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Emily Hirsh:

I try really hard in my podcast to talk about the reality of marketing in that it is an ever evolving, constant, constant practice of refinement. Even if things are working, you can still be refining and improving.

You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers podcast, episode number 441.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. This is the final episode of my six part series, just walking you through everything you need to have success in your marketing and in order too, of what is kind of where you need to start and how you can build upon it and what’s really important and breaking it down into pretty granular pieces. So today we’re talking about really optimizing your strategy and I titled this that 95% of you are missing this, which is very true. And here’s the reality with marketing. I feel like there’s a good percentage of business owners and people out there who are capable of coming up with a strategy. Maybe they have to guess a little bit, maybe they don’t, but coming up with a strategy, being able to put it together, you know, maybe they’re duct taping it, have the funnel, get the ads, launch it.

That is like a marathon right in and of itself to get that, especially if you’re on your own to launch it…and then it doesn’t work. And I try really hard in my podcast to talk about the reality of marketing in that it is an ever evolving, constant, constant practice of refinement. Even if things are working, you can still be refining and improving, and it’s very common and frequent that something might be working and then it stops working and you have to change things and update, add, copy, and creative or change the wrapping paper on it. And so I think that most people, 95% of people, if they’re doing their own marketing, hopefully if you have a marketing expert or an agency, this is not happening, but if it is happening, then you might have a problem, but most people don’t know how to optimize.

And when I say optimize, what I mean is take existing results, take action and make decisions based off those results, and then see improvement. And I think people get lost in the feeling of throwing spaghetti at the wall of trying something. And it’s not working if you know, launching something, putting all this effort into it and then it doesn’t work and they’re just left exhausted, burnt out, frustrated, defeated, and not knowing where to go next. So I think that is really common to have that happen. And that’s what I wanna talk about today. And the reason the, the first reason, and I feel like I’ve said this in a lot of episodes, so hopefully I’m driving it home in part of this series, but the first reason that nobody knows what actions to take is because they don’t know their numbers.

And I’ve talked about that in the last couple of episodes. So that’s number one. Like you cannot take action, you cannot optimize without numbers. If anybody on my team comes to me and says, Hey, this strategy isn’t working, what should we do? I’m like, you better bring me numbers. Like don’t even bring me that until you bring me numbers. If a client comes to me, a new client or existing client, and we have a strategy conversation, I’m basing it off numbers because we can guess all day long and we can try and say, like, I think our audience will respond to this, or I think we should do this, but we’re never gonna get it right without numbers. And if you don’t have numbers, then you start to get those numbers and then you make decisions off of those. So comparing your actual data that you’re getting versus your goals that you have set is the first step to optimizing.

And now this is an ever evolving process. This is gonna happen every week, every month, every quarter, every year that you’re making shifts and you’re making adjustments. I think there’s a saying that’s like the power is in the pivot. I think that as a business, and especially in digital marketing and marketing, you have to kind of come to terms with the fact that you’re constantly going to be adjusting. You will absolutely never reach a place in your business where you’re like, things are great. I’m just gonna set it and forget it. So as much as we all want that, including myself and my business like that sure would be nice, iIt’s not gonna happen. Which is why it’s important to have the support, to not have all of this pressure on you, and to not feel like you’re shooting in the dark to feel like you’re throwing spaghetti at the wall.

So in order to get to that place, we have to know our numbers and we have to know where the problem is. And it’s literally as simple as this: you have your goals, you have your goals all the way throughout your funnel. Every place there is an action. Somebody should take, you have a goal set for what that conversion metric should be. What percentage of people should be taking that action? Now you go compare your actual data to those goals and the very first place you’re not meeting your goal, unless you’ve set a completely unrealistic goal that you’re like, I want 10% of my leads to convert at my $5,000 product, which is not doable or realistic, unless you’ve set a crazy goal. You go to the first place that you are not achieving that goal and you make adjustments and as granular as you can get with it the better.

So for example, if you have a webinar funnel, then we first need to know, are people watching the webinar? If they’re not converting, let’s say you have a webinar funnel. You’re getting leads. People are signing up for the webinar. They’re going to the webinar and they’re not converting on the webinar. So the very first thing we have to know is are they even watching the webinar? Right? Cause that’s like a micro conversion number related to the overall conversion of the webinar itself. If they’re watching the webinar all the way through, then we have a problem with the pitch. Okay? So you find that first hole and you get granular with it. And then you ask yourself, okay, what’s contributing to that. I just literally had this conversation with an elite client. She’s like, why do you think my course isn’t selling at what we estimated it would sell at?

Right? We’re actually getting really cheap leads. They’re coming into her funnel and we estimated like 4% were going to buy, but only 2% are buying. We need to double it. Okay. This is normal. This is normal for this to be happening. And she’s like, Emily, why do you think that we’re not hitting that conversion? And I said, well, here’s the only things that can contribute to it. Okay. These are the only things. One your emails, right? You’re selling via email. It’s like a $200 offer you’re selling via email. So your emails two in those emails, we’re sending people to a sales page. So the sales page is contributing to it. Three, the offer itself and the positioning of the offer itself. That’s it? That is what can contribute to that. Actually there’s a fourth. Fourth is the strategy. So in this funnel strategy, it’s because it’s a $200 offer, we started the strategy without a webinar.

 And the action we’re gonna take is should we actually sell via a webinar because it’s a B2C market. So you narrow down what the issue is or where you’re not hitting the mark. And I say issue, but it cannot even be an issue. It could be the opportunity for improvement could be the other component to this. You narrow that down and then you figure out what are all the contributing factors within this metric? Like what, and just think of the experience. It’s not complicated. It’s not like data analysis, science, where you have to be like a data expert. You don’t, you just have to think about the person. If the leads are not converting to sales, where are all the places that there’s an opportunity for them to convert to sales and what’s not working.

And now we take action on that. And so you, you narrow it down. It’s kind of like a science experiment. Like you narrow down the variables and you figure out which ones are going to make an impact. And then you take action on that. And so some examples of this. So for example, we had a client in elite who just started their ads about three weeks ago. And the funnel was an opt-in page to the thank you page and it had a like $17 offer on it that wasn’t selling at all. It was like totally not selling. So the first thing we did was we had our copy team audit the copy on that page and come back with suggestions for how we could improve that page and the messaging around it. Within one week of doing that, we went from zero sales to 10.

That’s huge, that’s 10, Xing the sales. Her budget’s pretty small. So that’s really huge. So we just looked at, okay, that’s the first place that people aren’t converting. And so what are the actions that we can take for this? How can we improve this? And some of those things look like a lot of times it looks like auditing copy, but it could be auditing a landing page, the copy, the format of the landing page. It could be, I’ve probably audited like five elite clients already webinars in one of them three times to get it where we needed, but it could be auditing the webinar itself, which I should do a whole training on that because every webinar audit that I do has pretty much the same issues in it. So there’s something there, but the webinar itself, if you have a webinar funnel, is obviously a massive contributing factor to the success of the funnel.

And it’s more than just the pitch. It’s also the content. It’s the lead up, it’s the authority building. It’s all of it. Emails, email sequences are another place that you can dive in. And so we’ve had clients where we’ve completely audited their sales emails or audited you know, webinar invite emails to increase, show up rate. And then if all these little things don’t work like landing page audits and email audits and looking at the messaging and the webinar itself, if that doesn’t work. And it’s like, okay, we’ve tried all these things. And this is usually when you get to that, like, okay, it’s been like a month and a half, six weeks. We’ve tried a lot of things. We’ve done all these steps. It’s still really not working. And I want a massive difference in my results. Like I’m at zero to barely at all.

And I really need to increase this. Usually it’s now a foundational issue. And so from there, we do a deep dive on the messaging. And so I had one of our elite clients, one of the very first ones who I launched their strategy. We weren’t getting qualified leads to book a call in her fennel. And we tried calling out in the ad copy. We tried saying, this is for business owners who are at X, Y, Z. We put it on the landing page. We still weren’t getting qualified leads. And what it came down to that I decided was, and we wouldn’t have known this without testing it. And so this usually takes a little bit more time to get to this point. Like you usually can be at the point where you’re kind of like auditing and refining landing pages and emails and even webinars in that first, like 30 days, once you get to like 45 days and it’s completely not working now, we need a deep dive.

And so we actually completely changed the offer, the free offer that she was bringing leads in with, because I was like, we’re at like zero qualified leads when we want like 10 X that right. And so refining pages and emails, isn’t gonna get us that night and day shift. And we’ve kind of exhausted that we’ve audited the landing page. We’ve audited, the emails we’ve made, those changes. Like we’ve done all those things and now we need to make a bigger shift. And so we actually changed the entire free offer itself. And we thought about like, what’s going to repel the wrong fit person. What’s gonna attract the right fit and how do we shift that? And so there’s times where something is like foundationally not working and we’ve exhausted all those little things, audits, reviews, refinement basically. And now we need to do a deep dive.

And so for us that could look like an extra call with our creative manager. And I’d say for our elite clients that happens frequently because I think some of those businesses who haven’t run a lot of ads or haven’t had a large volume yet of traffic and success with their marketing, they are not as clear on their messaging. And it requires a lot more refinement and adjustment. So that could require a deep dive, which could result in some big shifts to offer positioning. It could require changing the strategy like for that one client that I’m shifting from not having a webinar funnel, because it was a $200 offer. And I think that was the best decision to test out. Plus she already had it ready when we started to now completely changing it to test a webinar funnel, but there is a process I run through and I exhaust all the little things like changing a landing page and email a webinar, all the things in the funnel.

