Ep 476: Inside Look At How I Plan My Own 7-Figure Marketing Strategies
Today, I’m giving you a behind-the-scenes look into my marketing strategy for my multi-7 figure business. If you’ve been curious about how you should be planning your marketing strategy, this episode is for you! It’s packed with valuable information that you can start using in your own business right away, such as:
- How to plan your marketing strategy without overcomplicating it
- Why you shouldn’t make your yearly planning super specific
- How often you should be planning
- How I make promo decisions that bring results
So grab a pen and some paper, and tune in!
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
Emily Hirsh:
How do all of those things together connect and support each other versus be off on their own on Lone Island? So I see this a lot where people have like, I have this offer and I have this, you know, other offer and they don’t talk to each other.
You are listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers podcast, episode number 476.
Hello my friends. Welcome back to the podcast. We are almost in February. I am having an interesting day today. Texas got kind of like an unexpected ice storm. It’s not really snowing out, it’s just like ice everywhere. So when that happens in Austin, Texas, everything shuts down. They cannot handle it and so people don’t drive so they close the schools. My nanny usually doesn’t come. I had a flight today that was canceled but I didn’t know that until recently and so I had to do both my workouts for 75 hard. So I did my freezing cold walk in, it’s very cold out and like ice on the road while on Zoom calls cuz I was trying to fit it all in before I left for the airport only to find out my flight was canceled. So my kids are very happy about that and I’m gonna try to fly out at the same time tomorrow, but we’ll see because the storm is supposed to be here through tomorrow so we will see.
But I have learned to just kind of surrender in these moments. I’m really hoping I do get to go to where I’m going. I’m going to Montana for work and some fun snowboarding and I really wanna get there by a certain time cuz there’s a snowboarding date that I have. So I’m hoping that I’m able to, but we’ll see. I’m indifferent to it at this point and we are going to Colorado soon anyway, so I’m packing in all my snowboarding days and having an awesome season there. So because it’s the end of the month I follow a process in my company personally and I bring it into some of our clients companies and like support them with this that I thought I would share here. And that’s how we do our planning. And so I just planned for our February and our march with my own marketing team and my marketing team is crushing it right now.
Like I have very limited time for my own marketing cuz I’ve been really involved in our client delivery for the last several months like six to seven. And so on the side I’ve been not on the side but I’ve had, you know, my own marketing campaigns and we had the bootcamp and just a lot of things. And the reason that it is doing so well and it is going so well is because of my team, my marketing team that I’ve built internally and also because of this planning process because we look very far ahead and we have a very organized way that we execute promotions and live launches. And so I thought it would be cool to kind of share that with you and share it from the behind the scenes of my own marketing perspective cuz I think we do a pretty good job.
And so first of all, I wanna explain how we plan and then I want to talk about the kind of ingredients that go into a marketing strategy. And this is a little bit broader sense of a marketing strategy. Sometimes I talk about a strategy in terms of like an actual sales funnel and in this sense I’m talking about it from your whole business marketing strategy. So this is everything you can consider to grow your business using marketing, which goes beyond just paid ads. So I wanna talk about that because what you’ll have to do is decide where you’re going to put your energy and effort and resources out of these things. And that’s something we do every month, every quarter, every time we look at what we wanna do because there’s a lot of things that we wanna do. There’s a lot of ideas and there’s no shortage of that.
It’s a matter of where you’re gonna put your resources to actually get results and leverage. So first of all, I follow a process that I followed for a very long time with my company that you basically break down your planning in chunks. And so we do annual planning, which is a lot of me kind of casting a vision and I don’t really believe in super detailed annual planning because you don’t know what’s gonna be thrown your way throughout the year. So I typically have some big goals like number of clients revenue, just bigger overarching goals. But I don’t always know exactly how I’m gonna get to those goals going into the year because the thing is so much changes. So if I planned in super detail like every single month, every single week of my year, it would absolutely not work out in that order or in that way.
So there’s really no point in doing that in my opinion. So what I do is I have a bigger overarching annual goal that’s our revenue. It’s how many clients we wanna add and there may be a few other things there, but really that’s it. And that’s our overarching. Then I look at things from a quarter because I do think you can get pretty detailed three months out, especially with marketing. This is honestly really important and not enough people do this and they end up in a very reactive place where they need to make sales right now in their business, but they can’t because they haven’t prepared. And so marketing takes time. Like when you do a promotion, you have to build the funnel, you have to write the emails, you have to create the ad assets, then you usually have to run ads to the event or whatever it is beforehand.
And then you have the event and then you can potentially make sales. But even for me, sometimes it drags on longer than that. So we have applications, we have calls, it’s a longer window of time. And so if I am reactive and I get to a place where I’m like, oh my gosh, I need to do something now because we haven’t hit our application goal, it doesn’t usually result in success. So I like looking at things from a three month visibility standpoint and looking at how are we going to, for me it’s how are we going to hit our application goals? How are we gonna hit our podcast download goals, how are we gonna hit our sales goals? So we have about three to five quarterly goals every quarter. And so some of ours, this current quarter that we’re working on is adding 30 new clients to our roster.
It is getting our podcast download to a specific spot and it’s also working forward and towards launching a YouTube channel. So those are examples of quarterly goals that we have. And I do that every quarter. Sometimes they carry over, sometimes they shift and these are directly associated with our annual goals. So I know that if I move these things forward over the next three months, it will support my annual goal. Then we get monthly specific. And especially with marketing, I feel like we do this every month, but every month we do it, we’re looking at the next few months. So for example, it’s the end of January. We just looked at all of February and all of March because a month is not that much time in marketing. Like I said, if you have to build a funnel, write emails, launch a funnel, run ads to a funnel and execute an entire promotion or launch, it’s more than four weeks.
And so if you’re only looking even at a month at a time, you’re likely falling behind. So we just looked at all of February, all of March and I plan, you know, what promotions are we doing? Are we gonna do a live launch? Are we gonna do a live event? Are we gonna launch a new funnel? Like what are the actions we’re doing? And we typically follow this process. So first of all, it’s driven by all our quarterly goals. So that’s an important thing to note here is all of the things that we create as monthly targets and projects we’re gonna work on are directly underneath a quarterly goal. This keeps us on track to focusing on what we know we need to focus on and what we’ve committed to. And a lot of times we list out everything we could do in the next month and then we prioritize.
And I’ve learned, and I still could probably get better at this, but I’ve learned to try to do less. So to have a list of everything that we could do and then to really make sure like, okay, are we sure that we can do that? Are we sure that that’s priority or should we move that to the next month or a different time? Is that driving our bottom line? Is that driving what we want? Because there is no shortage of things you could be doing with your marketing. Like most people feel that way. I would say 98% of you probably feel like you’re not doing enough with your marketing and you have way more that you wanna do that you just don’t get time for, right? So when you feel that way, it’s a matter of figuring out what’s the most impactful things you can do, what the time and resources you have.
And that’s another important piece to this is the time and resources you have. So I have a whole team, I have a full-time marketing coordinator, I have a full-time internal copywriter for me that’s on our team. I have social media support, I have tech support. If you’re looking at this from the perspective of you only have you or you and a few contractors, you have to adjust what your output you’re expecting is based on the resources you have to put into it, right? Okay. So with that said, that’s the process that we follow with planning and I wanna talk about the components that go into our planning and what I consider every time that we do it and kind of the ingredients to this successful marketing strategy. So first of all there’s three main components to your marketing, right? There’s generating and growing an audience, there’s generating leads and then there’s conversion.
And so all three of those likely need some attention, but figuring out what needs the most attention is a good place to start. Because if you don’t have an audience of people that you’re growing, you likely won’t have leads. And if you don’t have leads, you definitely aren’t gonna have conversion. So you can’t focus all in on conversion until you figure out the audience and the leads. So I always look at where’s our biggest gap. For me, I like to work on all of these, but for example, audience is my podcast. I want to grow my podcast. Okay? What are actual actions we’re gonna take to grow my podcast? Something we just tried was Spotify ads, it was a test, it actually didn’t work very well. The Spotify ads weren’t very successful. I wanted to test this. If it worked well I could bring that over to clients.
I’m also very much a Guinea pig for our clients cuz I test a lot of things that you guys don’t even realize I’m doing. So I wanna grow my podcast. Okay? We have Spotify ads that we could test. We’ve run Facebook ads that worked well to my series. We focus on guest outreach and intentional relationship building, right? So those are things that can all drive growing my podcast, which is one of our quarterly goals. The other thing I look at, so I look at those three things and I decide, you know what, they really probably all need attention, but what needs the most attention? And what needs the attention first? For me, our goal is to sign 30 new clients this quarter. We’re already over not over 30, but on track, past track for that because we’ve added 12 to our roster this month.
And so I have to look at, okay, what’s gonna do that, right? I need to generate applications, I need to do live experiences. We did our bootcamp. What’s next? What are we gonna do in February? What are we gonna do in March? What are our goals here that are going to drive the applications to then drive these sales? So I look at that and then I plan things around that. In, in February we’re gonna do a workshop, a paid workshop in March we have something else planned. And so I’m already planning that far out in what I’m doing to drive applications and drive sales. The other thing I do in like the ingredients that goes into a successful marketing strategy that I’ve talked about on here before is having both of these things dialed in, which is one, you’re evergreen, consistent strategy, your, you know, how are you generating audience leads and sales every single day, every single week for your business?
What is that consistent strategy? Because every business needs this to not find themselves in a feaster famine position where you’re really, really successful and then you do a launch and then everything dies and your business doesn’t get any traction, right? So you need some sort of ongoing form of growing your audience and growing your leads, which is why I love Facebook ads because they can work for you every single day while you’re not even online. You can be generating leads, putting people into a funnel, growing your audience, right? Then you also need some sort of live launch, live experience, ideally once a quarter. This reengages all your warm traffic. It also allows you to bring cold traffic in. The energy is higher, it’s a great experience. Usually the sales conversion is higher. It is a very great method to capitalize on all the work you’ve done around your consistent audience and lead generation, right?
So having a plan for asking yourself, what is my consistent lead gen and conversion strategy? And then what is my promotion, my live launch, my cash infusion strategy that I’m gonna do over the next three to four months. And, and start planning and thinking about that. And what that’s gonna do is allow you to again, capitalize on the work you’re doing consistently. So this is something we plan for most of our clients coming in and it depends on where they’re at. If they already have a huge warm audience, we maybe go straight to a live launch soon. If we need to build the audience beforehand, we start there, then we move to a live launch. Okay? So that’s another thing that I keep in mind. And so as you plan this out, what happens is, is you start to get I was just talking to a client about this yesterday.
So if you’re gonna do it, you know, every three to four months, some sort of live experience and you’re gonna do a different live webinar, you’re gonna do a promotion that gives you likely specific content and themes that you can leverage everywhere in your marketing. So that is gonna help you drive your social media, it’s gonna help you drive your content. If you have a podcast or you have videos, it’s gonna help you drive your ads, it’s gonna help you drive your email marketing because you’re theming your month and you’re theming your promotional calendar. So what we do is we plan out, so we’ve got our quarterly goals, we plan out our monthly goals that likely look like, you know, launch x, y, z funnel, do a live workshop, overhaul an email series, like those are some examples of our monthly goals, okay? As we do that, we’re also planning out a promotional calendar cuz we know, okay, if we’re launching x, y, z funnel this week, then we want to post that on social media, we wanna share it on the podcast, we wanna run ads to it.
