[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

Struggling to get to that next level of marketing success you’ve been after?

Here’s what to pay attention to!

The secret is not some impossible ninja trick that you’ll never be able to master, it’s a matter of having the right components in your strategy.

There are three critical components you need to lock down if you want to make 2021 your most profitable year yet:

• You must frequently refresh your messaging (yes, that does include your ad copy and creative!).
• You must have a complete, cohesive strategy where everything is working toward achieving one main goal.
• You must know your numbers, clearly define your success, and religiously track your metrics.

And luckily, in this episode I’m breaking down each of these critical components with the action steps you can take today to ensure you’re successfully implementing them in your own marketing.

I guarantee that if you do, you WILL hit that next level of marketing success in 2021.

Ready to get started? Hit play now to tune in!

If you need support nailing these components of your marketing strategy, Team Hirsh can help. Click here to submit your application to see if you qualify for a free strategy audit where our team can help you in determining your next steps.

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello, my friends, welcome to the podcast. I feel on fire coming to this episode, I just got off of a bunch of team calls. We have so much exciting things happening, and so many projects we’re working on that are going so well. And just, it’s like one of those days where everything is going well. Well, not every day goes like that, but my team is just in an incredible spot. I love all the people I’m working with. I just feel so fortunate, so in momentum. So I’m super grateful for that, and I hope you are having a fabulous day as well. 

I am going to dive in today to the three components that I feel like guarantee your marketing success. If you pay attention to these things, these are the most important things to pay attention to in your marketing. And this is inspired by a combination of things. One, I just recently did a live webinar. So what I talked about on there, and then in the follow-up Q and A on that webinar just made me realize what was like the most important things for people to really realize with they’re marketing. 

And then also, every Monday, we do a team meeting. So in one of our recent team meetings, an ads team meeting, we talked about what is creating success for clients. A lot of this was the themes of that, and so my team is so fortunate to have the view of over 55 client accounts and be able to see what is working, what is not working. That just gives me this incredible viewpoint every week when I go into that meeting to what’s happening right now and how we can better serve our clients, but also bring it to you guys on the podcast here in terms of what’s super important for Facebook ads. So here are the three things that if you pay attention to, if you get this right, you will have guaranteed marketing success. 

So the first one, and I have these in order of what I think is the most important. These are all very important, obviously if they’re the top three things, but this is like the most important thing. The first thing is messaging, and I have talked endlessly about this in other podcast episodes, and it’s part of The Hirsh Process, it’s part of everything we do. But one specific thing that came up in our ads team meeting was how important it is right now to refresh ad creative at least once a month, if not more. We actually talked about, on a backend note, creating a better process so that we can be requesting more videos and even updated photos from our clients because messaging is not just about like ad copy, but the entire ad creative as a whole.

So getting it, especially if you are the face of a brand, getting updated images for your social media, for your ads is extremely important right now. And having refreshed, very powerful ad copy with different angles, and different messaging, and different hooks, and components to it is extremely important right now. Then also on a deeper level, making sure you know your ideal customer in a very intimate, deep way so that you can speak to them better and more powerfully than anybody else out there. Because if there’s one thing that’s happened over the last year, it’s that the ad space, especially in the online world, has gotten more crowded, has more people, it’s harder to stand out. Which I just see that as a challenge of, okay, if it’s harder to stand out, I’m just going to be the best. And so whenever I personally go to create a new webinar or a new promotion, I am always asking myself, what can we do to stand out? What can we do to be different than everybody else out there? 

So your messaging is arguably the most important thing in your marketing, because without it, it doesn’t matter how good your targeting is, how good your strategy is, how good your product is, nobody’s going to be attracted to it. So this is a very critical component. Specifically what we talked about in our ads team meeting was how important it is to consistently refresh what you’re doing every single month. Our recommendation is that once a quarter you get a refresh of images. This is something we’re going to start recommending more consistently to clients. We tell it to them in their onboarding, but we’re going to create a process of reminding them because it is so important, and because lately, we’ve actually seen organic images that have no texts, no headline in them, work better, best for our clients, convert the best. So it’s important that you have fresh audiences for that reason. I’m sorry, refresh images for that reason. 

