546: My Take On DM Marketing Strategies
In today’s episode, I’m diving headfirst into the world of DM strategies—the art of direct messaging to grow your business organically. Now, I’m not talking about the infamous spammy cold traffic DMs that many of us have encountered and swiftly ignored. Instead, I’m focusing on a particular approach that involves reaching out to individuals who’ve joined your Facebook group or shown interest in your lead magnets. This method is often hailed as a potential goldmine for engaging potential clients and sparking fruitful conversations.
I’m here to present a different perspective. One that suggests that the time and effort poured into these DM strategies might not always yield the desired results. Whether you’re a firm believer in DM strategies or you’re open to exploring a new approach, I invite you to join me and listen in with an open mind.
_______________________
Ways I can support:
[Free] Receive a weekly behind-the-scenes look at what is getting our clients’ insane results: https://www.notforlazymarketers.com/newsletter
Looking for Hirsh to support your marketing and help you scale faster? http://helpmystrategy.com
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
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I am coming at you from Wyoming. I’m everywhere these days. We’re having such a great summer but busy, busy with fun and work, but I have been working less than I usually do and it’s just such a, a real sign of the growth that I’ve had with my team that I’m able to do this and just from across every department, from marketing to our delivery, both in our done for you and essential and just the, the team that we’ve built, we’ve probably been working really hard for the last 6 to 8 months on recruiting and hiring and being relentless with the people that we bring on the team and the quality and the value match. And, it’s been a lot of work and a lot of sometimes feeling defeated because we couldn’t, you know, find the people and, and as fast as we wanted to match our growth, but we’re still hiring and the team that we have now I get on my huddle every day and I’m just absolutely in awe of what we’re accomplishing of the people and if you are building a team. My one piece of advice, if I could give you one piece of advice would be to hire based off of values and understand that you can’t train values, you can’t train someone’s values and what they, you know, how they show up and what’s important to them and not important to them, but you can train skills. And so we hire obviously people who have experience and, you know, or in, in digital marketing, but even more important to me is someone with the right values, the values of proactiveness of speed of over delivering of this not being just a 9 to 5. So anyways, that has paid off tenfold for us, but it’s taken a little time to see it all come together. Yeah, so I had an amazing trip in Alaska. Oh my gosh. If you ever get a chance to go to Alaska, it is beautiful. It’s gonna be hard to top some of my hikes that I did in Alaska anywhere else, but I’m sure I’ll find a way And then I was delayed a day coming home and because of fog delays, we got stuck on our off grid lodge that you can only get out from a bush plane and we couldn’t get out. So we missed our big flight in Anchorage and so we got home and we had a two day turnaround and we took the whole family and my nanny and we’re now in Wyoming for two weeks and then California after that because, no, thank you on the Texas heat. If you’ve seen, if you live in Texas or you see the weather, I think they’re at 30 consecutive days of over 100 degrees, like ridiculous. so I’m enjoying my 50 degrees in the morning, 70 degrees in the afternoon, hiking in the Grand Tetons with a beautiful cabin and I’ve been working like half and half days on a plane. It’s been really fun.
