READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing and getting through. We’re going into a new quarter soon. I cannot believe that we are in the fall. Most kids are back to school. I think by now, by the time this episode comes out, we’ll be back in our hopefully finished, remodeled house. We’ll see if it’s actually on track. We’ve definitely run into a few delays, but should be close. I will share the before and after on Instagram and you guys can see, but we basically gutted our entire downstairs for our house. I’m very excited to show you guys that new product of the completed remodel, hopefully completed. 

I am excited for today’s episode because I think it’s something that a lot of people need to hear and nobody talks about this enough and that is the mistake and danger of comparing other businesses strategies to yours. I’ve definitely talked a good amount on my podcast in conversations, consistently about the problem of taking somebody else’s strategy and then replicating it for your business and the downfalls of that. Now I think there’s a lot of people out there who have found success, they have successful marketing strategies, they have great ideas, they’re in your industry. So why not take those ideas and bring them into your own business? But we need to talk about this deeper because there’s a big mistake that most people make. 

So let’s first start with this. I see an abundant amount of people trying to provide advice, whether it’s coaches, or influencers, or even marketing strategists out there providing advice as if it’s a one size fits all model. The problem with that is many problems, but let’s just start with the most basic of basic problems of this, which is if you tell a business owner who’s targeting consumers to go do a certain strategy that’s exactly the same as a business owner targeting other business owners, and you think the strategy should be exactly the same with no tweaks, it will fail either for one or the other. Typically there are strategies out there that are really great for B2B, they’re really great for businesses targeting other businesses, but they won’t translate over in B2C targeting consumers. 

There’s various reasons for that, but consumers are like a whole different game. They are usually less expensive to acquire a lead, harder to acquire the sale. You have to take into consideration if you’re targeting a brand new business owner who has the time to put into building their business, trying your methods, implementing your process, going through your challenge, and then you’re targeting a busy mom with your fitness program, there is no way that the strategy can be the same and it actually convert. So that’s like the surface level that I talk about all the time. 

You have to consider when you go look at a successful strategy, what is their audience? And how is that compared to yours? Does your audience have the same amount of time? Do they have more time? Do they have less time? Does your audience have the same level of commitment to solving their problem? Do they understand their problem? You have to take into those considerations at the bare minimum. 

That’s where I see coaches and programs where they have a mix. They have students targeting business owners, they have students targeting consumers, and they’re just teaching the marketing strategy that is specifically worked for their business. I see this all the time in programs where the marketing strategy, the Facebook ad strategy is literally exactly what worked for their business and it’s not molded. That’s the problem with getting marketing advice from a coach. I’m just going to say that because there’s no way they can have the perspective to help a wide variety of businesses that somebody who runs multiple accounts, and ads, and is in all different industries, and sees that perspective, compared to the coach who sees their own marketing and is bringing that advice to you.

That’s the first part, but I want to go deeper on this because over the last three weeks, I have had several conversations around this. When that happens, I’m usually like, okay, my audience needs to hear this. The first conversation actually came from a friend who was like, “I just talked to…” her friend, “and he’s doing X, Y, Z. We should do that. We should go do that. And I think that’s a great idea. We should replicate that strategy.” And here are the questions I asked that dove deeper. Number one, I said, how much are they spending on Facebook ads? It was $15 a day. Number two, I said, okay, that’s great about the cost per lead that they’re getting, but how much are they getting in terms of a sales conversion? Well, those leads hadn’t been put to the test of a sales conversion yet.

Whenever somebody comes to me and is like, “oh my gosh, there’s this great strategy. It worked for this person. We should replicate it,” or “I want to replicate it,” or “you should replicate it,” and you’re speaking like that, there’s a specific thought process that I go through to dig deeper to see if it’s actually a good strategy. The first one was the ad spend because you can get people who are spending $10-$15 a day, and they’re like, “this is working so well, and I’m getting $3 leads and it’s working.” Then you go try and take it to someone who’s spending $500 a day or $250 a day and it’s going to be different. 