So about once a quarter that you refresh your images, about once a month that you add in new videos. If you have, let’s say a webinar ad or a sales ad, if you can update those videos about once a month, that’s ideal. Then if you’re running your own ads or you have a team running your ads, at least once a month, you should be refreshing ad creative. That means new copy, new images, new headlines, and that you are testing that new creative. That doesn’t mean turn off everything that’s working. I mean, it’s put fresh things in the feed. 

One thing our team brought up is on a consistent basis, we see Facebook favor ads that are new. So if you have a campaign going to a webinar and it’s getting this conversion and it’s been running for, let’s say six to eight weeks, and you haven’t really done much to it besides ad audiences. If you start a new campaign with the same audiences, but new creative, we almost instantly see that CPM, the cost per a thousand impressions, go down. Which means Facebook is literally charging you less to show that ad to your audience because it’s fresh. So we know that Facebook is seriously favoring fresh, new creative. We know new videos, new images, new headlines, new copy, new angles is going to do really well. Just by doing that, you can bring your ad costs down. Now, obviously you have to balance that with optimizing your ads. You can’t create new ads every single day and just keep watching them because nothing would optimize, but you need to weigh the importance of having new creative consistently. So that is one of the most important components to successful Facebook ads is your messaging. 

The second piece is that you have a complete strategy. So this came from my webinar and this was the biggest epiphany that people had on that webinar. I also recently did a training for Social Media Examiner’s society, this also came from there. This was their big takeaway from my process was how important it is to not look at your marketing as all these floating pieces. This is so common. People will have a webinar funnel that’s like 75% there, but they could probably improve the emails, they could probably improve the landing page. But it’s out there where they’re kind of running ads to it, they’re kind of pushing organic traffic to it, and then they maybe have social media that they’re doing. So they’re posting, and they’re trying to attract people organically, and then maybe they have this opt-in lead magnet on their site, or they have a podcast. They have all of these things kind of floating around that are not a cohesive, connected strategy. 

Marketing success is going to come when you are obsessive and you are just very committed to making sure that every effort that you put out, your entire strategy, is all connected to achieving your big goal, whatever that big goal is for you. For me, it’s for getting applications to work with us in the one of two ways that we work with people, done for you or done with you. All of that is driven through applications. So getting those applications is my main goal. Everything I do, social media, my podcast, a video that I make, ads we run, webinars, we do secret series, opt-ins, all that we do is to drive those applications. I measure what works the most to get those applications versus what doesn’t. So having that complete strategy is critical.

Where I think people drop off is they also only track pieces of the strategy. So a common question I’ll get is like, “well, I ran webinar ads in the past fast and they converted in this way, and I’ll get like a cost per webinar registration, or I got a couple of sales,” and they’ll give me partial metrics. Somebody will ask me this, especially if I’m on a training, “what do you think I should do next,” would be the question I get. It’s very important when you’re looking at your strategy, that you’re looking at the whole big picture, because if you narrow in, for example, on the cost per webinar registration, but then you’re not looking at the show up rate, and the actual conversion of the webinars. So if you’re paying too high cost for registration, but on the backend it’s making up for it because you’re getting quality leads there. then you go to shut off that or try to lower your cost per registration, and you can mess up the whole picture. 

So what I recommend is that you make sure you’re very clear on your main goal. And ideally it is one thing. So I’m very big on focus in marketing, and I think your strategy needs to be complete and it needs to be focused. So your one main goal is, is to sell your product or get applications to your service or sell your mastermind, membership, sales, whatever it is, what is that main, big goal? Now you can have down sells and upsells that are associated with that, but a one main big driver. And then how is anything you put time and energy and effort towards going to impact your results to that one main goal? And are you tracking that and are you connecting all of those things so that when you do a webinar, you’re able to go a hundred percent into it and your organic social media, your podcast, your ads, and your emails and your funnel, all support that one initiative.

And they all support that goal of selling, whatever it is you’re going to sell on your webinar, or have you have a physical product business, you have one core bestseller product, you drive most of your traffic there, your social media, your ads, your emails, your website, it all supports that main goal. So you can increase that and you have this big picture connected strategy versus 15 things floating around out there and kind of working. And, and I see that a lot. And I’ve even been guilty of that, where you have like 10 to 15 kind of working strategies. And if you limited how many strategies you had, you got more focused and you did a hundred percent of your effort on those. You’re going to see so much more of a return. So the second component to successful marketing, to guaranteeing that marketing success is to making sure you have a big picture, complete strategy to focus in on your one main goal.

