It’s episode three of the ‘Marketing Questions Answered’ series, and I’ve enjoyed answering your marketing questions so far. I’ve also noticed a common theme that many of you seem to struggle with: the lack of a clear strategy and plan for your marketing. It’s important to understand how you’re going to grow your audience, generate leads, and produce sales, and this plan should drive your actions. Without a plan, you may feel overwhelmed and unsure of what to do next.

In this episode, I’m answering two questions that are related to this theme. The first is from someone who is struggling to find clients and is wondering if it’s a recipe for failure to focus on providing affordable low-ticket offers as a solo small business. 

The second question is from someone who is asking what the best-performing lead magnet is. They’re specifically curious if people actually want PDFs anymore or if there’s another lead magnet that would work better. If you’ve ever asked yourself either of these questions, or find yourself struggling with lacking a clear strategy and plan, tune in!

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

It does not tell them their custom marketing strategy. It does not build their ads for them. It does not help them write their copy. It does not help them execute any of the how. And so now I’ve built the authority, I’ve created the clarity of what they’re missing. I’ve built trust through that, and it’s a natural lead into our offer.

You are listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 493.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. We are on episode three in this series of your marketing questions answered. I’m having so much fun with this because it’s really cool to see number one your guys’ questions directly, because why else would I record my podcast, but to serve you guys and answer questions or support you with your struggles? But after, you know, several, several people filling this out, there’s a lot of themes that I get to pull out of this and support you guys in the episodes because it tells me that, you know, if multiple people have this struggle or aren’t seeing this thing or able to answer this question, there are a lot of other people in this place, right? And that’s really cool. And I think one of the biggest consistent things I’m seeing throughout all of these questions is a lack of a very clear strategy and a lack of a very clear plan with your marketing to understand how you are exactly going to grow your audience, generate leads and generate sales.

And that strategy and that plan should drive your actions. But without that plan, you don’t know what to do next, and you’re overwhelmed and you’re in this place that I know a lot of you are in. And so this was very confirming of that because the questions, a lot of them are all around that. So I’m gonna answer two questions today because they’re both relatively simple and somewhat go together. So the first question that somebody asked, they said their biggest marketing struggle was finding clients, and they asked me, is it a recipe for failure to focus on providing affordable low ticket offers as a solo small business? So this is a, you know, question around strategy, like I was saying, like they, they want to find clients and they’re trying to figure out how to do that. And so I don’t have any more information than that, but I’m assuming that they’re asking, I wanna find higher ticket clients, and is it a bad idea to start with affordable low ticket offers as a solo small business?

So I’m gonna first just talk in general about low ticket offers. So low ticket offers can be great, and I don’t know this person’s niche to go in detail on that. You didn’t provide that detail, but low ticket offers can be great. They can also not be great. So I think that low ticket offers are great as a place to create your ideal customer. In most cases, if you have a low ticket offer, you’re able to bring someone in, provide a lot more value to them than you would maybe through like a free lead magnet or webinar, and then hopefully bring them into being clients. Now, there is a very specific strategy and method to this that has to be followed in order for this to work. Because if you focus on low ticket for the concept of I just wanna make it affordable, but then you’re ultimately trying to attract high ticket clients, that’s a mistake because high ticket clients typically are willing to pay high ticket because of the place that they’re in.

So if then you go create digital products that are going to attract somebody at a lower level, at the more beginning stages of whatever your niche is in and aren’t willing to pay that higher price, then you’re not going to be creating ideal clients for your ultimate goal, which I’m, I think I’m reading that that is your ultimate goal since you said your biggest marketing struggle is finding clients. And so no, focusing on lower ticket offers in the beginning is not a mistake if it’s intentional to a bigger picture goal. Now, if you are in like the b2c, the health and wellness space the mindset space, the productivity space, you can have low ticket offers and a and a profitable business. And let’s actually define a low ticket offer. I would define a low ticket offer as under a hundred dollars. So you can have a profitable business, you’ve gotta have a pretty high sales conversion and a really low cost per lead to get there.