If you’re coming in saying, “I have a great strategy,” and you’re spending $10 or $15 a day, let me see you scale that strategy before you tell me it’s a great strategy, because that’s such low volume. How do you even know that that is a good strategy? You don’t, because the leads, there’s nothing wrong with spending that amount of ads, but there’s no way in a couple of weeks of spending that much on your ads that you can walk away and say, “I have a winner strategy that everybody should go implement.” That’s irresponsible to think that way. 

So the first thing is understanding when somebody says, “I have a great strategy,” maybe it’s like, “I had a great launch, here’s what happened.” Okay. How much did you spend on that live launch? How many leads did you get? How much traffic did you get? And if it is a really low volume, like less than 500 leads have gone through this strategy and been proven through it, don’t take it and go implement it. Again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with having 500 or less leads, or having a low ad spend. A lot of people are in that boat. I’m just saying you shouldn’t take your strategy and tell other people to go implement it until you’ve proven it on a large scale, thousands of people, thousands of dollars of ad spend behind it. Then it’s a strategy that somebody else could potentially go replicate. That’s the first piece. 

The second piece is understanding sales versus leads because sometimes people… you’ve got to look at the big picture. The big picture with ads is to make money, right? We want a return on ad spend. So if somebody is like, “I’m getting $3 cost per lead,” okay. What are those leads doing? Don’t go replicate a strategy where somebody is saying, “I’m getting a great cost per lead,” but you don’t know if they’re actually making money on the backend. 

Sometimes a lot of times people like to share their great strategies with their great cost per lead before they even know if they’re going to make money on the backend. That’s not a fleshed out strategy until you actually know the end result of it. That’s great you’re getting $3 cost per lead. What if they’re crap quality and none of them buy? Then it’s a terrible strategy. Then you’re going to have to rework your strategy. 

So that’s the other thing, is having the full picture. If somebody is referencing number of leads or cost per lead, but you have no idea if those leads bought, or if they’re referencing a click through rate, or I’m getting this cost per click on my landing page to my ecommerce product, what’s the sales? What’s the actual success, A to Z, of that strategy? How much did you spend? Is it a scalable strategy? So those are the two things. 

The next conversation that came up was actually on my team, and it was someone who was coming new to work with us. They said, “a coach told me I should do X, Y, Z.” It was modeled after a big influencer who has a big name. I’m actually not going to say the name, because it really doesn’t matter. I don’t want it to taint it. They have a big name, well-known reputation, been in business for a long time, spent millions on Facebook ads, multi-million dollar company. This person’s coach told them I should do my webinar like that. At first, my team was like, well this person, this influencer, is doing it successfully. Then they named a few others, and I said, “yeah, but you guys, that person didn’t do it to start out with.”

The strategy was that the person on the webinar was going to put their full price. So they’re selling high ticket, and he used to go to an application. They were going to put their full price of the product, and then at the end, so basically pitch the product, say the price of it. Then at the end, then say, “now go book a call,” instead of the more traditional way to do it is either you leveraged the call as your call to action on a webinar or you mentioned your product, but you don’t go into real detail about the price and the information because they’re gonna get on a sales call.

Now I’m not saying you can’t say your price on a webinar. I’m just saying my team was like, “well, this influencer is putting it in their ads that their program costs $35,000 and then they’re giving you all the information on the webinar.” The point is that person, that influencer who’s been in business for at least seven years didn’t do that to start. So you can’t look at what somebody is doing today, seven years into business, multiple million dollars of profit in ad spend later, and then take it over to a new business and say,you should replicate that, what they’re doing today, because it’s working for them. 

No, because that big influencer has a name. They have a brand. You say their name, you’re going to probably know it. You go to their sales page, they have hundreds of testimonials, hundreds of past students talking about them with their results. They can do things that a new business owner cannot do. This shows up in so many ways. I think that so often I see people get this advice, or go look at a company, what they’re doing in their marketing, and you cannot compare yourself to an eight figure business owner when you are a six-figure business owner and what you can do in your marketing.

