Ep #321 – The Big Shift – Your Marketing Has To Change

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Emily Hirsh:

Hello everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. I am very excited for today’s episode. I’m actually in San Diego right now. I just spoke at T&C yesterday, as of recording this, and it was so much fun. Traffic and Conversion in San Diego, if you guys are like, “what is T&C?” It is so much fun being back on a stage. Oh my gosh, it’s been two years. I had William and then COVID happened, so I haven’t spoken in at least two years. It might’ve been a little bit more, but I think it was about October two years ago. So two years since I’d been on a stage and I just love the high, and the adrenaline, and the audience, and just being up on a stage. It was amazing and I’m super grateful to be a part of that. So I’m in San Diego. I have my sales director here and we have been working all day and I need to record podcasts and content, and it’s always fun doing it on the go. My setup is, I should take a photo of it for Instagram. It’s always very scrappy getting it set up together to record podcasts on the go. 

Anyways, that’s what I’m up to, but I am very excited for today’s podcast episode because I finally get to hint at this big shift that’s about to happen in our company. If you’ve been paying attention to what I do, and my audience, and our emails, and our social, you might’ve seen last month we did a ton of interviews for our audience. We actually interviewed over 50 people, a combination of our audience and our customers, past customers, current customers, just trying to really gauge where’s everybody at? Where are you stuck? Where are you frustrated? What’s changed for you in the last year? And trying to make sure that we have our offers and are set up to deliver these offers to serve you guys. To make sure that we can help business owners who are struggling right now get to the next level and improve their marketing and start growing their audience, and generating leads, and generating sales. 

There’s so many of you who have been impacted by the iOS updates. Yesterday, in my presentation, I asked the room, “raise your hand if you’ve ever run ads.” Almost everybody raised their hand. “Are you currently running ads?” That was about a half to three quarters of the room. Then, “were you impacted by the iOS updates?” Everybody literally raised their hand. So I know that everybody’s gone through some sort of a transition or a shift this year, myself included, and with that comes the opportunity to shift what we’re doing to meet people with those changes that are happening around them. 

We’re about to go through a massive shift and I’m going to share a little bit of it on here, but I’m also doing what we’re calling a marketing partner info session. A Hirsh Marketing Partner Info Session on this Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern time. So two days after this podcast releases at 1:00 PM Eastern time, I’m going to do this info session that’s going to be all about the shift we’re making ,and it’s a big shift. It’s also, I think and hope, ahead of the curve of what a lot of other marketing companies are doing, because I haven’t seen them do this yet. I haven’t seen this being offered, and it’s a massive gap out there and it’s causing people to not get results.

So I’m going to do this info session. If you want to sign up, you can go to hirshmarketing.com/theshift and sign up for that and register all you have to do. If you go to that, it just adds it to your calendar. There’s no opt-in or anything, just adds the calendar event to your calendar. Come show up with me on Zoom. I’m going to share that in more detail, but let’s talk about it a little bit. 

First of all, after interviewing our audience, we’ve finally taken all of that and gone, okay, what is exactly what people need right now to guarantee that they’ll be successful and do we have that in our existing offers? Do we need to shift things? Do we need to add things? What do we need to do? So we’ve taken that and we’ve spent pretty much the last month in deep brainstorming. That’s what I’ve been doing basically this whole week I’ve been at San Diego. We’ve been also making sure this is all finalized and our I’s are dotted, T’s are crossed around it. I’m overly excited. 

The second piece I want to talk about, and this is what I’m going to go into more detail about in the presentation on Thursday, but I think that there is a shift happening in the entire industry. And I’ve been saying this, this new era, but I’ve been talking about this with my team and our audience and even our customers for the last couple of weeks, and that shift is how in order to be successful as an online brand today, and a personal brand, or any online brand, you’ve got to have a face of a brand in some way, in order to fully be successful. I think we’re heading in this direction where you can’t just be an entrepreneur who sometimes creates content. You have to become a creator. You have to step into video, and Reels, and stories and that level of content to stand out. 

I had this conversation that was so interesting the other day, where I was like, what if somebody just isn’t good on video, or what if somebody just doesn’t want to do Reels? Can they be successful? I know some of you listening to this might be like, “oh my gosh, I don’t want to hear what she’s going to say,” but you know me. I keep it really real, and I believe that in order to be successful, you have to do that now. I think it’s like, yeah, I could sit here and argue you can still be successful without it. But the reality is if you are sitting in a situation right now where you don’t have an audience, or you don’t have a very big audience, and you’re not willing to put yourself out there on video, using Reels, using podcasts, using innovative content, I don’t know how you can stand out from everybody else doing that. It might still work, but I’m going to make the argument that you have to be a creator or have that in your brand in order to be successful. 

