If I could give you just one piece of advice to massively improve your results, it would be to focus on choosing what’s most important in your marketing.
I see it all the time with entrepreneurs where they’re either a one woman/man show or only have a few team members. They need to generate leads and sales and create successful marketing, but have no idea where to put their time and effort.
They end up trying to do EVERYTHING, Facebook Ads, YouTube, Instagram lives, Google Ads, a podcast, etc., to find what sticks…
But nothing ever does.
Starting to hit a little close to home?
We as entrepreneurs often struggle with time management and think we can do more than we actually have capacity for, myself included.
But when we stop trying to do it all and start focusing only on what’s most important in our marketing, that’s when the magic happens.
Which is why in today’s episode, I’m sharing a powerful exercise that will help you find clarity on where your priorities should lie so you can break free from the overwhelm of trying to do it all and finally create success in your marketing!
If it’s not moving the needle forward, it’s setting your business behind.
After tuning in, shoot me a DM over on Instagram (@emilyhirsh) and let me know what clarity you found on what matters most in YOUR marketing.
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
In today’s episode, I want to dive into choosing what is most important in your marketing. This is going to be very important and it’s actually inspired by a conversation that I had with a couple of our Ignite students on our last monthly training. It’s a theme I see all the time, which is a lot of people out there who are maybe a one woman or one man show, or they only have a couple team members or contractors, and they’re trying to build their business. They’re trying to create successful marketing. They need to generate leads and sales. And it’s like, where do they put their time and effort? I think a lot of entrepreneurs think they can do way more than they can, myself included. We have an issue with time, right? We’re always like, that’ll take two hours and it takes five. Or I’ll be there in 10 minutes, and it takes 30 minutes. I have that problem with time, and I think we all do as entrepreneurs. We definitely over-commit ourselves on accident. We don’t even realize we’re doing it, right?
I see this a lot when it comes to marketing, because there’s so much that you can put your attention to. There is organic social media. There’s content creation, like having a podcast. There’s YouTube. There’s video. There’s live on social media, Facebook lives, Instagram lives. There’s stories. There’s reels. There’s Facebook ads. There’s Google ads. There are all different funnels you could choose from, and then when one doesn’t work, somebody likes to give you an opinion that you should go do what they were doing because what they were doing worked. So you change everything and then you go do that and the cycle just goes on and on.
I was having this conversation with an Ignite student, and the question they asked me was how do I increase the number of engagement in likes and comments on my social media posts? Which is a good question, right? We want to have engagement on our organic social media and that will help drive traffic and leads and sales ultimately. He was like, “well, I don’t know if I should post a couple of times a day, every day. I don’t know if I should go engage with other accounts. I don’t know if I should do a giveaway.” He was giving me all these ideas, and none of them were bad ideas, but instead of just being like, oh, here, here’s the idea I would do to improve your followers, what I asked him was why do you want to improve the engagement on your social media? Why do you want to improve the likes and comments? First his answer was that will lead to more engagement, which will lead to more traffic to my site and more sales. And I said, yeah, but why do you think that is going to make the biggest difference in increasing your leads and sales? And he said, “I don’t know. I just think that I want to do that in conjunction with my paid ads, because I want to get organic traffic.”
So I kind of questioned him and we got to the point of like going and doing giveaways and creating two posts a day on your social media and getting more people to like, comment, and engage with your posts is not going to move the needle as much as other things could. They think this happens all the time that people, business owners convince themselves of all these things they need to be doing, because you need to have an organic presence, a paid presence on multiple platforms, and create all the content, and write the emails to your list, and all the things. The reality is, if you go about it trying to do all those things, you will not do all of them. There’s no way. Especially if you have a small team, I can’t even do all those things and I have a whole marketing team. We are not Gary V. We don’t have that level of support.
Most of you might be a one woman or man show, like I said. It’s impossible to do all those things. So instead of trying to do everything, and I know this sounds like basic advice that a lot of people say, but still I see people doing this without realizing it. Instead of trying to do everything, you need to only be doing what’s actually moving the needle. What I encourage you to do right now is get out a blank piece of paper and write down every action, whether it’s time or a money investment, or your team is doing it. What is every action that is actually generating you leads and sales or attempting to do that. So that could be, I have a podcast. that could be, I post on YouTube. That could be, I post on Instagram. I post on Facebook. I do a Facebook live every week. I email my list. I run Facebook ads. List every activity that you are doing that is either successfully generating leads and sales, or it’s attempting to and it’s maybe not successful yet, but you’re still trying to do it. List all that out.
Then I want you to rate them in order from what is doing the best to the worst. What is actually generating new leads and sales, or if nothing is generating new leads and sales, then what’s getting the most traction? What do you think is actually getting the most engagement that will lead to the leads in sales, and rate them in order from the best to the worst of what’s actually working. Then look at that list and question if you should be doing all those things, because you might find that you have eight to 10 things on your list, and two are actually generating leads and sales. Get down to the bottom of what is actually generating leads and sales and is going to be the most successful and question, what can I remove? What can I take away? Yes, you might not have as big as of a social media presence, or as many likes on your post, or you might not have a weekly Facebook live, but if that’s not generating new leads and sales, why are you doing it?
