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You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers podcast,  episode number 401. 

Hello, everybody, happy week, I hope you guys are doing amazing. I am coming off a very busy week with  our live challenge last week and also I seem to ironically plan these things when my personal life feels  crazy. I have a nanny transition happening and I’m getting a new nanny. My nanny of two years is  moving on to a new business venture and that’s like a huge deal because I call her my wife and she’s so  helpful and she’s been a nanny to my youngest since he was three months old. So it’s like a super big  deal and so I somehow planned my challenge for the same week that I had no nanny because I had a one week transition in between and it was insane. There were  days where I had toys all over my  office, because I had to let my two year old just play in there while I worked, but we got through it, we got through it and we’re in a new week that I hope to have a little  more space. I feel like there’s things that I just need to plan and sit down and think with my  brain and I haven’t had any time to even do that in the last week. 

So today’s episode, I am covering  3 Reasons Why Your Marketing Strategy Might Not Be Working Right Now. I feel like there’s a lot of  business owners, and I just did the challenge so I did Q&A every day, out there who are like my marketing strategy isn’t working or what was working before is now  not working or it works a little bit and then it stops working or I just can’t get it profitable. Just so many different struggles and frustrations around marketing. The reality is you have to get  your marketing working, you have to be generating leads and sales in order to get that marketing  working. So you have to be able to diagnose what the problem is and pivot. I was just on a podcast  interview recently where I was talking about the biggest mistake I am seeing people make in business  owners make is the unwillingness to pivot and kind of like the stubbornness around, ‘well it worked a year ago’ or ‘I had my best month this month and it was using the strategy so why  can’t we replicate it?’ The reality is that the pace at which the digital landscape is changing, society is  changing, people’s wants and needs and problems and frustrations are adjusting and the need to pivot  your strategy to change sometimes just the wrapping paper on what you’re promoting, or sometimes  go deep and change your offer. You have to be open to that and you have to be willing to try to diagnose what the problem is and then  take action as fast as you can. So I decided to do an episode on three reasons why your marketing  strategy might not be working just to start turning your brain and see if any of these things resonate  with you, if you feel like I haven’t paid attention to that in a while or it’s been 6, 12  months since I looked at that, that could be why and what comes up for you. So these are all core  foundational concepts that I’ve definitely talked about before on the podcast. But I’m feeling like after  last week I was called to just say, let’s do a reminder. Let me just refresh on some of these things in a different way, in a different perspective, to really help you look at right now today, your marketing  and where you should be putting your effort. So let’s dive into those three things.

