[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

Scaling is truly an artform.

Some have mastered it, and others haven’t even begun to crack the code.

I’ve seen so many entrepreneurs who find micro-success in one area, one funnel, one ad, but they have a hard time replicating that success.

If that’s you and you feel stuck, like you’ve hit a ceiling with your growth, you’re going to absolutely love today’s episode my friend.

I’m sharing all my best tips and strategies for scaling your business and achieving your next level of success and showing you how to finally:

• Identify why you’ve been stuck when scaling in the past
• Leverage what you’re doing well to scale vertically
• Hook the attention of cold traffic to scale horizontally

I guarantee that if you can master the art of scaling, your business WILL grow, and that growth will be limitless. 

After tuning in, I want you to think about what are the actions you could take this week in just improving what you’re already doing? 

When you have your answer, DM it to me over on the ‘gram (@emilyhirsh)

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast today’s episode. We’re going to talk all about scaling your business, increasing the success in your business. I’m kind of defining scaling here. I think the automatic assumption with scaling is often increasing ad spend, and that is the only way, or the main way, to scale. Where, in this episode, I’m really referencing scaling your business, meaning growth in any way. So for you, that could mean increasing the sales based on the audience you currently have. It could mean taking your organic success and bringing it over to ads. It could mean increasing your ad spend, whatever the next step for you is that you need to take in order to increase your sales to grow your business more. 

A couple of weeks ago, we did a private podcast series all about scaling. So I’m kind of bringing the summary from that to this podcast episode, it was such a great series and I really enjoyed teaching it and seeing people’s takeaways from it, because I think that oftentimes we sometimes find micro success, or we see success in one area or this with this one funnel, or this one type of promotion, but we have a hard time replicating it. I see that often with entrepreneurs. 

So the first thing I just want to touch on is potentially why you’ve struggled to scale and a few main points that are really important when scaling your business. The first is that it’s critical you’re consistently identifying the success, you’re identifying what actually creates success for your business so you can do more of that. I oftentimes see people doing things in their marketing or their business as a whole with no real reason behind it, no real goal behind it. So if you have multiple funnels, or you have multiple promotions or strategies that you’re executing in your marketing, and you’re kind of just doing all of them because you feel like you have to, or you saw other people do it, I challenge you to reevaluate and figure out what’s actually moving the needle. What’s actually creating success? And can you narrow it down and go all in and focus on that?

One of the easiest ways that you could scale and grow your business today right now is focusing all in on what’s working and doing more of that, especially if you’ve found something that is working. The other thing is, which ties directly into this, but a lot of people are in that place where they feel kind of like they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to see what sticks and they’re doing a webinar funnel, and opt in, they’re trying to master Instagram and post on their Facebook, do Facebook lives, release a podcast, all the things, and each one of those things. The problem is each one of those things could be beneficial and is not a bad strategy, but it’s a bad strategy when you spread yourself so thin that you can only put in 80% to all of those things. 

You want to find a handful of strategies, one funnel, one form of content, one main strategy that you’re executing, both organic and paid, that you can go all in with, you can go a hundred percent with. Over the last couple of years as I’ve been growing my business, I have consistently come back to the what I’m NOT going to do list. The no list is pretty much more important than the what I’m going to do list.

There’s this saying that is a business will oftentimes die from indigestion of good ideas rather than starvation of good ideas. That is so true. And I try and come back to that and encourage my students and clients to come back to that because there isn’t a lack of good ideas and strategies out there, there is an abundance of them. If you choose too many of them, you will hinder your success in scaling. Okay? 

The last few things I want to talk about just like why you’ve potentially held back your scaling and your ability to grow your business is one, when you try and reach out to cold traffic, it is a different game than warm traffic. I think oftentimes people don’t realize that, so they maybe get some sales in, whether they are networking or it’s through their social media, or they’re on Instagram stories. Something starts to pick up success and they think, “okay, I’ve found it. I found the answer. Now I’m going to go start ads. I’m going to go reach new people and it’s going to work exactly the same.” That’s generally not how it works, because cold traffic is different. You have to think about when you’re marketing to warm traffic. 