So, all right, today’s podcast episode, I’ve had it on this list. I have things that come to me randomly and this is one of them. And this, this may upset some people, but I want to talk about the DM strategies and my take on them because I’ve tested these out myself. And I recently had a friend test this out trying to grow their business organically only without ads to start. And it was kind of like an experiment. And so I was just behind the scenes, kind of seeing the results of that. And this is my take on them. I don’t think they’re a good strategy. Here’s why. So I’m talking about not like Spammy Cold Traffic DMs. Obviously, that’s never a good strategy. I’m talking like if you are getting, you know, people who are joining your Facebook group and then you’reDMing all of them and trying to start a conversation or like you’re DMing all of your leads who come in from a certain lead magnet or something. I’m not saying this will never work. I just think that if you take into consideration resources and the resource of time that there’s a better way to do it. And here’s why I don’t think it works. I don’t think that you are going to get the bang for your buck in terms of the time it takes you to send out all those DMs and then have the conversations because in order to do it right, when someone replies, you have to reply back and have a genuine conversation, it can’t just be like automated. So when somebody does that, it takes a lot of time right? To have these genuine conversations. And yeah, you could probably eventually hire a va to do this, but it’d be pretty hard. I think you have to have someone who could really represent you in the DMs has been my experience, which I have a few people on my team, but very few where I’m comfortable having people just DM as me in private messenger, right? And so the amount of time it takes one sending the DM to back and forth when the people reply. And the thing is when you’re reaching out to people in that way, probably 99% are not gonna be interested in taking the action of buying or filling out an application or booking a call with you. Whereas if you create a marketing strategy and an experience where the people interested in booking a call, filling out an application, buying your product, buying your service, whatever it is, if you create an experience that leads them to that through steps, then they’re saying, yeah, I wanna do this and the chance of converting them is so much higher. So if you think about this from an experience standpoint, if you are messaged, like you’re somewhat interested in a topic, let’s say it’s weight loss and you join a Facebook group because you’re interested in this and you’re messaged, you know, hey, welcome to the group and a conversation has started, you might be interested in what this person sells, but you haven’t even had a chance to check it out. You haven’t taken any action probably on your own in terms of like signing up for a lead magnet or watching a training or just reading posts and exploring more what this person is about. And so therefore you don’t really have trust for them. You don’t really have a desire yet to learn more because you haven’t showcased that. And so the chance of you being like, yeah, sure, I’ll book a call with you and then actually being a quality call is the other piece like because maybe you’ll book a call, but then you’re like, well, I don’t even know you on that call. Like I’m not gonna sign up for your coaching package. It’s just so low. And so the amount of time that it takes to send out DMs have the conversations that come back from the DMs you send out. I just don’t think it’s worth it is kind of my take on this. And I’m saying this from the perspective of I’ve seen a lot of people try it, we’ve tried it and it’s not that again, it’s not that it’s not successful at all. It’s just that it’s so small that it is successful for the time that it takes. Our time is better put elsewhere. Remember everything you say yes to and you commit to and you put time into is a no somewhere else. It is absolutely taken away from something else you could be doing. And so I’ve tested, I’ve had people test it. And so recently I had a friend who’s growing their new coaching business and they wanted to try and do it organically. And so they were advised through another program to basically follow the process of having a Facebook group and messaging everybody who joins that Facebook group, starting conversations and then trying to get those people on to a call to then sell their coaching package. And they did that. And then they also had like a lead generation funnel that they promoted in the Facebook group and now are running ads too after I showed them that, that was way faster. But the comparison of the people who booked calls from the DMs to the people who booked calls who signed up for the lead gen went through the email series, went to the application call page, filled it out, booked to call. It was like double the conversions. They barely, I think they maybe sold like one out of maybe 30 calls from the D MS and then they were selling like 40% of the calls from people with going through the action. And it makes so much sense, right? Because somebody who’s actively saying I’m interested in this, I’m interested in your product or service. I want to buy it. I’m clicking myself, I’m going through the journey and I’m being nurtured, I’m building trust and I’m showing that I have some buy in is going to be way more likely to buy from you than someone who’s like, yeah, sure, I’ll get on a call or just the hundreds of people that you’re gonna DM who don’t reply, who don’t get on calls, who reply once, who ask for free advice. So I think instead of putting your time and your energy into DMs and conversations most of the time now, I do have, I think like two clients who do this and they do it well and they’ve trained their team to do it. But I still would say maybe we explore, you know, it is a different route in the end more successful because again, I’m not saying it’s not gonna work at all. I’m saying the amount of time you spend on it can be better spent on an experience that’s very intentional. And so what do I mean by that? I mean, creating an actual funnel experience, an experience where you go from, sign up for this free offer, this lead gen offer, this lead gen, download this webinar, this workshop, this series, whatever. And you take people from there, you give them an experience, you achieve the result of giving them clarity over what they’re doing. Now, seeing the possibility, seeing the pathway, whatever and creating a gap that your offer now fills for them. Because throughout that experience, you gave them that clarity, you showed them the direction they need to go, you provided value and then you also showed them what else they need, which your offer is gonna naturally fill all throughout that time, you’re also building trust where now somebody has all these touch points with you and they’ve read your emails and they’ve maybe watched you on video and they’ve seen a couple of examples of results that you’ve gotten and things that you’ve done in credibility that you can build. And now they’re offered with, hey, you have this problem and I have an amazing offer that can solve it or an amazing product that can solve it. Here it is. And now they’re actively taking that action to go and buy it and you will get more people, I believe through that. And that can truly be automated. This is why I love ads because you don’t have to be DMing everybody all day and then your DMs and you can have new leads coming onto your list, going through the email sequence, going to the funnel, filling out the application booking calls. I mean, that’s what a good marketing strategy does is it creates that consistency and then with this extra time, you can put it into maybe creating a live launch, creating a new experience, a new wrapping paper, a new bonus for your offer. Extra content to connect with your audience. I want you to think about if you have, you are currently or you’ve considered doing ad M strategy where you message a bunch of leads and you try to have conversations. How much time is that taking and where else could that time be going? Like if you were like, OK, I’m gonna free up the, you know, one hour a day that I spend doing this. So five hours a week, which is on the low side. Honestly, I’m gonna free this up. And where would you put it? And would that place that you put it into creating new content coming up with a bonus for your offer, executing a live launch, building a new funnel. Would that pay off more than putting it into the DMs, my guess is it probably would because there’s so much more consistency, it’s also a better experience and you are definitely gonna have higher quality leads when you execute it this way. My friend who was also doing this D MS was like, I’m literally always on my phone now because I get all these D MS back and I feel like I have to respond right away or they just like, don’t respond to me. And so, you know, 10 hours a day, I have my phone right with me and I’m responding and that’s like a terrible situation for a CEO. Like you do not want to be glued to your phone, responding to DMs in order to get your sales or calls booked or whatever. And so my take on DM strategies are, they can work when done, right? They can work, they can work, they can create conversations. It has to be a lot of time put into it very authentic, creating those conversations, but your time and energy is probably better spent elsewhere. And I have tested this again myself and I’m not saying it didn’t work, it did create good conversations. We’ve even gotten a couple of sales in D MS, but honestly, also the best DM conversations I’ve had are the ones who come to me that’s different. I’m talking about DM outreach where you’re messaging 100 people and trying to start a bunch of conversations. Somebody who DMs you on Instagram or says they want you to send them something because they posted a keyword on your post that is different. That’s them taking an action saying I want more from you. I want that freebie. I wanna book a call. I wanna hear about your offer. You need someone to claim that and say that for them to be a quality lead. Otherwise you’re gonna have a way higher volume of people that you need to talk to before one’s gonna say yes, it’s the same reason why like door to door sales, I don’t know the statistics on it, but I could imagine you’ve got to go to a lot of houses before one person says yes, it’s not a good use of time. D MS are kind of like door to door sales. I’m gonna message a bunch of people and I’m gonna try to start conversations and I’m gonna see where they go if you could put that energy into a more consistent, reliable sales funnel that is bringing in leads every day and taking them through an experience and a journey. And if they want what you offer, whether that’s free or paid, they have to make some micro commitment saying so they’re gonna be more quality leads. So that is my take on DM strategies. I’d love to know what you guys think if you’re proving me wrong and you’re like, oh, I’m spending barely any time and I’m Dming a bunch of people and it’s working great. Tell me, come, tell me on Instagram because I’ve probably had the, you know, 8 to 10 different tests including ours. And as I said, like it can work. It’s not that it doesn’t work. It’s just probably not worth the time and it just increases the volume of how many touch points you need to have with potential people before you get even one quality person. So, all right, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you next week.