The first one is something I talk about extensively and I’ve talked  about how I’ve put in way more resources internally for our clients and then for my own marketing  department in this category because of how important this is. So the first reason why your  marketing might not be working is your messaging and your offer positioning. When I say offer  positioning, I mean anything you’re trying to get somebody to do. So that could be a webinar that could  be a lead magnet, that could be anything that you’re saying, ‘Hey, I have this offer, give me your name  and email or pay me money’, this is my offer. Both of those are offers, and people make that mistake a lot where they don’t treat their free lead generation as an offer. So the first thing that I would look at  when diagnosing your marketing is: Your Messaging and Your Positioning and ask yourself, ‘do I stand out from everybody else?’ If you just remove how close you probably are to your strategy and to your offer and to the way you’re communicating to your audience, you just try to take a step back and ask  yourself if I saw this for the very first time, would I go, ‘oh my gosh, this is such an amazing offer, this is  so valuable and I know exactly what I’m going to be able to achieve if I download this offer by this  product or buy this service or sign up for this’. If the answer is no to that, which for a lot of you it is,  the answer is no because this here can take a long time to perfect and refine and improve. So for a  lot of people, you’ve thought you’ve achieved this and now your marketing isn’t working and  you’re not opening your eyes and going back to this. This is something that has just increased in need  to perfect this year, in the last year, because people who have weak offers and weak messaging that  just stays surface, it doesn’t hit the emotions, it’s not powerful, it doesn’t stand out, it’s just not going to work. There’s way too much out there that is those things and that is fighting for, no matter what your  audience is, their attention. Attention is currency right now, getting someone’s attention,  being able to maintain someone’s attention and trust is the currency of marketing. We have to get  that attention, we have to connect, we have to have content and messaging that’s emotional. So if  you’re listening to this and think ‘this is my problem’, what I recommend doing is just  going back to your messaging. Your messaging shows up in your ad copy, it shows up on your  landing page, it shows up in your emails, it shows up on your sales pages, it shows up anywhere that  you talk about something you want somebody to do. I want you to look at it and again, ask yourself if I saw this and I had no idea who this business was, I’ve never seen them before and I’m my ideal customer, would I do it? Or is this surface? Is this checking boxes to write ad copy? Is this not going to capture that attention and create that  connection and like: oh my gosh, I have to click this, or I gotta download this or I need to consume this, just that engagement. If the answer is no, how can you do that? Do you need to talk to your  audience? Do you need to interview people to understand their language? Do you need to hire a copywriter because you could never get it to that place. Do you need practice writing? Do you need to  talk it out? How do you get it simple, clear, and extremely enticing? So I would start there because oftentimes this is the root of it. This is the root of why your  marketing isn’t working and you’re just spinning your wheels over targeting and strategy and changing your funnel and trying to hire coaches and try this next thing. But at the root of it, if you don’t  fix this, nothing else is going to work. Okay? So that’s the first reason.

The second reason that your marketing might not be working is your customer journey or your sales funnel strategy. So it is very  common that people choose a sales funnel strategy that they saw somebody else do or it’s a template taught in a program or they are replicating somebody else’s funnel and bringing it over  to their business and they’ve lost the connection with their ideal customer and what the experience  really needs to be for them. So you guys, a customer journey, a sales funnel, if you break it down in simple terms, here is  what it is: It’s an experience. You are creating an experience for somebody who has no idea who you are. You have three goals.

Your first goal is to capture their attention, to get them to engage, to click, to  watch a video, to engage with content and to become a member of your audience.

Your second goal is for them to become a lead, to get them on your email list, to be able to nurture them  through emails, to build that trust, to get them, to attend a webinar, to get them as a lead.

Your third goal is to get them as a paying customer, to sign up for your service, your product, your offer.  

