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SHOW NOTES

Overcomplicated marketing filled with heavy technical components, shiny objects, and tons of bells and whistles does NOT = a converting strategy.

I’ve seen far too many marketers overthink their strategy by trying to add in all these extra components, when in reality, they are not what’s going to make or break your business.

That’s not to say they’re bad strategies, but they are not what’s going to move the needle forward.

Instead, you must first focus on the core components of your marketing, which include your messaging and the customer journey you’re creating for your audience to build a connection.

It really is that simple. Marketing does not have to be complicated and overwhelming, contrary to popular belief.

Tune in to today’s episode of The Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast where I’m sharing simple, yet highly effective ways to improve your marketing by focusing on those core components!

I guarantee you will achieve far greater success by doing this, rather than worrying about all the extra steps, bells and whistles you can add in to your strategy.

Shoot me a DM over on the ’gram (@emilyhirsh) and share how this episode inspired you to bring it back to the basics!

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a fabulous start to your week. I know I say this like frequently, but seriously, can we believe that it’s already April? I just cannot believe how fast time goes. Maybe, I don’t know, is it like all my young kids or does everybody feel like this? I just don’t know, but it’s insane. Before we know it going to be the holidays again. I just sometimes want time to slow down, especially with my kids, and how fast they’re growing, but I have been enjoying the gorgeous weather here in Austin, and been super, super strict and happy with my routines that I have right now. 

I, for those of you guys who don’t know, I think I’ve talked about it on the podcast, but I finished the 75 hard challenge and I finished it in January. And then I did the phase one after that challenge, which is a 30 day challenge. Which is 75 hard, plus you add in a five minute cold shower, 10 minutes of visualization, and eight powerless tasks. You can Google 75 Hard if you guys want to learn about it. But I am in the best shape of my life, and I do five minute cold showers every morning now. It sounds crazy, but I’ve actually converted like several people into starting to do them because you feel amazing. A funny story is that I do it with a song because it’s a lot easier to like, okay, I just go till the end of the song. So I do shower to Hello by Adele. cause it’s like four minutes and 56 seconds. And my husband hates it so he plays other music while I play it, cause it gets stuck in his head. But every morning me and Adele, we do our five minute cold shower. It’s a great shower song. That’s how I get through the shower. 

So if that makes you laugh, anyone want to join me send me a message, let me know. I feel like cold showers or something that it, I mean it takes discipline and your mind to do it, definitely to turn the knob cold. I do hot and then I turn it cold. Definitely takes discipline, but it’s something that you don’t have to physically go work out and you feel amazing from them. So I highly recommend them. I even did them when Austin had their ice storm, I kept doing my cold showers. It was freezing and I didn’t do it the two days that we lost power because that would have been crazy because then I would’ve gotten out, it’d be like 45 degrees. Might’ve gotten pneumonia if I did that, not sure, but I did do my cold shower. There were days that I would look out the window and my cold shower, it’s ice cold because it’s a legit snow storm outside. And then there’s ice. Like the tree was ice and I’m like, I’m actually crazy, what am I doing? I bet I’m one of the only people in Austin doing this, but I am crazy. So had to fit that.

All right, today what we’re talking about is over-complicating and overthinking your marketing. So many people do this, so I’m very excited to talk about this. This is inspired from a conversation I was having about somebody, a business owner, with their marketing, and they were telling me, they’re asking me advice, as a lot of people do, because I am a marketing expert, with like, what do you think I should do with my funnel? Or what to improve? So they were telling me what their current situation was, what they were converting. And they started saying, you know, maybe I should move my sales page round and add a testimonial here and change the order. Or maybe I should add in this other tool, do more text messages or ManyChat. Just a lot of  very technical strategies that they were going to add in. Which are not bad ideas. 

But I always like to boil it down to the core of your marketing first and address problems there before we get into the shiny object, very technical, small components. Because the thing is, yes, those small components can make an impact, can potentially improve your conversions, but they’re not going to move the needle enough to double your sales conversion. And so I sometimes think people with marketing think that it’s about achieving this perfect layout and formula of having your sales page lined up. Right? And you’ve got all of these specialty tools in this complicated funnel. And you look at the funnel map, nobody can understand it, and that’s like a good thing. And that’s not how marketing has to be. 

