515: I Made This Mistake In My Own Marketing & It Cost Me Big Time
In today’s episode, I’m sharing a mistake I made in my own marketing and how it cost me big time. Consistency is crucial for effective marketing strategies. Instead of pausing marketing efforts, I’ve got some great recommendations that can help meet your audience’s needs.
Listen in as I discuss the benefits of consistent marketing initiatives and some repercussions that I learned from my own mistake.
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Emily Hirsh:
You know, when you do those things, when you’re an expert in a specific industry and you know, on a specific subject matter for me, obviously it’s marketing and you make a mistake and then you’re like, why did I do that? I know better because I eat, live, breathe this, right? So this is a mistake that I made in April.
You were listening to the Not for Lazy Marketers Podcast, episode number 515.
Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a great week. I am excited to share this episode with you because I always love when I teach myself a lesson and I’m like, I know better. You know, when you do those things, when you’re an expert in a specific industry and you know, on a specific subject matter for me, obviously it’s marketing and you make a mistake and then you’re like, why did I do that? I know better because I eat, live, breathe this, right? So this is a mistake that I made in April and I wanna share it with you guys. I actually did share it lightly on the podcast maybe like three weeks ago, but I wanted to do a specific podcast episode on it because I think it’s really important, especially with summer coming up. And so I wanna talk about that.
And so the big mistake is pausing your marketing, pausing your energy and effort and resources, going to your marketing, and actually generating an audience and leads. And so I’m gonna give you guys the backstory. So we had a big launch in March and we sold people into our new offer Launch Your Funnel Live. And so after that launch, which was a huge deal, we also had to deliver it. And so I was also gonna be on two different trips back to back. So two weeks, like half of April, I was gonna be gone. And my marketing team was like, Emily, we really need some time to catch up. Like we wanna catch up on these funnels that we have had on our list to fix. And we’ve been running traffic to them to generate leads, but we have all these ideas of what we wanna do on the email sequences and da da da.
And so we made the decision intentionally at the end of March to stop and pause basically our marketing. So we kept on my visibility ads, but we shut off all our lead generation ads and we basically paused, like I even missed a few podcasts, which was because of my travel, but I never do that. And we really slowed down, like we still post a little bit on social media, but we didn’t have our normal efforts on generating new audiences, new people and new leads. And we knew going into this, that that was obviously to slow down leads in sales, but I don’t think I knew how much. And my business was fine, but this was a really good lesson. And so this is what I ended up telling my team that month later on was I said, you know, we tried not having something going.
We tried, like being able to not have a live experience or a live launch happening in a month, or even if it’s me doing a podcast series on the podcast that’s something that we get to do to reignite our audience and to bring people into our world. And we actually stopped all of our ads and now we know the result of that because immediately, almost after doing that, everything just slowed down leads. It was kind of obvious that that was going to happen because we obviously shut off our lead generation funnels and ads is the primary way that I bring leads into my business. But also applications slowed way down. Like we probably had less than half the amount of applications that we had in March. And the interesting thing about this is in March we didn’t do a live launch that was specific for generating applications because we were selling Launcher Funnel Live, which is a program.
And I sold that straight on a webinar. And my takeaway from this, and I think, you know, just proves what I already knew to be true, which is when you are running ads, people see your ads in the feed and they may not take the action that the ad is telling them to take, but it’s serving as a reminder as you as a business. And so I know for a fact when we run ads, even if the ads are not directly for a funnel or a call to action to say, Hey, go to our application to work with us as an agency, it brings us more application because our visibility is higher because we’re in the, I’m in the feed. More people see me more, and I’ve talked about this many times, but people need probably 40 plus touchpoints with your brand before they buy.
And I define a touchpoint as simple as somebody scrolling Instagram and seeing your ad, not clicking on it, but even seeing it, watching your story is a touchpoint. Seeing your email and not even opening it is a touchpoint because it’s microsecond, it’s a microsecond of real estate in their mind, which is building trust because you are staying consistent. And so running ads, obviously you want the direct return on ads spent from those ads, and you wanna see the funnel working, but understanding that the underlying in addition to that benefit to your business is the constant visibility. And I’ve had this proven true with clients too, where they’re like, I know that all the sales coming through this funnel that we can directly attribute back to ads is not all the sales that ads are bringing us because if we turn the ads off or we lower our budget, our sales go down.
