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Marketing can be really overwhelming, especially if it’s not your main focus in business. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of using TEMPLATES, because everyone promises that theirs works, right?

But, one of my core values is – NO cookie cutter strategies. (That means, NO templates!)

In this episode, I’m detailing the importance of customized marketing strategy in a busy marketplace. I’m asking the questions, “What can you do differently? What can you do to stand out? How can you leverage YOUR personality?”

I’m also sharing…

Why templated marketing FAILS every time
How my Team remains innovative in the day-to-day (whether they’re marketing visionaries or not)
And what you can do to create AUTHENTIC marketing strategy for your business

Listen to the episode and then share your takeaways on IG stories (tag @emilyhirsh for a shoutout)!

NOTE: This episode is closely related to episode 29 that covers why Hirsh Marketing is no longer an agency, so listen in to episode 29 as well!

Key Notes:
[3:39] The problem with templates in marketing
[4:39] The KEY to innovation (+ the exact questions I ask my team!)
[7:43] What’s the worst case scenario? You spend $20 testing something that doesn’t work.
[9:37] If you’re using “Perfect Webinar,” you might get lost in the mix in 2019

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Episode Transcripts:  

I’m Emily Hirsh and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention, innovators, influencers, creators, and game changing entrepreneurs, your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience. With killer strategy and laser eye for impact we launch multimillion dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now, we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind the scenes with the Hirsh marketing team, and giving away the secrets to our client’s success. Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.

Today I’m going to talk about how to think differently in your marketing and why that is so important. This episode was inspired by actually, one of my team huddles that we just had. I brought this up in what we call our “updates from leadership” section, which is where I’ll have a check in with my director of operations who brings everything to me about how the company’s going. She’s actually the only person now who reports directly to me in our company. And so, we have amazing daily check-ins where I get all the inside from the company and things I need to know, problems I need to resolve. And so, I get a lot of ideas and inspiration from that call on like, how we can lead our team to always be the best. And so, this is something that I brought up on today’s huddle, because I think it’s really important in marketing.

So let me backup a little. Marketing can be super overwhelming. There is so many ideas. People have ideas in every Facebook group, everybody you talk to you has a different template, and “This works for me,” “I swear this works,” “This is the one thing that works,” “This is the only thing that works,” “Webinars don’t work,” … you know, it can be so overwhelming. And I think that’s why a lot of people come and hire an agency, or a marketing team, or bring someone in house, or hire a whole in house team, because they don’t want to deal with that. But, I hear this so often and it’s, people say, “I just want to be told what content to make, and then I go and do it. And I want my team to stay innovative.” And that innovation is what people lose. And so here’s what I talked to my team about today.

I think it’s really easy, and we fall into this trap, too, sometimes, and I have to continue to lead my team to be visionary thinkers. Because one of my biggest core values for our company is that we’re not a cookie cutter marketing agency. I can’t stand like, cookie cutters strategies. Whenever somebody says something to me, and they’re like, ‘You have to do challenges,” or “You have to do evergreen webinars” … Those both work, right? But not for every business. And so, when someone comes on to work with us, it’s really important to me that we analyze their whole company from historical past data to currently what they’re doing, to what their goals are, to who your ideal customer is, to their product, the price of the product. All of these things play a part in the actual marketing strategy, that templates are impossible. And you should be actually like taking knowledge from tons of options and then creating something customized for every single company.

So, it’s very easy to fall into a trap, though, especially agencies. Like especially agencies, and remember we’re not an agency anymore. Go back and listen to one of the earlier episodes that I did about, maybe 10 ago, 10 episodes ago, about how we are no longer an agency, and we are a full marketing team. So, it’s really easy as an agency, because here’s what happens is, you have to create some sort of structure and some process for your team to be able to implement client work. Then you end up creating a template, and you’re like, our ad copy, you know, here’s what you get for ad copy. Here’s what you do for images, here’s the audiences you target, here’s how we load it. The problem with that is it limits trying new things, because one thing we really know is Facebook is always changing. And if you don’t continuously test new things and try new things, then you don’t know if it’s actually going to work or not.

And so I super own the fact that like I made our ads training a year ago, no, a year and a half ago, I made our ads training. We’ve updated it four times because I know that the things I said a year and a half ago aren’t relevant anymore, don’t necessarily work anymore, or aren’t the right strategy anymore, and we have to stay on top of that. But on a day to day basis, what I want my team to do is to stop with every account that they are managing, every ads manager, and just think to themselves, “What could I do differently here? What could I do to stand out in this account?” and this a lot comes down to the creative, “What can I do to stand out? What could I do to leverage this client’s specific messaging, and brand, and personality,” because we work with mostly influencers.

So, everyone has a personality to it that we should be leveraging. And good marketing, you’re leveraging that personality, and you’re leveraging anything unique about that person because that’s how you’re going to stand out. So I encourage my team, and this is what I said on my huddle today, “I encourage you guys, I want you to take, even if it’s two minutes, take a step back from the to do list of, ‘I’ve got to do my daily tracking, and task this out, and load this ad, and do these audiences,’” because my team lives in that. It’s very busy to be working in our company, and on ad accounts in general, there’s so much that goes on. Especially right now we’re dealing with a holiday promotions and everything in the new year going on.

