In this episode, I’m sharing five powerful strategies that you can implement right now to improve your marketing game. These tactics are all about creating better experiences for your audience, understanding the importance of foundational marketing principles, and finding ways to make your content stand out.
I’ll walk you through each strategy and provide examples of how you can apply them to your own business. We’ll explore the concept of creating a captivating experience within your content and lead generation, how to define and enhance the emotions you want your audience to feel, and the importance of regularly reviewing and optimizing your marketing sequences. I’ll also share insights on leveraging social platforms effectively and the power of messaging and positioning in your marketing efforts.
If you’re ready to take your marketing to the next level and achieve incredible results, then this episode is for you.
Listen now to discover how implementing these strategies can transform your marketing approach and ultimately drive more leads and sales for your business.
Key Points:
- Create Better Experiences within Your Marketing:
- Define the experience you want your audience to have when they interact with each piece of your content.
- Evaluate and improve your Instagram, email sequences, webinars, sales pages, and other lead generation resources.
- Be intentional with your content and ensure it aligns with the desired experience you want your audience to have.
- Prioritize Relationships with Your Ideal Customers:
- Build a deep and evolving connection with your target audience.
- Understand their pain points and provide valuable solutions.
- Continuously engage and nurture your customer relationships for long-term success.
- Adjust and Pivot Your Marketing Strategies:
- Stay adaptable and open to change as the marketing landscape evolves.
- Regularly assess your strategies and make necessary adjustments to stay ahead of the competition.
- Embrace new opportunities and technologies that can enhance your marketing efforts.
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Emily Hirsh:
Hello, everybody! Welcome back to the podcast. Happy Thursday! I am in my birthday week. This year, I’m turning twenty-nine, my last year of my twenties, which is like crazy because, on one hand, I can’t believe that I’m still in my twenties. You know, with the life that I live, I definitely skipped over some steps of early twenties that a lot of people experience. On the other hand, I’m going to be thirty next year, and, to me, that sounds so old. I know, whenever I say that, most of my friends are in their thirties and forties, and they’re like, ‘Just stop.’ But I just feel like there’s a pivotal thing when you hit 30. In my twenties, it’s like, ‘Oh, it’s so awesome, I’ve done X, Y, Z, and I’m only 28,’ and now it’s like, ‘Well, I better achieve some things this next year before I turn 30.’ I don’t know. Anyways, this year I’m really excited for my birthday.
I have been doing this ritual since I got back from Costa Rica where, in Costa Rica, we pulled rocks. They have words on them, and we pulled rocks every morning. Like, we would meditate, and we’d pull a rock, and it’d have a word. Then we get to share what that word means for us that day, based on what we’re talking about that day. I loved it so much that I bought the rocks that have the words on them and this little cute moon tray. My husband and I have them in our room. So every morning, I pick a rock. There’s a point to this story, just hang on. It has a word on it, and I love it because I pick it in the morning. I usually do it either right after my meditation or my journaling. Then I drive to CrossFit, and I think about that word. I drive without any music or anything, and I reflect on that word. You can always find a meaning in the word, and I do believe the universe gives me the word that I need.
So, the other day, maybe like a couple of weeks ago, three weeks ago, I pulled the word ‘friends.’ My husband and I, we like to talk about it. It’s a conversation for us, too. We always ask, ‘What does your rock mean for you today?’ It’s an awesome little ritual. I was like, ‘I think I pulled the word ‘friends’ because I want to have a party for my birthday.’ So that was maybe three or four weeks ago. I’ve only been back from Costa Rica for three weeks. So it was soon after I got back. I haven’t had a party since I was—I can’t remember. I’m thinking that maybe when I turned 16, I did something fun like a party. But I actually can’t remember. I don’t really have those friends anymore.
Anyways, I have been very intentional this year about building friendships. So we’re having a party. We’re having a pretty big party. Everybody said yes. I think there are going to be about 40 people coming to our house this weekend. Then my husband’s taking me on a surprise trip next week. I was fully deciding to be in my feminine, receiving, not planning or controlling anything about the party and the trip next week. So I don’t even know where we’re going. I know nothing, and I’m just surrendering and trusting it’s going to be amazing because it is going to be amazing. That is that, and I think this birthday in this next year is going to be a pretty incredible one. This last year was really incredible. I have grown a lot this year. It’s been a good year.
Today, I wanted to give you guys some tactical advice and things that you could go implement. I always try to balance in my podcast giving conceptual ideas that you can take in any way that makes sense for you, and also giving you 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 1, 2, 3 steps to go do this, this, and this. These are five things that all of you can take right now and see what ideas or inspiration you get from them and go and improve your marketing. Some of you, one of them is going to be like, ‘Oh, that’s the thing,’ and some of you, another thing is going to speak to you in that way.
