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Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a fabulous summer. I know summer is ending for some of you. As many of you know, I’m in Colorado for the whole month of August. I’m in heaven. I definitely want a second home here. I love the mountains. I don’t think I would want to live in the mountains full-time through the snow, but I love having the option to come to the mountains and I love hiking. It’s just so incredible to be more in nature. I have this routine right now with my kids where I finish work at three, and then we have this trail right by our house that has a creek. We go down and we play in the creek, we go on a little hike, we look for moose, and I spend two hours in nature after finishing work with them. It’s amazing. 

Meanwhile, my house is getting completely ripped apart and redone. I got a video yesterday, my assistant’s going and checking on it a couple of times a week. It’s so crazy. I can’t even recognize the house. I’m so grateful for everything, and for the ability to do this, and be able to work here. My nanny comes in about a week to help us for the rest of the time, but right now my husband’s being a super dad and taking care of the kids while I work during the day. 

Today, when this episode comes out, I will actually be doing a free training on the two keys to creating highly profitable marketing campaigns, no matter what platform you’re on and really pointing out that so many people right now are blaming a platform, or a specific strategy, or one specific component, I’ve actually talked about this on the podcast, when really most people are missing these two things that are part of the foundation to your marketing and used to not be as important as they are today. So definitely come join me for that training. It’s today at 3:00 PM Eastern time. If you haven’t registered, you can go to notforlazymarketers.com/keys. K E Y S. I will be live at 3:00 PM Eastern. There will be a replay, but try and come live because there’s a special bonus around the iOS update and a cheat sheet we have for you guys on managing that. It’s updated from the last time we launched it because obviously stuff has changed with the iOS updates. 

So in today’s episode, what I want to talk about is what levers you can pull in your marketing. The reason I want to talk about this is because I see a lot of people who are saying things like, “my webinar funnel isn’t working, my ads aren’t working, my CPM is high, my offer isn’t selling,” like you name it, fill in the blank. I’m seeing this in a lot of Facebook groups and people are like, what should I do? What’s the answer? What do I do? I think coming back to this idea that I’m going to talk about is going to be helpful for all of you, because there’s only so many levers you can pull in your marketing to improve your results. If you come back to this playbook in marketing and this idea of whenever something isn’t working, I stay calm and I come to this, these three levers that you can pull. There really are only three, and there’s an order that you can do them in.

I’ve talked about this before, but not in this way, and I think this is going to help any of you out there who are like XYZ, fill in the blank is not working, whether that’s your ads, your funnel, your offer isn’t selling. Even if your organic marketing isn’t working anymore, these things can help. One of these isn’t relevant to organic marketing, but these components can help. Marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. That’s a thing I think a lot of people mistake is they think that I have to have this complicated strategy and this funnel map with 95 directions and arrows going everywhere, and if I don’t have that, then my offer isn’t converting, or I don’t have a good enough funnel. So here are the levers that you can pull in your marketing. 

Number one. Can anyone guess, longtime listeners, what I’m going to say? The number one thing you can do to improve any results, whether it’s your funnel, your ads, your offer, whatever, is your messaging and your creative and going really deep on this when something isn’t working. So for example, if your ad stopped working, then going really deep and getting better creative, better ad creative, writing new copy, taking that copy to the next level, taking it a couple levels deeper so you can connect better with your audience, creating maybe a reel or a video that you can run that’s even more creative, even more innovative. Everywhere I look, I can tell you that anytime we refresh creative, we try a new angle, we go deeper on messaging, we connect with the audience more, it improves results. 

So with your ads, that means refreshed creative. The frequency you’re having to refresh creative has increased tremendously with a funnel that’s not working. This means the positioning of the offer that you’re sending people to in your ads, this is the page that you’re sending people to, what the copy on that page says. Does it speak to pain points? Does it speak to desires? Is it connected to your ad? How do you improve that? This means the messaging in your webinar itself if you have one, or in your challenge, or your video series, the actual content and messaging within that, how you’re positioning your offer, how you’re leading up to your offer. It can be overwhelming, all the options, but going deep and really taking a step back because, I think all of us are guilty of this and I do this myself, when you’re so close to your strategy, or your funnel or, or the way you’re positioning your offer and your messaging, you sometimes don’t see things that it’s like, wow that’s really not clear, or wow that’s really misaligned from what my audience really wants, or at least thinks they wants or needs, or is answering the problem that they have.

