541: How I Create Every Single Marketing Strategy — The Anti Marketing Hack Series #2
I’m back with day 2 of the Anti Marketing Hack Series, a series where I’m diving deep into the foundational marketing strategies and principles that will always remain constant, no matter how the economy, the industry, or the platforms change. Today, I am sharing with you a secret that I believe is key to creating a successful marketing strategy.
Here’s the thing – marketing strategies should never be a copy-paste replica of someone else’s success. Marketing is all about creating an experience – an experience that captivates your audience, leads them through a series of emotions, and ultimately, turns them into loyal customers. Listen in to learn how you can approach your marketing this way, tackle any challenge, pivot quickly when something isn’t working, and make decisions with clarity.
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Emily Hirsh
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to episode two of our series. Welcome back to the podcast. If you are newly tuning in this week is a little unique because I’m doing a five part series called the Anti Hack Marketing series. And it’s all about the foundational marketing strategies and principles that never will change no matter what happens in the economy, the industry with marketing, with Facebook, with the platforms. It does not matter. I believe that these are foundational components of marketing that will never change and therefore need to be at the root prioritized in your own marketing. So this is episode two of the series and we will have five total that will come out in a row every day. So some bonus episodes on the podcast. All right. So let’s dive into episode two.
This is kind of my, one of my secrets behind how I create every marketing strategy. It’s something I definitely have talked about before on the podcast. But I think it is again at the foundation of never going to change in marketing and that is the importance of creating an experience. So I fell into marketing and very quickly realized it was like exactly where I should be with my skill sets and just my natural ability to look at something. And I have this unique skill to be able to look at a business, look at their offer and create a strategy within minutes. And if you’ve ever gotten on a call with me or seen me in like a Q and A call, been a part of one of our programs where I’m teaching, you’ve probably witnessed this skill. I can have a conversation with someone and they can tell me, you know, their business and what they sell in a couple of details. Like I don’t even need much and I’m like boom, boom, boom, here’s your strategy. I do this all the time and every time I do it, I realized I’m doing exactly the same thing which is focusing on the experience like that is how I am able to do it so quickly is because I focus on how I’m going to create an experience for that business to achieve what we want, which is generating leads and sales. So I look at the ideal customer, I look at where they are, where that ideal customer is in their journey when considering buying. Then I look at the offer we’re trying to get them to buy and I piece together the exact experience they need to go in order to be ready and willing to purchase. And this is where it changes for every business. Because if you are, for example, selling a $100 product, the experience somebody needs to go on is going to be very different than someone who’s going to sign up for a $3000 a month service. Right? Or if you’re selling a physical product for $50 the experience that person needs to go on to say yes to buying is different than somebody who’s going to buy a $1000 product, right? So the offer I take into consideration is the industry. So if you are serving business owners, typically they make decisions faster because they’re like, ok, business expense, money making opportunity, Roy, whereas if you’re serving consumers, they genuine, generally make decisions slower because they it’s not a business expense, it’s usually a personal indulgence or they’re spending money on themselves or a gift, right? And so those things really matter when taking into consideration the experience that you’re trying to create. Because in the B to B example, I could have a shorter customer journey because I know people are going to make decisions faster. Whereas in the B to C example, I need to build in a longer customer journey and more nurturing to accommodate to that person. I also have to consider the person, the business that is trying to create this experience because this is really important. You’re trying to create an experience for your audience and your leads to bring them and turn them into sales. But in order to create the best experience, you also have to take into consideration how you show up best or the face of the brand shows up best, right? Because the way you create that experience is by building the relationship, which we talked about in the last episode and that is going to be best done by you being able to play to your strengths into how you show up differently than other businesses. So let me put that to an example. So I may have a client who is not very great on video, but they can create amazing guides, they can create amazing PDF S and resources for people that are extremely valuable. Well, for them, instead of saying, let’s do a webinar, I’m going to focus on how do we leverage that resource that they could create? Whereas I may have a client who’s amazing on live video and they just show up with the perfect energy and it’s natural to them. Well, maybe we’re going to do a three part series or a live launch that allows them to show up in that way, right, and play to their