I’d encourage you as I go through these five things, don’t try to execute ideas from all of them. Pick what’s going to make the biggest difference and what stands out to you the most based on your business, where you’re at in your business, what you’re focusing on, and all those things. Okay, let’s dive into them. These are five things you can do right now to improve your marketing. A lot of it’s bringing awareness to marketing principles and strategies that are foundational in your business. But I think we need that awareness very often.
The first thing on this list is to create better experiences within your content and your lead generation. I have done solo podcast episodes just on this topic about the importance of creating an experience with your marketing. I believe that is what marketing is. It is creating an experience for someone to go through a journey and go from one action to the next that you want them to take. So it usually starts with your content and then it moves into lead generation and then from there, nurture and convert. So when you look at your Instagram profile, for example, or you look at your email sequence or your webinar or your challenge or your lead generation PDF download or your sales page, all of those things are experiences. During those things, you want somebody to feel something. You want somebody to get clarity, to have an understanding, to build trust, to now know they need more support, to open up the space for your offer. So, looking at all the areas where you have an experience happening, whether you’ve been intentional with it or not, and asking yourself, ‘How could I improve it?’ and maybe just taking one area. Maybe you’re just like, ‘Okay, this month I’m going to focus on my organic marketing.’ Look at your Instagram and really define what do I actually want that experience to be? What do I want that experience to feel like when someone lands on my Instagram or my Facebook or my Pinterest or whatever social platform you use? Define how you want them to feel.
I’m actually launching a Youtube channel soon. I went through this process. I got out a huge piece of paper, and I was like, ‘How do I want people to feel when they’re watching my Youtube videos?’ What are the emotions? What do I want that experience to be? Because if we can be intentional with this, we can follow it up with strategies and content and topics that are all in alignment with that definition. The same thing with an email sequence. If you haven’t looked at it in a while, look at the sequence, look at the regular emails you’re sending out, and ask yourself, ‘What’s the experience I’m trying to create?’ Define what that is, and then see where there’s a gap in what you’re trying to create. So that’s the first thing. There’s a lot of places that you can improve the experience of your marketing, so choose the most impactful one or choose one that you haven’t looked at in a really long time.
The second strategy or thing is focusing on relationships. This one is so simple, but I find myself in situations where people are maybe having a hard time with their marketing. They’re getting leads but not getting sales, or maybe they’re not even getting leads, not getting traction. Oftentimes, the answer to get over that short-term hump isn’t focusing on relationships, and this can manifest in many different ways. This could mean focusing on the relationship with your audience, your followers, your content consumers. This could mean focusing on the relationship with your leads, this could mean literally focusing on relationships and connections that you have to leverage your business and get more people in front of and eyes on your business without having to spend marketing dollars yet, because you don’t have an ad spend. At the core of it, business and marketing are really about relationships. So when you focus on how you can show up as the better half of the relationship, your marketing will just improve. Or if you don’t make a lot of effort around relationships in your marketing and your business, look at how you could make the time to do that. This is something I’ve had to work on because I have previously struggled with making time for networking or strategic relationships, especially when you’re remote, you have to make an effort. To me, one of the worst things is wasting time, and I used to label spending time on relationships as a waste of time, even though it’s not. I’ve had to be really intentional with this, really building strategic relationships from an authentic place. Not just, ‘Let me build this relationship so they can do something for me,’ but trying to make an effort to build relationships that could potentially serve them and serve me. Whatever comes up for you around this, ask yourself, ‘What relationships or relationships should I focus on that would support my marketing and my business growth?’
I do find that there’s a lot of times when business owners don’t have the money yet to invest in ads, but if they got a few sales, they could probably invest in ads, reinvest it back in their business. My answer in that situation is, ‘How can you do some networking?’ Get into a community, whether it’s virtual or in-person. There’s so much power in that, and it takes time and effort, but if that’s the resource you have to put into your business, you need to be leveraging it. So focus on those relationships. How can you improve them, and it could be a single area, maybe just focus on a few relationships or the relationship with your leads. What comes up around that? How do you nurture them more, build trust with them more, serve them more without strings attached, and make those shifts in your marketing so that those relationships are strengthened? That’s number three out of five.