So you can’t not have one of these in place, doing  only two of the three of  these things in your experience in your customer journey. So if you step back and you remove all the complications of sales funnels and marketing and how  complicated people make it, and you ask yourself, what do I have to do to create the most  epic experience and take someone from, they consume a piece of my content all the way to  becoming a paying customer. There’s one other thing that your strategy should do, and this is really  important and not easy to do: from the point of becoming a lead to becoming a sale your job is to  create a gap that your offer fills. If you can do this perfectly, your marketing  strategy will blow up, it will work so well. People miss this all the time, in the lead generation phase they deliver a webinar presentation or a PDF or some sort of resource that is so extremely  overwhelming and dense with just like vomit, all this information on you that there’s no way you’re going to sell your offer because you didn’t create the gap and you want to create a gap that your offer can fill. So you have to do two things at the lead generation phase, you have  to create value, you have to solve a micro problem. You have to be able to provide that value, but not solve the problem. So it’s like they don’t need anymore help because at the same time of solving a  problem or helping them realize they’ve done something the wrong way or they’re making these  mistakes or they need these tools, they need to understand that the next step is your offer.  So the way that this works and the way I teach this is when you’re choosing your lead generation  promise or topic or mode or how you’re delivering it, think about all the micro problems that your ideal customer is having, not the biggest problem out there- like they  want to lose weight or they  want to make money with marketing or they  want to scale their team, those are like the big problems that you solve, your offer solves, your end result solves. What are all the micro problems attached to that? So if we use that they want to lose weight as an example, micro problems could look like, ‘I don’t know how to plan my meals’, ‘I don’t know what workouts to  do’, ‘I don’t know how to schedule my time and get these workouts done’, ‘I am afraid of hurting myself’, ‘I am not motivated enough’, ‘I’m too busy’, right? Think, what are all the excuses, he  reasons, the micro problems that people experience in trying to achieve the biggest outcome that you  solve and you create for people with your offer, then you just solve one of those micro problems or you  can shine light on why they’re not achieving the big problem, which gives people a realization that, ‘oh, I’ve been doing it wrong this whole way, this is a new way of achieving weight loss or a new way of successful marketing in your business. Now  the trust is there, the value is there giving someone a realization that ‘oh my  gosh, I need to stop wasting my time doing X, Y, Z’, or ‘I’ve been doing it the wrong order’ or whatever it is, that’s value, that is value. Then you give them the next step to take easily, which is: now that you understand that this is how it works and you could go do this all by yourself, but you’re not going to, so you therefore need my offer. So I see this all the time in funnel strategies that people have created  a customer journey, created a funnel and in that lead generation portion, they randomly put something  there or they tried to pull from somebody else’s lead generation ideas and webinars and structure it  exactly the same and then they end up completely overwhelming the lead, which is going to completely kill the success of  selling your offer. So if your  marketing isn’t working right now,  look at your customer journey and ask yourself, ‘is this the best experience I could possibly create for somebody to go from not having any idea, any interaction with my business, to becoming a customer’.  You know what that also means, it means playing the long game. Does your customer journey, does  your funnel, consist of like two weeks and that’s it, if they don’t buy they’re just lost? The  average amount of touch points that somebody has to have to buy from your business is 7 to 10, the average amount of time it takes, depending on the product, is like 3 to 6 months to buy  from you, sometimes way longer for people. So if your customer journey is planned out to the extent of two weeks, and then you have no strategy  and you just hope people buy, that’s not going to work either and you’re going to be losing a lot of money.  So that nurturing strategy that happens long term after 1, 2, 3, 6 months of someone joining your email  list is absolutely critical. If you’re missing that, I can guarantee you, you have leads sitting on your  list, who could buy from you and you’re losing that opportunity.

The third reason why your marketing might be working, and I love this one is because it is kind of easy to simplify and can make such a huge difference in your understanding, and your overwhelm around marketing,  which is the lack of data and decisions being made based on data. Here’s what I’ve observed after working  with hundreds of business owners and just seeing how they look at marketing. Number one, marketing  is very overwhelming to most people and the reason why is there’s so many components to it. There’s organic, there’s social media. There are paid ads. There’s your sales funnel. There’s your emails. There’s your email nurturing. There’s your webinar itself. There’s building the pages. There’s so many pieces to the puzzle, which I totally understand And it’s valid. That’s why ideally you get support. However, the piece is, business  owners have no idea what numbers they should be tracking. They don’t know what those numbers mean, even if they were to be tracking them. Most of all, they have no idea how to make decisions based on those numbers, so then you’re experiencing the throw spaghetti at the wall approach, the  flying blind, where you’re doing stuff. All of you guys, I know you and you’re not,  not doing things, you’re not lazy, you’re not like sitting back and just hoping that it starts working, you’re actively taking action and doing things, but you feel like you’re spinning your wheels. A Lot of times that’s because of those things, you don’t know your  numbers, you don’t know what those numbers mean and then you don’t know how to make decisions based on them. When you understand your data and when you understand what that means, and  specifically what actions you should take based on your data, you’re not going to feel like you’re  throwing spaghetti at the wall. You’re going to feel in momentum, like you have a plan and you know the next step, you know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it and the impact it should  have. So to simplify this down and not have an hour long podcast, that’s going to be really  overwhelming.

