[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

NEVER underestimate the power of your warm audience.

If you’ve been keeping up with me on social media, you might have seen that I held a Marketing Mixer to unveil my newly revamped Ignite Academy.

This campaign was a massive success that resulted in a 40x return on ad spend…

By targeting ONLY my warm audience.

Yep, you did read that right. We spent $1k on ads and made $40k in revenue from just my warm audience.

What does that mean for you?

If you’re not continuously and strategically growing, nurturing, and leveraging your warm audience, you are potentially leaving stacks upon stacks of cash on the table.

Tune in to today’s episode of The Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast where I’m sharing the exact strategies my team used for this campaign to maximize the conversions of our warm audience, our key takeaways, and two critical questions you need to answer today:

• What is your strategy for continuously building your warm audience?
• How are you re-engaging them to turn them into blazing hot leads?

Shoot me a DM on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) and tell me your biggest takeaways / action items from this episode!

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody. I hope you guys are having an amazing summer. I guess summer only if you’re on that side of the world, not for you Australians and New Zealanders, but I am here in California and super pumped for so many reasons. One, I am so grateful for the ability to come to California. I’ll be here for two and a half weeks, home for a month, back for another two weeks and then Colorado for a month this summer. I’m so grateful for the ability to take my work with me in that way. Yesterday we went to the beach. I am working until about two and then playing with my kids and family for the rest of the day, so it’s been really awesome. 

I also brought my nanny with me this trip, which has literally been a game changer. I love her. She’s my age and we’re good friends. I’m calling her my wife because I think everybody needs two partners, especially moms. You need a wife who can also help be that extra pair of hands with my kids. My husband’s not with me on this trip. He’s home because he takes clients in person, but still, she’s so helpful. It’s been amazing having that extra help to make the trip more fun for me too. 

Then also, we run our company on a July through June annual planning. All of our financial pieces are obviously annual regular fiscal year for taxes and stuff, but we plan our goals, so our revenue goal, our client goal, our Ignite student goal, in June. So I just did the annual planning meeting with our leadership team and I’m so excited about where we’re going, the numbers and the goals that we set. I’m all about setting very realistic goals for our growth as well, so I feel like we’re going to crush those goals. We have so many plans in place and I’m just continually so impressed with my team right now. It feels so good to be in this place. We have such a solid leadership team, a solid team across the board. I am in the best place that I’ve ever been in my business, and it feels amazing to be running the machine and the company at the size I am, which, I want to get much bigger, but at the size I am with very little stress and very little fires, if at all, so that’s really exciting. 

Today I want to dive into the power of your warm audience and share a recent campaign that we did and the success from that kind of inspired me to talk about the reason that was so successful. So you might’ve seen this because it’s been all over my social media and on a little bit on the podcast, but last month we relaunched our Ignite Academy. Now we call it Ignite Academy, but my Ignite program has been here for two years, but we relaunched it with all the updates. It’s basically a full suite marketing program now and includes things on organic marketing, on your messaging, on your funnels, very in-depth, and not just a Facebook ads course is the big rebrand that we did. We worked on it for about six months, no for four months, which is still a really long time in my world and then we relaunched it.

When we relaunched it, we did the strategy of a marketing mixer and it was basically like a party. I had balloons behind me, it was super fun. I did this little mini-presentation and then I really just talked about the updates to the program and the changes we made, why we made them. I showed the inside that kind of unveiled the behind-the-scenes of the program. I showed the inside of it, and we also had a fun trivia game. There were prizes. So it was very fun and kind of like a webinar, but not really because I wasn’t really pitching. Everybody who came to the mixer already knew that the reason for the mixer was to kind of unveil the Ignite Academy and celebrate that. I did have a discount offer for the program if people got their application in within a certain timeframe after the mixer. We crushed it with our numbers and it was as a pure warm audience campaign because cold traffic who doesn’t know about my business, or if you were to do something like this with your business, they don’t really care that you updated your program so there’s no point in creating a campaign for them. 

However, my audience and people who have been following me for a while, or have maybe checked out the Ignite program at one point but not bought it and were on the fence, or it’s in the back of their mind, this was the way to push them over the edge. So it was highly successful, and where I’m going with this is the power of your warm audience and not underestimating the power of your warm audience, because this is where consistent and quality marketing comes into play that it is so powerful because you’re able to leverage that in these certain cases. 