So if you’re somebody who’s like, “I am terrible on video and I never will be good on video,” you’re going to have to figure out who’s going to be the face of your brand. And is that going to be, I’ll tell you about the person I just talked to at the event yesterday about this, but is that going to be your customers? Is that going to be a specific customer or a specific persona of a customer? Is there some other way for you to bring in the face of your brand somehow so that you can be producing creative content? 

Somebody came up to me after I spoke yesterday and was like, “I specialize in…” she’s in the industry of helping people with diabetes. She said, “I obviously can’t be the face of the brand. And I don’t think our patients who have severe diabetes want to be the face of the brand. What should I do? How do I create Reels?” So we pulled up TikTok and Instagram, and we just searched that and found all these videos about somebody’s taking their diabetes medication, a doctor talking about diabetes, and all these creative videos, right? 

So I was like, you can’t afford to have that as a reason to not show up with your content, because look at all the people who are already doing it. If you want to have any chance of standing out, you’re going to have to get creative with that. That could be a doctor, that could be, I don’t know her brand intimately. So it was good. We were giving her ideas that could be a doctor, that could be people who are willing to represent the persona of your patients. It doesn’t have to be your exact patient who doesn’t want to be on video, but you’re going to have to get creative with how can you do that?

I think that’s the big slap in the face right now, because I’m going to be honest with you guys, I am not that excited about this either. I mean, I’m leaning into this, but you guys know me. I don’t go on social media. I don’t want to scroll TikTok. I don’t want to be spending my time documenting every second of my day. There’s a way to still be successful and show up in that way, while also not having it take over your entire life. I’m not saying your time as a CEO is best only doing that, but you need the resources. So this is where the shift comes in. 

Behind the scenes, I’ve been working on for my own brand, and if you guys have checked out my Instagram recently, you’re going to see this instantly. Go to my Instagram and look at the last one to two weeks, okay? I’ve been working on my own brand of process around this, right? I don’t want to be on Instagram all day. I actually don’t want to be on Instagram at all on my phone. I don’t want to be on stories and I don’t want to be recording content all day, or Reels for five hours a day. So what’s the solution? 

I’ve been working on process behind the scenes with my team. We brought on a creative manager and they have been, my team has been saying here’s a list of all the reels that you’re going to record, or I’m going to come record with you because I have someone in Austin and we’re going to batch do all this, and then we’re gonna bring it to your social. So I’ve been working on that behind the scenes of my team and for our clients. What my vision and goal is, and because here’s the thing, like I am our clients. I understand how precious your time is and how we don’t want to be spending all of our time recording videos, or Reels, or lip syncing to silly audio, right? But you have to do a version of that to be successful. 

So part of, and I’m not going to give it all away, but part of the big shift that we’re making is adding all of that into our services. Adding in researching reels for you, researching angles that you need for your ad creative, sending that to you, getting you to record that, and then editing it, and then taking it to your ads, and then you can use it for your organic social media. We’re adding it in our done with you program, where we’re going to help our students come up with those angles, go record it, how to edit their videos, how to show up as a creator, because the reality is you have to be a creator to have a successful online business. That is the reality that I was like, you know what? I’m just going to have to accept this. So that’s one piece to this shift.

The bottom line in listening to this is my question to you is do you have process and resources set up in some way for you to do this consistently? Because I want you to go look at any successful brand and business right now, especially if they haven’t had a big audience. You can’t go out there and say, “oh is Marie Forleo, or Amy Porterfield, or Russell Brunson doing this every day?” They don’t have to. They already have an audience. You can’t compare yourself to them, but I want you to go look at anybody who’s gotten momentum in the last three to six months and is growing their brand., and you tell me if they’re showing up like this or not. I can guarantee you the ones who are the most successful have been showing up like this. I’ve been saying messaging, content, all of that is the most important thing, and this is how I believe you can up level it. 

Here’s the other piece to this that I’m going to share more in this info session, but I recently read a book, $100 Offers by Alex Hormozi. Highly recommend it. He’s a friend of mine, and also, this was an incredible book. One thing he talks about in this book is he has this formula. I can’t remember the exact formula, but essentially I’m going to give you my interpreted version of it. Essentially, your goal as a business owner to your prospects is to create the highest amount of perceived success, like guaranteed path to success. So when they look at your offer, or they look at engaging with your company in some way, they’re like, if I do that I will 100% be successful with whatever it is that they want to achieve.

