[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

If there’s one thing in your marketing that you should ALWAYS be doing, it’s this: building your warm audience.

The businesses that commit to consistently building their warm audience and delivering value to them will be here forever – regardless of if Facebook shuts down tomorrow, or Instagram breaks, or social media goes out.

The businesses that don’t put in the time, money, and effort into building their warm audience will have a time limit on their success. At some point, you’ll hit the ceiling because you will run out of your warm audience if you’re not constantly building it up.

I don’t want that to happen to you, my friend.

So what can you start doing today to build that warm audience and ensure that you have a following of true believers that will buy from you, no matter what goes down in the social media world?

Find out when you tune into today’s episode of The Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast where I dive into the importance of building your warm audience + the two main strategies you can implement to grow and nurture them.

Subscribe To & Review The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast

Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.

Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast. I love saying that new name, so fun. We just recently had our first workshop in our Not For Lazy Marketers Club. So if you’re not in the club, make sure you’re in there. It was awesome. I had so much fun, I was exhausted by the end of it. It was 90 minutes, and it’s a lot. For those of you content creators, you know what I’m talking about? Like on video, like on every second for 90 minutes straight, I think it’s more tiring than speaking on a stage because it’s different when you’re behind a computer, you just have to have a different level of energy, like even more than in person. So it was super fun. It was a lot. And I am so pumped. I think workshop days are going to be one of my favorite days of the month. My team too, they had so much fun. So if you’re not in the club this next month, our topic is going to be all about the iOS update and pixels. So you can join the club at notforlazymarketers.com/club and make sure you’re there so you can get access to that workshop as well as all the other things that our club members get access to. 

But today I am diving into the topic, the power of your warm audience. I’m super excited to talk about this. It’s been a while since I’ve dove into kind of like this concept and how important this is in your marketing, and so I am excited to talk about it with you guys today and make sure it’s, you know, it’s one of those things that I can probably talk about every other month in a different way, and it will hit different for different people and where you’re at with your marketing. But it’s something that’s really important that you constantly are keeping top of mind. I’ve been reminded of this recently because of, we launched our new club, and so we launched this club to our warm audience, to my list who are followers, to you guys on the podcast, to all of our warm audiences, actually on Facebook of people who engage with us, who watched my videos. And we were able to get over a hundred members with very little ad spend to cold traffic instantly, which is so cool and rewarding when you launch something new where you have a live webinar, or you do something new and you have this audience to launch it to, and every single successful business owner that I have worked with that I see behind the scenes, you know, they have a massive warm audience and that’s kind of like the secret to their success because without it, they wouldn’t be able to do the things they’re doing.

So I think sometimes people look up to these big influencers or these people who have this big following and they feel bad that they can’t do what that person is doing, but they don’t remember like, cause it’s not as obvious that they have this massive following. So somebody like Marie Forleo or Russell Brunson, or Gary Vaynerchuk, or anybody out there who are these bigger influencers with very successful businesses, they can literally put anything they want out tomorrow and make thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, instantly from it without spending any ads, just from leveraging their warm audience, which is awesome. 

So what does that mean for you guys? It means that you need to constantly be building your warm audience. You should never not be building your warm audience. And how do you do that? A few ways. You run content and visibility ads. So I, you know, you choose one method, like I want to promote a podcast, or I want to promote videos, or I want to promote my blog, and you will constantly spend about 5% of your monthly ad budget, running ads to that content almost every day of every month. I’m running ads to this podcast to build our podcast audience, and we choose different episodes about every month, or every few months, that we run traffic to. I released these episodes, but we’re constantly driving traffic to my podcast because that’s my main method of connecting for you. It might be video, it might be a blog, but I want to see every single week that the number of people listening to my podcast, going to my podcast page on my website is increasing. And that’s how I measure the success of growing my warm audience in that way, but it’s also your actual email list.

I feel like for sure people have been like, well, email is dead and email open rates have gone down and you don’t need email lists anymore. I’ve seen that out there and it’s just not true, because with an email list, you own those leads. So one thing I like pointing out is when you see big companies who buy other companies, what you don’t realize is they’re not just buying that company for their idea. They could go create that idea probably with the right developers. They’re also buying the database of customers and of leads. So if you have a huge database of email addresses and leads that you have earned, not like bought from some scammy site obviously, they’ve signed up for something you’re offering for free and joined your email list. The bigger your email list, the more valuable you are in your businesses, your assets are, and the easier any promotion you put out there is going to be. You should always be growing your email list, whether that’s through an opt-in or a lead magnet, whether that is through a webinar funnel, whatever it is. Even if you’re e-commerce, there’s ways to grow your email list by getting people to sign up for coupon codes. Obviously when they buy something from you, they’re on your email list. Now you can send them promotions. 

The bigger the email list, the more money you’re going to make in your business. It really is that simple. You could probably calculate, like for every, you know, 1000 people on my email list, I make this much money and it might be around that. And the more that grows, the more money you’re going to make, because the more opportunity you have. So you want to do a promotion, you want to do a flash sale, you want to do a live webinar, you want to launch a new product. Like I launched our membership club, and you have a warm audience to leverage. t’s 10 times easier for you than somebody who doesn’t have a warm audience. 