strengths because that’s how we also build a good relationship. And so the mistake that a lot of people make is their marketing strategy becomes a template or a copy paste replica of somebody else’s strategy. So I see this all the time where either somebody joined a program or a course and somebody was teaching how to do, you know how to set up their marketing, how to implement this strategy and they go replicated. Exactly. And it almost never works unless that person takes the foundation of the template, the foundation of the strategy and makes it their own. And the reason why it almost never works is because one, it wasn’t created for the customer, for their unique customer. It wasn’t created for their offer to be an experience driving to their offer and it wasn’t created with them in mind and what their strengths are. And so you will see people all over, including myself, do a successful marketing promotion and you’ll think, OK, I just need to copy that and I’ll be successful. But really the magic is in the customization. And so back to the experience, I want to hit on this a little bit more because that’s kind of around the customization and the strategy. But when you look at your marketing as an experience, it really helps you make decisions. So instead of looking at a sales funnel or a strategy as this technical overwhelming thing, look at it as literally an experience like you are going to have someone show up at your door and in a certain period of time, you need to turn them into a buyer, right? And so if that happened, what would you do? Like what type of conversations would you have with them? Where would you take them? What would you show them? What would you say to them? That’s the experience you’re trying to create. And so whenever I create a strategy, I put myself in the shoes of the ideal customer. And I think what is the best experience that I would need to create for them in order for them to have the trust and the confidence in purchasing my offer or the offer of the business. I’m creating the strategy for and there’s a lot that goes into an experience, right? So an experience isn’t just you know, do this and then do this and then do these steps. It’s also the way that you speak. It’s the language that you use, it’s your messaging. Think about when you get somebody to feel something or realize something or believe something that they maybe couldn’t see before like you get someone to go. Oh, that is what I’ve been doing wrong this entire time to try and offset my arthritis, for example or oh, that is what I have. You know, I thought I had to do it this way and I just realized this is the path forward. That’s an experience that’s actually more than an experience than just watching a webinar. So I think sometimes when I talk about marketing as an experience, people immediately go to, OK, you know, she’s talking about the steps, the experience is to watch the webinar, read the email, go to the sales page. OK. That’s part of the experience. But I would argue a bigger part of the experience is how are you going to make someone feel? What are you going to get them to realize? Because you can literally create an experience through your content alone that could change someone’s life. That’s the level of impact and possibility. There is out there when you build a business the right way, you could have someone go to your webinar or participate in a challenge or download a lead magnet and never see something the same again. And do you think if you have that impact on somebody and they have that experience engaging with your brand that they are gonna likely become a customer at some point? Absolutely. So the experience is so much more than just the tactical step. It’s the journey you’re going to take your customers, your potential customers, your audience, your leads on and even your customers after they buy, it just continues on as an experience. And so there’s a lot of times that my team and I will be talking about my own marketing or I’m weighing in on a client’s marketing and every single time I make decisions based on the experience, this could be little or big decisions. So for example, when we’re looking at the delivery of our challenge, we just did, well, I’m looking at how would I want to be communicated with about it? How many emails a day? How do we structure them? What is the best experience? What is the best way for people to consume the information to get the most out of the challenge? I’m not following a template. I’m not looking at it and saying, OK, well, this is what the rules are for how you run a challenge. I’m saying, what is the experience I want to create for my leads? And what do I have to do to do that? So when questions come up, I’m gonna, I’m gonna have a bunch of question examples for you. When questions come up like this, these can all be answered through an experience. So questions you may be asking is what funnel should I choose? What should I put on the Thank you page of my funnel? How should I structure my email Marketing? How many emails? How long, what do I say in them? What content should I record for social media? What should my copy be in my funnel or in my emails? How should I set up communication within a funnel? Like how often do I send emails? And you know, I have a live launch like I was just talking about with my challenge, the frequency, the structure, the way you’re communicating. Should you do this or should you do that with your funnel or your strategy? All of those things can literally be answered with you just looking at the experience and you just saying, OK, this is the end result that I’m trying to get someone to from this point to this point in this experience. And this is what I need to do in order to get