[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

Think you’re “done” with your marketing?

Think again!

Marketing is an ever evolving process where there will ALWAYS be opportunities for improvement.

Nothing you do will ever truly be “perfect.”

There will always be issues that arise where you’ll need to pivot and optimize your strategy.

And even when you get it as close to perfect as you possibly can, that doesn’t mean you should stop.

That means it’s time to scale, scale, and scale some more to explode your ROI.

But how do you know when you have opportunities to scale and optimize your marketing?

All it takes is a clear process of analyzing your data and knowing how to interpret it to drive your marketing decisions.

In today’s episode, I’m walking you through that process of scaling and optimizing (which just so happens to be step 5 of The Hirsh Process!) and laying it out so simply and concisely that you’ll have the foundation you need to start skyrocketing your profits in under 25 minutes!

If today’s episode provided clarity on the opportunities you have to scale and optimize your marketing, send me a DM letting me know over on the ‘gram @emilyhirsh!

Need additional support with tracking your ads, analyzing data ridden spreadsheets, improving your strategy, and more! Visit helpmystrategy.com to see if you qualify to work with Team Hirsh!

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, everybody. I hope you’re having a fabulous start to your week. I have to share something with you guys because a lot of you guys know who follow me, the value that I place in unplugging and kind of disconnecting from social media, which is ironic I know cause I do Facebook ads, or our team does, but just that importance. And so I’ve actually been kind of taking it to the next level recently and actually studying what technology does to our brain and it’s so fascinating to me, the level of addiction we have to it, but also what is happening to our attention span and constantly being plugged in, and how this constant need for stimulation is impacting the way we think. It’s actually changing the form, the way our brain looks. I know there’s a new movie out called social dilemma. Actually, before that was out, I was already reading about all this and I have not watched that movie yet, but anyways, on Friday night I actually turned my phone off at 6:00 PM and then left it off and didn’t go on it for a full 24 hours. Which I know sometimes I say it I’m like, wow, like I know my dad and my parents would be like, okay that’s not that big of a deal because they didn’t grow up with phones, but I’m like, I’ve had a phone since I was like 13. 

And yes, I’m young and I don’t think I’ve gone that long without, like sometimes I haven’t had service or I’ve been on an airplane maybe, but I haven’t gone that long without a phone. So it was amazing. And I plan on doing it every Friday. It’s like a Sabbath Saturday, technology Sabbath I’m going to start calling it. We’ve made it a joke in my house and my kids know I’m like, okay I’m turning the phone off. I put it in the drawer and I didn’t have it for the full day. And it actually makes it easier to not go on anything because you don’t even have it near you so it’s not an option, and then going into the next day it becomes, you just don’t go to your phone as much. It’s like a reset, so I highly recommend. Totally off topic what we’re talking about today, but I want to share it with you guys cause it’s something that’s happening for me. I cannot recommend it enough to give yourself that. I just feel like a different person. I feel like a different person, different level of mental clarity when I challenge myself to actually sometimes sit there and do nothing, to actually sit there and just think when I’m feeding William. And I normally would have my phone to distract me fully when I’m laying there, instead I just lay there and I think for like 30 minutes, and that is a thing that we used to do so much and now we never do, and it’s so critical for our brain and the way that we process things to actually have time to do that. Okay, promise now, no more side notes. Let’s dive into today’s content. 

So last week I did an episode and I said, this is step five of The Hirsh Process. You guys, I said the wrong step. So were you paying attention because it was actually a step forward. Today is step five. So today we’re going to talk about scaling and optimizing your ads. This is the final step of The Hirsh process. This is the step that you’ll never be done with, you’re always going to be coming back to, and it’s really critical to your success after you’ve turned your ads on. So you are always either scaling or optimizing your ads, or you should be. You never want to be in a place where you’re doing nothing. Even if they’re working okay, if they are working then you should be scaling. You should be spending more money on your ads and increasing the budget because if they’re converting and they’re producing a positive return on your investment, let’s spend more money so we can make more money. 

So you’re either scaling or you’re optimizing. You’re improving things. You are improving your targeting, your messaging, your strategy. You’re trying to get it to that positive ROI, or to a higher ROI if you’re at a very low one. So you’re always doing one of these things. How to know which one of these to do comes with tracking your numbers. You have to track your numbers so that you know what decisions to make. Not just some monthly or a weekly basis, but a daily basis. So with all of our clients, we track numbers every single day. And I don’t just mean like go into ads manager and look at the columns in ads manager, but actually plug things into a spreadsheet, compare those numbers to a goal. and then make decisions off those numbers every day for every single one of our clients. And I tell you this, because I think it’s what you should be doing with your account.

