Here we take a look at your customer’s journey as a whole as we cover the FIFTH step of The Hirsh Process, which is Scaling and Optimizing. Dive deep into customer data, ad optimization and more. Gain confidence and learn why this step is so important and should not be skipped.
Key Points:
1:27 What you need to know before you spend your next $1,000 on ads
2:47 What we report on every week for our clients and how you can analyze your data to identify the gaps that are costing you money.
4:18 What questions you should be asking as you think about optimization and what it really means to optimize
5:20 The key to scaling – what everyone (you and your ads manager/ agency) needs to know
8:41 The counter-intuitive profit-mindset that you need to have when it comes to ‘wasting money’ on your ads.
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In today’s episode we are going to cover step five or phase five of the Hirsh process, which is scale and optimize. I find that this step is one that many people skip or they never do, and it’s an ongoing step so you will never stop scaling and optimizing your ads if your funnel and your ads are working. I put this as a step because over the three years that I’ve been doing this, I continue to have people come to work with me and my agency and say, “We’re not getting any reports from our ad agency or we never look at our data.” When I asked questions like, “Hey, how much did you spend on this launch and how much did you make?” … You know, I asked pretty basic number questions, people didn’t know what it was. If you don’t do this step then you won’t have the knowledge to say, “Let’s spend 1,000 more dollars” because you won’t feel confident doing it because you won’t know how much money you’ll make from that $1,000.
[00:01:30]
So, scaling and optimizing is obviously two pieces. Scaling and optimizing. So, we are going to look at first optimizing. That means taking the data from steps two and three really in the Hirsh process, which as a reminder, step two is visibility and step three is lead generation. Really step four too, which is sales and making money. You’re going to analyze all of those together and not only look at your ads but look at your sales funnel and your customer journey as a whole and try and find are there any gaps? Are there any places that you need to improve or are you getting positive ROI and should you be scaling?
[00:02:00]
So, for this, here’s what we report on every week for our clients and what we look at. We look at the … Most of the time we’re running lead generation campaigns. So, we look at the cost per lead that we’re paying on our ads. We look at the cost per click that we pay on our ads because right there then you see three things. You see the cost per lead and you see the cost per lead, and you can get the landing page conversion because you can see how many people landed on that webinar landing page for example, and converted. That gives you a chance to look at are there any gaps
[00:02:30]
So, for example, if you’re getting $1 ad clicks and $10 registrations, you have a landing page issue. If you’re getting $6 cost per click and $8 registrations you have an ad issue because your click is too high. So, this immediately allows you to see is there any gaps? Or if there is problems and it’s not converting how you want it to, where do you need to focus? Is it the ad or is it after people click on the ad? So, that’s the first phase of what we look at.
[00:03:30]
Then we look at, from that, sales conversion. So, we’re looking at a few things. One, the percentage of people who convert to a sale. So, if 100 people sign up for a webinar, how many are buying? 1%? 2%? 3%? 5%? We’re looking at that. If we’re running traffic to a webinar we’re looking at the live show up rate. Then we’re looking at the total ROI. Literally we spent this much, we made this much, how much ROI did we see? That’s basically … You know, we customize some of our reporting but that’s basically what we report on every single week for our clients. Every live launch, because that allows you to see on the front end okay, is my ad or landing page … Does it have any issues or am I getting people in no problem? Then on the back end, is my sales conversion low? Is it what I want it to be? Is it making me money? Am I profiting? Am I seeing ROI? Or do I have a gap there? Do I have a gap in my targeting? Is my webinar not converting? Are people not showing up to my webinar? Do I need to test different times?
[00:04:00]
This is where really … When I say optimizing I’m talking about optimizing your funnel and not changing the funnel but making that one funnel, as long as it’s working a little bit and you’re getting some sales, making it perfect. So, this never stops and really if you are running ads you should either be doing or getting, if somebody else is running your ads, a weekly report and then you can compare the data week after week if something changes. Everyone should know how much money do you make for every $1 that you put in because now here’s scaling.
[00:05:00]
So, way too often do I also see people who are like, “Well, I spend $500 on ads and I make $1,000.” I’m like, “Why aren’t you spending $2,000 on ads and making $4,000?” You know? It’s like they’re afraid to spend more of their money but if it’s already proven that it’s making you $2 for every $1 or $3, or $4, or $10 for every $1 that you put in, scale those. I mean, that’s an ATM machine. I once had somebody tell me, “You know, you could go invest in real estate or investments out there, stock market, but can anything make you as much money as investing back in your business does?” I’m like, “Wow, that’s a really good point.” Because when you have a funnel that’s like an ATM machine, you put in $1, you get out $2, or $3, or even $10, why are you not putting more money into that every single day?
[00:05:30]
Now, scaling is definitely an art and it’s not easy. So, my tips on that for you is look at two things. Perfect your funnel on the back end. Don’t go change a bunch of things all the time. Don’t change your webinar title. Don’t change your landing page. Don’t change the times of your webinar unless you’re testing specifically that thing. Don’t even change the way your funnel is set up. Don’t go from webinar to challenge and bounce around because what happens there, is if you continually have a ton of factors on the back end of your funnel, then you actually don’t know what is and isn’t working. So, once you have it proven, really, really analyze that data and say, “Okay, our show up rate is low so we’re going to test a couple different webinar times. We’re going to put ManyChat on the thank you page fro messenger reminders.” Those are minor things that you can then compare, did that help our show up rate? But if you change everything or the whole structure, it’s really hard to see what is and isn’t working.
