READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Hello, everybody happy Friday. We don’t normally launch podcasts on a Friday, but it was Thanksgiving this week, us Thanksgiving. I hope if you celebrate, you had an amazing day. I don’t like to skip podcast episodes, so I still wanted to push someone out there. Who knows for all of you guys who are hopefully relaxing this weekend, maybe getting a walk in or whatever you do while you listen to podcasts and you can tune me in still I’m excited for today’s content. I think you guys are gonna really like it. You know, me with my actionable advice, especially coming to the end of this year. 

But before I dive into that, I do want to announce and share with you guys, our black Friday special this year. So this year, if you get your application and to work with Hirsh Marketing between now, today, when you’re listening to this through November 29th, which is Monday following Thanksgiving. IF you get your application in and if you’re not sure exactly how Hirsh Marketing can help you, we can explain that in the application. So we have two main ways that we support businesses with their marketing. And just so you know, if you’re new here, that means everything from your strategy to kind of creating that exact marketing strategy, your budget, your projections, the messaging around it, all the foundational components of your marketing. Then actually amplifying that into a marketing strategy organically, and then with paid ads. So we’ve really expanded this last year in both ways that we support people, which is our complete done for you agency offer, which means we do all of the copy, all the funnels, building the design, we do the ads and all the components that go with that, the strategy, everything from a to Z, literally all of our clients have over there. All they have to do is record videos that we asked them to do, and we strategize for them. 

And then the done with you side is really for business owners who aren’t quite ready for the full done for you, they’re not quite there in their business, but they need like a handholding get me to that level offer. And with that, we’ve added a lot of, I haven’t even fully announced this, but we’ve officially added in last month, a lot more coaching support. So increased calls with our success coach. You get now biweekly 30 minute one-on-one calls with an ad strategist and marketing strategist. Who’s just looking at your business and is a part of team Hirsch. You get ad audits. So if you have live ads every single week, he, we go into your ad account with the loom and we record you, like add these audiences, change this, here’s, what’s wrong to kind of take that overwhelm away and so much more copy reviews. You can submit your ad copy. You can submit your landing pages. We’ll review those for you. We’ve got a messaging coach in there. So much support to get you to the next level. hen on top of that, of course is trainings and resources. It is not a course. I’ve been very intentional with that. You guys do not want a course. You don’t have time for a course. You need the minimum effective dose of marketing support to get you to that next level where you can continue to fully outsource it. That is ignite. 

So those are the two ways we can help you. If you get your application in our Black Friday, special is two things. One you’ll get up to a thousand dollars off what we’re calling is ad credit. It’s essentially going to be a discount off of our services up to a thousand dollars, but our intention behind it this time, we’ve never done this before, is for you guys to take that ad credit and go apply it to ad spend. So actually go use the strategies that we’re creating for you in the strategies that we’re supporting you in creating, and now you have ad spend to be able to go amplify those strategies. Then the second piece that you will qualify for this bonus if you get your application in and you sign up to work with us, I want to make sure that’s clear. It’s not for anyone who just gets their application in, you have to then book a call and sign up to work with us once you have that call, but your application has to be timestamped in by Monday at the end of the day. 

The second piece is our custom content deck. We’ve done this one other time and it was a bonus on a webinar and it was one of our most successful things that we’ve offered in terms of feedback after the fact, but also what people wanted. So what we do with the custom content deck is you will submit information about your business. So once you sign up, you’ll submit a custom intake form that says, here’s my offer, here’s my audience, here is my current social media platforms and what I’m doing from a content perspective. Then we take that and our creative manager and strategist, and maybe me even looks over them cause I love them too much. So you’ll get even my eyes on them, behind the scenes look at that. Then we create you this deck and inside that deck is specific messaging angles. What ended up happening the last time we did, these was a lot of like us kind of auditing. So we looked at the way that the business owners described their unique angles, and then we gave them feedback on that. How to stand out more, how to create stronger messaging that comes through in your ads, in your content, and then we actually find ideas. So whether that’s Teels or unique video angles, and we give that to you so you know how to go create that. 

So you will also get that, but you have to get your application in by the end of the day, Monday at the latest. We don’t have unlimited spots, we’ve opened up 15 for this custom content deck and that is like the max. So don’t wait. Get that application in and then you’ll qualify if you sign up to work with us for up to a thousand dollars in ad credit and the custom content deck. You can get your application in super easy, super minimal effort right now at monetizemyads.com/strategy.  That’ll take you directly to our application. If you’re not sure which one of those offers is the right fit for you, we are going to help you with that kind of pathway within the application. We’re also super upfront with pricing with what those offers contain so you have all that upfront. So you can go to monetizemyads.com/strategy,  get that application in and you’ll qualify for those amazing bonuses. I think you guys are going to love them. 