This is, I say this too a lot, like probably the biggest mistake, but truly, I think not paying attention to numbers is the biggest mistake people make with their marketing. Once they start it, there might be other mistakes they’re making before they actually start running ads, but before starting your ads, I mean, once you start your ads, not paying attention to numbers is what I would say over half of people I talked to do. Even when I say it all the time. I say it on the podcast, I say it when I talk to people, I say it when I speak at events. I feel like it’s such an obvious thing, but it’s not because it’s difficult, it’s overwhelming. People don’t know what number to track and they forget. 

And so I shared recently on a podcast when I was in this mastermind and somebody with a $3 million business was sharing how his biggest struggle right now was he wasn’t converting his sales calls to customers. And so he was getting leads, he wasn’t converting sales calls. Of course, when you start asking questions around me, my immediate answer is, well, what’s your sales call conversion? How many calls are you getting? How many leads are you getting? He didn’t have the answer to any of those things. And he also didn’t have a way to go find it very easily. He had a $3 million company and he didn’t have that tracking in place. This is so common. It’s common for people who are just starting. It’s common for people who are successful, and you can make so much more money if you have this in place. 

So in order to know if you should be scaling or you should be optimizing and what to optimize, you first have to track. You have to track each step of your funnel. So I want you to picture your customer journey and anywhere that somebody needs to take an action and do something, there’s a metric tied to it. So if you’ve got your Facebook ad, you’re starting with your Facebook ad. The one thing you want people to do with that Facebook ad is click on it. So you’ve got a cost per click that you can measure. And you can track once they click on that page, they’re going to land on another page, on that page is going to be an action you want them to take. So then you get to know from there, how many people that convert, for your leads for your sales, for your webinar registrants, whatever it is that gives you a cost per webinar registration and it gives you a landing page conversion. If a hundred people land on my page, 30 people opt-in to my webinar, my landing page conversion is 30%. I spent $300 for that and I got $3 cost per lead if I did that math well. So now I know those metrics. Okay? 

Now, once those leads opt-in to my webinar, what is the next step that I want them to take? Not buy, I want them to watch my webinar. So now I have a webinar show up rate out of a hundred people who signed up for my webinar, 40%. Forty of them are watching my webinar. There’s my webinar show up rate. Now out of those people who are showing up to my webinar and signing up for my webinar, how many are buying? There’s my sales conversion. So those are, that’s a quick overview of like a basic, you know, webinar funnel, but everywhere there’s an action I want somebody to take there’s a metric tied to it. And your job is to track each one of those metrics, ideally on a daily basis, but at the minimum, a weekly basis. And all of that should drive decisions for you.

So I got a fun message on my Instagram in the last couple of days, and I think she’ll probably listen to this and hear this and love this. But she was like, I am so happy you told me to track my numbers because I wasn’t doing it as well, and then went back and I looked at everything and then I knew exactly what I had to do next. And I was like, yes! That is like, yes, that is the point. That’s why I tell you to do this. And she was like, I’ve gotten this many opt-ins and I’ve gotten this many sales, and so I know this. And it was those numbers that she tracked told her what to do next, because it told her what was working and what wasn’t working, and there is no exception to this rule. I do this in my business all the time.

There’s times where I go really deep with the metrics and I’ll actually look at every single lead who applied to work with us to figure out the actual student journey they took. How long were they on my email list? So there’s some manual work happening in there too when I want to really study. Where are they coming from? What ad are they coming from? What actions are they taking that lead them to an application? And how long are they sitting on my email list? That’s all metrics that we have, and some of it has to be manually pulled by looking literally looking through our CRM software and looking at their tags, but that tells me, okay, so these ads are doing well, this opt-in is doing well, and while this might be a cheap cost per lead, this one’s bringing quality. So data tells me those decisions every day.

Ideally you should be tracking every metric that is tied to an action in your funnel. And with that, you should have a goal set for each one of those metrics. So you should have a cost per click goal. That cost per click is probably a dollar to $2. If it goes above that, okay, you start there. My cost per click is too high. And then you’re like, it’s kind of a science experiment of trying to be like, okay, what do we eat? Not a science experiment, but you’re trying to pull out what the problem is and then that tells you the action. So if my cost per click is too high, I need to start with fixing the ad. 

Now here’s the mistake some people will make. They won’t know their numbers, but they will know overall it’s just not working. So many people I know, probably listening to this, have been there where they’re like, I’m spending money on ads, I have a funnel, I have a marketing strategy. It’s not perfect, but I have one. I’m spending money and all I know is I’m not making my money back. So I’m going to throw away this entire webinar and redo it. And that’s kind of like the thought process. But wait a second, if we go back and look at the funnel and we actually have a metric tied at every action, and then we have a goal attached to those metrics, and then that goal tells us whether or not we’re on track. And we go to the first place we’ve fallen off track and we diagnose that and we figure out what do we have to change to fix that first metric? Because if your cost per click and your ad is off, you’re not getting enough people to the landing page, to the next step, to the webinar, then to the offer.