For example, if you have a funnel and someone saw you on your Instagram story three or four times, and then they decided to come to your webinar, and then they decided to buy from you. That’s a completely different experience than somebody who saw your ad one time, signed up for your webinar and attended your webinar. They have more touch points. They have a different relationship. Same if you are someone who’s networking in a Facebook group, or you did a guest interview or a guest training for somebody else’s group, or you did a video on social media and then you were talking to your DMS. Organic has a lot of variables to it. It’s harder to track exactly the customer journey, but it’s harder to replicate that exact customer journey. 

So oftentimes when you go to start scaling and increasing your traffic with cold traffic, then you have to figure out how do I replicate a journey of nurturing that makes sense for people who have no idea who I am? It’s oftentimes a different game. You also are sometimes going to just have to pay more for it. I will almost always see higher cost per lead for cold traffic, and lower landing page conversions, and lower sales conversions, and that’s just the way it is. Your warm traffic is constantly most likely going to convert better, and that’s why we’re always trying to build our warm traffic too as part of a strategy, but you just kinda have to accept that. Then also accept I need to reach out to cold traffic.

So my last point is sticking to just organic methods is really a very slow way to grow your business, and at some point, in my opinion, you have to make the decision to stop trading your time, which is really what organic marketing is, for money and expecting that your results are going to increase. You will hit a ceiling with your organic marketing pretty quickly. And so if you haven’t done this yet, creating a solid paid ads strategy that will help you bring in new leads and help new people see your brand is critical to the growth of your brand, unless you want to stay exactly where you are right now and grow really slowly. I mean, that could be your goal, or that could be all you can handle right now, but if you are someone who wants to grow, organic marketing is really slow.

I sometimes see people in the beginning phases who are like, “well, I’ll just post a bunch of times on social media and people will see it, right? It will work.” If that only was how easy it was. Organic marketing is extremely difficult. Less than 10% of your followers see what you post. It’s really hard to grow new followers without paid ads and it’s just not reliable. I was just explaining you can’t track the customer journey organically. You don’t know how many posts they saw on your Instagram profile, or how many stories they watched before they decided to go to your webinar, buy your product. You’re just kind of doing things to be consistent, but it’s not a scalable strategy. It’s a good way to prove something in the beginning, and to prove that you have a good offer, and that people like what you have, and you have good messaging around it, but then you have to take it to paid ads of some form. And that is how you scale your business. 

So there’s two ways to scale your business vertically and horizontally. Vertically means you leverage your current success. It means you leverage your current audience and you get more out of that, and you increase the value, increase the revenue out of your current audience. Horizontally means you reach out to new audiences. So we’ll talk about both of those, but scaling is, and increasing your business and growing your business, is an art of doing both of those things. You ideally are doing a balance of both of those constantly. And maybe sometimes you’re focusing more on one than the other, but as I talk through this, I want you guys to just think about opportunities right now of where you could improve your business sales and you could scale your business.

So scaling vertically means really leveraging your current success, taking what is working and making it better. The way you could do this right now is maximizing whatever you’re doing that’s working. So like I said, first, you have to identify what you’re doing that is working, and then you have to figure out how can I do more of that? So this could mean increasing your ad budget, that’s a way of scaling vertically. It could mean adding in an extra live webinar or live event that you do once a quarter that brings your warm audience into an extra opportunity to buy from you. It could mean building out a more complete customer journey. Maybe you need to have more email nurture sequences, or you need to have more nurturing upfront, or you need to leverage your content better, or you want to have flash sales, or whatever it is, building out that complete customer journey so that if somebody says no, or says yes to buying here, then there is a place for them to go. And that takes time.

I often see people who build basic funnels to get them launched, which is a fine strategy to do that, but then once you launch them, once they start getting success, don’t just jump over to the next strategy or the next platform. Fully go back in and audit that strategy so that you can create it to be the best it can be and be a complete strategy with email nurturing, and retargeting ads, and upsells, and down sells. Maybe if that is the right move for you, maybe you don’t want to have a new product, but before creating a brand new product or something, hooking it in as an upsell or downsell to something that is working is oftentimes a good strategy of scaling your business vertically.

