One of the BIGGEST (and most common) marketing mistakes I see is HOW people talk about their offers.
This episode was inspired by this HUGE fitness guru I’ve been following online.
I mostly follow her content for the workouts, but I’ve also tracked her recent launch.
While I’m sure she does pretty well — I noticed that she’s leaving a TON of money on the table just in the way she communicates her offers.
And she’s not alone. This is a mistake I see almost every business make, and it’s even something I struggle with myself.
Because deeply communicating your offer is truly the hardest part of messaging but also the MOST important — even if you’re promoting something free!
In this episode, I’ll share with you…
- Why just following the strategies of giant influences will never work unless you have a similar audience size.
- The #1 mistake you’re most likely making in communicating your offer to your audience.
- Why you need to focus on how you communicate your freebie even more closely than your paid offer.
- Steps you can take to get better at communicating your offer.
- Questions you need to ask yourself today if you want to stop leaving cash and opportunities on the table.
WARNING: What I’m sharing today is NOT easy.
BUT it’s essential.
In fact, I have a homework assignment for you at the end of the episode that I do NOT want you to skip.
I promise, it’s going to make a world of difference, BUT you gotta put in the work and be willing to experiment.
(Something far too many businesses are unwilling to do!)
DM me @EmilyHirsh with any discoveries you make about your messaging and different approaches you’re going to try!
WANT TO WORK WITH TEAM HIRSH?
Honestly, we’re more than a marketing team — we’re a tactical partner who will care about your business growth just as much as YOU (maybe even more)! We’re here to play the long game and help you create a powerful impact! APPLY NOW!
SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW THE NOT FOR LAZY MARKETERS PODCAST!
Thanks for tuning into this week’s episode of the Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast! If this podcast has added value and helped you in your business journey, please head over to iTunes, subscribe to the show, and leave us an honest review. Your reviews and feedback will not only help us continue to deliver great, helpful content, but it will also help us reach even more amazing entrepreneurs just like you.
READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope your week is going amazing. I feel like I’m having one of those weeks where I am so busy and am absolutely drowning. I know many of you can relate if not all of you. And I’ve noticed in those times that you have to get so, so efficient. Like I feel like right now I need double the amount of time that I have. I have a lot going on in Hersh marketing. I also am building a software and I can’t share everything that’s going on over there, but there’s a lot happening and requiring my attention. And I feel between that between kids, 75 hard workouts, all of that, my time, I have to be intentional with every minute of my time. And whenever I’m in this situation, what happens is anything that’s like, not priority doesn’t get done.
So I’ve noticed, like I have been way more intentional with the, the tasks I’m working on, responding to messages and email. I mean, like you get to this place where you just kind of accept that for the next few days you’re gonna have on red messages, you’re gonna have emails that can’t be attended to, and you have to do only the most important thing in front of you. That’s the kind of week I’m having this week. And so I think it actually makes us better for the other week when that happens, as we recognize, like, what are we doing that we don’t really need to be doing, that we could delegate, that we could streamline that is not really moving the needle. There’s a few things that I was like, we’re just doing this to do this. And we’re gonna stop because the, we need to recalibrate this.
Like it’s not, we’re, we’re just doing it to check it off a box and there’s no reason to do so. I’ve really been kind of forced to do that whenever you, whenever I get stretched thin, which I’m feeling a little bit right now, and there’s months and seasons that that happens. I’m training new team members, like all the things for, for growth, I’m in a growth phase. For sure. So anyways, today’s episode, I wanna dive into the importance of your marketing messaging. Something. I talk about a lot, but doing the upfront work around the, the way you communicate your marketing. And I have noticed something that I really have been observing, and I think a lot of people can learn from this. So what I’ve noticed is there’s a specific influencer who’s in the, um, fitness space. And I mostly follow her, not for her fitness advice, but because I’m intrigued by some of the content that she puts out, let’s just say, and anyways, she’s running a free challenge.
Um, no, it’s not even free. It’s a challenge, the paid challenge. And I watching her promote it. And she has a pretty big following from her past. And I think it’s probably like she puts something out there and a handful of her audience will just do anything she says, right? She’s earned that status, that influencer, you know, level through her warm audience. And you can’t really go replicate that unless you have it. And so copying and replicating someone’s strategy in that situation is never gonna work for somebody who’s a newer business owner. Who’s just starting out. Who’s trying to build that audience. And so she has this free challenge and I was watching her kind of promote it. One thing I noticed was I was thinking to myself as I was watching her, like you are leaving so much money on the table and potential on the table because of the way you’re choosing to promote this.
And so the way that she would talk about this offer, and again like this is relevant, not again, but this is relevant for any offer that you have, like free pay. It doesn’t matter your industry. Like whenever you’re talking about something that you’re trying to get a, an audience member or somebody to take action on what you’re saying, sign up for the free training, sign up for the challenge, sign up for your paid offer, whatever it is you have to accurately and completely sell it. It doesn’t matter if it’s for your paid, you still have to sell it. You sell that. They take this action. And the way she was promoting it was, she was like getting on stories or whatever. And she was saying like, actually, a Facebook live was what I was watching, like a part of. And she was like, it’s just gonna be so awesome.
You guys, like, you just don’t even know, like we put so much into this and it’s gonna be awesome. And like, there was no tangible benefit or clear outcome from what she was promoting. And I believe that she got signups that she, you know, had people sign up for this and I’m sure she will make money from it. But I was, and that’s only because she has a following and she can say that and they’re like, sure, I’ll buy it because I trust her. And that’s kind of the power of your warm audience. However, as I was watching, I was thinking she’s leaving so much money on the table that she could get people to sign up for this, to engage in this activity that she wants them to do to take her up on this offer. If she actually paused and took the time to go deeper in her communication.
And I think that this TA takes so much more work and it’s why so many entrepreneurs don’t do it in their marketing because it takes upfront work to do the heavy lifting, to actually accurately explain an offer. You have to work through like it’s messy. Communication is not easy. And so working through what the benefits of your offer are, what the outcomes are. And clearly, very clearly explaining that in your marketing, it takes practice. It takes refinement, it takes doing it one way and then listening to feedback and doing it a different way. But you can’t just create a free offer or a paid offer or anything that you want somebody to do. And then just be like, it’s so awesome. You guys sign up for it. And, or also just focus on the what, and that’s also kind of what she was doing. She wasn’t even focusing on the what as much as she could, but this is what I also see.
A lot of people do wrong is they focus all on. It’s gonna have, you know, my, my offer has 20 video trainings and you get w regular coaching with me and you get this and you get this. And they’ll say, I, this has taken me so long to put together. This has been a year worth of my work. This is hours of my work. And you have to remember like, the reality is it sounds rough, but nobody, nobody cares how long it took you to put something together. Nobody cares how much hard work went into this. Like, that’s great pat you on the back. That’s great, but it’s not going to get me to take the action you want, especially if I don’t have that trust with you yet, what will get somebody to take action is focusing extremely strongly and deeply on the benefits and the outcomes of your offer.
And so when you look at your marketing and again, when I say the word offer, I mean, free offer, like lead gen webinar training, any of those things, I also mean paid offer. Whether that’s a service, a product, it doesn’t matter. You have to take the time to actually pause and say, okay, here is my offer. And what are the benefits? The very clear benefits that if somebody signs up for this offer or buys this offer, they will get out of it. What am I promising? What are the outcomes of this offer? And you even have, have to go as far when you explain at, as is that being described in the way that I know my audience wants versus needs. And that’s another thing that people make a huge mistake on is they will describe their offer free and paid. And they’re jumping ahead to what the audience needs, because you maybe know that because you, you know, you’re an expert in your field and you’re like, you know, they don’t need that.
They need this. And so then you start talking about what they need. You have to first talk about what they want. That’s how you’re gonna get someone to take action on your offer. And then you can give them what they need, but you need to focus on what they want. So, as I was watching this influencer, do this and watching her promote her challenges intrigued. And I was really thinking like, you know, she will, she’s doing so much, like this is such common entrepreneur thing. She’s doing so much. She has all these things. She promotes, she promotes like products. She promotes this, you know, challenge. Like there’s an event. There’s like so many things that she promotes and she could ache. And as an outsider looking in, I know I don’t have all the information, but she could make so much more money. Most likely if she did less.
And then she was able to go deeper with what she was doing and do less volume, but go deeper on what she’s trying to sell and what she’s trying to promote. And so I think that she’s trying to do all these things and then she ends up not having the right amount of time to really do it well. And that’s such a common entrepreneur mistake. And so, as I was watching her, I was like, wow, if she would’ve just like pushed this launch, maybe like a week, or like sat down for like two hours and really fleshed out, like, what are the benefits? What are the outcomes of someone signing up for this challenge? I guarantee you, I guarantee you, she would make so much more money, so much more money. And I think this is showing up in smaller scales in, in so many of your guys’ marketing.
So my challenge to you in like push for you today, listening to this episode is take a look at like, what are you promoting? Whether that is a free offer, a lead gen, a webinar, a training, a video series, a challenge, something free, and also your paid offer. And have you really paused recently and the upfront work to figure out and your communication around the benefits and the outcomes. And you need to see it as your responsibility, as the marketer, as the CEO, as the entrepreneur, the face of your brand, whatever, it’s your responsibility to do the work in order to communicate that clearly. And if you can do that and do that successfully, your marketing results are gonna skyrocket. And I’m telling you, this is the hardest thing to do. And I experience this in my own business where it takes oftentimes multiple iterations, or it takes talking it through in a call with my team and being like, okay, what am I trying to to say, like, how do I get more clear on this?
And how do I, you know, clarify it? How do I connect it to what they want and not sound repetitive or surface level or boring, or like everybody else out there. And it really does take time. And so I think the mistake that so many people including this influencer is making, and I can guarantee you, like, I should message. I should message her this. I don’t know if she would listen to me, but I think that you’re trying to do oftentimes too much and promote too many offers, too many funnels, do too many things like organic paid, do it all yourself, like bootstrap it. And then you end up not doing anything as a effective as you could. And then you don’t realize it, cuz you’re like, I’m doing all these things. Like why isn’t it working? But if you would just do less, but go way deeper on what you’re doing, your results would improve so much.
So instead of saying, I’m gonna put all this work into like putting together this offer, having my paid offer, but not doing almost that same amount of work that you’re doing to actually put together the offer and promote it. You need to put that same amount of work in how you’re gonna communicate it. And that same amount of intention, because that is everything. And if you can’t clearly communicate and go really deep on the better benefits and the outcomes of both your free and your paid offer, I guarantee you, even if you’re successful, you are leaving money on the table. This is also something that you can always improve. Like you’ve never completed this. I will always be improving how I can communicate. And one of the only ways that you get better at it is practice is doing podcasts, doing videos, doing webinars, and pitching your offer over and over and over again, doing sales calls, pitching it over and over and over again, cuz then you try something and it works and that sticks.
And it, it just takes that constant refinement, constant improvement and constant clarity. And, and you have to be clear. That’s the other thing like, are you even clear on the benefits and the outcomes of your offer both free and paid? And if you’re not, there is no way your audience that you’re trying to attract is gonna be clear on that. So coming at you hot today with this tip, and I hope this makes you stop and think for a second about any like current or soon to be marketing that you might have going on right now. And really pause and ask yourself, like if I just spent an extra couple hours and I figured out how could I go deeper that I do this better? How much would that improve my communication and clarity around this offer? And I’ll just add right now, we I’ve been in the middle of our free challenge and I’ve been witnessing kind of some people’s copy and what they’re doing.
And, and this is very common. Like someone I, I saw in there would put like, you know, experience these benefits and this thing. And it’s like, that means nothing to somebody who doesn’t know you. And just to understand if you’re doing that, like, so is a lot of other people. So it’s not like you’re bad at marketing or, you know, you suck and you have to be hard on yourself. It’s that, it’s the easier thing to do to stay really surface with your messaging. And it takes really pausing and doing some deep work and understanding of your ideal customer and your offer and the way you’re gonna position it to get it to the level that you need it to be. All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening and I’ll talk to you next week.