them there. This is how I need to communicate. And this takes time to flush out, right. You’re doing the heavy lifting work of creating an experience that’s clear and impactful and very easy for somebody to be a part of. And that takes work to flush out. Otherwise, if you don’t put in that work, the experience will likely be overwhelming, confusing and people won’t have those realizations and be able to move from point A to point B. I also look at experiences as there’s multiple. So anything in your marketing, you should be looking at you trying to get someone from one place to the next and that is a complete experience and then they kind of enter into another experience. So those are customer journeys and they should be completed, but you always, no matter what should be leading, should be leading someone from one place to the next. So for example, if you look at your content, not in every single post, maybe that you put out. But in your overall content strategy, there’s probably a point that you’re trying to get people to and it’s probably, or maybe there’s a few of them, but it’s probably a lead magnet or a webinar training or some sort of lead generation. And so your content experience that you’re creating, your customer journey is putting out a lot of content that is within, you know, certain pillars to create this experience, to get people to feel what you want them to feel as they are consuming your content and then leading them to let’s say a webinar, OK, when they get to the webinar, that experience is complete and now a new experience starts now you have from the webinar to where you’re trying to get them to go from that to that webinar, like a sales page or an application page, that is one experience. So from the time they sign up from the webinar to when you are sending them to the next step or they don’t go to the next step, that’s an experience and then they either are going to kind of like split off and they’re going to either buy the thing or take the action you want them to in the webinar or they’re not. And now there’s two experiences, there’s an experience for the people who buy or they take the next action and there’s an experience for people who don’t, right? And so these also could be considered funnels or customer journeys. But what you need to remember is number one in every experience in your marketing, it should be trying to go from point A to point B. You need to be clear on what those points are in order to be clear what the experience you need to create is number two, once they get to that point B and they accomplish what you wanted them to. A new experience starts. And so you got to flush that experience out and it just continues and you’re gonna end up having, it sounds more overwhelming than it is because these already exist for you guys. Some of you just have a really bad experience, you know, set up because it’s not intentional. Some of you have half of these in place and you don’t have others, right? So all of those questions that come up in your marketing around, what should I do? What should I put on the page? What should I write in the emails? How many emails, how do I time them can literally be answered by pausing, putting yourself in the shoes of the person that you want to go through this experience and considering that experience that you’re trying to create and that usually gives you the answer and it sounds so simple, but that’s literally how I create most of the marketing strategies and answer most of the questions. I’m going to give you an example. So I was just doing a VIP day with a client and she’s very new like this, this person bought a VIP day and she’s, she doesn’t even have her, her product all the way down. She’s like sold a business, it’s coming into another business. And so we’re starting from the ground up. And she had previously sent me a list of ideas for her lead magnet. And within minutes of getting on the call, I was like, you know, boom, boom, boom. This is what we need to do. This is what I’m thinking. And she was like, whoa, you just, you just in five minutes said everything that’s been in my head for months. But one of the things that came up was all of her lead magnet ideas made an assumption that her ideal customer had already accomplished something. And it doesn’t really matter what it is, it was that they had already hired a nanny, but it doesn’t really matter what it is. But what I saw instantly was I was like, well, if we use those lead magnets and those topic ideas as our lead generation, we are creating an experience where all the people who haven’t made that decision and, and had that accomplishment yet won’t be included in this. And that’s not in alignment with their ideal customer, her ideal customer. And she was like, well, I never thought of that. Right. And I was able to think of that in minutes because I thought of the experience. If I was someone following her, I already knew who her ideal customer was. And if I was following her and I saw her content that she was putting out, I was going to be someone who maybe hadn’t made the decision yet to hire a nanny. And so then having lean magnets that are all about like tasks, you can give your nanny or,, you know, ways to hire them. And, and like, assuming that they already had a nanny basically was her list. Well, that’s not going to create the best experience that’s going to exclude a lot of people in my audience. And so then we were able to come up with what the lead magnet should be based on who the ideal customer is and the experience we want to create. So looking into the behind the scenes of how we do this for clients, this is ingrained in every client’s custom strategy also. And this is how we can pivot very quickly when something isn’t