Then in the same token, you need to remove any amount of time and effort they’re going to have to spend to get there. So if you have the maximum amount of guaranteed success and the lowest amount of time and effort that they’re going to need to get there, you have an offer that is such a no brainer. That hit me and I was like, that is so good. Then I took that back to our offers and I was like, do we really have this? I think we had the guaranteed success, but I don’t necessarily think we had the time and effort to the max. 

So when we’ve been sitting down, and both of our offers are going to get an upgrade. Right now I’m just announcing the agency side, the marketing partner. That’s why I’m doing this info session on Thursday. But I have basically asked myself, like we sat down and we listed every single problem that our audience, our prospects, has before signing up with us as a client during and even after they leave, and how do we address every single one of those problems in the easiest way for them? That’s partly how I’ve come up with. We need to be giving them exact videos to go record, all they have to do is record those videos and then they send it to us, we edit it, we take it and then they can go post it on their social and we run it as ads. That’s one of the many things. 

But I’ve run it through this filter of how do I make sure that we make this so that all our clients have to do is just show up and record the video. We’re going to drive everything else and do everything else for them, which is why video editing, landing pages, emails, all that stuff is now going to be included. That’s like, hint, come to the info session for more. But with your own offer, I just want you guys to start thinking because, at least for me, this was so powerful. I think it will be for you guys too, and run yourself through the filter of if someone sees my offer or hears my offer, does it give them the most clear guaranteed path to success with the lowest amount of time and effort that they’d have to invest possible? And if not, how can you get it there? 

Super powerful for me, and I think it would be super powerful for you guys to look at your offer in that way. So I took that and we’re now really changing and upleveling a lot to get our clients to that level and also to meet the demands of where the industry is. When I look at any other marketing company out there, agency service provider, or course, I don’t feel like they’re meeting where you need to be in terms of a creator. I want you guys to think about this. 

On my marketing team, I recently brought on a creative manager. We have a creative director in our agency we’ve had for a while for our clients, but I didn’t have a creative manager. So I had a marketing manager, but not a creative manager. My marketing manager actually left the company, got a different job, left. Instead of replacing her, I chose to step in myself on some of those components and hire a creative manager because I was prioritizing that I wanted that creative ideas and support over maybe having project management with the marketing.

Now I do have a little bit of an advantage because I have my marketing team to run my ads. I have a tech person, I have copywriters. So I had that, but instead I decided to make the sacrifice of having some marketing strategy and project management support over the fact that I needed the creative manager. You’re going to see it in my social media and you’ll continue to. It’s massively up leveled. We’re taking that same exact idea and I’ve taken that over to clients. I also feel like even on the side where we’re delivering that, the creative, and the messaging, and the ideas is more important than even strategy and ads. You need both, but if you’re lacking in creative right now, and creative ideas and content, you will fall behind. Really good content, really good videos, innovative creative is absolutely trumping everything else.

So what I’m doing, and I’m going to share more again in this info session on Thursday, is making sure we have that 12 out of 10 in our offers, because I think it’s so critical. I think most people haven’t caught up to that. The goal with this is number one, come to the info session. You can go to hirshmarketing.com/theshift. All that’s going to do is add it to your Google Calendar, and then you can show up on Thursday at 1:00 PM Eastern Time where I’m going to share a lot more. At the end of the day, at the least in this info session, if you’ve ever considered working with our team in the done for you capacity, you are going to want to be on this info session. There will be a recording that we can send out, but you’re going to want to be there because what we’re doing is we’re upleveling all our services. This is your last chance to come in at the founding rate, because we’re going to be raising their prices and there won’t be a lower amount because we’re adding literally so much, so the amount that we’re letting people in on right now is such a great deal. We’re going to cut that off in the next week. 

So one, come to the info session. Two, I want you to think about are you setting your business up so that you can show up as a creator, so that you can create the best possible content to then take that over to your organic and paid marketing? Then number three, if you look at your offer, would you say that your prospect, your audience, would feel like they have the most guaranteed path to success with the lowest amount of time and effort that they would need to invest to get there? And if not, how do you get it to that level? Because that will massively improve your offer and your sales. 

That’s what I have for you guys today. I hope you choose to join me on the info session on Thursday. I’m literally so excited I can’t even sleep. We’ve already started to roll some of this out to our existing clients, so you guys already were put into this. But I’m really excited because I feel like this is such a gap and it’s causing a lot of pain for you guys because you’re having to either try and fill in the gaps yourself, which you’re not an expert in it, or it’s just missing completely, which is costing you money. Let’s end that. I’m done with that. I want to see people be successful despite the iOS updates. I want to see you guys thriving. I’ve watched us test this on various client accounts, in my own account, and this is the key. This is the key to still being successful today. Thanks so much for listening today guys, and I’ll see you on Thursday.

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