Here’s how you should look at data: Every point in your customer journey, in your funnel there are actions you want people to take, so you  have to first define what are all the actions. You want people to click on your ad. You want people to opt  into your webinar. You want people to watch your webinar. You want people to open your emails. You  want them to click on your emails. You want them to buy your products. That was just like a quick  summary of six. If attached to each one of those actions is a metric, what is the metric that is  going to tell you if that action is successful or not? This is where people mess up. For  example, with ads, there are a lot of metrics you can look at and they are effective, but you also need to  figure out what’s the minimum effective dose. So with your ads, you could look at CPM, which is the cost per thousand impressions. You could  look at the click through rate, there’s two clickthrough rates, you could look at the link click through rate and all click through rate. You could look at your cost per conversion, right? You could look at  your landing page conversion and your number of clicks. However, what’s the one metric that’s going to tell you the actual success of your ads, I think, and would say, it’s your cost per click, because that’s going to  directly impact the ads success. If your click through rate is really low, your cost per click is going to be really  high. So if you just focused on, ‘I need people to click on my ads, I need quality people to  click on my ads. How do I get the cost down for people to click on my ads?’ That metric is going to affect your CPM, your click through rate, all those other metrics. So if you just  focused on that and you said maybe if I launched new creative, maybe if I made this more compelling, maybe if I tried new audiences, I need to get my cost per click down. Then you move to the cost per conversion, webinar registration, let’s say, now that’s going to be impacted by landing page conversion  and the number of clicks. But if we focus on that, we’re going to be able to make decisions based on  that. So every place that you want somebody to take an action in your customer journey should be a  metric attached to that. Then if you do it that way, you understand what metric impacts which decision, this action that I want someone to take. So if the metric is not good, that you’ve defined for  that action, then you ask yourself, how do I improve the volume of people who take that action? I know you guys can answer that. If I was to say, ‘Hey, your webinar show up is 5%. Only 5% of your  leads are showing up to your webinar. So how do you get more people to show up for your webinar?’ I  bet you could come up with actions. I’m going to add reminder emails. I’m going to add a bonus to my  webinar, you could probably come up with some really creative things. So if you define your data  and you say here’s all the actions that somebody takes in my funnel, in my customer journey, from the  beginning of coming into contact with my business, to becoming a sale, and you really should only have  like six to 10, there’s not that many actions. Then you say, what is the one driving metric of that action  that I need to track. Then you track them in order, because at the first drop off point, that’s going to  impact all the rest of the metrics. So at the first place where the metric isn’t good, where your cost per click is $8, way too high. You’re  never going to have a good cost per webinar registration. You’re never going to have a good landing page conversion or a sales conversion, all the things until you fix that. So then you just ask yourself, what do I  do to improve this? What are three actions I can do to improve this metric? Now, of course, there’s  more metrics, for example, our team, we’re definitely tracking click through rate and  CPM and all those things, but we’re experts, right? If you’re not at that level, don’t dive into it trying to do that and then completely overwhelm yourself and then have no actions to take. Instead, make it the minimum effective dose. Start to take action on that data and you will see improvement. You also are going to feel more in control of your marketing, which is really important because if you  feel in control of your marketing and you feel like even if it’s not working, you’re taking action to move it  towards the right place. You’re on the right track. That’s the process of marketing and so you need to  have that. So that’s the third thing, understand your data, go through that process I just  explained, understand what metrics you need to track. Then the actions associated with them and  out of that you are going to constantly have things you can be doing in your marketing to improve your  marketing and where the problem is and where the hole is. Then you won’t feel like that flying blind  feeling, which is terrible when you’re spending money and you’re panicking, because it’s not working. Worst of all when you don’t even know what to do to get it working. That is definitely where you  don’t  want to be but yet I see so many people in that place in their business.

Okay, you guys, I hope this was helpful. I  hope it gives you a few things to dig into in your own marketing and at the end of the day, just focus on those one or two or three max things I can be working on over the next 30 days  to improve my marketing, to improve my numbers, then you just move on to the next thing. You know what? That will never end. Even when you are successful, that is still the case, you’re still trying to improve metrics, you still  want to get less cost per lead, you still  want to increase your sales conversion. So you should always have actions in place to do those things. Thanks  so much for tuning in and I’ll talk to you on Thursday. 

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.

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