And so I knew this, but it was just proof of why you can’t afford to do this in your business. So I think there are times where this can be intentional, like I did wanna slow down our delivery a little bit because we had signed 13 clients the month before. And so it was intentional that I did this, but it was also a lesson of like, Ooh, if that wasn’t intentional and I didn’t wanna do that, I can’t do that, I can’t afford to do that. And so the important thing here is understanding that if you want your business to grow, you need to have constant initiatives and effort and resources going into consistently growing your audience and your leads. And that is what will grow your sales. And one of the best ways to do that, in my opinion, is paid ads because you can get the traction that you could get in a week that would take you months on organic social media because of paid ads.
Obviously it depends on the budget that you spend, but it just amplifies your reach and the visibility and the traction your business will get. Now obviously you wanna have something strategic to run the paid ads too. You can’t just throw spaghetti at the wall and guess, but this is a great strategy. So for you guys, this takeaway is looking at your business and asking yourself, do I have efforts and initiatives going into this next month, you know, coming up this month right now that are going to guarantee my audience and my leads grows with ideal customers? And how do we grow your audience and leads with ideal customers? Number one, strategic content created exactly for your ideal customer. Number two, a lead generation strategy. Something, a funnel where you are generating leads ideally every single day for your business. And those things have to be created for you then to take it to organic social media and take it to ads.
But if you don’t have this going, your business is likely going backwards versus growing because we’re all constantly losing leads and followers. People will become disengaged with our brand, people will unsubscribe, people will stop following us, whatever. And so we have to replace that. And then some in order to be growing, I want to make sure you guys understand you have to have the foundation for this to happen. But if you’re not prioritizing right now, like if right now you don’t have a consistent lead generation funnel or a consistent lead generation strategy and you’re not prioritizing getting that in place to then get traffic into that, that should be one of your number one priorities. If you don’t have a content strategy and a way to consistently show up for your audience and build that audience, that should be your priority. Those two things should be happening every day, ideally for your business to grow.
And I also wanted to share this kind of underlying benefit of ads. And I am absolutely not just saying this like, because I run ads and being like, Hey, you guys should run ads. The reason I love ads so much is because to me, with the right foundations and the right strategy in place, it is the fastest path to growing your business and and gaining more audience and leads because you have so much more control at the pace at which you reach people than you do organically, especially when you have that right foundation. I mean, if you’re looking at like, okay, you create a lead generation funnel and it’s done now and you go launch it well on social media, maybe you’ll get a handful of people in. It depends on your following, but you run ads to it and you could get a hundred people in a week easily, like with not even that much ad budget.
And so that’s a huge benefit to your business for the pace at which you want it to grow. And the big takeaway from this though is consistency and understanding that if you decide, hey, we’re gonna pause marketing or we’re not going to have efforts around our marketing, around growing new leads and generating new sales, then at least understand the repercussions of that. Now the other interesting thing with this is there’s like an immediate repercussion, and then if you do this month over month, you will feel it in the months to come. So you might like sometimes people experience where they turn their marketing off or they slow it way down and initially it doesn’t change anything for them, they’re still able to generate leads and generate sales, and they’re like, oh, well that’s great. Like, I’m able to do less to my marketing and get more.
But three to six months down the line, things start to slow way down and they’re like, what’s going on? You know, and they can’t figure it out. And almost every time this happens, I’m able to go in and see that in order to convert their customers, their customers have to hang out usually for that length of time. Like it’s usually like, okay, we stopped our marketing about three months ago, but it’s been fine that whole time and now it’s slowed down. Well, likely the average amount of time that someone takes before they buy from that brand is three to four months. And so they stopped their marketing three months ago and it’s hitting them now and it’s impacting them now. And how long do you think it’s gonna take to recoup and get back to where they were three months ago? And so this also happens to businesses where maybe it’s like it’s the end of the year, it’s the holidays or the summer, and we’re gonna talk about the summer in a second.
They make the decision to slow down their marketing stop efforts, pause ads or turn ads off or lower their budget. And at first they’re fine and they’re like, okay, well that’s great. Maybe we should do this. Always three to six months down the line, they have a way slowdown, if not halt of sales, and they can’t figure out why. That’s also because most people don’t know how long somebody’s on their list before they buy and they, and they don’t know that number. That’s a very important number to know. Average time someone is on your email list before becoming a customer, because that tells you exactly how far out what you do today is going to impact your marketing and when you’ll start to see a return from it. So understanding that then allows you to know, okay, if I stop my marketing today and the average time that someone’s on my list before they buy is two months, I will feel this in two months.
And if I stop my marketing for a month or two, it’s gonna take me that long to catch back up. Let’s talk about the summer for a second. So historically, in a lot of businesses, the summer people call it the summer slump. It happens in my business. Things slow down a little bit and I feel like when that happens, sometimes people think, okay, well I’ll just stop my marketing until the end of summer. Same thing with the holidays. It’ll come around like Thanksgiving and people will be like, okay, I’ll just wait till the New Year’s. I personally think that’s such a mistake. And the reason is because that is more of a reason to do your marketing. Like if you know that naturally sales and business might slow down during a season, then you don’t go, okay, well then we’ll just do nothing like that.
Doesn’t make any sense. Then the answer is, okay, well we have to do more to be able to still create a result. And so I feel that pausing your marketing and your business growth and your efforts in your business for an entire season like summer is like June through August is a huge mistake because then you’re talking, okay, we have September, October, November, and we’re gonna pause again. The most successful businesses do not do that. Do you think like Apple and Amazon and, and these huge businesses that are super successful are like, well, we’ll just stop our marketing for the summer because less people are gonna buy. I don’t know if that’s true for them. Obviously their industry is different, but I was just naming big companies, but even, you know, let’s look at successful companies in our space, click Funnels, Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher, all of those big people that a lot of people look up to.
Do you think they’re pausing their marketing for the summer? Absolutely not. They are increasing, they’re marketing, they are prepping for whatever’s coming next, but they understand if we wanna meet certain goals in the summer, we have to actually dial up our efforts because it oftentimes is a time where things slow down. So one thing that I do and support clients with who potentially struggle with this happening is really try to also shift the messaging. So in the summer, is there a way for you to connect with your ideal customer and your audience in a different way than you would in January and February? Can you capitalize on their experiences and what they’re going through in the summer and actually leverage that to support them more and bring them into your world and your offer and your products than you would at the beginning of the year?
There’s always opportunity. And so the mindset of just, oh, shut it off and pause is sometimes mind blowing to me in such a mistake though, because it will damage your business for the next, not just the time that you pause, but like the next six months. It is even more reason to get even more intentional with your marketing. And if anything, ramp it up to make up for the slower time. And the way that you can make up for the slower time is you ask yourself, why is it a slower time? What are people going through? Are they going on vacation? Are they home with their kids? Do they have less time? Like, what is it that your audience is going through that makes it a slower time? And then how do you adapt your messaging and your strategy to meet people where they are at based on that so that you can still get sales as a business?
It is definitely normal to have busier times, busier seasons in a business and like a cyclical cycle like that. However, you cannot have entire seasons where you don’t have good months. Your business really can’t afford that. Very few can. And so you have to take action to stop that from happening. And so I would start thinking for sure now, I mean somehow June is around the corner, which is crazy, but usually like July and August are the worst for a lot of businesses, and likely it is because people are traveling more, their kids are home, they have less time. Like that’s a very common reason. And so ask yourself, how can I serve my audience during that time? How do I make things easier for them? How do I give them an incentive or a reason why they should take whatever the action is related to what you sell?
And how do I connect with them based on the experiences they’re going through? And then how do I make sure my business stays consistent during that time? Now obviously if your goal is I wanna not work in the summer or whatever your goal is, number one, some people have the ability to do that because they have a team. Like, I could do that, I could take a whole month off in the summer and my business would be fine, which is a gift that I’ve worked very hard to get to that place. Or if you feel like, well, I don’t care if my business slows down and I don’t make revenue, then that’s a choice you’re making. But don’t then question why your business is struggling come October, November. Because if you pause for months and months, three months, two months in the middle of the year, you will feel it for the next four to six months.
I promise you, because I’ve seen it happen many times. There’s always an excuse on why something won’t work. And to me, that’s just a reason to say, well, how do we make it work? Because it’s not an option. Same thing with the idea of a recession. It’s like winners win in a recession and losers lose because winners look at situations and say, okay, this is gonna be more challenging, or we’re gonna be up against X, Y, Z. How are we gonna make sure it works? What are we gonna do more of? Where do we need to put more energy? Where do we need to push the gas down a little bit harder to get to that success? And that’s how I operate my business and how I keep it successful all year round. All right you guys. So this is just mostly to bring awareness to your marketing and if you’re like, shoot, I don’t have my stuff together for the summer and I don’t have a consistent strategy, then I would go to help my strategy.com and chat with our team.
It is completely free to talk with us to kind of analyze where your business is at right now, what makes the most sense. We are going to be announcing something really soon that will give you guys an opportunity to work with our team in a done with you slash done for you capacity that is more accessible than our elite program. So, or our elite offer. So if you are somebody listening to this going shoot, I don’t have consistent lead generation, consistent audience building, consistent sales happening, and summer is coming, I mean, it’s almost here. I would book that call help my strategy.com and let’s chat and just see what makes the most sense for your business. 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 help my strategy.com and see if you qualify for a free strategy audit with Team Hirsh.