All right, let’s dive into this week’s content. So I want to talk today about the three critical marketing actions you can take right now for 2022. So I know a lot of you entrepreneurs, myself included, the end of the year contains a lot of busy-ness. I don’t know, maybe that’s just me. I feel like every year, this time of year in my business, there’s always something, whether it’s a team member who we didn’t expect to be leaving and now we have to be hiring, and hiring in the holidays is not good. That’s happened before. Whether it is, for me right now, it’s prepping for some big things that are going to be happening in January that are going to require a lot of work in December. 

So whatever it is, I feel like this time of year is busy, no matter how much I try to not have it be busy. I also know that I spend a lot of time reflecting on like one, how the heck has it been another year, and what went well and what didn’t in my business, and what do I want to bring into the new year? So here are some things to get your brain kind of churning and thinking, as you start doing that planning, if you are doing that planning, beause I know for me, I definitely start now. I’m already planning like well into the new year. 

So the first thing, and this is coming up a lot with the businesses that I’m mentoring, with Ignite students, with different conversations on my team, is simplify. I feel like I talk about this a lot, but I do think going into a new year. So the action you can take right now is challenging yourself to simplify your marketing strategy. And I have a challenge for you guys, and that is if you had to literally write your marketing strategy, so write down how you’re going to generate leads and how you’re going to generate sales, that’s essentially a marketing strategy, right? That’s why we do everything. That’s why we create content, that’s why we have lead magnets, webinars, you name, it is to generate leads, which then generate sales. So if you had to write your strategy for how you’re to do that on a single napkin, could you do that? Is it simple enough? 

This was actually inspired, I think a couple of weeks ago, I shared with you guys this conversation I had with a really successful entrepreneur. He told me this story that he had this business that I’m going to is my age and he’s much older. Now he had a business and he was like in $200,000 in debt and his business wasn’t profitable and he was trying to do all the things. And he was like, it was the typical entrepreneurs shiny object syndrome and I was losing money because I was trained to do all these things, and I went to a bar and I sat down and I wrote down my strategy on a napkin. I was like, anything that didn’t fit on that napkin I was going to get rid of. And he said, I was about to have to file for bankruptcy, and I just pivoted to basically following that strategy, and that is what brought me into success. He now has a multiple, I think he’s like $25 million or something, his business. 

So after I left that conversation and I didn’t include that in the podcast, if you want to go back and listen to, that was a couple episodes back. There was so much gold on that conversation, but it was so dense, I couldn’t even include everything. But I left that conversation thinking, could I do that? Could I fit my marketing strategy and what we’re putting our effort to into a napkin? To be honest with you guys, I don’t think I could. I think I have fallen a little bit into that category in the last six months of trying to do too many things. So if I have, I know you guys have, and here’s why I think that’s happening right now. 

I think that’s happening right now because marketing has changed so much. So we’ve had to pivot to the mindset of love’s got to find something that works or works again because it used to work and it’s not, so I’m going to try all these things, and that’s not always the answer. Sometimes you do need to test new things, but at the end of the day, you need to come back and say, okay, is that working or not? Let’s simplify if it’s not. So my question, my action for you to take now going into 2022 is to challenge yourself and say, if I had to describe and draw it out, what is my lead generation and sales strategy on a single napkin, could I do that? Or is it way too complicated? Or am I not even clear on what that is? Or do I not even have a strategy? 

So that’s the first thing, and as you’re thinking about that, kind of like a part B to this is, I want you to ask yourself, this is something I say to so many people and my myself included because there’s always, always going to be a hundred plus actions that you can take. There is never going to be a shortage of ideas of things that you could do to improve your business or to improve. Let’s just say just your marketing right now. I could sit down and write 25 things easily in the next 10 minutes that I could do, and that’s true for everybody. That’s going to always feel like that, and so you have to constantly ask yourself what is going to take the smallest amount of effort and yield the most results. And I want you to be specific about what is going to take the smallest amount of effort and yield the most results in Q1 of 2022 so that you. And sit on that. Sit on that for a day or two, but I want you guys to really think if I have to pick just a couple of actions, you better make sure they’re going to take the smallest amount of your effort and time, and they’re going to yield the most results.