And so if your choice is to go to do something dramatic, like throw away your webinar and fix that, but your cost per click in your ad is the first problem is not going to solve it because you still will have the problem with the cost per click and your ad. You still will have the problem getting people to the webinar. So it’s important that we track our numbers, have the goal, and then we stop at the first place because that place is like basically a plugged up, like stopper, where now people are stuck there. They can’t get through there and they can’t get to the next step, so it doesn’t matter what you do down the funnel to fix the rest of the steps until you plug that hole. You fix that hole and you fix that gap, and then you get it flowing again. And then you go to the next step and you do the same thing. So most people go to the bigger picture things of like, I need to throw my whole funnel away, or my whole offer away, or redo my whole webinar, when really sometimes little things such as fixing your cost per click on your ads can improve your funnel as a whole. So I want to go into a little bit on how to make decisions with these numbers and how to kind of diagnose this. 

So the first step is the ad. If you have a cost per click issue and people are not getting from the ad to wherever you’re sending them, there’s only two things that can really be, maybe three. The targeting, the messaging, or the offer itself. Meaning, the offer could also mean like the webinar title, whatever you’re trying to send them to they’re not interested. And the best messaging and the best targeting can’t always fix that. So those are the problems that it could possibly be. And so we just start with the most likely case, the messaging, and we write some new ad copy and we test some new ad graphics, or maybe some videos. We test some different angles with the ads to see what people respond to. And we try that for five to seven days. We get some data, we track it again, and we see what happens. If it’s starting to improve, we know we’re on the right track. 

So the first step cost per click. If we have an issue there then we need to get that cost per click down into our goal area of $1-$2. If that’s where your goal is, that’s industry average for most industries, sometimes you can get lower, sometimes you’re a little bit higher. And you need to look at your messaging, your targeting, and then last case scenario would be the actual title or offer you’re sending people to. And it’s not positioned right or people aren’t interested in it. If they’re then getting to the ad, but they’re not taking action on that page and you have a landing page conversion issue, it’s really only a couple of things. The messaging on that page, which is the most likely case. 

The next most likely case is that there’s a disconnect. If they’re clicking from the ad to the landing page and you know that ad is enticing them enough to click, that’s most of the hard work, and the landing page should convert at above 30%. And if it’s not, then there’s some big disconnect. Like they think the ad’s one thing and they get to your page and they think another thing and that’s causing them to drop off. Another one could be just the way that you have it designed. The button’s hard to find, there’s a bunch of things to click, it’s not above the fold, it’s not mobile optimized. All of those things will impact conversion. So you want to get that to above 30%. 

Once they take action there, you’re obviously going to go different ways depending on your funnel, but the next metric, if you’re selling a digital product, and this is like a gen funnel is going to be some form of engagement. Watched the webinar, engaged in the video series, participated in the challenge, downloaded the opt-in. Whatever it is, you can track that metric. If you have an issue there, like let’s say your webinars show up rate is really low. We’ll think through, okay, am I, do I have enough reminder emails? Do people know the link and where to go and the time, and are they being reminded of this enough? Is it enticing enough to them to actually go watch the video? Do I actually tell them why they can’t afford to miss this webinar? Why they need this information? They need to set aside this time to consume this information. Do you do that well in the back end of the funnel, after they sign up, usually through emails? If not, improve that. 

Put some time and effort into improving that. If your offer, if your ad goes to an offer like an actual sales offer like a SLO funnel, or a physical product, that page will probably convert more like 5-10% of traffic, depending on the price point of it. And then from there what you should be kind of tracking is, of course, do they go to the checkout page and buy, but then do they take upsells? Do they buy more products? How do you increase that cart value? And because there’s a lot of opportunity there that people don’t really capitalize on where they’ve already taken a customer so far to actually buy a product, and they can do so much to actually have that person spend more money. Whether it’s more quantities of what they’re buying, whether it’s an upsell from what they just bought, whether it’s going back and buying something else in a month from now. How do you capitalize and really maximize that customer? 

If you have that physical product that you’re sending them to from an ad now back to the digital product, if you’re going to the webinar and you’ve got a good cost per click, a good landing page conversion, a good cost per registration and a good webinar show up rate, they’re getting on the webinar and then they’re not buying, or they’re signing up for the video series. They’re consuming the content and then they’re not purchasing what you want them to. There’s a few options. One, the obvious one would be the way you pitch the offer is off, the messaging. There isn’t enough urgency. There’s not enough clarity around it. You haven’t hit the pain points enough. You haven’t really connected to this audience very well with your messaging and it’s not converting them, or people don’t think about this as much. Is the actual content in the webinar the right lead up to the offer? 

