512: Our $1M Month For Our Clients & The Transparent BTS Takeaways – Bonus Episode!
This week, I’m dropping a major bonus episode inspired by the training I offered yesterday. In this podcast episode, I’m sharing the insights I gained from a recent team meeting, where our team discussed what strategies worked, what didn’t, and our most successful clients.
While the foundations of marketing remain unchanged, I noticed two critical aspects that have become increasingly important in marketing – offer and messaging. Buyer hesitancy has increased, making people more hesitant to spend their money, and valuable information has become readily available, rendering courses and digital products without support less valuable. These are things you must take into account in your business and offer over the next year.
Listen in as I explain how these changes affect businesses and what entrepreneurs and business owners can do to stay ahead of the curve.
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Emily Hirsh:
I think on the low end, this is something that businesses need to do every year, but I mean, if you think about any large successful company, they’re always changing how they serve clients. They’re always looking for ways to improve. They’re specifically always looking for how do we get people results faster and easier?
You are listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 512.
Hello, you guys. Happy Friday. If you’re tuning into this when it comes out. This is a little bonus episode for you guys. So yesterday I did a pretty exclusive live event. We only put it out to our audience, and it was all about dissecting and kind of sharing with you a few things, sharing with you takeaways from our million dollar month for clients, which we have done before. But we just recently had a million dollars in revenue for all of our clients in one month, and we always celebrate that that is such a huge, huge amount of impact to generate collectively that much revenue for our clients in a single month. And with that dissection with my team and kind of breaking down what was the most successful, you know, where do we think the industry’s going, what are we gonna do more of?
I had some big takeaways last month from that that led to a couple of changes and predictions that I have for the industry that then led to changes in additions in our delivery, including adding a completely new role into how we support clients. And so we’re not giving out a replay to the entire training unless you signed up for it. However, I wanna do this recap because I think that you guys will get a lot of value out of the two predictions that I have and how I am letting that impact the way we serve clients, which also means you guys should bring that into your marketing. So I’m gonna go through a little recap of what I taught yesterday and, and share it with you guys. So I sat down with my team, and we do this every single week, but we specifically monthly have a little bit bigger of a takeaway of like, what strategies worked, what didn’t work, what clients were the most successful, why?
And we dig into that. And oftentimes when I sit down for these, I don’t talk, I just listen. I listen to my team, my ads managers, my account managers, my strategists, and I have a very high level view of everything happening. And so oftentimes it allows me to see themes and shifts that are happening in the industry. And then I always bring that into my content, and that’s what drives our monthly marketing report, our weekly newsletter and the content that I bring you guys. And so there’s a couple of things that I think are becoming so critical in people’s marketing that I wanna mention them. And every time I realize these things of like, okay, those are the two things that made the biggest difference in all of our most successful clients, it’s always things that I’ve never not been important. Like the foundations of marketing are always gonna be the foundations of marketing.
But I think as the economy changes, as noise gets louder, it, you know, for everybody, as it gets harder to stand out, as the industry shifts, the dial kind of goes up on the specific things that maybe in the past you could get away with not having fully dialed in and not having to a place that’s, you know, 10 outta 10 really great and really dialed in. And so these are the two things that I think are really important to pay attention to right now. And also, I’ve witnessed most businesses seen a lot of success right now have had to make pretty large pivots as it relates to these two things. Like there are a lot of entrepreneurs, I know a lot of clients I know who have shifted, not just optimization, small shifts, but pretty large shifts. And so those two things are, one, your offer and two, your messaging.
So not new concepts, not things that I’ve never talked about here before, but we’re, I’m gonna dig into this a little bit. So here’s what’s massively changed in the last 12 months around what people sell and your offer. And this this part, this offer part is going to be probably more related to online businesses, digital course creators, service providers, coaches, consultants, and a little bit less e-commerce. But I’m gonna tie that in in a second. So here’s what’s changed in the last 12, what 12 months buyer hesitancy has increased. So with the economy, with the way that the economy is right now, inflation, all those things, it means that people are a little bit more hesitant to buy. They’re a little bit more hesitant to spend their money because people are unsure what’s gonna happen. They need to think about it a little bit more.