And in an ideal world in your business, you build upon that and you have something else that people can move into from that. But it’s a different game than the B2B space because the B2B space, you’re gonna pay more for traffic. And so therefore if you have like a $47 offer, you’re not gonna be overall profitable, likely because you’re gonna pay more for traffic. So low ticket offers can be great. Now here’s the thing with them, there’s a lot of people out there who preach them as a marketing strategy. So self-liquidating offer funnels you know, paid challenges, paid workshops. And here’s the, here’s the thing with that. If you don’t have a warm audience, meaning you don’t have an existing list, you don’t have an existing audience that follows you and you can engage, I prefer that you go the route of having a free lead magnet or webinar or something that somebody can come in on.

And then if you want, you can have this low ticket offer on the thank you page, but at least then you’re getting leads. And I just had this conversation with someone who asked me this question in a different way on a, a training where she said, how do I know if I should do a free webinar or a paid workshop? And I said, I would gauge it by the size of your warm audience and your ultimate goal because if your warm audience is small, your list is small and, and you wanna put this out there are going to be requiring a filter through this paid product. So naturally you’re gonna get a lot lower of a volume. And if your long-term goal in your business is to grow your list, to grow your audience, right now you’re at the more early stages, it’s probably smart for you to do lead generation and to make sure that that is happening, even if those leads convert later on.

If your goal is also to sell a higher ticket offer, then you have to ask yourself, is it better for me to have like a paid workshop where I get, you know, 15 people in? Or is it better for me to have a free offer where I get 200 people in spending the same on ads and maybe converting the same to my higher ticket offer? Maybe, but at least I also generated a bunch of leads that I can convert later on. And so what I told this person is like, my general rule of thumb is whenever I do a paid workshop or I, a client does a paid workshop, for the most part, I’d say 90 to 95% of the time, not every other, every single time. There are cases where we don’t do this because of a specific reason, strategic reason, but it becomes a warm traffic promotion.

So like when you see me do a paid workshop, I don’t spend money on cold ads. That is only going to my audience, to my email list, to my podcast subscribers, to my social media. We do run ads, but they’re all retargeting net because I don’t really, it’s not worth it for me to spend the money to acquire these new cold traffic customers into this paid product and try to break even, but risk not breaking even. So that’s how we do that promotion. Now, if you don’t have that audience, you probably wanna go the free route. And what I told this client was it, a general rule of thumb is it takes about six months of consistent lead gen and audience growth. And then you could test this of having a small priced offer to cold traffic. So if your goal, this person asking the question is getting higher ticket clients, if that’s your ultimate marketing business goal and you’re trying to do that through low ticket offers, I don’t think that’s the best route because your volume is going to be really low bringing people into from those low ticket offers to high ticket, you’d be better off doing lead gen creating an awesome experience and converting those people into your high ticket offer, doing that for maybe six months.

And then maybe you try a low ticket offer or you leverage low ticket offers to sell to people who didn’t convert into your higher ticket offer. So that’s how I like to look at this. So if your goal essentially is I need to get more cold traffic, growing my audience, growing my leads, and I don’t have a lot of warm traffic, I would go the route of lead generation over leveraging small price digital products to sell people into becoming a client, a higher paying client. If you already have that going and you wanna test something, small price, digital product it could be great converting those clients if it’s going to create them into ideal customers. So when I do paid workshops, the topics I choose and the people I’m trying to attract into that workshop are agency clients. And we’re very intentional with that because my ultimate goal from these workshops is actually to convert people into agency clients.

It’s nice to have the workshop and do the workshop and have that paid product, but it’s to convert them into agency clients. You could also leverage a digital product as a down sell. So for people who are not a fit yet for clients and you’ve already given them that option and you wanna provide them with something to support them, that is an option that you can, that you can give to them. So the second piece to this episode that I want to answer, someone said, what lead ma magnet strategy do you see performing the best? And are regular people really wanting PDFs and she wants to attract consistent leads? And so I thought this tied in because my advice to this previous question is probably you should do lead gen leading to your higher ticket. Understanding what your main goal is is really important.