And if that still doesn’t work, it’s a foundational issue. It’s an offer issue. Whether it’s the free offer or the paid offer, it is a positioning issue. It is a strategy issue. It’s a foundational issue. And so I think when you get to that, like 45 day mark, and the other piece to that is that you’ve exhausted. All other things you’ve refined, copy, you’ve refined your messaging, you’ve refined your emails, you’ve audited, and you’ve even read on your webinar, whatever it is, and it’s still not moving the needle. And you’re at the place where it’s like completely not working. That’s when, you know, if it’s a foundational element. And so I actually had someone ask me the other day, like, how do you know if it’s the offer or like the foundational component of the strategy versus a need for refinement? And my answer was number one, have you exhausted all the things like, have you updated the page?

Have you done some refinement? Have you tested new things? And those didn’t start to get any traction. Like it still was pretty, you know, low results. And then number two, are you trying to like 10 X, the difference in results? Like, it’d be one thing. If you had a page where it’s like, let’s say your goal was convert 3% of the leads that you brought into your funnel, and you’re at like two and a half percent, okay. Changing at 0.5%, that is gonna come through refinement. But if you’re at 0% and you’re trying to get to 3% and you’re trying to three X, your sales conversion, you probably have to make some bigger changes right. Than just refining some messaging. And so, you know, that is, it’s a little bit of like an intuitive thing that I have with strategy. But my process is we exhaust first, the optimization tactics and strategies and actions we can take with what we have and what is contributing to that very first whole in the funnel.

And if we do all of that and we exhaust it and it’s been a while, and we’re trying to make a massive pivot in the results, we’re trying to get, which for a lot of people, this happens with their sales conversion. It’s like they can get to the point of getting leads. They can get to the point of getting people engaged, watching their webinar, whatever it is, and they can’t sell them. And so that comes down to, if you’ve exhausted, improving the sales page, improving the pitch, improving the emails, working on that. We might have to go back to the basics, which I actually said to a client the other day, I was like, we’re gonna go back to the basics. We’re gonna pull up your ideal customer avatar document. We’re gonna reconnect with this. And we’re gonna change the offer positioning that you have, and even maybe your offer a little bit itself and that worked.

 So it’s like go back to the basics, go back to why you’re doing what you’re doing. Connect back to that, like simplify it and get to the root of it. And so if you’re trying to make that massive difference, like I said, where it’s like, I need a three X or 10 X, my sales conversion from where it’s at, that’s not gonna come from just small tweaks. But if it’s a little result or you need, you’re starting to see improvement, but you don’t have enough improvement. You can use that refinement. And so when working with us, this comes in the form of audits. And then if you’re in our profit high level package, we go implement all the audits. So we rewrite the emails, we update the landing page, copy, update the sales page. Like we do it for you. If you’re an elite, we audit it and we send that feedback to you and then you update the funnel.

 and then we can audit it again if needed or, or whatnot. But I think the important thing to note there is we’re not waiting for the client to say, Hey, can you audit this for me? We’re saying, Hey, based on your data and based on your results, we’re gonna audit this for you. And that’s the key when you’re using your marketing, that your actions are backed by data and your data is telling a story. That’s driving those actions, which is really simple to see when you track your data against your goals and you re-look at it every month and you readjust it. Just, I can’t say it enough, it just makes marketing so simple. It makes it so that anybody can find success because it’s just a formula. It really is. It’s not luck. It’s not like you have something that somebody else does, or I have something that somebody else doesn’t, yes, you have to think this way.

And you have to understand it this way, but it’s really not that hard. It, and it, it, you need the talent to go execute it. Like you need the ability to write good copy, to have the eye for good messaging, to be able to go deep with your messaging. I mean, some of our elite clients I’ve torn apart, their funnels, like I’ve gotten it. And I’m like, oh my gosh, we’re gonna change all of this. Right. And so I don’t think they would ever be able to do that on their own. But in terms of actions, if anybody tries to sell you on complication with marketing, like it’s not reality, but consistency and being strategic with numbers and constantly refining and looking at things intentionally that way, that is marketing, right. It’s constant refinement. So if you’re like, oh my gosh, it’d be so nice to have a webinar audit from Emily or landing page reviews or a messaging deep dive, or just someone to take all this from me and be able to drive my entire marketing strategy and where the holes are and what we should, should do next. Go to hirshmarketing.com/elite and book your call-in. We can see if we are a fit to work with you, and you can get that kind of partnership in your business with an entire marketing team. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you guys next week.

Emily Hirsh:

Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast. If you loved 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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