Sit there and I want you to question the why behind all your actions and ask yourself if I stopped doing this, what would it do to my numbers? Would it drastically decrease the number of leads and sales we bring in? If I stopped recording this podcast, that would be a big deal for my company. But I stopped going on Instagram stories for the most part, and that didn’t do very much at all, if anything, impacting our results. For me, that wasn’t where I wanted to show up. It wasn’t moving the needle and it was taking a lot of my time and mental bandwidth, so I stopped it. Look at everything and question, what if I stopped doing this? Would it impact the bottom line of my business and of generating leads and sales? If the answer is no, it wouldn’t impact it, stop doing it and put your effort and your energy into the things you listed at the top of that list and go all in on those.
So back to this conversation, we started talking and I said, okay, so let’s pause the conversation on your social media for a second and I want you to tell me what is getting you the most leads and sales. He said, “we do a webinar every month and that has generated me basically a three X return on my ad spend, but I just want to make sure that I have leads coming in from all over, because what if that stops working and then I don’t.” I said, “well, what if you doubled your budget to your webinar next month and you went all in on that webinar presentation and optimizing that webinar and making sure that you fixed any holes, you improved your messaging and you went all in on that? What would happen?” He said, “I’d probably get more sales.” I’m like, what if you put the time that you were just talking about putting into social media, which is a big time suck by the way. I like social media, but to an extent organic social media is basically trading time for success, versus paid media is trading your dollars. Yes, you should do both of them, but also at some point business owners have to take a step back and say what’s most important and what do I realistically have time for?
We got to the place where he’s like, “yeah, if I went all in on my webinar that I already know converted really well, I would get better results.” And I said, “so take all that time that you’re going to put into these different efforts and go put it into your webinar and come back and tell me how it does.” So he’s doing that, and pending the results, I know it will work because that’s with anything, right? Even with our health, with our personal life, with our business, if we just narrow down, what’s working and do more of that, we will be more successful. A lot people are trying to do way too much, and that is my advice to you.
I want you to do that exercise, right? Then moving forward any time you want to add a funnel, add some sort of marketing effort, add a platform, add a goal at a project, I just want you to step up back, take a day and think for a second, why am I doing this? Can I clearly state the why behind why I’m doing this? And if I do this, is it going to impact the bottom line of my business? Or is it going to make me feel better because I’m crossing something off my to-do list, or I’m showing up on a different platform? Which one is it going to move? Is it going to actually generate leads and sales, or is it going to just help me cross something off my list? Now, if you’re like, well, I don’t know, because I haven’t done it before. That’s fine, but I want you to then ask yourself, would my time, and energy, and resources be better spent putting into something that’s already working, or do I actually need to add something new? Maybe the answer is you actually need to add something new. I’m just saying to step back and question that.
You have to be in a place where you can be very specific, and picky, and intentional with where you put your effort, and your resources, and your company resources, and your own time ,and your company money, your team’s resources. Now and forever do you have to be intentional with that. As you grow, you’re going to be able to expand what you can do, but you never will be able to do everything. I am not on every platform. Even highly successful, eight, nine figure businesses are not on every platform. The way they got successful is they did a few things really, really well and scaled that. So don’t try and be everywhere. Don’t try and do everything and take a step back and question that why. Ask yourself, if I didn’t do this would it impact my bottom line? If the answer is no, it wouldn’t impact my bottom line, go do the things that are working. And make sure you also know what is working.
I think that’s another thing is people are just doing. They’re in that cycle of I got to post the content, I got to make the content, I got to run the ads, I got to build the funnel. They have all these things they have to do, but it’s like, do you know what is working? And do you have the system set up to know what’s working? Which comes back to your numbers and understanding where your customers are coming from, understanding where your traffic and engagement is coming from, and taking the time to evaluate that. You can’t make these decisions as you go, unless you know those things. So make sure you’re set up to know what’s working and then consistently evaluate that. The more you can take things off your plate, the more you can do less, but do what you’re doing well, I truly promise you the more successful you’ll be.
I hope this short episode inspired you to step back, take a look at that and really evaluate. Maybe a few of you will have things that you’ll be like, “oh, why am I even doing that?” I know that’s what I come to. One thing, I always actually have this like written down on sticky notes and stuff, is simple. Keep it simple. It doesn’t have to be complicated. We don’t have to be doing everything. We don’t have to take every idea. I don’t have to take every idea from every team member, or Facebook group, or colleague who said something. You’re going to get a lot of ideas. People think they know what you should be doing, and you have to be the boundary and the filter between saying, is that what I really should do or not? I totally get that sometimes you’re going to be testing something, but you still should question is my energy and resources in testing this the best spent place? And the answer might be yes, but at least take the time to question it. All right, you guys. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you next time.