Over complicated marketing, and really technical, and like all these like cool tools, and bells and whistles, does not equal converting strategy and equal more sales. In some cases, it actually equals less because the more complicated it is, the harder for the lead. So whenever people are talking to me about their marketing strategy, even honestly, seven figure business owners who have achieved success, absolutely have achieved success and now they’re trying to achieve more success, a lot of times I noticed this theme that they think the answer is a new tool, or a new funnel, or a new front end to their funnel, or doing something really crazy with their sales page like adding in a video ask component where you can ask them questions… those things are all again, not bad strategies. So don’t confuse them with being bad strategies, but more often than not, they are not the thing that’s going to massively move the needle. 

And so in this situation, this friend wanted to change their sales conversion, they were at about 1.8% of their leads were converting to 3% because they knew that they could get there, they’d been there before. So she was telling me how she’s going to change her layout, and add these things, and incorporate text messages, and all these things. Again, not bad strategies, but what I brought her back to was like, let’s look at the core of your marketing strategy first, because I bet we’ll find things that we can go and improve in that core that are going to be more impactful than these small technical details, or bells and whistles that you want to add in.

The core of your marketing strategy is number one, your messaging. Almost all problems or improvements can happen within your messaging to start with. Your messaging is so critical to your success. I know I talk about this all the time, and sometimes you think you’ve got your messaging, or you do have your messaging and it’s kind of working. You can do even better. You can go even deeper. You can take it to the next level. So the core of your marketing is that messaging, that customer journey and experience you’re creating for your audience, and that connection you’re building with them. That sounds like really simple and maybe lame, but I’m telling you if you go and you really look at that, instead of looking at technical pieces and adding in a new software and making it more complicated and adding an extra step or a video or many chat or whatever, you might find more answers and more success by really just looking at that core foundation.

So in this example of this person I was talking to, they wanted to improve their sales conversion and they were getting leads, but they wanted to improve their sales conversion. It was a webinar funnel and what they were going to go have their team implement was text messages to try to increase their show up rate. Not a bad strategy, still could work. She had all these ideas for how to change her sales page, like the layout, and adding testimonials, and putting these buttons, and all of that. Still not about strategy. And what else then she was going to add, potentially add ManyChat. 

So again, not bad strategies, but what I came up to with her is, I said, you know, looking at this, your goal is to improve your sales conversion. So there are core things that will improve that sales conversion that you need to go back and re-look at. The first one is, is there enough urgency on your webinar? Because just that alone can double your sales conversion in some cases. And I’ve personally experienced that. Do you have a live webinar show up bonus? Do you have a live webinar purchase bonus? Do you have enough urgency for people in that webinar funnel that they will buy? If you can increase that urgency, you’ll increase your sales conversion, simple, very effective. 

Let’s also look at your webinar. Let’s look at the messaging of your webinar. Are you overwhelming people in the content so that they’re overwhelmed by the pitch? Let’s look at the pitch. Is it very clear in that pitch what you’re offering and the emotional benefits that the lead is going to get by buying that? So many times, myself included, I do this without double-checking it, or actually asking for feedback for this is I will pitch a component of my pitch and tell you what it is, but I don’t tell you why you need it. And I’ve made that mistake. And so many entrepreneurs make that mistake. I’ll give you an example of my own. 

So in one of my webinars, I had a live webinar purchase a bonus. So if they got their application in on the webinar, they qualified for a sales funnel audit basically where we would audit your funnel and basically provide you with a roadmap strategy. You’d fill out an intake form and then we’d audit your strategy and give you back a presentation with like, here’s your blueprint. So that was our bonus, right? And I had a slide where I talked about that bonus, which is still a great bonus. You know, if I told you like, hey, you’re going to get a sales funnel complete audit where you fill out an intake form, and then we fill out a presentation, and we can give you the exact blueprint of your marketing strategy that you can take and go and execute, you’d probably be excited about it. You’d be like, oh, that’s cool, I want that strategy. 

But if I really got into the emotional reason of why you want this and took it the next level deep and said, you’re going to fill out an intake form. We’re going to give you your marketing strategy so that you have the exact steps to go and implement, you don’t have to waste time trying to test things that don’t work. You don’t have to waste time spending money on strategies that are not going to convert. You can take what we know with our industry expertise as marketers and with your business and your product price. We’ll give you a blueprint, a customized blueprint to what you need to go do so you don’t have to waste that time or that money on strategies that are not going to convert. You’d probably be like, oh, I like that even more, right? Cause I hit on the pain point of wasting time, of not having strategies that you know are for sure going to work, and leveraging our genius for that same exact offer, same exact bonus, different way I described it. And I didn’t do a bad job in the first one, but I had an opportunity to do a better job. And I improved my sales conversion just from that. 

