two or three that actually do private podcasting.

However, I didn’t like it. So we’re not using it anymore. I’ll talk about what we’re doing now after with the podcast series is it’s now evergreen, but the software I recommend is hello, audio. It’s by my friend, Lindsay Pedea. And they just launched their software. So it’s in new stages, but she is what turned me on to private podcasting, even being the thing. Here’s why I didn’t like transistor if you’re curious. So here was probably the biggest downside and the feedback we got around the tech. So that’s the hard part is like the tech, because people are still figuring out private podcasting and how that all works. So when you signed up, you’re signing up and you’re getting tagged in our CRM software, which is Ontraport. And then we were sending you a transistor link to our private feed. The problem is transistor makes, makes the user, put their email in again, and then they send them a personalized, private link.

But the downside is all we can send people to was transistors page. So in all of our emails, we were sending people like reminder emails, Hey, episode to launch, like to transistors page. But if they already signed up to that, then they were going to that page where they had to put their email address in. But if they put their email address dress in, it was saying, you already subscribed, go find your link. So then they’d have to go to their email. Five new Lincoln, not impossible, totally doable, but a little bit of a pain, right? So it’s always about that customer experience because then if you, you know, put your email in and get it as like this already, this already been used, you have to go in your email, find the transistor email, click the link, get it into your podcast feed. Once it’s in your podcast feed, it’s super easy.

Then all the episodes are there. Then you really just go to your podcast feed with my friend Lindsay’s, um, software. They don’t require email. So they’re just straight giving the person their link. And we are able to in Ontraport link to their link, their unique link using a merge field in every email. So we’re able to keep sending them back to their links. So I like that the reason I tested transistors, they had a little bit more stats and I was trying to get stats, but the stats didn’t actually turn out that good. So I’m using Lindsay’s and she currently doesn’t have a lot of stats, but will. So I wanted stats of like downloads, but it’s hard because all of these softwares are limited by like RSS feeds and what they’re giving them. So anyways, we don’t have to get too techie in the, in the softwares, but I like it because it’s something new and it’s like, okay, what?

What’s the good and the bad. So the software was not ideal. We use transistor, we’ve now switched to hello audio. The user experience with transistor was not my favorite for that reason. Okay. Let’s look at, so that’s the strategy. Let’s look at some metrics. So they’re really good and so excited. Okay. So, um, for the podcast, we spent a total of $7,879 from that we got 780 leads, actually that’s total ad spend. So we probably spent about more like 7,000 on the ads. And then eight 79 was probably for retargeting. We got 780 leads. We paid about $8 and 50 cents a lead. Now, in my opinion, that was a little high. I’d like to get that down. I like to get it down to more $7, but that’s because I have high expectations for myself because we’re a marketing agency, but you know, average webinar leads are seven to $10 in the B2B space.

So we were right in there. We were right in there of the cost of what a webinar registrant would be. Um, we got a total of 578, uh, organic leads, sorry, we got 800 ad leads, five 78, organic leads. Yeah. And 1378 total leads. Organic just means our social, our podcast, people sharing it. Um, we didn’t pay for those leads. Those came through our own channels. We paid eight 50 a lead our landing page converted at 30%. So pretty good. I actually would like to also get that up. I think there was room for us to get that up and be even more clear in the messaging, but still not bad. Um, on the thank you page of our sign up, we had many chat. So you got a workbook. If you clicked our mini chat button. The reason for that is I do it for all live webinars, any live experience, because you’re able to send many chat messages out, which have a very high open and click rate and just view rate.

Um, so we had 64% of people on that. Thank you. Page sign up for many chats. That was pretty good. So they signed up for chat. Now they’re subscribed email and they’re also subject to subscribed many chat so that we could send them. Episode three is live, click here, go apply for the application. Just additional messages. I do that with webinars too. The incentive behind it was they got a workbook. If they click the mini chat button on the thank you page. So we had 886 subscribers to that. So 64% of people. So total, we got 1378 signups. We paid about eight 50 a lead. We spent about 7,800, just over dollars. Now our di our data on the podcast downloads, like I said, it wasn’t very good. I didn’t like the data, but we had a total downloads of 25, 37. So 2,537, which it’s like, okay, we had 1378 leads, 25, 37 downloads.

That’s because they’re counting each episode as a download. So I don’t know the number. It wasn’t possible to find the number of like how many people out of the 1378 downloaded the podcast, my guess would be 40 to 50% based on the 25 37, which if that’s the case, that’s way better than a 20% show up rate on a webinar, right? Because that would be the equivalent stat that I’d be comparing. Okay. Out of that, we had 24 total applications come in to our agency and calls booked. So we actually didn’t, nobody got denied. That’s actually the crazy thing. It was all qualified applications, which it’s kind of hard to get approved. So it was all very qualified people. We had 24 apps, 24 calls from the podcast secret series. Now here’s a cool part. 18 of those applications, can we track directly from our ads?

Uh, so they were tagged with an ads tag. And so we know that those came from an ad new leads that came in. So that’s about a 1.7% conversion of all of our leads to application a little low, but I’m okay with it, especially when you hear the ROI in a second. So compared to if you’re selling like a course where a lot of people can buy it, you would have a higher sales conversion on a webinar or in something like this, where I am selling marketing services. And so a lot of times people aren’t ready for the marketing services yet, or, you know, you have to be like, I want to hire an agency or I am ready to run ads right now or in the next 30 days. Or I, you know, know that I want to start running out. So I’m going to get that done with you course.