So the mistake that I see a lot of people make, which is hard because if you don’t have a marketing team, if you don’t have a lot of support with your marketing, it’s really hard to put attention in all the places that you need to put. I often feel that myself and I have a marketing team of three full-time people working with me to launch everything from our organic to our ads, to our funnels, to our promotions. And I even feel, feel that way, but it’s important to constantly be growing your warm audience and not just focusing on all I’m going to do is post, or all I’m going to do is like my live launch once every three months or once every six months, then I’m going to be silent because I’m so busy. 

Create a strategy where you are constantly staying visible, you’re constantly growing your warm audience in, in various ways. So you grow your warm audience through that valuable content. And then you grow your warm audience through your email list. And you’re figuring out ways to do that consistently because it will grow your business. It will be a direct impact, and growing your revenue and growing your sales. If you’re somebody who does live webinars or does live experiences or live promotions and you’re not growing your warm audience in between them, you are losing money by not doing that because your promotions, and your live webinars, and these live launches and experiences would be so much more successful if you were also growing your warm audience in-between that time. 

And so your warm audience is like the one thing that you own, no matter what. Facebook shuts down tomorrow, Instagram breaks, social media goes out, you still have your warm audience. You still can email all those people. You can contact them. If the whole internet marketing world changes in the next week and you have to pivot, or you have to change your offer, you have to launch something new, if you have an audience of people who love you, and are raving fans, and are following you, and you’ve delivered value to them, they will buy whatever it is, the next thing you put out. Once you get to a place where you have, I have a following, an audience, I mean, I feel like I have pretty small following compared to people I’ve worked with, but then I’ll meet people who are like, “well, it’s so cool, everybody knows you!”. And they’ll say these things, and I’m like, I do not see myself that way, but once you get to that place, everything is easier. Launching something new, doing a webinar, growing your business, it just gets a little bit easier when you’ve got that base to work with. 

So I know a lot of people focus on that initial reward, that initial success, in their funnel. They need to make their money back within a couple of weeks, they need to see that their webinar leads are buying. But also make sure you’re looking at the long game of the power of building your warm audience, because I have so many people who have been following me for years then become a client, then sign up to work with us one-on-one, or people who sit on our list for six months and then sign up for our program. So don’t undervalue that piece too, because sometimes people get so caught up in that initial return on their ad spend, especially when they’re in the beginning. Which yes, you want to be making money, most of us are doing this without venture capitalists, without investments, like we have to fund our business. I totally get it, but also leverage the power of building your warm audience, and do not underestimate that, and make sure you constantly have effort out there going to grow in your warm audience in two ways: one, through content ; and two, through some form of lead generation.

Every day, every week, every month, you should see those numbers going up. You should be tracking those numbers. You should be building relationships with that warm audience. It’s not just get them on my list and then they’re going to sit there and I’m not going to do anything until I have a promotion. It’s get them on my list, build relationships, deliver value, connect with those people, stay consistent, stay top of mind. If you think that I have a leading marketing company and I have created myself a name in the industry for being well-known for that, it didn’t come from me doing something one time, or even three or four times. It came from me having this podcast for two years, twice a week, not missing a week. From sending out emails to our list twice a week, not missing a week. Delivering value through webinars, podcast, series, content, all this content. I spend a huge portion of my time on content and being consistent with content, and I do it because I’m building relationships, I’m building my warm audience. 

So if you look at me and think, “wow I wish I had that,” or “I wish I was at well-known this,” I don’t have a secret that you are not capable of. Same with these massive influencers you follow. Look at somebody like Rachel Hollis, which there’s some different opinions on her, on her business last year, but regardless, she has a massive following. So if we just look at that, what did she do to build that following? She went live on Facebook every single day for over a year. She built that following. She put out her book. She found people who would promote her book and she built relationships with them to get in front of her audience. I mean, she built her business through organic traffic and by showing up and delivering value. 

Everybody that you follow, you’re following them once they’ve gotten most likely, or, you know, if they’re big, you’re hearing about them after they’ve already put years of work into building their warm audience, and to building a following, and to showing up consistently, even if nobody’s listening to their podcasts. In the beginning, I didn’t have very many downloads in the beginning of my podcast. I don’t think I even really checked the stats in the beginning because it was like, there’s no question about it. I’m putting an episode out twice a week and I’m committing to doing that no matter what. And if you do that, come back in a year and your business will have grown. 

So business growth and success, and marketing successes, is a lot about that consistency. Showing up and building that warm audience is one of the number one things you can do, if not the number one thing, because you own that audience and nothing can take that away from you when you have true believers. Like I said, it doesn’t matter if tomorrow everything crashes and burns. You have people who believe in you, and as long as you can serve them, they will buy from you. You will be in business. You will be okay because you put the time, and the effort, and the energy, and probably the money, into building that warm audience. The companies who do that will be here forever. The companies who are consistent will not be forgotten. The ones who don’t put in that effort, who don’t put in time and money to connect with an audience and build that foundation, they have a time limit on probably their success, because at some point you hit a ceiling and you’re going to run out of your warm audience. Don’t let happen to you. Put consistent effort into your warm audience, into building your list, into building people consuming your content. Deliver value, over deliver value, be the best out there in delivering value to your audience, and it will pay off 10 fold.