[00:06:30]
Where you should be putting your effort into constant new things and innovation is on the front end, on the actual Facebook ad creative piece. So, we have clients, depending on what they’re spending … As you scale, you need to have more and more options. So, we have a client who spends about $50,000 a month, which is maybe extreme. If you’re listening to it you’re like, “Wow, I’m never going to spend that money on ads” but he makes about $200,000 a month from his ads that he spends $50,000. He wants to continue to scale. He wants to get to $100,000 by the end of the year.
[00:07:30]
So, what we have to do for him because it’s that massive amount of volume every single day, a big, big daily spend, is almost every week if not more we have one to two new ad creative versions that we have to put out there. It doesn’t mean that we’re shutting off what’s working, it’s because we know the trend that eventually that ad that’s doing it, it will saturate. It’s about a month to maybe two months life span. So, we’re ahead of the game at putting new stuff out there because if we wait and we have to shut something off that had $1,000 a day budget, we’re never going to be able to scale ’cause we’re going to go three steps forward, two steps back. Three steps forward, you know, keep on doing that and barely move forward. So, put your effort into constant new creative and that’s why having an ads team or having a creative team on your side is so essential because that’s where the constant new effort needs to go, especially when it’s time for you to scale.
[00:08:00]
Then finally I want you guys to take this data and I want you to use it, like if you’re doing a live launch you should use it to project and improve your launches with each and every one. I want everyone when they run ads, to not just see it as like, “Well, only if I get the leads how I want to or the sales how I want to, then I was successful.” Even when something doesn’t work you guys, it’s valuable to pay $50 to figure out that that thing didn’t work because you’ll never do that again if you’re looking at the data right. Then you’ll never waste that $50 again, so it wasn’t really a waste.
[00:09:00]
So, I always kind of use this one example because I think it’s a really good one but things like this have happened a lot where … I had a client who launched and the format of the launch was a four or five day challenge then a webinar, open the cart to people who come to the webinar and then eventually turn [inaudible 00:08:34] Evergreen. So, we didn’t open the doors to everybody in the challenge. We only opened the doors to people who … You know, you go on the webinar, you get pitched and then you buy. Well, we spent a ton of money, like $8,000 or something on the front end, on the challenge. On getting people in the challenge. Then the plan was like okay, then they’ll sign up for the webinar. We obviously ran ads to the webinar. What we learned during this was that quickly, people who signed up for the challenge stopped signing up for the webinar. It was like maybe half of the challenge registrants signed up for the webinar. We needed to hit numbers. So, we were like, “We’re going to open the webinar up to cold traffic and bring people in.” When we did that we were getting sales from cold traffic.
[00:09:30]
So, ultimately what we learned was in this case, don’t go and do this for your exact funnel because if you listened to what I was saying in the very first episode about the Hirsh process it’s not cookie cutter strategies. In this case, this audience was able to come in and convert cold traffic on their webinar. Their webinar was really good and they essentially didn’t need the challenge, but we had spent $6,000 to $8,000 on the challenge and the clients were like, “Man, I wish we would’ve known that.” That was ultimately a waste of money. I was like, “You guys, yes it was. We should’ve put all that into the webinar and we would’ve maybe profited more, but had we not done it this launch would you have done it the launch after? Would you have gone and said we need to do a challenge?” They were like, “Yeah.” I was like, “Exactly.” You have to learn those things and then you have to know how to look at the data.
[00:10:30]
On the flip side of that, don’t take something that’s working and then just change the entire structure and expect it to work the same. I had another client, we did $1,000,000 launch. Afterwards he comes to me and he’s like, “Well, the webinar worked really well but I think next time we should just do a challenge and we should try that.” I was like, “No, we are not going to do that because this worked really well and we’re going to scale this because that is a mistake we make way too often.” So, use scaling and optimizing to look at what is and isn’t working. Improve your results and then spend more money once you have proven data that it works. Use it to continually improve.
[00:11:30]
We have clients who have seven, eight years of data from launching and they come to us and it’s all numbers. Marketing is numbers. You have to remove the emotion of spending X amount of dollars and know, “I need to spend this much money so that I can make this much money or get this many people in the doors or this is how much I have to spend to get that many sales.” Whenever my team … I train this in my team and I also have to sometimes train it in clients but whenever they come to me and they’re like, “$30,000 a month, oh my god, that’s so much money.” Anybody new on my team, we have to go through this. I’m like, “You guys, take a step back. I want you to remove the emotion from it and I want you to look at this all from data and numbers.” That’s what I do really in step one in the Hirsh process too, is we look at everything. We’re using the data from here, from past launches often for clients where I’m like, “Hey, if you want to have a $2,000,000 launch, this is how many leads you need to get in the door. This is how much you’re going to spend. Are you comfortable spending that much? Yes or no?” Okay. We have to adjust our end goal.
[00:12:00]
So, scaling and optimizing never ends. You should be doing this on a weekly basis. We’re really optimizing and scaling daily, but reporting on the big picture weekly. So, hopefully that was helpful for you guys and if you are not doing this or implementing some sort of reporting in your marketing, you are missing out and could be leaving potentially a lot of money on the table. If you guys are looking for a marketing team who can help you scale and optimize, who knows how to look at the data of your ads and will send you those weekly reports, go to helpmystrategy.com and you can book in a call with the Hirsh team.