So my conversion is usually lower than the average for like a course or a mastermind for that reason, but it makes up in the ROI because it’s such a high ticket service. Okay. So let’s move to the sales stats. Um, from that we had four agency sales, seven ignite sales, 39,979 in collected revenue. So like people coming into our agency, they pay their first deposit, uh, which ranges from five to 7,000 of the onboarding and the whole first month of their ads. Okay. So they pay that and then ignite, obviously they pay paid for the cost of the course. So we got up right now, all those agency people they’re now agency clients, those four people. So they will pay us monthly from here on out. So we got 39,979 of collected revenue, which was a 507% return on our investment. So pretty dang good.

We sold or agencies 700 night, almost 40 grand made from 7,879 investment 507% return on our investment. Here’s the other keys that I love is our application. So another reason when we did our webinar, the majority of the applications we’d get in the people watching the webinar were ignite. Like it was that level of a S of a lead, which is, is fine. I want to sell a ton of ignite, but I also have to crack the code on how do I continually get high level agency clients. And when we did this, it flipped. So it was like 75% agency, 25% ignite where the webinar was like 75% ignite, 25% agency, which means it proved what we were thinking. The higher level piece both will consume the podcast versus attend the webinar. So overall incredible results, incredible ROI. On top of that, we had so much engagement, so much Facebook growth, group growth.

Um, so many people who were commenting on how great the content is, how they, you know, got so much value out of it. It definitely boosted our overall brand awareness and wherever, whenever I do something like that, what happens is these leads become sales in the months to come too. So like, we’ll be able to track back. They originated from our podcast popup series in July, but it was just amazing brand awareness growth, not to mention of course, ROI. So we will be doing it again, live, uh, for sure. And this is a strategy that I, I highly recommend. I’ve already had one person kind of copy me, which is awesome. Um, I hadn’t seen it done before, so it was really a cool, like fun thing to try and navigate, um, and figure out how to do so now what we’ve done is we’ve turned it evergreen.

So it’s now running ads where you sign up and you get access to the private feed, the unique URL we’re using, hello, audios, unique URL. It’s very easy for them to get access to it. Um, I actually rerecorded the episodes for the automated series because what I did was I took all the questions I was getting in the Q and a throughout the series and everything. And I updated the content because that’s what I do. I listened to what you guys said. Yay. Um, when you, when you tell me what, what you were not clear on, you know, with content. And so I went and updated it and now we’re running an automated. So hopefully I’ll have some stats soon, um, for the actual automated series. And we’re going to test it against an automated webinar. So I want to see how both kind of convert in an automated stance, but the live podcast series crushed it.

Um, we will be doing it again. And like I said, I want to do kind of a new round of content in quarter four, sometime like a theme to content around it. Um, with that also I want to share just private podcasting in general, what else we’ve done with it? So we’ve done this where we are doing, um, this like lead gen kind of strategy, but also on the backend, uh, we created a whole PRI uh, podcast feed for our clients when they’re onboarded that has trainings, uh, top podcast episodes. I wanted them to listen to, um, ignite training audios that I pulled out for them. And so it’s a private fee that they get access to when they sign on as a client. Um, we took my audio book and we put it in a private feed because otherwise you can get it from audible, but you have to obviously be paying for audible and have a credit, you know?

And so this way we can deliver the audio to you through our own funnel, um, and the best way that I could find to deliver it. Wasn’t a private podcast feed cause just giving one whole audio clip is kind of lame. Like it’s hard for people to listen to it. We also are creating a private feed for a whole section of our ignite course not the one that has like a lot of screen sharing and stuff, but more content based. And I’m going to create a private feed for our live training. So we do a monthly live training and ignite, and I want to create a feed for that. So people can consume it via audio. So it might sound crazy all the ways that I’m using private podcasting, but I’m obsessed because it works. People consume it, the content I know myself, like I will way more listen to audio.

Then I would watch a video and have to be logged into a training center to watch the video. So it’s just my students, my audience, my clients, to consume material that I want them to consume because it’s going to help them and support them, move them through in their journey. So that’s all the ways that we’re using private podcasting on the backend right now, um, which we’ve had amazing feedback about as well. So just gets you thinking, like how it might be relevant in your business. Like I said, I recommend, hello audio, if you haven’t used them. Honestly, Lindsay like turned me on, like I said to this, she’s the CEO of hello audio. And she turned me on to this. Um, I w I never thought about it before, and she’s a teacher. And so she was like, this is, you know, a great way to get your students to consume information better and actually go through your course.

And so, um, you know, we’ve tested it and the numbers don’t lie. So that is all the results from our pop-up podcast series. I can’t wait to hear what you guys think. If you do end up trying something like this, tell me, I want to know how it goes. I want to know how you’re doing it. I know we’re going to have some clients probably do this, who have asked us about it. So, um, I’m, I’ve got the benefit of being our client is I’ve got SLPs upon SLPs on how to roll this out and actually implement this in your business and the ads and all the little pieces and details that we thought of. So if you’re interested in working with Hirsch marketing in that capacity or in any other capacity, make sure you go to help my strategy.com and get your application in otherwise, I’ll see you guys all in the next episode,