And so for this, like what lead magnet strategy am I seeing performing the best? Here’s the thing with lead magnets, 100% people will download them if they’re very valuable. Like ask yourself, would you download a really valuable PDF that actually solved a problem, answered a question you had, gave you advice that you wanted and supported you? Like for example, our marketing playbook, thousands of people download that. Why? Because it’s super valuable. It gives you an in in-depth marketing strategies and things that are working and not working in predictions. So people download that because they really want it. A one page checklist that’s not very tangible, that doesn’t have a lot of information in it. I’m probably not gonna download that. So the best lead magnet strategy that I see performing is obviously not a cut and dry answer. What you have to ask yourself is, first of all, what is a small problem that I could solve for my ideal customer to be able to convert them into a paying customer?

And I wanna solve a problem in the sense that it gives somebody clarity, it gives them an understanding of mistakes they’ve been making, why they haven’t previously seen results and what they can do in the future. And then my offer fills that gap. So I wanna give them confidence in me, I wanna give them value through clarity, but I’m not giving them like a step-by-step tutorial on how to do something. So first of all, what is that experience? What is that problem that you can solve? And once you come up with that and you come up with what that attractive thing is, is that the best thing to be solved in the form of a pdf or is it better for that to be a webinar or that to be a video? And so the actual like medium that I decide on a lean magnet really depends on the best experience I’m trying to create.

And you have to keep in mind for all lead magnet, lead generation strategies, you’re trying to do two things. You’re trying to create clarity, create confidence in achieving their ultimate result and build authority throughout the content. And you are most importantly creating a gap that your offer fills. And so the actual content you have should do that. So if we use my marketing playbook as an example, it creates the clarity in what they were missing in their marketing strategy from that year. It gives them the desire of understanding marketing predictions that they can implement in their business. It gives people an inside look into hundreds of converting ads, which saves them time. It does not tell them their custom marketing strategy. It does not build their ads for them. It does not help them write their copy. It does not help them execute any of the how.

And so now I’ve built the authority, I’ve created the clarity of what they’re missing. I’ve built trust through that and it’s a natural lead into our offer. So no matter what lean magnet strategy you choose, that is the experience you’re trying to create. And so to answer the question of are regular people really wanting PDFs? Yes, if they are valuable enough? And so maybe even asking yourself like, would I download this? Is this valuable enough to me? And would I, you know, get value out of this or be enticed by this or feel excited by it? Would my ideal customer feel that way? And remember too with this, like the goal is not to overwhelm them. You’re not trying to fire hose people with information. More does not always equal results, but tangible clarity does where if you are breaking something down for somebody so they can have an epiphany or they can understand what they were missing or they get clarity that will move them into the next step, move them from being unstuck.

Okay, so yes, lead magnets are working now, I don’t know if I answered this fully, but what lead magnet strategy am I seeing performing the best? There is not one, like there are a lot of things that still work. Webinars still work, VSLs still work. Actual PDF downloads do still work when they follow those results, quizzes can work. You have to decide what is that best experience that I can create for my ideal customer and what is the best medium to do that and is it a lead magnet? I do think people who are very busy will download a PDF over a 10 to webinar. However, if you’re trying to move someone into high ticket, maybe you need some form of video after that lead magnet in order to do that, like a VSL or something. There’s different things you can play with and then just experiment.

And I know, you know, you may not have a team, you may not be able to experiment a lot, but one of the reasons I’m such a good marketer is I’ve tried every funnel myself, like put my money where my mouth is, spent money on the ads, spent money on the funnel, tried them because I’ve also learned what works for my business throughout that the last seven years. So that’s to answer kind of what that best lead magnet strategy is. If for the person who asked low ticket offers as a small business, if that’s the answer for them, maybe you’re realizing lead magnets might be the answer for you. So two in one questions answered in this episode. I will be back tomorrow on the fourth day answering another question I’d love to know on social media if you send me a message, which question has been your favorite so far, or one piece of clarity, if you feel like sharing that and tagging me on social, I am always very appreciative of it. Appreciative of passing, you know, the podcast onto your audience and sharing it with them to be able to come. Listen, I obviously put a lot into my content to try to support you guys and give you that minimum effective dose to getting results. So thank you so much for tuning in and I will be back 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.

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