This is my argument to you that you should always be growing your email list. You should always be growing your warm audience, so people watching your videos, people going to your website, people engaging on your social media. You should always always be growing those assets because then you can do these types of promotions and get a massive return. I think this is one thing too that people often miss with marketing is they are oftentimes looking for that quick result, that quick sale without even meaning to. Here’s why is because we’re all in business and we need to make money, and we don’t have, most likely, investors and financial backing, so we have to make sales every month. I’m in that position too so I 100% get it. 

So what we look at is, okay, we need to get a lead and we need to convert them quickly so we can not only make our money from acquiring the lead but be a profitable company, which I fully get. But also, you have to keep in mind that you might convert X percentage of leads in the first 30 days or however many touchpoints that they’ve had with you, but then you’re going to have probably an even larger percentage of people who will convert in three months, five months a year from now and you don’t want to lose out on those people or lose sight of that potential. 

That’s where I’m going with this because sometimes when you’re marketing, you have to see I got this many leads and I got this many sales, let’s say in my webinar funnel or whatever your funnel is. You got this many leads, you got this many sales, and so here’s your return on ad spend. You also have to see the value in I also grew my email list X amount, and now I have 500 leads who didn’t buy, but could buy from me in the coming months, and what’s my strategy for converting those people?

So because this was a warm traffic campaign, we promoted it to our social media, our email list and we spent about a thousand dollars in ads, which is really low, just because we were trying to target warm traffic. We actually, the way we did this, it was no opt-in. We had people add it to their Google calendar. That was the link, no opt-in required, just come party with us at this marketing mixer to celebrate this program release. Also, why it was so successful in terms of the sales and the conversion, which I’ll share in a second, but why it was so successful is that the audience was like, I mean, the leads don’t get better than that because number one, they’re all warm traffic. They’ve all been on my list for at least, usually all of them are a month to a year plus, that is what it ranged because we went back and pulled those numbers. Number two, the reason they were getting on that marketing mixer from the beginning and showing interest is that they were already interested in the program. They already had that interest, otherwise, why would they show up? 

I was positioning the marketing mixer as come, let me unveil the new Ignite Academy program and there’ll be prizes, and I’m also sharing kind of like state of the union, what’s going on in marketing with iOS, which is a lot of the reasons why we made those changes. So I provided value in the training, but also it was heavily about the Ignite Academy program. So they’re coming basically saying I’m already interested in the Ignite Academy because I’m interested in these updates that you created. That’s even hotter of a lead than just a webinar registrant who’s interested in the content you’re going to teach. So those leads were hotter than hot. It doesn’t get better than that and that was really amazing. 

So our conversions on the backend, we ended up making $40,000 from the campaign, which means we sold over, gosh what was our number. We sold almost 20, we sold 16 Ignite courses, but get this. We sell it through an application, so they have to apply then get on a call and then we sell. Our sales conversion was 88%. We closed 88% of those calls, which is crazy. Our average conversion is usually about 55%, which is very high, but our application is really great and it really qualifies people before they even get on the call. So we have a very high conversion rate already on our calls, 55%, but this time we closed 88% of people who got on a call into the Ignite Academy because they were such great leads.

The other interesting part is that over 50% of those leads had joined my list in the last 90 days. So what that told us from a marketing perspective is number one, we had some people who had been there for a year plus, so seeing that long game, seeing that average amount of time until they buy. But also, the people who were on the list in the last 90 days were actually the hottest because we were still so top of mind. 

What’s coming out of this for my team is number one, we’re always all about the warm traffic campaign. My main intention with this podcast episode is to get you thinking about two things, are you consistently growing your warm audience, and that’s number one, and how are you doing it? How much money are you spending? What’s your strategy? You really should be doing it every single day because if you stall, if you take a break in growing your warm audience, you might not feel it right away, but you’ll feel it in the coming months. So for example, if you spent one whole month and you didn’t grow your list at all, you didn’t grow your social media, you didn’t grow your engagement and your video viewers, and you did that for a month or two, then in the next two to three months, you’re going to feel it in your sales because you’re going to have less leads. That’s just going to go down and down that you can actually engage with and pitch your offer to, or get them on your webinar, or DM with them, whatever it is. You’re just going to have less people engaging with your brand, so you’ll start to feel that in the months to come.

So the first thing is, are you consistently growing your warm audience, and what is your strategy to do so. You should be always growing your list in all those warm audience buckets all the time and defining what’s the budget you’re spending to do that. Lead gen will have a higher budget, but you should be spending about 5% of your budget on just brand awareness and visibility on just promoting content to get eyes on your brand. 