You’re going to have to work harder if you don’t have a reputation, meaning you’re going to have to prove yourself, prove your offer, prove your worth, and prove that you can get results for your customers, students, clients, whatever, more than somebody who is an eight figure business, who’s been proving it for seven years, who has already proven it and has a name who cares what you think of them. This person, some people had some opinions of like, “they suck,” in terms of their actual delivery of their product. It doesn’t matter what you think of them. They have a brand, they can do things that other people can’t do. 

So whenever you look at a strategy, you hear about a strategy, a coach tells you to do something, a marketer tells you to do something and they’re like, “X, Y, Z is working for my client or for me, or for whatever,” dig deeper, ask yourself first of all, is this business on the same level as mine? I don’t say that to be like, “oh, well you’re on a lower level.” It’s just the reality of the fact that you don’t have the brand awareness, the name, the reputation that that person has. Therefore, you have to adapt your marketing to be at the level that you’re at and not jump three steps ahead because you will have to go backwards. It won’t work. I guarantee you, it won’t work if you skip ahead like that. 

The business owners that you’re comparing, they didn’t skip ahead. They did the work beforehand to build the brand, to do the extra work, to prove it. That means potentially doing sales calls with people who don’t know your price. Maybe that’s what it means for the people who don’t know your price, because you need to talk to them and prove yourself a little bit more than just on the webinar. That, again, can show up in many ways. This was just the example that came up and what came out of it was you can’t take a strategy from a big influencer and replicate it into a brand new funnel, brand new business, and that was the end goal. 

So when you hear this great strategy, go check it out. I want you guys to dig deeper and I want you to almost be like, “no, I’m not going to do it,” until somebody convinces you otherwise and you ask how much spend? How much traffic has gone through this strategy? What’s the end result from A to Z? Not just the cost per lead, not just the webinar show up rate, not even just the webinar conversion rate. I want to know the profit, the return on ad spend, A to Z metrics of that strategy. 

Then take into consideration that person’s audience, that person’s business maturity, that person’s brand awareness. Do they have a brand name? Do they not have a brand name? Is their audience totally different than yours? Right now, there are so many people who think they have the answers to marketing and are telling you, “you’ve got to go do this. This one thing is going to save you. Jump to this platform. Try this strategy. Change your webinar. Webinars are dead.” So much advice out there, right? I want you to try not to take it until you can dig, like you’re a detective, into it and really identify is this the right strategy for your audience and for your business where you’re at? 

You might be able to take the bones of a strategy, and then you might have to tweak it a little bit for you. You’ll know how you have to tweak it based on putting yourself into the experience of your audience and asking yourself, if I didn’t know my brand or I had never come into contact with my product, or my brand name, or what I do, would this experience be what I need to become a paying customer? Or do I need more touch points? Or do I need more information on a webinar? Do I need more follow-up? Whatever the answer is. 

This is where having, hopefully, a marketing expert in your corner that can help you create this customization is good because yes, there are best practices. Things like using urgency, webinars in general, like those are best practices that it’s not going to change drastically. It’s not like, I’d say, “oh you should use urgency and you shouldn’t in your marketing.” Everybody can use urgency. It’s how you use those things. It’s how you use the webinar, from the topic, to the structure, to the setup, that matters. It’s in those details. 

The problem is that there’s, again, people out there teaching when they have a very narrow view of usually just their own business and what’s working for their own business, and that doesn’t mean it’s going to translate over into everybody else’s business. So that is the danger and the mistake of comparing other strategies to yours and just taking off with that strategy. Yes, again, there are bones, there are goldmines, there are components in strategies that can be successful, but make sure you have the full picture before you take that and go implement it in your business. Alright you guys, I hope you found this helpful and I’ll talk to you next time.

♥ LISTEN ON APPLE PODCASTS

♥ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY