Let’s travel back to the marketing world 20 years ago…
When we didn’t have social media, SEO, or Google ads and tracking how a lead turned into a sale was impossible to track.
Businesses had to spend nearly all their marketing budget on being visible to get results.
BUT in 2022, we lost some of our specific tracking abilities.
In this first episode of The 2022 Marketing Momentum Series, I propose that we need to bring back that OG marketing mindset — and prioritize building brand awareness.
Here are the juicy marketing mindset tidbits I cover:
- The spending NON-NEGOTIABLE to make room for in your budget every month
- The mindset you need to adopt to consistently create a marketing process that WORKS
- The top 3 elements your content HAS to have to increase conversions (and eventually sales!)
- How to make creating content EASY while maximizing your time
- What your #1 focus should actually be when you’re marketing (hint: it’s not sales)
Have you seen a steep decline in leads lately? This episode will help you understand why.
So, stop stressing about the iOS privacy updates, algorithms, and constant digital marketing changes, and listen to this episode!
And after you listen, send me a DM @EmilyHirsh and tell me your most “aha-worthy” takeaways!
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Intro
If you’re not generating new leads, you’re going to feel that in your business in the months to come. And I think a lot of businesses right now are paying for the fact that they halted a lot of this six to 12 months ago because of iOS, and they freaked out. And instead of saying, “Okay, I need to figure out how to make this work for myself right now … ”
You are listening to The Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 392.
Emily Hirsh:
Hello, everybody. Happy Monday. I am coming at you with another podcast series. So, we have done these every month of the year, and I don’t know if we’ll stop. I keep saying that. I just have to be inspired to have the content to share. But last month’s podcast series, where, basically, I released more episodes outside of my regular tuning on Tuesday and Thursday, and it’s all centered around a theme. Last month’s series was all about your ad strategy and layering that, and it got insanely positive feedback, that people are asking me to do more, more podcast series. And I’ve gotten some messages from people who ask, “Will you just do a daily episode forever?” And I’m like, “I’m not sure I can create that much content, but I’m glad that you guys enjoy it so much.”
So, this series is a five-day series. It’s going to be Monday through Friday this week, and we have some real things going with this. And if you’re kind of watching me from behind the scenes, from a marketing perspective, I’m testing some things. So, it’s also a fun thing to kind of watch because you can implement this if you have a podcast.
The topic of this series is Marketing Momentum. And the goal with it is to give you all of the tools that you need to get your marketing in momentum and, specifically, surviving this new era of digital marketing, which we’ve been in a new era of digital marketing for a while now, but really, in the last year to year-and-a-half so much has changed, on every single paid platform, on marketing, on online business, strategies, webinars, all those things. And it’s really hard to keep up with those changes. I don’t just mean little tactical changes, where it’s, “This new button in Facebook,” or “You need to try these types of audiences.” I mean big shifts and changes to the way marketing is working, to the way we need to look at marketing, and then to how we need to execute our strategy. So, in this series, I’m going to talk about surviving this new era, getting your marketing into momentum, making sure you’re getting results. And some of the cool things I’m going to do here is show you how you can create an audit for your marketing, how you can up-level the most important part of your marketing which will impact all of your results and, overall, just strategies that you need to execute. Also, it goes beyond just Facebook ads. It’s going to be your entire marketing strategy, how you look at it, how you think about it, your organic, your paid, your funnel, your webinar, every piece, your email marketing.
That’s what we’re going to talk about this week.
So, it’s coming out daily this week. And we did this last time, and it was really successful. And then a lot of you who listened to the episodes after the series was over, and you were like, “Oh my gosh, I missed this.” So, we’re going to do this again. If you share this series, so you take a screenshot of one of the episodes, or you share the page where we have all the episodes, which we will email out to our list if you’re on it, if you share it on social media, preferably Instagram, and you tag me, you’ll be entered to win a business audit with myself. And so, that means we will get on a one-on-one 30-minute call-you cannot buy these. As I’ve mentioned on my podcast before, I don’t do a lot of calls at all, but one of my superpowers is sitting down with someone for even a short amount of time, picking out what the problem is currently in their business, and giving them exactly what they need to do next to solve that problem. So, we’re going to be giving away a business audit, but in order to win, you have to share this episode. And because there’s five episodes, you can enter to win five times. So, you could share every episode. All you have to do is put the shared screenshot, whatever, on social media and then tag @EmilyHirsh, so we can see it, and then we’ll enter you to win. You can win up to five times, and we’ll give you through Wednesday of next week. So, you have this whole week to listen to the podcast. And then Wednesday of the following week, we will announce the winner. So, you do have a little bit of time, but you don’t have a lot of time, and you can enter five times.
All right. So, with that, let’s dive into the first episode. We are going to talk about The 2022 Marketing Mindset. And, more specifically, I’m not a big person to talk a lot about mindset, but it’s funny, a little while back, I did a podcast episode about your Marketing Mindset, and it was actually one of our top
downloaded podcast. So, that tells me that you guys want to hear more about the mindset you need to have in your business and marketing. I’m specifically talking about marketing in 2022, like how you need to look at your marketing today versus even just a year ago. And I’ve been in this game for seven years, some people way longer, I know, but I feel like I’ve been around the block in the digital marketing space, and a lot has changed. So, let’s talk about that.
The first thing I wanted to start out with was marketing 20 years ago. I wanted you guys to think about that for a second, because it’s really interesting to me to kind of go down this path. If we go back to before Facebook ads and before heavy digital marketing, what was marketing? It was magazines, billboards, door-to-door, radio ads, right? And what is that, essentially? That is brand awareness. That is businesses saying, “I am going to take a percentage of my budget. This is my marketing budget, and I’m going to put it towards brand awareness because I want potential customers to hear about my brand, to hear about my business, and to know about it. And then when they need a real estate agent or a lawyer or whatever, they will call me.” So, that’s essentially brand awareness. 20 years ago, you could not track, unless maybe it was Google ads, but even then 20 years ago, that was not around. You could not track the exact lead. With Facebook ads, how you can be like, “I got 10 leads. I paid this much cost per lead. Here’s exactly what the leads did,” even though some of that requires some manual tracking today. Back then, you couldn’t do that. Right? You invested in marketing because it was like, “If I don’t, my business won’t grow.” You’re not able to see this quick turnaround where it’s like, “I got a lead on Facebook, and then they turn into a sale the next day, so I can put more money in my ads.” Right?
Today, because you’re able to have that tracking for the most part, obviously we’ve lost some tracking with iOS updates, but because you’re able to have that tracking, people expect that their marketing is going to pay off in work tomorrow or next week. But the reality is, since the beginning of marketing, right, businesses invested in marketing as a non negotiable, so they could be visible in their business, so that they were top of mind for potential customers. I feel like, over the years, what’s happened is, first of all, the online industry came about, where now we have digital courses and webinars, and that’s obviously all new, but people got lazy with their marketing, and they expect, “If I don’t see this immediate return,” like they don’t see the value in brand awareness. The reality is, if you’re not doing some form of marketing every day, where new people are seeing your brand, you don’t have that brand awareness and that visibility. And, so, what happens is, you start to pay for that.
So, I have specifically talked with at least five business owners where this was the pattern that happened.
iOS hit.
Their ad costs went up.
Last, probably summer/fall, they turned off all of their ads.
They stopped generating leads.
They stopped generating new people seeing their business, for the most part.
They maybe still had a little bit of organic, but it was really slow.
Then, they go into this new year, and their sales are completely stagnant because they stopped adding leads and audiences and people coming to their business a year ago, six months ago, and they’re paying for it now.
Because the reality is that most people, I’m not saying every single scenario, but most customers are going to have a touch point with your brand multiple times, seven to 10 times, before they become a buyer. So, we cannot afford, in our business, to have this very short-term mentality with our marketing. I know that it takes an average of three to six months for a lead to become a paying customer for us. And we do have a little bit longer because I sell really high ticket, right? For the agency, especially. So, I know if this month, in April, I decided, “Well, ads are too expensive. I’m going to turn off my ads. I’m going to stop generating leads while we figure stuff out,” I know I’m going to pay for that in three to six months, because then I stopped generating the leads, and things got quiet, and I didn’t have this new audiences and new people coming into my world, and now I’m going to pay for that. So, the reality with marketing is that it’s not black and white. We want it to be where, “Okay. We have this funnel. Every single lead goes through this funnel and does these steps, and then they buy in this exact order.”
But the reality is, we’re dealing with people, and we’re dealing with creating an experience. That’s marketing. And, so, some leads might see an organic social media post and then see a Facebook ad and then sign up for a webinar. And now they’re on your email list, and they listen to some of your podcast episodes. And then you send out this random promotion that says, “Hey, buy my product,” that they’ve already heard about twice, because they signed up for your webinar, and they heard about it in a couple of emails. And then that day is the day they’re like, “You know what? I really do need this. I’ve been thinking about this. I’m able to implement this. I’m going to buy it.” As much as we’re trying to get accurate tracking, and I’m building a tool for this, there’s no way you’re going to be able to actually fully grasp the experience that this lead had, where they were consuming social media posts and then listening to your podcast and then opening some emails, but not other emails. And then this email finally pushed them over the edge.
So, because you can’t replicate that exactly the same for every single lead, you have to create a marketing strategy that is consistently showing up and generating new audiences and new leads every single day as a non-negotiable. Because if you don’t do that, your business is going to pay for it in the months to come. You might be fine today because you used to have people in the pipeline that you’ve been growing and building from the past months, potentially, but you’re going to pay for it in the future.
So, I think, lately, one of the biggest shifts with iOS is we did lose some of the specifics of our tracking. And it was inevitable that this is going to happen, that we’re going to lose some tracking because it was like the Wild West, right? Even before I started, I mean, the cheap cost per clicks and digital marketing, because it was so new, there weren’t a lot of regulations on it, in terms of tracking and privacy and all those things. So, I think we need to bring some of this mindset back to what marketing was like. The OG of marketing was just brand awareness, and that is never going to change. And so, while we can be so much more specific with our marketing now with digital marketing we don’t have to just do radio heads or magazines or whatever, and cross our fingers and hope it works, we still have to see marketing as you’re trying to create an experience and touchpoints everywhere for people, because you never know what’s going to bring someone into your world and fully convert them. At the end of the day, marketing is just that experience. And the better you can make that experience for your audience and for your leads, the more successful your marketing will be.
The reality is, if you, right now, are not consistently generating new audiences, meaning new people who see your brand, who see your business, and start following you. They start consuming your content, whether that’s your podcast, your emails, your social media, whatever it is, they just start to engage with your brand. If you’re not generating new leads, you’re going to feel that in your business in the months to come. And I think a lot of businesses right now are paying for the fact that they halted a lot of this six to 12 months ago because of iOS, and they freaked out. And instead of saying, “Okay, I need to figure out how to make this work for myself right now, based on these changes, and not turn off my marketing and not walk away and throw my hands up,” instead of doing that, they halted everything. And now their sales are down. Their business is stagnant. They don’t even know where to start. And then they go to start ads, and they’re so expensive, and they don’t work right away, so they panic.
I have seen this in so many businesses. So, the solution to that is, of course, you need a solid strategy which, as we get into this week, I’m going to talk more about strategy, but you have to be growing your audience and growing your leads. You have to be running visibility ads. You have to be getting new people to consume your content. You have to be creating valuable content, and you have to be generating new leads on your email list. If you are not doing those things, don’t expect sales, and don’t expect sales in the months to come, and you have to know that kind of snowball effect.
So, that’s the first piece of The Marketing Mindset is, we need to make marketing a non-negotiable item on your expense sheet. Right? Every month, you spend this percentage or this amount of money on your marketing, and you can choose where you spend that, if that’s Facebook ads, if that’s hiring somebody to do your social media, I don’t know, but it’s something.
You know what, too? Sometimes, the choices you make to put into your marketing and hire and get that support, or you invest in something, it’s not going to work. That is also the reality. But as long as you’re investing and consistently making an effort to have a strategy, to improve the strategy, to look at numbers, to follow that process, there is no way you won’t start to get momentum because you’re going to figure out what works. You’re going to figure out what doesn’t work, and you’re going to do more of what’s working. So, that’s the first piece.
The second piece that’s related to your Marketing Mindset is that I need all of you, all of you, to really, really pay attention to this one, experimentation in your marketing is what it should be. I just started to touch on that, but you can’t be afraid to mess up. You need to think about, yes, you’re spending money, but what is the worst that’s going to happen if this strategy doesn’t work, if this ad doesn’t make money back right away? What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen? You’re going to lose a certain amount of money that you’ve chosen to spend. That’s the worst thing. But the reality is, eight out of 10 of the things you try might not work, but you have to try as many things as you can to figure out what is going to work, while still staying focused. A lot of this comes down to trying audiences and creatives and testing a funnel and updating your webinar and being able to try a lot of different things, not that you need to have a new funnel strategy every day, but on the front end, those little tweaks, those little changes, being aggressive with your experimentation with different types of content.
Because you know how you’re going to get better? Do you know how you’re going to get better at posting content, at getting more people to pay attention to your brand, at being consistent, at generating leads? The only way you’re going to get better is if you show up and do it every day, is if you force yourself to create a marketing strategy and commit to it every day. And then you’re going to just get better. And then you’re going to figure out what’s going to start working. And a lot of what you try, might not work. So, the key to that is that you just pivot quickly, and you keep going. You don’t say, “Oh, it’s not working, which means, therefore, marketing doesn’t work for me.” It means that one strategy or that piece of content didn’t resonate or that title to your webinar didn’t work or that angle for your ad wasn’t what it should be. It doesn’t mean marketing doesn’t work for you. So, if you can pair the mindset of, “I’m going to experiment. I’m going to try new things. I am going to pivot,” and then pair that with acting quickly and having urgency and not being afraid to mess up, because you really can’t mess up that bad. You really can’t. The worst thing that’s going to happen is you lose money, which isn’t really a full loss because you learn from it. Right? We all make decisions where it’s like, “Man.” We all do, where it’s like, “Oh, that didn’t work out as well as I thought it would.” But the value is in knowing that didn’t work out, so we can learn from that and do better next time.
The last couple things on this that I want to say is, in The 2022 Marketing Mindset, content, engagement, entertainment, and connection equals conversions, not the other way around.
So, let me say that again. Content, engagement, entertainment, and connection equals conversions, meaning leads and sales. Not the other way around, where it’s like, “I got to get leads and sales, and so I’m going to maybe do some of these things.” If you shift your focus from leads and sales and being stressed out about that, they will become a byproduct if you focus on creating extremely valuable content, engaging with your audience, your list, your leads. Entertainment, that’s what people want. Right? That is part of the content today, if they want that entertainment. Fun content on Instagram and social media has become like people’s TV and connection. You create that connection.
So, if you focus on, “How can I create valuable content, create a connection with my audience, create engagement and possibly entertainment with my audience?” then conversions, leads, and sales are going to become a byproduct. So, the last piece of this is that, every month, what I encourage you to do is, batch together and come up with monthly content ideas to increase your brand awareness. And then you use that. You use the content you’re creating, the value you’re bringing, focus on that. Focus on over-delivering. Focus on brand awareness, like we talked about, going back to marketing 20 years ago.
What if your priority was just, “I want to get people to see my brand, to see my content, to resonate with it, and to follow me and engage with me, and I want to provide so much value to them.” What if that became your core, soul focus? Because then, what you do is, you take all of that that you’re creating, and you tie your service into it. You tie your offer into it. And people have this flipped, where they’re so focused on selling the offer, which, obviously, that’s the goal for every single business. We want to sell our offer, but they forget about how you do that.
And how you do that is you create incredible brand awareness. You create an ability for people to see your brand or see your content and go, “Whoa. That is something I haven’t heard before,” or “That is really good,” or “That is super valuable.”
Think about anybody you follow or you have bought from. They provided value to you first. You built that trust with them because they provided value in some form or another. So, you’re never going to get the sales and the conversions if you don’t prioritize the brand awareness and coming up with, how do you create a process? How do you create a strategy around every single month? Your number one priority is to deliver value to your ideal customer and to create content and visibility strategies that, then, you can tie your offer, your lead generation, all of those things into that. But start with, “How do I just get new you people to start paying attention to my brand and making an impact on them when they do pay attention to my brand?”
All right, everybody. As a reminder, if you share this series, you can share this episode or any of the episodes, and up to five times, you will be submitted to win a business audit with me, which is a 30- minute call, where I’m going to audit your current business, where you’re at, what you’re struggling with, and like rapid fire, tell you what to do, what to do next, based on all the behind-the-scenes I’ve
seen and the experience I have, it’s one of my superpowers and favorite things to do for businesses.
And, so, we’re going to pick a winner, but you have to share this and tag me on social media @EmilyHirsh. You’ll be entered to win. You can enter to win up to five times. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you guys tomorrow.
Thanks for listening to The Not For Lazy Marketers Podcast. If you love this episode and want deeper support with your marketing, head over to helpmystrategy.com to see how Hirsh Marketing can help take your marketing to the next level, no matter where you’re at today. We help our clients scale faster than ever, find hidden leaks in their funnel, experiment with new creative marketing strategies, and help their business explode and be more profitable than they ever dreamed possible.
Head over to helpmystrategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.