Then number two, what is your strategy to re-engage that warm audience both when they initially come on your list, but then let’s say, let’s look at the next six months of this year. How are you going to re-engage your audience and make sure that they have multiple opportunities to re-engage with you, to buy from you? You will almost always feel like you’re saying things over and over and over again, and that people have already heard them. And they haven’t, because what you have to remember is you are nobody’s priority. You are not your audience’s priority unless they are the hottest of hot buyers, which is like 5% of people that actually actively want what you’re offering. Otherwise, your job is to stay top of mind. 

You’re nobody’s priority, but you feel like, “oh my gosh, I’ve said this seven times or five times and I’m still am saying it and I’m still getting people who don’t know the answer, who don’t know I offer my product.” You should feel like that. You should feel like you’re talking about the same things over and over again, and pushing your valuable content and pushing your offer in obviously an authentic way that means you’re doing it enough. So the second piece is what is your strategy to re-engaging your warm audience consistently? We have that down pretty well. We plan out our quarters, we plan out our years with our live events and what we’re doing, and the different promotions that we’re going to do. We do that pretty well.

Another thing that came out of this for us is the people who bought in the first 90 days, that was our number one sales group, which is very interesting, but it makes sense. If you think about the customer experience, people who join my list through a webinar or Hirsh Marketing Report, whatever method, in the last 90 days were our highest number of applications and sales conversions through this promotion. It makes sense because we are most top of mind for them. They joined our list in the last 90 days and most likely they knew about the Ignite program. They knew it existed, they may be slightly considered it, they were on the fence about it, and they hadn’t really forgotten about us yet. Then when we rolled out this promotion, it was like, “oh, here’s my chance. This is a great opportunity. Everything has been updated. There’s going to be a discount.” All of those things push them over the edge. 

What it made us do internally was think about what does that first 90 days look like for somebody who’s joining our list. We’ve now created a quarterly goal around this to create that experience better than ever, because we know that we’re probably right now leaving some money on the table in making that an epic experience for somebody who joins my list and what that first 90 days, 45 to 90 days looks like. How are we intentionally re-pitching and re-offering my offer? How are we giving them value? How are we building trust? How are we staying top of mind? Because that 90 days, really like 45 days and then I’d say 45 to 90 are like two chunks. Those are your prime times to convert somebody who was on the fence. We now a quarterly goal to go back and look on that and we’re calling it like the F45, which is my team’s fun name of the first 45 days. We’re starting there of like, what does that experience look like? We’re simplifying it. We are building systems around it to try to leverage that opportunity that we feel like we might be leaving on the table. 

So ultimately what I want to point out here is have you think of those two things, what is your warm audience strategy and how are you re-engaging with them? But then also making sure you understand this is marketing and your goal is to create this snowball effect where you are consistently building your list and building your audience, building your engagement, building your social media following, because that just continually makes selling easier. If you do that, it becomes this snowball effect. What you’ll see is big influencers, big, successful entrepreneurs who have large businesses, everything is easier for them because they did this, because they have a list of 50,000, 100,000 people. Which might sound crazy to you, but we have clients who have massive email lists and they can put out something tomorrow and make a ton of money with it because they have that asset. 

Sometimes I see people who think, “marketing should be that easy for me. It should be that easy as somebody I follow or this really awesome business owner. I know that they’re making all this money.” What you’re not seeing is they spent years building up their following, building up their warm audience and their assets to make it that easy for them. Even myself, I’m actually launching a new company at the end of this year to next year and it’s going to be way easier than when I started this current company, because I have a following, because of an email list, because I have clients, because I already have that. I’ve already done that work. So as you build that, you’re creating a snowball effect where everything will become easier for you as long as you stay consistent, as long as you don’t have a pause of multiple months where you’re not doing anything, you’re not showing up, you’re not growing your list. All of those things are an asset to your business, and there should never be a gap when you are growing them. Okay? 

That’s the power of your warm audience. We got 40X return on our ad spend. $1,000 in ad spend and $40,000 in revenue, which is pretty incredible. We also closed 88% of the people who applied to come into our academy, which is only possible because I consistently spend money on ads, grow my email list, grow my following, and nurture my audience and build trust. So you need to build in a strategy for that. All right, you guys. That’s what I have for you today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I hope you go implement some of this. I feel like this is often the place that most of us are leaving money on the table, including myself, and have opportunity to improve it. I’ll talk to you guys next week.

Have questions? Text my team at +1 (512) 648-5723!

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