working because we’re instantly looking at it through the perspective of the experience and what’s missing. So for example, if you have leads coming into a funnel, coming into a webinar and they’re not buying or you have leads going to a sales page for a physical product and they aren’t buying. The first thing I do is go to the place where somebody isn’t taking action and look at two things. What happened before that point and what’s happening at that point? And where do we have a gap in our experience? And remember experience also means messaging. So are we overwhelming them on the webinar? Are we not clear enough with the product? Are we not clear enough stating the desires and the results and how they’re going to achieve their desired result with the product. We need to improve that. When we look at the sales page for the, for the physical product. Well, what was the ad that they saw before? Did it confuse them? Is it misrepresenting? What’s on the page? Is there a disconnect? Do we need to improve the copy? Do we need to show the value more? And then that gives us action items that we can go implement to solve the problem? So this is also how if, if something isn’t working, which oftentimes in marketing is your experience where you have something that is working or is working a little bit, but you have to optimize it more often than not, that is going to be the experience with marketing than just launching a strategy and everything works. That is extremely rare that that happens. So this can tie into the actual strategy. But again, it’s also within the messaging because an experience is how you’re getting someone to feel. I would say it’s more so that right? Because when you think about experiences in your life that you remembered, are they things you did or are they things that you felt while you were doing something? I can pretty much guarantee it’s the latter. So why do we make it different in our marketing? Everything comes down to that, the emotions and the feelings because that’s how humans take action and why, you know why they do things. Ok. So sometimes your experience might need shifting or redirecting. If you, you don’t currently have an experience that’s lining somebody up to be ready and willing to do. The next thing you want them to do in that experience, which often time is purchase your offer. But remember every point in your marketing, you may have an experience that’s getting them to purchase the offer, but it might start with content to lead generation and then lead generation to webinar and then webinar to book a call and then book a call to buying, right? And that’s like five experiences right there and five journeys and, and you’ve got to create that and look at the experience you’re creating how you’re making people feel in ways that you could improve that. So for clients, this is not only how we create their strategies, very custom, but I would almost argue even more importantly, it’s how we pivot instantly because you don’t always know until you get the feedback from the people going through the experience, right? When you get someone going through an experience and they’re saying, and very clearly not taking action, that’s them telling you the experience isn’t hitting for me. I don’t feel that I need to take the next action for whatever reason. I either don’t feel the pain enough or I don’t see the desire, I don’t see the fact that I could achieve my desire enough. And so then therefore they’re not taking the action. So the opportunity is where can you go and solve that and improve the experience? And so the next time you’re sitting there going, OK? Should I do this or should I do that or what should I put on my thank you page or how many emails should I send? Because that’s where all the overwhelm comes in with marketing, right? All the options, all the things you could be doing. What platform should I be on? How many times a week should I post on social media? Should I be on Twitter? Just come back to? What am I? What’s the why? What am I trying to do with this thing? Content, webinar, email, marketing, whatever question you’re asking about. What am I trying to accomplish with this and what experience? What do I need to do within that experience to get them to the next place I want them to go and usually that will answer your question at least to test something, see how it works and adjust the experience. OK. So creating an experience is at the root of all of your marketing strategies. And remember that an experience isn’t just the actual to do that you want someone to do. It’s also the way you speak to them, the way you’re able to get them to see things and how they ultimately feel because that’s going to lead to them either taking action or not taking action. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening to episode two. I’ll be back tomorrow with episode three of the anti hack marketing series and I am excited. Tomorrow is definitely a good one. These are all so good. Like these are all. If we can just remember all of these, all of you guys will crush your marketing because they’re so simple. But yet so many of us lose track of this in the noise and the stimulus that’s trying to pull us away with. You got to do this and you got to do this and you got to do this and you got to stay focused on what you know, works and what is important and avoid the hacks and the overnight fixes and the things that a lot of marketers out there try to promise you. And I’m like, nope, ignore all that and let’s create your success for your business, which is unique, needs customization. But these things will be true. Now they were true 20 years ago. They’ll be true in 50 years. I promise you that. All right, everybody talk to you tomorrow.