They need to have more touch points. So we’ve talked about that. We know that number two, this one is a little bit more of a bold claim, but I think people don’t want courses in digital products anymore, for the most part, without any support in them. And here’s why, because over the last few years, especially valuable information has just become more and more and more available. And you’re talking entire YouTube channels and podcasts that truly, if someone wanted to go get all the information they need to be able to accomplish what they wanna accomplish, it is available for free for them on the internet somewhere. And you know, you could argue, okay, it’s not good enough, it’s not quality enough. Yeah, sure. If someone wanted to marketing results for their own business, it would take them a really long time and a lot of back and forth and figuring things out.
But you could listen to my podcast and you could accomplish it. I give it all away, right? And so that means information in the form of digital courses and digital products without any support combined with it, or an experience combined with it, is not nearly as valuable as it used to be. And I see a lot of times people don’t even want that type of an offer anymore because they don’t see the value in it. And so that’s what’s already changed. Here’s what’s going to continue to change the industry and your business. One, ai hands down this, this is not gonna be about ai, but it’s gonna change every one of our businesses over the next five years, especially when it relates to information and things that we sell. So if you sell a course and you’re selling information to people where they can learn something, that’s not really gonna be valuable anymore, especially with ai, let alone all the content out there.
Two, increased amount of noise and content fighting for people’s attention as well as three, the desire for speed to get a result. We live in a world and a society where people want the result that they paid for within a minute after buying. Obviously that’s not realistic most times, but if you look at, you know, for, for physical products, Amazon has made it so that everybody expects like, oh my gosh, more than two days to get here. That’s ridiculous, right? If now it’s like same day delivery, I can order something on Amazon and it can be at my house in two hours, which is just crazy. So physical products, like people wanna buy it and they want it delivered to their house as fast as possible. And Amazon is going to constantly be fighting for not fighting. But setting that bar for, for other physical product companies with digital products and services is just people are buying.
Like, I want the result fast. I don’t wanna put a lot of time into it. I don’t have a long attention span. I want the result fast. Now, obviously, and we’ll talk about this a little bit, but obviously there’s only so much that you can deliver in a fast period of time. Like you can’t do the impossible. But keeping in mind people have a strong desire for speed can help you with your offer. So what does this mean for what you sell? One, you continually need to meet your audience where they’re at and speak and give them what they want. And that probably has shifted for your audience in the last six to 12 months. And so if you haven’t connected back to that and what they want, it would be a good time to do that. Two people are no longer, this is a prediction I have, and I’m gonna say, you know, it’s a little bit bold, but I really believe it.
I don’t think people are gonna pay for courses anymore. I think they still are a little bit, and maybe there’s still some industries that, you know, are more behind in the course development, but especially in the B2B space, I don’t think people want that anymore or see the value in it. They are going to pay for the handholding, the support, do it with them. If you can’t do it for them or they can’t afford it yet, that is what people want because that’s gonna get them the results faster. And then three, your offer needs to get people results in the fastest and easiest way possible. And this should always be improving. Like your version of fast and easy today is going to be different than your version of that in six months. And so if you as a business have not shifted your offers in the last six to 12 months, there’s probably an opportunity for you.
I think o on the low end, this is something that businesses need to do every year, but I mean, if you think about any large successful company, they’re always changing how they serve clients. They’re always looking for ways to improve. They’re specifically always looking for how do we get people results faster and easier? And so sometimes in, in, I think the like digital product course space, service space, a lot of people think, okay, once I have my offer, like it’s said, I don’t need to change it. But if you haven’t shifted it in a long time in the last six to 12 months, I bet you if you look deeper and you listen to your audience and your leads and your customers, they would share with you what’s missing and why they’re not buying. So that’s your offer. The second piece I said is your messaging.
And here’s what’s changed a lot in the last six to 12 months as it relates to this. Now, messaging, I talk about this all the time on the podcast, this is the most important part of your marketing. You cannot have good strategy, a good offer good ads, good organic, nothing without your messaging dialed in, because this is how you communicate to your audience and to your leads. This is how you communicate and connect and build relationships and build trust and ultimately get people to buy. So your messaging is every form of communication, written, video, content, all of that is your messaging. And your messaging comes from a deep understanding of your ideal customer. Because if you understand them, then you can speak to them. So here’s what’s changed as it relates to messaging in the last six to 12 months. One, a drastic increase in noise and demand for your audience’s attention.
If you were to look at like a graph of the amount of noise, humans today are bombarded with all day, I’m sure that it would just go up, up, up in the last, you know, five years or even more since technology since social media started, right? It just has gone up and up and up and up. And so as a business, that means the fighting for your audience and your lead’s attention is continually getting more competitive. Number two, surface level language is just completely ignored. Like if you don’t go the next level deep, if you say things like, you know, build your business or get healthy again or whatever, like the, the most surface level thing you can say, it’s just gonna be ignored because it doesn’t stand out. There’s other people out there going deeper and making that connection. Number three, what people used to believe and be drawn to, I see that they often now doubt.
So especially in the B2B space around business and, you know, whatever, building a life of your dreams and having an online business and all the things, a lot of things that people used to be drawn to, they doubt now because of all, I don’t know, it’s probably because of all the bad products out there, the misinformation out there and just the overall abuse in the industry of messaging, right? And so then the people who are really good at getting results and being true to what they say have to suffer because others have ruined it. And so I think that what people used to be like, oh, I really want that. They’re like, I don’t really know if this what this person’s saying is true anymore because I have doubt. And then number four, storytelling content and real life behind the scenes is what builds connections in sales.
So I’ve talked about this before, but with TikTok, with reels, with the way that content has gone, the way that brands, no matter what type of brand you are, e-commerce service, business, physical product, digital product, all of them, the way you build connection is through storytelling. Real life, like showing behind the scenes, connecting with people on that human to human level. Because anything overproduced or scripted or doesn’t come off as like I could just, you know, see you do this in a room with you if I was there. People don’t trust because they’re drawn to that, that type of content that is on TikTok now, and that is on real. It’s like we wanna see the real thing. So here’s also what will continue to change in the coming months with messaging, in my opinion. So this is a prediction I have, but I think that we’re entering a time period where people are actually gonna lessen the volume and the number of brands and people they follow.
This is a prediction. I could be wrong with this, but I, you know, you talk to anybody, they know that social media is not good for them. Like the most people, if you talk about social media, it’s always like, I need to be on it less. I need to scroll less, I need to do this less. Like, I wanna be more present. We know the negative impact that it’s had on us, and I don’t think there’s many people who don’t know that, but yet we do still engage in it. However, I think people are going to lessen the amount of people they follow and go really deep and become more loyal to the few people that they have built that connection with. So that means, and I talked about this, I think it was on my last series, building an audience of people who consistently come back and consume your content.
A newsletter, a podcast videos is going to be the way it is. It’s going to be really valuable because people will do less of the mindless scrolling and then from there connect with someone. They’re gonna choose their people and maybe they’ll add to their people, but I just think they’re gonna go deep with the people that they have deemed are worthy of their attention. Number two, the volume of content and the frequency of changing the wrapping paper is only going to increase. And this is hard for a lot of business owners, but we are in a, in a place where the amount of changing the wrapping paper means, like, you take the same thing. Let’s say it’s a webinar or an offer. You change the title, you add a new bonus, you, you gotta make it sound new. Because my third thing is the effort that must go into new is only going to increase so quickly, is what we put out going to get old and ignored.
And if people are like, oh, I hear this every week, and it becomes templated or it feels way too the same people are gonna ignore it because their attention is being drawn by all the other people who are constantly putting new things out. And this is probably one of the biggest, I wouldn’t say challenges in my marketing, but where the most amount of effort goes in is how do we take the same things? Because I don’t change my offers a lot, I improve my offers, but how do we take the same things and make them sound new and exciting and still stay connected? So what does this mean for your messaging? One every week, every month, every quarter, you should have initiatives for improving your messaging, staying connected to your ideal customer. You’ll probably need to change the wrapping paper on your marketing at least once a quarter.
And a lot of effort should go into new ideas, new angles, how do you come across new and exciting and connect with your audience in that way. So if you’re not consistently coming up with new angles, deeper level ways to connect, fresh wrapping paper, ways to stay top of mind, you are being drowned out. So those are the two things that I think are very critical to pay attention to. As I said, they always have been in marketing, but right now there’s probably a need to make bigger changes than normal with your offer and your messaging. So I took these two things and I made a couple of adjustments to the way that we serve clients. Number one, the offer piece. We’ve always for at a high level, given feedback on somebody’s offer, but even more so in the last few months, I’ve found myself, like I had one client come in and I was straight up like, that offer’s not gonna work like it.