I just went through this with a mentorship. I’m getting so much inspiration from these you guys, by the way, for those of you who know, I’m mentoring three businesses right now, and I just get so much inspiration from the conversation. So I’m just so excited that I’m doing it. But I was having a conversation with one of them, and we were talking about this question because there’s a lot, it was her first call with me. So she’s kind of brightened up and like, I could go in this direction or this direction I could do this. One of the things she said was I have about four clients who are ending their year long contract this month, and so if I can get them to renew, that’d be huge. I was like, right there, that’s your number one priority because those are clients who are already onboarded. They are already have a relationship with you. You’ve already paid to acquire them. You’ve already done all the work to do that. If you could save half of them who are renewing, that’s huge for you. So what are the actions you can take? Can you offer them like an incentive? If they’re thinking about leaving, is there something you can add into their package that they need that would serve them that is not even that much effort for you and that will yield the most results? That’s the number one thing. So we came to that strategy. For you, I want you to think about that question and then apply that to just in the first quarter of 2022. What is that answer? What are those things that are going to be low effort, very high reward? Okay. So that’s the first marketing action that you can take right now going into 2022.

The second one is your content strategy is really defining that and defining that in a way that is not overwhelming, but as effective. So I’ve been talking a lot the last several months about the era of the creator and how I believe going into this new year, and right now that content is amplifying everything. It’s amplifying how you grow your audience. It’s amplifying how you generate leads. It’s amplifying how you generate sales. If you have a webinar content, it drives people to that webinar, it’s everything. I think in the past, we used to think of content as just let me post on social media and that’s my content strategy. Now content has to be entertaining and engaging. The founder of Instagram, not the founder. I know I’ve said this recently, too, not the founder, but the head of Instagram said Instagram is facing a massive paradigm shift right now, moving towards entertaining video because that’s what its users want. And if Instagram is facing a paradigm shift, we are facing a paradigm shift and we need to lean into that. 

So content is the root of all of your marketing strategy, messaging and content. Those two things are going to amplify what you have. So asking yourself right now, and you’re just defining it. You’re not creating all the content. You’re not doing all of that in the month of December, but right now, the action you can take is defining your content strategy. Do you have a way to amplify your brand? Do you have a way to strategically and in a very innovative and unique way, have a way to amplify your offers, whether that’s a free offer, like a webinar or a lead gen opt-in, or your paid offers, or your application? How are you going to stand out through your content? Some answers that might come from that are not necessarily like, oh, I’m going to post four times a week. No, it’s what are your values? What are your angles? What is your brand identity? That’s going to carry over into your content. And then how are you going to consistently post that and consistently show up in that way? 

And not just post it, honestly again, not just organic social media, but it can come out as an ad to your webinar, or an ad to your lead magnet, or an ad to your application. That is what’s going to amplify it. So defining for yourself, how are you going to nail down those unique angles? How are you going to stand out? If you go back and listen to the last episode, if you haven’t yet, it was all about the importance of really speaking to what your audience wants and not just needs and how to stand out. And that carries over into your content. But the action I want you guys to take is to define how are you going to amplify your brand and your offers going into Q1? 

So for me, what that is is my podcast. But I can get even more specific and think about different video ideas and things that we can do from an ad perspective. So we’ve been brainstorming that as a team of how can we amplify the podcast using content. So we’ve been testing videos of like me driving in the car, lifestyle videos promoting a specific episode. You guys might’ve seen those. We just did some outside. So that’s content that’s amplifying my podcasts. So that’s a specific way is okay, if you’ve got your pillar of your podcast, or YouTube channel, or whatever, how are you going to amplify that through micro entertaining content that you can put out there? Then we have something coming up in January, so we’re thinking about specific ways to spend that specific messaging angles, specific videos, specific content ideas that we can use to connect with our audience. 

So it’s having those core pillars of you have a podcast or a video or whatever form of main content you put out, but then how are you going to amplify that? And then you’ve got a webinar or some sort of lead generation strategy. How are you going to amplify that? Then you probably have an application or a call booking, or maybe direct to an offer. How are you going to amplify that and getting really specific and maybe just giving your guys yourselves two hours or something to just sit and brainstorm and connect with your audience and really just ask yourself, what would they want to see and what would attract them and what would stand out? That’s going to be like the name of the game in 2022 is how do I stand out from the noise, because the noise is not going anywhere. 

Now the third action that you can take going into this new year is brainstorming and coming up with one to two new strategies that increase connection. So I’m seeing this really start to work more and more. I think it’s always worked. It has always worked because marketing is connection, but I think these strategies are becoming more critical in the success of marketing. So how can you increase that interaction and connection with your audience? That could look like incorporating a direct messaging strategy into your funnel. Maybe it’s on the thank you page, or maybe you start posting once a week or every other week, some sort of really valuable piece of content that if people comment they’re going to get some sort of piece of value in their DMS. Maybe you have something in your email that kind of triggers people to reply or some way that you’re engaging in those conversations and you’re able to create that connection. 

Obviously, as you grow, you won’t be able to do all of that on your own, but you can absolutely build in having team members even support with those conversations. We have that right now, they don’t even pretend to be me. They say, hey, it’s, so-and-so on Emily’s team, client success specialist, or whatever the title is, and they support them with the conversation, and sometimes those leads application. Sometimes those lead to us either qualifying or not qualifying them to be able to work with us, but that level of connection is really effective. 

Other ways that this could come into play is interactive lives, if you have a following on social media, doing some sort of live where people can come attend and hang out with you. You’re probably seeing that successful business owners are doing this more. If you look at the more recent launches that have happened in the last several months, this is happening more. Again, because it’s creating that connection, that opportunity for people to ask questions, to hang out with you. Now, the thing with this is you have to have a following, I believe, for these to work because a stranger isn’t really going to invest that much time. But if you show up consistently in this way with your following, really you’ll build that trust. This could be maybe just showing up more on Instagram stories. 

I know that people I follow, which is very few, but I do follow some people on Instagram stories and stories are number one, my favorite way to consume content. If I’m just scrolling social media, and number two, I love it when people do the ask me anything questions about them and I get to learn like weird things. I don’t ever ask the questions, but I always look at the answers and they’ve got like lots of fun new things on stories around like post this photo from the scenario. I don’t even know. I’m not like I’m not a social media expert, but I will say what that is showcasing is that your audience wants that connection. So maybe your strategy is just, I’m going to show up more on stories and I’m going to create a more systemized way to do it, but to show the behind the scenes, to create that connection, to show that I’m human to show that I, you know, have this life. Of course this has to be in alignment with you think. There’s some of us out there who don’t want any of that, but the reality is it does work and it does lead to that connection, because at the end of the day, successful marketing and sales and leads comes from connection. 

So this third action is I want you to sit and just ask yourself the question of how could I increase connection with my audience? This is for your, your audience that you’re building, so that means you’ve got this content strategy that’s going to start building your audience, that’s going to start amplifying what you have to bring in the leads. Now with that audience, you’re building with those leads, you’re bringing in, what’s one to two strategies you could implement to just increase connection, to increase them feeling more connected to you than the other people they follow? 

This does also stem from the root of you’ve got to understand your audience to be able to connect with them, because you can’t be speaking to everybody, but you can be speaking directly to your audience and then your audience is going to be very connected to you. eople who are not your audience, won’t be, but that’s what you want. So brainstorming what those strategies are, is that third action you guys can take.  So lots of thinking exercises here for you, but I think that’s what the last month of the year should be for. I think if you can really get to the bottom to some of some of these questions that I asked you today, I think it’ll make such a massive difference in your 2022 and specifically in your Q1, and going strong in Q1 with actions and things that you can do. 

All right, everybody, I hope you have a fabulous weekend. Make sure to go to monetizemyads.com/strategy, if you have thought about working with us, if you have considered it, we don’t have unlimited spots. If you’re even considering it going into the new year, this is your chance to claim up to a thousand dollars of ad credit and your custom content strategy. So talk about coming up with content strategy, we’ll do it for you. That’s number two on here, cross it off for you. So go to monetizemyads.com/strategy  Get that application in by the end of the day, Monday, November 29th. Then if you sign up, you’ll qualify for that up to a thousand dollars ad credit, custom content deck created by our team, plus, of course, access to our amazing services. 

Again, we don’t have unlimited capacity. So we have some big things planned and I expect all of these spots to fill up, and I don’t say that just like as a joke, I’m serious. We look at our capacity every day on our huddle, and I am really careful about that because our delivery is so important to me. So if you’ve thought about it, if you’re thinking about it, if you’re on the fence, you have nothing to lose to go to monetizemyads.com/strategy, get that application, and I’ll talk to you guys next week.

♥ LISTEN ON APPLE PODCASTS

♥ LISTEN ON SPOTIFY