So, I want you to take a step back, and I said, “I want you guys to take a step back, take a deep breath, and just like, every day just ask yourself, ‘Could I be doing anything differently, or unique, or that stands out, or catches an eye, or really leverages this one single client’s personality, especially in the creative?’ And then I want you guys to go and test those things. Like, I give you freedom!” So we’ve got our boundaries. We have our like, we never run like ad campaigns and we don’t do right column ads. Like those really strict rules, right? But test if it works better just on mobile, test if it works better just on Instagram. Test if it’s a story ad that has 60 seconds versus 15 seconds, test a gif versus an image. You can’t templatize that, because it’s different for every single client.

And so, on a regular basis, I have to make sure I’m pulling my team where, employees and people who are not entrepreneurs, they don’t live in a visionary space. I live in a visionary space where I’m always like, what else can we be doing? What are other ideas? Let me think of this. I can see the future. They don’t live there. They live in a, I want to get my job done, I want to do my job well, I’m gonna need to check everything off my to do list today so I can get my job done, so that these clients are happy, so that Emily’s happy, so my managers are happy. That’s where they live, and it’s our job and my job as a leader, and my manager’s job, my strategists, my high level strategists’ job, to inspire our team to continue to be visionaries in the marketing space, because it’s so important.

And I’m telling you guys this, because if you’re working with an ads team, or you’re doing your own ads and you’re following a course, or you’re listening to people’s advice, you are going to get templated advice of things that, they only know what worked for them. Especially a course. They have very templated, so then it’s easy to go follow that, and then you lose track of your ability to think differently. And especially in the ad copy, the image, videos, headlines, even targeting sometimes, like just say like, “What could I do differently to stand out?” Then that’s the fun, amazing thing about marketing is, just go and try it. Because, the worst thing, worst case is you spend $20 testing something and it doesn’t work, and then you know it didn’t work and that’s valuable.

And so, I always have, encourage my team, and this is what I said today, and then I really felt called to bring this on here, because I think it’s so important in this space, because it’s such an overwhelming space. We have so much information just flying at us from everyone. From courses, and webinars, and masterminds, and Facebook groups, and your actual ad agency of what’s working, and then you feel overwhelmed, and then you end up not wanting to do anything, right? So, think, “What could I do differently in my marketing to make myself stand out, to be unique to my business, to be unique to my brand and my messaging, to really stop the scroll on the feed?” And, this is going to become more and more important as we go in 2019, because the ad space is only going to get more and more saturated.
So everybody who does it, has a very templated approach, is going to be lost in the mix of people who are trying to be innovative. And that’s the thing with marketing is, you always have to be two steps ahead, because by the time someone’s getting on a webinar and saying, “This is the number one way that you can make $1 million is this template, or this challenge format, or this webinar follow-up series.” By the time they are doing it, there’s hundreds of other people doing it. By the time Russell Brunson’s Perfect Webinar really took off, thousands of people were doing “perfect webinars,” right? So if you, you know, the Perfect Webinar is great. That’s actually a really good example of this, because the Perfect Webinar is great, it can convert. But what I’ve seen happen is people come in, they’ve got the Perfect Webinar funnel, they do the indoctrination videos beforehand.

You know what I’m talking about if you know this funnel. They do the Perfect Webinar. And, it’s so templated to them, that it feels off brand, or uncomfortable, or like they’re being too salesy or scammy, that the energy of the whole thing is off, right? And it just feels market-y, right? And scammy. Because it’s not authentic to them. And so what I tell all of my clients when they come on, or even before they come on, if I’m on a sales call, is I’ll say like, “We know the Perfect Webinar and Amy Porterfield’s webinar templates, Sam Oven’s has a webinar template, like we know all of these. We want to make the webinar for you. We want to make the webinar and the marketing plan that’s your brand, that you can get on video, and you can get on there, and you can deliver the content like you’re under fire. Because it feels authentic to you.” ‘

So if that means you give 30 minutes of value, that’s what it means. If it means you give 10 minutes of value and 15 minutes pitching, that’s what it means. There is not a templated marketing plan, it doesn’t exist out there. So if you’re trying to go with a templated marketing plan, you will fail. So, I want you to stop and ask yourself, “How do I think differently in my marketing, and my Facebook ads, and my funnels, so that it stands out for my brand, my messaging, and the influence I want to have?” And just think on that question for like a day. Go for a walk. Think about it, because you’ll come up with some amazing ideas when you allow your brain to go there, and you’re not trying to replicate a strategy that’s like, exactly like Russell’s, or Sam Oven’s, or Frank Kern, or whoever.
They’re all amazing people, but they innovated that strategy to begin with. It didn’t exist before they templated it, right? So, of course it worked for them, but the more people that they template it for and the more people who follow that, the more that it doesn’t work and it gets harder. So you have to innovate. It doesn’t mean don’t take the foundation of something, but then think, “How can I make it different for me? How can I make it unique to my audience?”

If you want a customized strategy, if you want us to take what should work for your audience based on your, like I said, there’s so many variables … who you’re targeting, how much your product is, what your product is, what the problem is that we’re going after, what’s worked for you in the past, what have you tried, what have you not tried? All of those things come into play when creating a strategy.
If you want to customized strategy created for you, book in a call with my team at HelpMyStrategy.com. Apply to work with us, because the very first thing we do is we create that customized strategy for you, and then we create projections on how we’re going to get our goals in the next 90 days after that strategy. Thanks so much for listening today, guys.

Thanks for listening to the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind the scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com. If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.