If something isn’t working in your marketing, the first place you should turn to is your messaging. You should just ask yourself, where is the opportunity? Where’s the opportunity for me to go deeper? Where’s the opportunity for me to gain a better emotional connection and to speak better to my audience’s emotions? Then start there. If you hear this and you’re like, well I have no idea, then what you need to do is go talk to your audience, go survey them, go get on calls with them. Don’t ask them “what do you want?” because people don’t know what they want. There’s a famous quote that Henry Ford said, “if I gave people what they want, they would have gotten faster horses” or something like that, and he invented the automobile. 

So don’t go ask your audience what do you want from me? Ask them what are you struggling with? What’s your biggest struggle? Where’s your pain points? Where are you frustrated? Where are you? What’s your desire? What is your ultimate dream in whatever your industry is? For me, I’d say with your marketing. For you, you might say with your health. If you don’t know how to improve your messaging, you need to go talk to your audience because that will give you the best Intel that you could possibly have. You can survey them, you can do one-on-one calls, you can do both. One-on-one calls are the most powerful because you can go really deep, but I’m a fan of both. 

If you’re really struggling to hit the nail, and let’s say, you’ve tried a lot of ad copy, you’ve tried different webinars, you’ve tried different landing pages, and you’re just not hitting the mark, most likely you have a disconnect from what your audience wants and how you’re communicating it. Go back and really connect with them. That’s the best use of your time. Maybe it sounds like, “oh I don’t want to do that,” or “I don’t have to do that, I’ll just keep trying this.” But honestly, you’re going to waste more time doing what you’ve been doing that hasn’t been working, than you are if you go buckle down and do 20 interviews with your ideal customer and then come back and improve your marketing. I guarantee you, you will improve your results if you do that. So that’s the first marketing lever you can pull if something isn’t working. Turn to your messaging, turn to your creative, turn to how you are attracting people to that component of your funnel, your ad, your webinar, whatever it is, and go and improve that. So that’s the first lever. 

The second lever is your targeting. This is a little bit more technical and is the one that’s really related to paid ads, but if you haven’t tried a lot of targeting options, if you’re somehow missing the mark on targeting options, if you don’t have a lot of data so you don’t know what your targeting is. I see this really often that people run ads and they maybe try three or four audiences and they’re like, “well my ads didn’t work.” Okay, well, you didn’t try enough audiences. The first place to look is your creative and messaging, but then you also have to do a fair amount of testing with your targeting. I definitely rate this one second over messaging, because it doesn’t matter if you have the best targeting in the world and you’re on point with your targeting. If your messaging is off, nothing will work. I also know that there are audiences that it’s like guaranteed that your ideal customer is hanging out in, and if those audiences aren’t working, then it’s your messaging. You have to go back to your messaging or it could be this third level lever that we’re going to talk about. 

So it could be that you are targeting the wrong people, you haven’t tested enough targeting to see what sticks. You could take this over to your organic marketing in the sense that, are you attracting the wrong target audience? Are you not clear enough in who your target audience is and that you serve those people? That could be the case and you could carry that over. So that’s the second lever that you can pull in your marketing and you can turn to, to improve it if your ads aren’t working. Or even if you’re like, “my webinar isn’t converting,” or “I’m getting registrations and they’re not watching,” it could be your targeting. I think that’s an easier thing to blame and is oftentimes not the problem, and it’s more the messaging and the experience you’ve created, but it is a lever that you can pull, and you can test different things, and you can see what that results in.

The third marketing lever that you can pull is your offer. That could be your webinar itself, it could be a free offer, whatever you send people to on your Facebook ads, or your organic social media whatever that call to action is that is an offer. You might have multiple offers. You might have an offer that’s “go watch my free training,” and then you might also have an offer that’s “buy my product or service,” or you may have only one. That is another lever you can pull. If you get to a point where you have tried so many different creative angles, so many different messaging angles, and you’ve talked to your ideal customer, you’re getting people to sign up for your webinar, you’re getting people to the page where your offer is and they aren’t taking you up on the offer, you’ve tested a bunch of different targeting, you’ve tried a bunch of different ad sets, you know you’re hitting your audience, if you know you’re doing those two things you have to go to the offer. The arrow is pointing directly at the offer at that point. That’s why this is the third lever, because you want to make sure you do ample amount of testing on the other two levers before you go to this lever.

What I don’t want people to think is, “oh my ads didn’t convert. I tried it for a week. I tested two audiences and a couple versions of ad copy. So now I’m going to go change my entire offer and start a new business or a brand new funnel.” You definitely don’t want to do that, but you don’t want to be blind to the fact that you can make any offer work. With an offer, there’s a few things that you can change. The first thing is positioning. I see this a lot where it’s not the actual offer once they get on the inside. So it’s not what you’re actually selling, or it’s not what you’re actually teaching on your webinar. It’s how you’re positioning that. 

One thing that people do a lot is they kind of skip ahead and they’re like, “well I know that people need this. They think they need this, but they actually need this, so I’m just going to create my webinar around that.” Then you’re marketing that on the front end, but they don’t think they need that, so there’s a disconnect. You need to make sure that the way you position your offer is addressing what people want, not what they need. The only way you’re going to get that is by talking to people, and observing your audience, and listening to your audience. What they need and want might be different today than it was six months ago, and you need to be attuned to that, and listening to that, and paying attention to that so you don’t become irrelevant. So paying attention and going and looking at your offer. 

If you’ve pulled the last two levers that hasn’t made a difference, now we need to look at your offer airst the positioning. Then if it’s a paid offer, the price. Is there a disconnect in the value that you’re giving and the price you’ve charged for it? This is where you probably have competitors. You probably have people selling something similar to you. It pays off to go do market research, to go see what they’re doing, to go see how they’re doing it. There’s a lot of cases where the success that you want already exists out there, so you don’t always have to create something new. What I suggest and like to do is go and pay attention to what’s working in your industry. That doesn’t mean go follow Russell Brunson if you’re a health coach and do exactly what he is doing in your industry to your competitors. Pay attention to what they’re doing, and then put your own spin on it. So completely reinvent the wheel, but put your own spin on it. 

That’s not just around offers, but let’s say that you go look at your competitors and everybody’s charging $500 for their course in your space, but you’re charging $1500. That’s obviously going to be an issue unless you have a very clear perceived difference in the value of your offer over your competitors. That’s possible. You can absolutely be at the highest charging, the highest rated business and the highest priced offer, but you better have the value perceived to back that up or, of course, people are going to go to the other offers and not consider yours. 

So the third lever is your offer. That, again, can be your free offer like your webinar, or it could be a paid offer, and you might have multiple, and you might need to look at both. Let’s say you’re getting people to sign up for your webinar. They’re coming to your webinar and then they’re not buying the offer on the webinar. So we need to pay attention to that offer and what the disconnect is. Start with the positioning of it. Really question yourself, am I addressing my ideal customer’s pain, desires, and what they want, not always what they need? You can give them what they need on the inside, what they want, what they’re saying that they want. Again, this comes from talking and listening to your audience. So that’s one piece of the positioning.

If it’s a paid offer, you can look at the price. I would definitely compare with other successful businesses in your niche and make sure that, at the least, you are clearly articulating the value of your offer over theirs. If you were to sit back and pretend like you are your ideal customer, they’re looking at these three options to buy from, and ask yourself why would they choose mine? Is it clear that mine is different, that mine is better and what the differentiating factor is about my offer? What is that unique selling point? If you’re not clear on that and if that’s not connected to what they want, you’re going to struggle to sell your offer.

So those are your three levers that you can pull in marketing. If something isn’t working, don’t overwhelm yourself, don’t throw your hands up in the air, don’t go start a new business. Calm yourself and come to these three levers because marketing is a process and it comes down to understanding this and then just getting to work. Start with your creative and messaging, talking to your audience, making sure you’re doing a great job with that, then moving to your targeting, and then finally moving into your offer. If you go and focus all in on those things and you stay committed to that, you go deep with that, you pay attention to your audience and what they’re saying, you pay attention to your numbers and where the break-off is, you will absolutely be successful. There is absolutely no way you won’t because this is the formula to marketing.

These are the things you can change and adjust to achieve that success. That success is dependent on your commitment to these levers, to pulling these levers, to doing the work, to not taking shortcuts, to accomplish whatever your goal is – the webinar registrants, the sales, of course. Ultimately it’s sales, but maybe the first problem you have to address is getting people signed up for your webinar. Then you move on to the next problem. You go back to the beginning of the levers and you figure out which one you can pull to change the numbers to adjust the numbers. 

All right, you guys, I hope that was helpful. I hope that brought some clarity and simplicity to anybody who’s struggling with something not converting because it happens to everyone. It happens to me too. There’s things I put out and I’m like, man, this is going to be awesome, and doesn’t do as well as I thought. A lot of times it comes from a disconnect in our messaging and we just do better. The next time we just improve. It happens to everybody. The most successful people, brand new people, all of us, they’re all doing this. They’re all just pulling these levers. Some do it faster and better than others, and those are the ones that are more successful. All right. If you guys feel like coming to the training today, or you want to get the replay, you can still go to notforlazymarketers.com/keys. I hope to see you there. Talk to you guys soon.

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