And that’s our promotional strategy, right? And so I was just talking to a client about this and I said, you know, if you can get this funnel that we strategized in a v i P day together working to where you’re getting consistent sales and then you put your creative energy into every three months, a live launch a different webinar with different wrapping paper, maybe the actual content is similar, but you have some sort of new inspiration, new content that you get to put out once a quarter. Now there’s your promotion because you’re gonna talk this month about x and your social media and your content is gonna match that, right? So this starts driving your themes that you can create by creating this strategy, okay? So that’s another thing to keep in mind because the ingredients to a successful marketing strategy is considering organic paid content, your actual funnel strategy, your consistent strategy along with your live launch promotional strategy, right?
And how do all of those things together, and then your email marketing too. How do all of those things together connect and support each other versus be like off on their own on Lone Island? So I see this a lot where people have like, I have this offer and I have this, you know, other offer and they don’t talk to each other, right? So if someone comes in this funnel, they don’t even know about this other offer, but they might be a fit for it. And then if you have this other, you know, strategy or live launch, you’re not really even mentioning it in your content. And so there’s a lot of disconnection that happens and a lack of cohesiveness. And so if you plan out what your months and your quarters are gonna look like, that allows you to then get granular and say, okay, here’s our email marketing calendar, here’s our social media calendar.
And it doesn’t have to be complicated. It can just help you drive what you’re gonna actually put out so that there’s cohesiveness and congruency in that. And then the other piece that I I think is overlooked a lot is relationships. You know, if you need to make sales or you want to get some massive leverage in your business, then how can you strategically focus on relationships, whether that’s with some direct conversations with your audience, whether that’s with reaching out to people who have your audience and are willing to do a collaboration with you. It’s about genuinely building relationships. And I like to actually break this down into an amount of time a week I’m gonna spend on this because I think it’s really hard to actually put like a number goal behind this of like, I’m gonna get on seven guest podcasts or I’m gonna reach out to 15 people.
You can do that, but you also need to leave room for not knowing where one of these things is gonna lead, right? So you could end up talking to five people and one thing lead to this massive opportunity of getting to speak in front of their audience, but you don’t know that. And so I like to put this time intentionally every week into doing this, and that might look different every week. Sometimes it’s checking in on people that I am friends with and that I know and that are good connections. Sometimes it’s going on Instagram and going to a list of 10 different people who are kind of like my ideal dream 100 clients or contacts. Sometimes it’s reaching out to a friend of mine and saying, Hey, do you know anybody whose podcast I should be on that you can make an introduction to?
Like, there’s different ways that I can spend this time, but I want to be intentional with spending time on creating relationships. So that’s another component that needs to go into a successful marketing strategy that allows you to get what’s called earned media earned traffic that’s separate from paid and organic. And it is definitely a strategy you can leverage, especially if you’re newer, but I think it’s still very effective because somebody else’s audience, if they, if that person to their audience kind of plugs you or says, you know, you’re great automatically that audience really trusts you. So it’s a very underutilized form and I think the reason why so many people aren’t successful with it is they’re not authentic with it. They try to template it, they try to formulate, make it a formula, reach out to so many people and it just doesn’t work that way.
Relationships don’t work that way. So creating time, and that can be many different ways, but creating time to strategically build relationships is a part of a marketing strategy and is important. So, all right you guys, I hope you found this helpful. I wanted to kind of give you an inside look at how I do my own marketing strategy. And this obviously carries over to clients and like I said, we test a lot of things that you guys don’t even see. And we work on a lot of things, like the Spotify ads is an example, and I do that one so I can be a Guinea pig, but two, because I’m always trying things. I tried 10 things and two work all the time. And so you see what works and you see this leverage, but you don’t see what isn’t working. And we’re trying a bunch of stuff and we’re very clear on our goals. And like I said, some things work, some things don’t, but we’re always moving forward. All right everybody, 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.