So again, core piece of her webinar. I said, let’s look at how you’re setting up the content. First of all, are you overwhelming people throughout the content? Or are you emotionally connecting with their problems, with their dreams, with their frustrations? Second, let’s look at your pitch. Are you just explaining the offer and explaining it in a way that’s maybe enticing, but can we take it to the next level? Can we explain it in a way that really hits on those pain points in those dreams and connects those to your offer? And then do you have enough urgency? So that was with the webinar alone and she found like 12 things that she could go and improve on the webinar with  those core components, which is really all about messaging and all about that customer experience and journey of what is that journey. 

A webinar is such a piece of art to get it right, and it takes, oftentimes, many iterations and adjustments. I see people often jump from, okay, I have my webinar, have my funnel, and now I’m going to add complicated and technical components to my strategy, to improve my sales conversion. When the answers oftentimes is in just still improving the webinar. They haven’t gotten it to the place that it could, even myself. I mean, I’ve probably done 50 plus webinars, and if I look at my webinars from a year ago to today, they’re way better. I mean, every time I do a webinar, I get better at doing webinars. So if you’re somebody who has a webinar strategy and you think you can just do two and it’s good to go, it’s just not. Every time you do one, you’ll get better at it. And so there’s always opportunity, maybe it’s every couple months, maybe it’s once a quarter to come back to that webinar and look at where you can improve it. 

My point here being, if you’re trying to increase something in your funnel, whether that’s your webinar show up rate, your sales conversion rate, your landing page conversion, your webinar conversion, whatever it is, before you jump to the over complicated strategies, before you overthink it and think you need these complicated bells and whistles, or you need these additional softwares or touchpoints, or it’s going to come from like finding this magical way that you lay the sales page out, or something like that, which is very common, people think that. Before you do that, go back to the core, go back back to the foundation, which is the messaging, the connection you’re building with your audience, that customer journey, and that experience. A complicated funnel that, you know, when you look at a funnel map and you’re like, oh, I can barely understand that, that must be a good funnel. I mean, so many people do that. Like, oh my gosh, there’s 15 steps in that funnel, that has to be a good funnel. Does not equal a good funnel just because there’s a bunch of steps in the customer journey. Some of the best or some of the most simple strategies that are done really, really well. 

If you’re trying to improve something in your funnel, what you should be, if you listen to my last episode, you’re always improving something with your funnel, with your marketing, go back to the basics. Keep going back to the basics. Never stop going back to the basics. The basics are where the answer lies in business and in marketing. So for so many of you, just by going and looking at your webinar with the things I just said on this podcast episode, I bet you can find four or five things to go and improve, instead of saying, oh let’s change the order of my sales page, or let’s add in many chat or text messages, which again are not bad strategies. I’m not saying they’re bad strategies. I’m saying you have limited resources that you can put into improving your marketing strategy. So many people put those resources into tiny technical, over complicated strategies that they think will move the needle, and they don’t. What moves the needle massively, we’re talking double your sales conversion, massively increased your sales conversion, massively increase your landing page conversion, is that core foundation. Until you have that core foundation rock solid, you can add ManyChats, you can change the order of your sales page, you can add text messages, you can add complicated steps to your funnel. It doesn’t matter if that core foundation is not rock solid. 

And that core foundation is not going to become rock solid in one week or two weeks, or sometimes even month. It might take a whole quarter. It might take six months to get that foundation rock solid because you have to get the feedback from your audience as you’re putting things out there, and then continually to go test, refine, repeat. So go look at the messaging, look at the connection you’re creating with your audience. Look at the journey and experience you’ve created and ask yourself, how do I improve that before I over-complicate overthink my strategy with which with additional steps, or softwares, or tools. 

Marketing does not have to be so overwhelming. People make it that overwhelming because of all the tech. But technology different shiny object strategies, they are not the success. If you go ask any entrepreneur who’s created a successful marketing strategy and funnel, and seven figure strategy, they will not tell you, oh, it’s because of this one software, or it’s because of this one thing I added in, like I added ManyChat, changed the game. You’ll never hear that. They mastered their messaging, they mastered their connection with their audience, they mastered that customer journey, that experience they created, they mastered that. And that’s how they created it. Sure, the technology and the shiny objects sometimes make things a little bit better. They’re not the make or break. They’re not the foundation. All right you guys, so don’t over-complicate your marketing. Don’t overthink it. That is not where the success is found. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you guys next time.

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