She had a lot of options. And I was like, that’s not gonna work to cold traffic. It’s not, it, it’s gonna work maybe to your warm traffic. Here’s my concern. And we changed the whole strategy and it was very good that we did because the marketing wouldn’t have worked otherwise. But we’ve done a lot of shifting, not necessarily what the offer is and helping develop an offer from the ground, but more so like how it is delivered, the medium it’s delivered, the support within it. Weighing in on, I don’t think that, you know, solves all of their problems. And so the ways that this could look is maybe when you come in to work with us as a client, like we’re catching it in onboarding and we’re like, you know, based on our experience, all the offers we see, the things that are successful that we see, we need to make a change here.
Also, frequently, sometimes you don’t know that the offer is the problem until you get some data, which that data typically looks like you’re getting a lot of leads and no sales, and those leads are engaged and they’re watching the webinar, they’re going through the email sequences, et cetera, and they’re not buying. That’s a like check engine light that your offer is a problem. So we’ll help brainstorm new ideas, new bonuses, new ways to position it, or sometimes it’s completely new offers, sometimes it is not every time. Number three, that can also look like, and this has been for several clients, adding an additional offer. So adding an a higher level offer to get more revenue in or a lower level offer for people who aren’t quite ready. I have found this happening a lot the, like downsell offers, and I think it’s because of the state of the economy.
There’s people who don’t have as big of budgets as they used to, and so having an option for them has become really effective. So this is something that we’ve always helped with, but I have had specific meetings, specific strategy sessions with my team, my account managers and my strategist on the importance of digging deeper on clients’ offers. Because what we’ve seen over the last several months is that your offer is one of the most important parts to a successful marketing strategy. And today, more than ever, is it showing if your offer is not fully dialed in and overall industry and feedback is just showing that we need to shift offers, we need to up-level them, we need to change the way they used to be over the last several years. So on top of looking at the structure and the offer itself, it’s also making sure the way we sell it.
So I had a client who has a great offer and, but it was delivered as like, you come in and you get access to all of this. And she had support in it. It wasn’t just a digital product. And she had all the support in it and it was a great offer, but they come in and they come in for six months. And I was like, but if I’m coming in for six months, I don’t wanna know. I don’t want it to seem like I’m not gonna get my result until six months from now. That’s way too long. So we laid her offer out in this roadmap of like, in your first 30 days, you will accomplish boom, boom, and boom for 60 days, this first 90 days this, and then three to six months this. And so I didn’t actually change her offer, but we changed the way she sold it, we changed the webinar completely, the slides and we laid it out in this way.
So sometimes it’s just the messaging, but that’s tied to somebody being able to grasp that they will get their result faster, right? Number two is the messaging support. And so this is where I had an announcement yesterday and kind of went through what this means for the agency because last month I added a new team member to Team Hirsch. So a completely new role basically added into the mix of supporting clients. And her title is content and messaging strategist. So her only job is ideation and coming up with ideas for clients. And so I was talking about the importance of new fresh, deeper angles. How do we stand out, right? And that comes a lot of times from a lot of creativity and ideation around what’s a, an innovative video we could do? What’s a different angle? How do we stand out? And that, that’s really a lot of energy has to go constantly in that.
And so I’ve always had lead copywriters and designers, and I have my whole creative team, but I wanted someone just responsible for this. And also bringing in support as it relates to content and organic strategy. So her only job is messaging, and what she does is we now have an updated what we are calling a creative direction document. So when clients come in, she is doing a call with them, and then she is going deep on creating their creative direction. Document within that document is some really cool things that we’ve developed that I think are pretty unique. One of them is the client’s unique voice. And what that is, and that sounds easy, but hear me out the other day. I did a podcast this week I think, where I talked about how one of the biggest superpowers you have is leveraging what you naturally do and what probably brought you a little bit of success, but then along the way you might have watered it down or you do less of it because you’ve lost it a little bit, or you’ve tried to follow a different path and you’ve lost it.