This one is like we can all do this. We can all put energy and effort into this, and it will always pay off: deepening your connection with your audience, leads, and customers by making an effort to understand them better so you can serve them better. If it’s been a little while since you’ve intentionally connected back to your audience, leads, or customers’ pain, frustration, or desires, or you’ve never done this, or it’s been a little while since you’ve done it, this is a great time to do that because the more you can understand and connect with their pain, frustration, and desires, the more you can serve them. The more you can speak to them about those emotions, present your lead generation, offer, or content as a solution. You can’t present these things as a solution if you can’t connect on those things. So an action you can take is, if you’ve felt disconnected from your audience, leads, or customers, set up a Zoom call where it’s like ‘Ask Me Anything’ connection time. Spend an hour, let them ask you anything they want to ask. Obviously, you have to have an audience to do that, but it could be with your customers, your audience. This is something I started doing for all our clients about every other month.
We don’t even advertise that we do this, but I enjoy the connection so much that I started offering free one-hour Q&A for our essential, done-for-you elite clients. They can jump on and ask me anything, hang out time, and it allows me to connect with our customers. I do this with our leads on the end of webinars during the Q&A. I do it in my Instagram DMs. I do it by just sitting there and thinking about it. We will do this by about once a quarter, pulling up all our applications we get for our customers and looking at their answers to the questions around their biggest struggle and their biggest desires with their marketing. To make sure we’re still connected to those things in our marketing because that’s the root of it.
Okay, the fourth thing that you can do this week, that you can shift, that you can change to get results, is making sure you have one big goal defined and that you’re focused on that goal. It’s so easy with marketing to get overwhelmed because you have so many components, and if you’re trying to do it all by yourself, it’s very easy to scatter your focus. Have multiple funnels, multiple offers, content strategy, new platforms, all the things. I would define, for about a 90-day period, one big goal. Is it a sales goal on one of your core offers, launching a new offer, launching a YouTube channel or a content channel, growing your list to a certain number? What is that one big goal? Then I would take inventory of where your energy and resources, meaning time, your time or your team’s time, are going right now. Is it moving the needle for that one big goal? If you haven’t looked at it in a while or you don’t even have one big goal defined, those things are going to impact the momentum. So, clarifying and focusing on one big goal for about a 90-day period, then taking inventory of your energy, time, resources, and money you’re putting into your marketing and making sure it’s moving the needle for that one big goal. If you have something that’s going to move the needle more, pivot to focus on that, and make sure you have initiatives to do that because there’s never going to be a shortage of things that you could do.
There will never be a shortage of ideas, a shortage of initiatives you could take. But there’s always a shortage of time, so be really critical with how you’re spending your time, your money, making sure it’s supporting that big goal. That alone could shift the trajectory of how successful you are and how much progress you’re making. Okay, the last one goes a little bit with my last podcast episode and the new Emily, but I think it’s really important, and I haven’t talked about it enough. This is like one of the most important things. If you do the previous one where you take inventory of your time and energy, actually look at it and analyze it. You say, ‘Okay, where am I actually spending my time?’ So many of us have the experience of, ‘Oh, we started our day, the day is over, do it again tomorrow. What did we even do? I don’t know. A million things. Everything flew by, it was crazy.’ But when you take inventory of it and then look at it and say, ‘Okay, how much of what I am doing do I love, and how much feels easy?’ If you love what you’re doing, that will come through in your work. It’s not just about, ‘Every second of every day is going to be easy.’ But even when you have challenges, and you put yourself into a place where you’re doing what you love, it won’t feel like a challenge, it will feel doable. You’ll feel excited to tackle it. That’s how I often feel in business. I’m faced with challenges, but because I get to do what I love and serve who I love and make an impact, I don’t mind facing those challenges. I want to overcome them so that I can continue serving.
So figure out where you feel that joy and that ease and that satisfaction, and where you’re in that place where it doesn’t feel like work. Try to do more of that. Even when you have challenges, and you put yourself into a place where you’re doing what you love, it won’t feel like a challenge, it will feel doable. You’ll feel excited to tackle it. That’s how I often feel in business. I’m faced with challenges, but because I get to do what I love and serve who I love and make an impact, I don’t mind facing those challenges. I want to overcome them so that I can continue serving. Figure out where you feel that joy and that ease and that satisfaction, and where you’re in that place where it doesn’t feel like work. Try to do more of that. I’m not saying every second of every day is going to be easy. That’s not what I’m saying. But even when you have challenges and you put yourself into a place where you’re doing what you love, it won’t feel like a challenge. It will feel doable, and you’ll feel excited to tackle it.
So those are the five areas you can focus on. My intention for you listening to this is to come up with a couple of ideas and takeaways and go implement them. There’s probably one of these five things, or maybe two of them, that really speak to you strongly, and you’re like, ‘Oh, if I do that, it will make a really big difference for me.’ That’s the thing you want to focus on, not every one of them, but the one that really was like, ‘I needed to hear that today.’ Take that and go take action with it. Everyone, have a beautiful rest of your week, an amazing weekend, and I’ll talk to you guys next week.