A lot of people make a mistake where they actually give too much content in something like a webinar, and you want to give value, but you don’t want to leave the person by the time he gets time to start talking about your offer where they’re so overwhelmed, or they have their plan of action that they’re like, well I can’t buy something right now I got to go do these five things first, and then I might be ready to buy. Or the content didn’t do its job in really positioning your offer and kind of being stepping, okay, opening their eyes to whatever you need to show them the problem in their health, the problem in their business, the way to financial freedom, whatever the problem is that you solve your content should be supporting opening their eyes to the problem they have while giving them a little bit of value. Of course, you don’t want it to be just fluff, giving them some value, but then the obvious next step by the time they get to it in your webinar and your video series or whatever it is, has to be your offer. And so that’s a little bit harder to diagnose and to actually find, and you have to really think through the psychology of your buyer and where they are.

And so I’ll give you an example. When I teach ads and when I teach marketing, I give away a lot to where somebody could go and do it themselves. They could take a lot of information I give and really go and get amazing results. And people do. There are people out there who, you know, for whatever reason can’t afford any of our offers and they take the content and the free content that I give out and they go and implement it in their business and they see results and good for them. And like, that’s the purpose. I want that to happen. But I also know my customer and I know that the biggest pain points for my customer is time, efficiency, speed, and actually getting things done in their business and with their marketing. And so my offer, whether it’s my done for you or my done with you, or whatever I’m doing is a shortcut for these people. t means you get all the templates, the tools, you get the support of Team Hirsh. We’re either going to do it completely for you, or we’re going to do it with you in our done with you course. 

And so I know that even if I give this value and I give this blueprint of how to create their strategy, or how to set up their ads, or how to look at their numbers, when it comes time to me offering something, if that’s what I’m doing on a webinar or whatever it is, I know that as long as I position the offer, that it will cut those objections, it will still convert because I know my audience. So if your webinar, or your video series, or your funnel is not converting, and you know the offer is good, you know you’re communicating it right, the other piece to look at is what is all the content leading up to it? And is that content putting a spotlight on the problem that your offer solves? 

So for me, if people get a little overwhelmed or even realize how much needs to go into their marketing, because then they know they need help, so that makes sense. And I’ve thought through that. So if that’s not converting for you, that’s what you can look at. Also with that sales piece in the offer converting, obviously make sure you have tons of followup emails, you have urgency, you really talk about what the offer does for the person and not just what the offer is. A lot of people make the mistake of just being like, well it’s, you know, an eight lesson course with 12 templates and dah, dah, dah. Like, I don’t care about that as the person interested in your offer. I care about the result I’m going to get if I consume that content, because content, like consuming content, or signing up for anything, it’s time for me. So I want to know what’s this going to save me? And how are you going to knock down the objection of like, I have to spend time on this, or I have to invest in money in this, but how am I going to make it back? 

And so you have to be so clear in communicating your offer, whether it’s on your webinar, in your follow-up emails, in your retargeting ads, what is this offer going to do for me? So that is how you diagnose a funnel and in a very like fast overview of a way, but the summary is you have a metric tied to every action somebody would take in your funnel. You have a goal tied to every action somebody would take in your funnel. And then you have your data that you track, ideally daily, comparing that goal versus reality on every action in your funnel. And then you go to the first place that you have a gap or you have a problem where you’re not meeting your goal and you dissect it and you solve it and you figure out what are the actions you need to take to improve that metric so that more people can get to all of the next steps in your funnel. 

This is an ever evolving constant process. And this is where my saying marketing always works came from. Because as long as you commit to this process and you continually do this. So even when it’s working, it’s like, okay well where can it work even better? Where can we spend even more money to make more money? Or how do we get our webinar conversion up a percentage, even though it is converting and it is profitable? Those are the things my team’s constantly thinking about is like, marketing’s never done. It’s never like good enough. We can always do better. We can always connect with our audience more. We can always improve our strategy, even when we’re profitable. So stick with this process, listen to the data. Data should always be driving your decisions. Decisions should be based off of numbers. And if you do that, everything’s going to be a lot easier for you. 

Thanks so much for listening today guys. If you want support with your marketing and everything I talked about today, tracking your ads daily, setting it up with our spreadsheets where we have every action tracked in somebody’s funnel compared to the goal and then we’re making recommendations, whether it’s the ads we’re actually doing them, or it’s the funnel and we’re giving you recommendations. That’s what Team Hirsh does. So you can go to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify to work with us. And I’ll see you all on the next episode.