[social_warfare]

SHOW NOTES

When I’m teaching The Hirsh Process, online or at events, I like to start with the question, “Can you define your marketing ‘success’?” And usually, only a handful of people even know what I mean.

Even the billion-dollar business owners are stumped!

My question comes from The Hirsh Process – Step 1: Strategize (BONUS POINTS if you head back to episode 2 for a full run-down of Q’s we like to start with!).

The thing is: You have to be able to measure your marketing success – otherwise you don’t have any! And that means, you have to know your numbers.

The answer is always in your numbers. Not just tracking numbers – actually understanding what they indicate.

In this episode, I’m walking you through the Team Hirsh problem-solving that we do with clients (obviously this starts + ends with numbers!). Tune in to hear all the details – and stick around for an announcement about what we’re working on behind-the-scenes!

Key Points:
[1:43] Can you define your marketing “success”?
[4:28] The answer is always in the numbers
[6:46] If you can’t define your “success” you will never whether your marketing is working
[8:37] Remember, YOUR markers of success might vary from another company’s
[10:43] P.S. My Team is working on something really special…!

Wanna work with Team Hirsh for half the price? We’re hosting a FLASH SALE of our highly-coveted Elite Strategy Call, August 1-5, 2019 – which means you can get a personalized funnel map + marketing strategy with Team Hirsh for $997! Go to https://go.emilyhirsh.com/summer-flash-sale to book your call!

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[social_warfare]

Episode Transcripts:  

Emily Hirsh: I’m Emily Hirsh, and this is the Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Attention innovators, influencers, creators, and game-changing entrepreneurs: your internet domination begins right here. We are the powerhouse marketers that you’ve been looking for. You’re already making waves in your industry, and we’re here to help amplify those waves of change by creating a connection that cuts through the noise. We take everything you’ve built inside your zone of genius and find its audience.

With killer strategy and laser eye for impact, we launch multimillion-dollar campaigns and skyrocket your reach online. And now we are doing the unheard of. We’re unveiling everything we’ve learned, taking you behind-the-scenes with the Hirsh Marketing Team, and giving away the secrets to our clients’ success. Stay tuned for top converting strategy, ROI reports, and insider knowledge that you won’t find anywhere else. You’re changing the world, and we’re the team to help.

Hello, hello everybody. Wow. I am coming off a month of almost straight through travel with just a few days in between each event. I actually secretly like it, because it keeps my life really interesting. And I went to all these great places… California twice, just was in Toronto… and then my friend came here for a week, so it’s been a really fun month. But I also feel like I am going to crush it this week, because I finally have nothing else on my calendar but to actually work and get stuff done. Hence, I’m here recording podcasts, crushing it, and being super productive.

Today I want to talk about the one thing even eight- and nine-figure business owners are consistently lacking. I think this is really important, because it’s so interesting to me. I went to a mastermind, War Room, and I spoke there. I was in front of about 150 people probably, in the room, and I asked them this question. I said, “Does anybody know the answer to this?” And maybe four, I’m not kidding, four people raised their hands. And there [were] nine-figure business owners in that room, eight-figure, seven-figure. Everybody’s above seven-figures.

I think it’s important to talk about this, because people think that people at that level have it all figured out. They don’t. I can tell you that they don’t, which is good, because your business is always broken, and that’s a good thing because you can always be fixing things. But also it’s something that if you can get into place now, you’ll be so much more ahead. So what this question is, it comes from the first step of The Hirsh Process. And this was part of my presentation… so I teach basically The Hirsh Process in the presentation.

The first step is answering three questions, and the third question is, “Can you define what marketing success is to you?” Basically, “Do you know your numbers?” The sub questions of that are, “How many leads do you need to get every month? What can you pay for those costs per leads? How many sales are you going to make that month with those leads? How many sales dollars and units are you going to make? And then what is your ad spend?” So it’s breaking it down how … I just did a podcast process behind setting your ad budget [episode 93]. But the thing is that these people are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, some of them, a month in Facebook ads, and they don’t have these numbers nailed down… they do to an extent, but… nailed down to the level that they should, to be as effective as they could. I just had this conversation with my team. I can’t encourage you guys enough, as listeners to this podcast, to really obsess over your numbers.