And if you are listening to this and you’re like, well, I’m the exception to the rule because I can sell my service and my course and my membership and still make it work. You’re probably not the exception to the rule. And this is the real talk for you. I really encourage you to go all in and focus on that one strategy and make sure you have a complete strategy and full initiative for that strategy, where everything is connected, because that takes a lot of time and energy and money to get something that good to get a strategy out there, converting traffic to it and scale it. That takes a lot. So if you’re spreading that across multiple ways of promoting things that are all kind of discombobulated and not, it’s doing your business a disservice, so that’s the second component to your marketing success. That’s critical.

And thinking through that, that big picture strategy, the third and final component that I have for you guys today, to guarantee that marketing success is that, you know your numbers. And again, this is another like big theme, big value of mine that I talk about in a lot of my podcasts, but this is a reminder for all of you who might listen to this and go, Oh, I don’t actually know my numbers, how I thought, and you need to know your numbers in two different ways. First, you need to know your numbers in the way of goals. So part of the Hirsh Process, and that first step that I talk about is having a foundation and up component of that foundation is defining your marketing success. So you should never ever be running ads. If you do not have a defined budget, defined lead goals, defined sales goals, defined cost per lead and cost per sales goals defined to sales, conversion goals, whatever important metric there is for you.

But those are like the standard. If you do not have those defined, you should not be running ads yet. And if you are running ads, you should go back and define those because the problem is people go and run ads and they, you know, throw a webinar campaign up there or start running traffic to their product, or, you know, they, they boost a post or whatever it is that you take as your first step. And then they spend some money on the ads and then they go, well, I don’t actually know if these are successful, so I’m gonna turn my ads off. Cause I have no idea what I’m doing. And that overwhelm kicks in. If before you run ads, you have very clearly marked success metrics. You will know if you’re successful. So we never run a campaign for clients or for my own ads in any scenario where we have not defined those things, like your budget, your goals behind your budget, your leads, your cost per lead, your cost per sale, your sales conversion.

Now doesn’t mean we’re going to hit those goals a hundred percent of the time, but at least we have a benchmark. At least we’re nowhere. We’re trying to aim. And even if this is a brand new funnel or a brand new marketing strategy, we have somewhere where we are trying to get there. And so now when we go get the data, we know where we fell and we know what we need to fix. So that’s the second component of your number. So the first component is doing that. First part is defining your success before you ever run ads and making sure you have those goals, even if they’re estimates, even if you get them wrong, they’re still defined and they’re all connected and cohesive. So your budget is connected to your sales goal because this is where people will say, Oh, I want to have a six figure launch and spend $3,000 in ads.

Probably not possible. If you connect those things, you will see that you will see what the reality is. So the second component then of your numbers is that you religiously track them. So when you actually go start to run ads, or even if this is an organic marketing effort, whether this is, you know, anything you do, if it’s organic marketing through Instagram growth, if it’s affiliates, if it is, um, you know, guest outreach to get on people’s podcasts, if it’s, um, you know, anything you can think of any marketing effort that you’re doing can have a metric tied to it. So you can see if it’s successful. I will specifically focus on paid ads. Cause that’s kind of what I’m talking about on this podcast episode. But if you are focused on paid ads and you’ve got these goals that you’ve set for your numbers.

Now when you go start to run those ads, you can take the actual data and compare that to your goals. So I’ll give you an example. Real time example. I just came out of my marketing meeting and we are looking at, we just did a live webinar. And now over the next two weeks, we’re going to update our evergreen webinar funnel with this updated content. And we had the exact discussion of, is there anything we need to update and change based on the data we just received from the webinar? The only thing that came out of it is that we actually want to play with some different webinars titles because our cost per lead was a little higher than we want. The webinar conversion was one of our best in terms of the actual webinar presentation and live conversion was almost double in our best.