So ultimately, scaling your business vertically means having all the levels and your marketing built out. You’ve got brand awareness, you’ve got visibility, you have lead gen clearly labeled, clearly strategized, you have sales and retargeting, and you have nurturing whether that’s in the form of retargeting ads or emails. So right now you probably have opportunity. If you were to sit down and say, how could I scale my business vertically? How could I increase my success with what I’m currently doing? And there would be strategies that you could pull from that. Like I said, it could just mean increasing your ad budget. If you’ve found audiences that are working for you and you’re running ads, what happens if you increase your ad budget by 10% each week? What happens there? And go and try that. But it also could be okay, I have hundreds of leads every month and maybe five to seven sales, if that is your numbers, whatever your numbers are, what do I do with the rest of those leads? How can I leverage and maximize the rest of those leads? Should I do quarterly live webinars? Should I do a flash sale? If I’m ecommerce, what can I do to really leverage that and get more out of the audience I’m already building? 

So the other thing is coming back to looking at what’s working. Look at all of your metrics and look at opportunities to increase metrics around what’s already working. Look at, is there an opportunity in your landing page conversion? Is there an opportunity in your webinar conversion? Is there an opportunity with your ad cost per click? And if you focus hyper focus on all of those metrics and you just increase one or two of them, you will improve your entire funnel and all of the profit.

For example, if you’re paying $10 cost per webinar registration right now, and you’re able to get it down to $8, by having new ad creative, by putting out new audiences, or creating a better retargeting plan. And you’re able to bring that down, you instantly have more leads coming in, which should equal more sales. Or if your webinars show up rate is like, let’s say 18% and you get it up to 20%, you have more people watching your webinars, you have more sales. So looking for opportunities to increase and improve the metrics around what’s already working, but improve it even more is where you can go in and focus. 

I think sometimes people only focus on something that’s obviously broken, but maybe there’s opportunity to even just get a dollar less cost per lead or cost per click on your ad, whatever it is. If you aren’t running ads right now, an opportunity for you to scale vertically is just starting ads to target your existing audience, because you probably have audiences that are sitting there that are engaged, or your email list, or people watching your video views, or visiting your website. You could just set up ads to just those people, which is a very inexpensive ad, and it shouldn’t be your only strategy, but it’s a short-term strategy. Right now you’re potentially leaving money on the table by not leveraging these audiences. So that’s a way to scale your business vertically. 

So let’s jump to scaling your business horizontally. So this means reaching new people. And this is in my opinion, what oftentimes entrepreneurs wait too long to do and also really struggle with. This is the ultimate strategy, because if you can crack this code, if you’re able to consistently get new people paying attention to your brand, in your funnel of your brand and, and really leveraging that, the ceiling is unlimited, the growth is unlimited. This is the hardest part of scaling, but once you can master this, you will experience a lot of growth. 

Scaling horizontally means reaching those new audiences. This could mean for some of you, you have organic success or success with a certain strategy and you bring it to paid ads, targeting cold traffic. That is how you’re scaling horizontally. You are now reaching new audiences with that strategy. If you’re currently running ads right now, this could mean finding and expanding out to more cold traffic audiences and scaling by reaching those new audiences. Or, also you could create new front ends to your funnel. So you could have a webinar and maybe you test out having a lead magnet, and then driving those people to the webinar. Or you test out a self-liquidating offer funnel. You’re still driving to the end result offer of what you’ve created success with, whether that’s a core product or a core service, but you’re creating ways to reach new people.

Now, it’s really important, I mentioned this at the beginning, but that you really figure out what works for cold traffic and what you need to do for cold traffic, because it might be different than what is working for your warm traffic. Oftentimes it’s a matter nurturing. So maybe you have a high percentage of people on your webinar who are buying right now with warm traffic, but they know and trust you. They have read your social media posts. They’ve watched your stories. They’ve been on your email list, whatever it is. And so obviously more of them are going to buy. So you have to make sure you create a strategy that has enough nurturing and the messaging is clear enough. That’s another really important component. 