The conversation I recently had with my team was … My head of the Operations of the Ads Team, she’s the head of the whole Ads Department, came up to me … or, not came up to me, but she sent me a message and was explaining a client issue, and just some conversion issues, and I was like, “The answer is in the numbers. We’re over-complicating this.” I want you guys to go back [to] before they came on with us, and I want you to tell me these numbers. And I listed them out: What was the webinar conversion? What was their cost per lead? What was their cost per acquisition of a customer? And how many leads were they getting in? And then how many sales were they making, and how much were they spending? I broke down all the core numbers. And I didn’t even have to look at anything to figure that out. I just knew the funnel.

And then I said, “And then I want you to take that, and I want you to tell me the numbers we’re getting. Then we’re going to compare those, and we’re going to compare where it’s gotten better, where it’s gotten worse, where the holes might be, what we need to do to fix it, and a game plan.” My team already had most of these numbers, but… People get caught up in the, “Oh, I thought it was converting at this amount,” or, “I don’t know what it was converting at, but it should be working now.” And it’s like, the answer is always in the numbers. And you can’t find those answers until you know the numbers. So what I say when I talk about this question, and the reason why I don’t say, “Number 3 to Part One of The Hirsh Process is ‘know your numbers,’” [is] because it’s not just about knowing numbers to know numbers.

I think that’s where people get lost is, they know they have to know numbers, and they know they have to do tracking, but they don’t know what they need to track and why, and the context behind it, and what does it mean with those numbers? What you have to do is define success in your funnel and in your marketing plan with numbers, meaning all the major metrics of your funnel.

So look at your customer journey, look at what you’re running, and if it starts with a video, what are you going to pay for the video views? And then if it goes to a webinar opt-in, what are you paying for those webinar opt-ins? How many leads do you need every single day? Every single week? Every single month? Okay. then what’s going to happen with those leads? How many are you projecting are going to convert? And if it’s data that you’re going off of, or if it’s not and you’re going off of industry standards, that’s fine… what is that number, how many sales are you going to make? What’s your ad spend based on it? All of those numbers matter, but you have to know why they matter.

For this instance that I just used an example of, we looked at it, and we realized the webinar conversion was down and the cost per lead was a little bit higher than what they were previously paying. Great. I love it when I figure out those things. They’re not… Okay, great, “the cost per lead is too high and the webinar is not converting” sound like really bad things to have, but they’re not, because then I can take that information, and I can go improve it, and I know where the problem is. And once I plug that hole, my funnel will fix.

So we did that. We put together a whole plan. Here’s what we’re going to do, here’s the suggestions we have for the webinar. Here is how we’re going to get the cost per lead down a couple of dollars. And if we do that, here are the projections for the next 90 days. It just keeps everyone on the same page. You can’t argue it, because it’s numbers. So the reason that I look at it as defining success is because, if you haven’t defined what success means in your marketing, so meaning… you don’t know the answers to those questions, your leads, your sales, your cost per acquisition of a new customer, your ad spend.. and you don’t know those numbers and you can’t answer that back to me, then you will never know if your marketing is or isn’t working, and then you will never be able to fix it if you need to fix it.

Those are super important things to note. And I can never believe how many people are not doing this. It’s not fun to go through numbers, especially if you’re not numbers-oriented and you don’t like spreadsheets, but it’s super important. And I would argue [that] even if you have an ads team doing your ads for you, you still need to know these yourself, because your ads team is going to help you figure this out…

Here’s the other thing I was talking about in my presentation is, a lot of ads companies… if you go sit down with an ads manager, they’re going to start, and they’re going to sit down, and they’re going to ask you, and they’re gonna say, “What’s your monthly budget?” And you as the client are not going to know the answer to that unless you know the answers to the other questions, which most of the time you don’t.

So it’s the ads team’s responsibility to work through those numbers with you, get the answers back from you, and then agree with [you on it]. Because if they say, “Hey, with your budget, you’re going to get 25 sales,” and you’re like, “No, I want to get 100 sales,” then you have to go back to the drawing board, readjust the budget, readjust the expectations, and figure out what’s possible. If you can’t define success in your marketing using metrics and numbers, you will not ever know if you’re successful, or you will never be successful because you won’t be able to fix what is unsuccessful.

If you’re not doing this, which I would highly doubt … The people who raised their hand in the room, one was my client, and then the other three, they have a good ads team essentially. They’re not doing it but, but they still knew it themselves. Because as the CEO, that’s high-level metrics that you want to be able to go and look at when you’re like, “Wait, why is our income down this month? Let me go and figure this out, and let me dig in a little bit.” And your ads team should have all those numbers and be proactive about it and talking to you about it and having those conversations about it. But if you don’t know it to start with, you’re setting them up for failure.