So we can look at that and say, well, our expectation was we were going to pay about $8 cost per lead. And we were at more $10 to $12 cost per lead this time around. So we know based on that, what the actions are, we could potentially take to, to improve that different webinar title, different ad copy. I can make a different video, different messaging on the front end. We don’t need to change anything to the webinar itself. Our landing page converted at 38%. That was great. So we had all these goals set up and then we were able to come in and say, okay, where did we fall? And what do we need to update? Based on that data, you never should be just guessing about what you should update, where you should put your energy with your marketing. The data will tell you, so with your numbers and with knowing your numbers and religiously tracking your numbers, all the decisions you make should be based off of data with your marketing.

And you should have two sets of numbers. You should have your goals, and then you should have the reality. And the reality compared to your goals is what is going to drive all of your decisions. And that is the way that I look at my marketing. The way that we look at clients marketing is by those numbers, because what you’ll find is if you’re scattered and you’ve got like a webinar over here in boosted posts here, and you’re trying to get social posts, you’re not going to know what’s actually working. And then you’re going to put your energy all across the board. And nothing really you’re going to feel like you’re spinning this wheel. I oftentimes feel and see people who they seem to think that the success with marketing and Facebook ads comes down to just doing the actions. So just posting on social media and then people will find me if I just post every day, eventually people will find my business, or if I just start running ads to my webinar, or I follow this template that this coach gave me or whatever it is, if I just take this one action, that’s going to create my marketing success.

When that’s not always the case, you shouldn’t just be doing things to do them, or because somebody told you to do them or you’re crossing it off your list, or you think you should do it. It should be driven by data. It should tie into that big picture strategy. And it has to be powerful, meaningful content and messaging and a strategy that you put out there. So this takes away. I had someone on my webinar asked me like, well, this is great for the ad strategy, but do I need to post every day on my site? Or I’ve seen people like last year I was at an event and someone there was actually new, like launching her business knew. And I asked her like, what’s your strategy for reaching people? And she’s like, well, I’m just going to start posting on Instagram and kind of see what happens and go from there.

And then maybe I’ll invest in paid ads later. And I’m like, you know, investing in paid ads later is a fine strategy. If you know, if that is that the, what you’re committing to, but just going out and posting on social media or just boosting some posts or just saying, I’m going to run webinar ads and see what happens. That is not a complete strategy that is not going to guarantee your marketing success. That’s going to halfway start your success and leave you feeling overwhelmed, feeling like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall, you’re shooting in the dark and you don’t know what direction to go. So to bring it back to confidence and clarity with your strategy, you need to know the numbers. You need to have your goals, and then you need to have your reality and not should drive your decisions. And that will bring clarity and competence into the actions you take, because you might realize, well, when I post every day on social media, it does nothing for me.

So one thing I told somebody on this webinar, I was like, what do you value your time at? How much per hour are you worth? And I think they were like, Oh, well, I’m like a hundred dollars an hour, which I think you’re probably worth more as a CEO, way more. I value my time at like $10,000 an hour. How much are you worth? And she said a hundred dollars an hour. I said, okay, so how much does it time? Does it take you to create a post every day on social media? She’s like, Oh, well probably like five hours a week to, to create them schedule them. Okay. So that’s $500 of value. Is the best use of your time doing that? Or is it putting it into something else? And I don’t know the answer for you. It might be putting it into that, but at least way that when you go to do what you’re doing, so you know why you’re doing it in your marketing strategy and it has that solid backing to it. And you can be intentional with your strategy and you can be, have competence and clarity with it. So those are the three things to pay attention to, to guarantee your marketing success. 

And I just want to mention, if you want to work with Hirsh Marketing, it’s crazy. We are booked solid this entire week and into next week, like full seven hour days, cause my success specialist who takes all of our client potential calls takes breaks. So there’s seven hour days, but literally booked solid of people who want to work with Hirsh Marketing in either our done for you or done with you way. So if you are considering getting marketing support, whether that is complete done for you, all of your ads, all of your strategy, all of your creative, or done with you where we give you the trainings, the tools, the templates, and the one-on-one support, you should get your application in to be considered to work with us for your free strategy on it. From there, we’ll help you decide kind of what the best next move is for you, but soon we will have a waiting list. So you can go to helpmystrategy.com to see if you qualify to work with us. And we will give you a free strategy audit, just complimentary if you qualify, to see what your next move should be and to move your marketing forward. So all of these things I talked about are what we do with clients and what we support our students with and making sure they have that clarity and get those results in their business. Thanks so much for listening today guys, I’ll talk to you on Thursday.