Sometimes your warm traffic, because they’ve already built trust around the problem you solve, you don’t have to give as much. You don’t have to do as much work hooking them in, building trust, building credibility, and really connecting with them that way. But cold traffic, I mean, you have to go about cold traffic thinking they automatically do not trust me. They automatically do not know who I am. They think I’m full of crap, whatever, not really, but hopefully not. But just go at it with that assumption and make sure your messaging that you put out to cold traffic does stand out and does really clearly communicate your unique advantage, and you are connected to their problems, their dreams, and you go that extra level. That is really important with cold traffic. 

Then with the strategy, you have to make sure the strategy works for cold traffic. If you’re in a place where you’re taking an organic successful funnel over to cold traffic, I wouldn’t actually recommend changing anything about the strategy at first, because you’ve proven it works organically, so why change it before we even go test it? Take it over and start targeting cold traffic, but then take it in and review those metrics. So if you have an organic webinar, or you have an organic physical product funnel that is working, it is selling organically, you have metrics. You know how your landing pages is converting, you know your sales conversion, you know your average cart value, you know all those metrics. Now take it over to ads and compare your cold traffic metrics to your warm traffic metrics. 

If they’re a little bit higher, totally fine. If they’re way off, start with your messaging and then maybe update your strategy. Which really, it just comes down to probably some more nurturing, but I would start with messaging. Usually it doesn’t mean like, “oh, I have a webinar that works for warm traffic and it’s not working for cold traffic, so I can’t do a webinar with cold traffic.” That is not generally ever the case that you have to throw away and have a whole different strategy. It might just be, “oh, I have to have a little bit more nurturing on the front end of my webinar, or I need to build out a better follow-up email sequence on the backend, or I need to change the messaging in my webinar. I have to connect better to the audience because they’re cold traffic. I need to build my authority better.” 

So the important piece I said there that I want to reiterate is knowing your current numbers for warm traffic then taking it to cold traffic, marketing it, and then coming back and comparing those numbers allows you to see where you’re landing. And again, you might be paying more for cold traffic, most likely you will. Whenever we do a promotion, my warm traffic leads are always less expensive. My landing page conversion like on a webinar for warm traffic is usually like 80%, and then cold traffic is like 25 to 30%. So I just go at it expecting that. That is very normal. So you can have those baseline metrics, then you get the cold traffic ones. 

But if it’s completely off, you’re getting no sales,I would start with your messaging. Make sure your messaging makes sense for cold traffic. Really look at it with the filter of somebody who has no idea who I am, no idea who my brand is, no idea, no trust, no authority. Will they take action with this? What’s missing in my connection with them? And then go and update that you don’t usually need to overhaul the strategy. So scaling horizontally means taking that organic success, bringing it to new audiences and following the process. I talk about so much on here, which is test, refine, repeat, and that’s the ultimate, if you can do that successfully, then you have a brand new ceiling of a lot of potential.

So overall, scaling horizontally and scaling vertically are strategies that should be going together. So you should be bringing in new leads and then constantly capitalizing on those new leads with new ways to nurture them, bringing the leads back into an opportunity to buy. Those are two ways to constantly, you want them working together. You want to be bringing in new people, but then maximizing those new people. And so you really want to be doing both of these things. But out of this podcast, I want you to think about what are the actions you could take this week in just improving what you’re already doing? And that’s the key. 

If I could boil it down to one thing, the art of scaling is taking what you’re doing that’s working and doing it more. So obviously, in order to scale and grow your business, you’ve got to have a foundation that’s working, meaning you’re getting some sales, you’re getting some positive reaction in your brand. Once you have that, figure out what are the most important factors, the strategies, the messaging angles that are working, and how you can do more of those in a very focused and disciplined way. If you do that, I guarantee your business will grow. Thanks so much for being here today, guys. I’ll talk to you next time.

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