If you don’t know your numbers, if you don’t know how to define your marketing, like “what is success” in your marketing using metrics… and you customize it to you… so somebody who’s tracking the cost per an application for a call is not going to be relevant to somebody who’s [tracking] the cost per a purchase of a $997 course sale.

It’s going to vary, you know, what your metrics are, and you have to make sure… There’s standard one’s… cost per lead is pretty general, your ad spend budget, everybody should know that number. But then when you look into the funnel, there’s important metrics that might be more customized to you, which is why you have to understand your customer journey and the metrics that you need to know to track, “is it successful?” Once you have that you should be able to very clearly answer the question, “What is success to me in my marketing?” And it’s always metrics. It’s not “get more followers,” or “get as many people into my webinar as possible,” or “sell as many course sales as I can and scale from there.” Those are all not achievable things, because they’re not measurable. You have to be able to measure your marketing success or you won’t have success.

Have some comfort in the fact that seven- and eight-figure business owners don’t know this. I don’t think it’s something that a lot of entrepreneurs are naturally good at or they like doing, so then they, therefore, put it off. But you have to do it to have success and/or take your marketing to the next level. My team is absolutely obsessed with this. We’re actually working on something really cool right now, which is, my internal team has daily trackers. So every single day they take ads metrics, put them in a daily tracker, and then compare that to the goal for the month. (And that’s the other thing with numbers is, if you know the numbers, you know on day seven or day five in the month if you’re on track. You’re not just waiting and hoping, you know day by day.)

We have daily trackers. It tracks all of these important metrics, and then it compares them to the goal, which we have to set the goal to plug the goal in, which is how you define success, it’s those goals. And then it tracks, “Are we on track or not? Are we red, green or yellow?” We have an internal daily tracker that our team uses, and then we have an external weekly report that our clients get, but we’re actually making a dashboard that a client can see every single day in their ad account, all of these important metrics, “Are we on track for the month or not?” We’re rolling it out to our top existing clients to start with, then everybody, and then someday we’ll have a software to offer this with.

It’s pretty cool, because I have built an entire custom tracking system all based on this: “What does success mean in your marketing, and are you on track to reach that success in your marketing or not?” So many people don’t know the answer to that. And it’s so frustrating for me, not because it’s your fault [but] because it’s ad experts out there that, I believe, it’s their job to be doing this, and they don’t. They wait for the client to tell them or they just “do their best” (in air quotes), and then clients… I had people coming up to me at these events saying, “I’ve been begging for reports from my ads team and not getting them.”

And I’m like, “Not only is that a red flag, because you shouldn’t be begging something from any team to get it. But second of all, how is that ads team making decisions if they don’t know the numbers?” And that’s the bigger red flag, because nobody, not even the experts out there, can make decisions if they don’t know the numbers. So if you have a team doing your ads, or you’re doing your ads, or you’re thinking about doing your ads, or planning to do your ads, just always remember decisions have to come from the numbers, and the problems will show themselves in the numbers. It doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s not crazy spreadsheets. It’s the top metrics of your funnel. You set the goal, and then you track the progress, and you see where you’re falling off it based on the goals.

Alright you guys, this [episode] got a little ranty, because I’m so passionate about it. I think it’s what sets us apart here at Hirsh Marketing. I think it’s what allows us to get clients amazing success. And I believe there are so many people not doing this, that’s costing them thousands and thousands of dollars every month by not doing this.

If you want to work with an amazing, amazing ads team, we literally have room for one person right now, as of today. [Because we’re] training some new ads managers, our capacity fluctuates. But if you’re even planning a couple months down the road that you want to work with an ads team, I would get on our list. Go to HelpMyStrategy.com to book in a call with our team, and I will see you all next time.

Thanks for listening to The Hirsh Marketing Underground Podcast. Go behind-the-scenes of multimillion dollar ad campaigns and strategies, dive deep into The Hirsh Process, and listen to our most popular episodes over at HirshMarketingUnderground.com. If you loved this episode of the podcast, do me a favor and head over to iTunes to subscribe and leave a review, so we can reach more people and change more lives with this content. That’s all for now, and I’ll catch you next time.