Everybody needs a unique voice. For example, mine is the very, like no BS highly disappointed, straight to the point. And the more we bring that into my marketing, the better it does because I’m polarizing to the people who don’t resonate to that, but I’m super attractive to those of you who do. And so she’s now working with our clients to develop this, coming up with messaging angles, both big picture and then if you have, you know, a webinar funnel or a specific product, like specific angles for that. And then the other thing is she’s reviewing every creative asset we put out. So every version of copy, every image, every video, and making sure it digs deep, it stands out, it hits those marks just because it’s an extra set of eyes, because with too, it helps to have multiple people provide that feedback. And then now let’s say like I had a client where we’re like, we really need to dig deep in this industry because it sounds too the same.
We’ve gotta come up with some new things, we’ve gotta get more innovative. So she’s jumping on a call and she’s creating the ideas. She’s jumping on a call first with the client and then bringing the internal team in and saying, here’s our ideas, here’s the inspiration. And then finally she’s supporting with organic and content strategies. So coming in, she will look at organic social media, content ideas, angles, topics, different things that we can talk about, and actually doing an audit of your organic social media, which previously was not something that we supported with. And then clients ongoing, she is able to come in, let’s say you’re doing a live launch, help with the organic strategy. So this has massively up-leveled our messaging support and just the overall ability to have new, deeper ideas and angles. And I’m constantly looking at, okay, you know, what is working, what’s not working, and where is like the biggest need?
And so we found this role actually kind of by accident, but we found this person and I was like, oh, she would be amazing for this. And so we created the role and it’s just been incredible for our clients because it’s meeting the need for new wrapping paper, new ideas, ideation, deep level video copy all of those things, but also helping clients develop their unique voice, unique angles and, and really digging deep with that. And so what this changed in our delivery was an updated creative direction document that has an organic content on it, that unique voice development deep dive into how we’re gonna differentiate you as a brand collaboration on what your angle and strengths is and how to bring that into your messaging. And then depth and detail around graphic direction, video direction. We also do this for every funnel. So it’s not just like a high level, hey, here’s your business messaging, but if you have a specific webinar or a specific product or a live launch coming, that specific thing needs to have its own messaging and then also ongoing.
And so anytime there’s a new funnel, a new offer, we see Costco upper sales go down and we need to change the wrapping paper, we’re able to do that. And, and now we have this role. So really the most powerful thing is having the combination of my funnel strategist who’s getting the funnel and the marketing strategy with a messaging strategist, because those are really two different brains. One is highly strategic in the, in the sense of more logic and step by step and what’s the experience and what’s the marketing strategy. And the other is very creative. And I find those are two different, I’m more so a funnel strategist. I can do a little bit of messaging, but I’m not nearly as creative as the new team member we brought on. But you need both of these to have really deep messaging and really solid strategy to stand out.
And so those are the changes that we made. And I really wanted to share this also so that you guys can reflect and think, okay, how is my offer and my messaging looking and where are my opportunities? And if at all during this you’re like, okay, I think I wanna explore working with Hersh marketing. Now we do have a bonus happening just kind of to celebrate this new team member and the support we’re providing. And so if you get your application in and book a call before May 10th, and then you do end up joining and signing up to work with us in one capacity or another, then you will qualify and get an extra 30 minute call strategy call with our messaging strategist, where you guys will purely focus on organic social media strategy, content strategy and ideation around how do you stand out with your content, with your organic social media how do you create content that’s gonna attract that ideal customer and really stand out from the noise.
And so you’ll get an additional 30 minutes of time that’s just purely a strategy call for that content, but you have to get your application in and your call booked by May 10th, and then you’ll qualify for that if you join the agency. So I hope you guys found today valuable. If you do wanna go and check out our application@helpmystrategy.com, you can do that. You have nothing to lose. Like if you’re on the fence, just go fill out an application chat with our team because at the least we’re gonna tell you what your next steps are. At best, you’re going to figure out how you can partner with us and make massive progress in your marketing quickly. So it’s, it’s a free process. Go through the process. We, we never take on a client, we don’t feel that it’s the right move for their business and we can help them. So help my strategy.com. All right guys, thanks for tuning in. I hope you found this extra episode valuable, and I’ll talk to you next week.
Thanks for listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast.