Forget about those cookie-cutter marketing strategies— let’s talk about creating something that truly connects with your audience.

I’m getting real about what’s happening on the front lines with our clients, the tactics we’re shifting, and why authenticity is the key to standing out.

If you’re ready to rethink your marketing and really tap into what sets you apart from the competition, tune in now!

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Emily Hirsh: 

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. This is the third episode in my comeback. And today I want to basically carry over from the conversation yesterday. So yesterday’s episode, I talked a lot about why I think the digital marketing industry and marketing in general and business in general is shifting so much. And I would definitely go tune into that episode if you haven’t yet because it’s going to compliment today’s episode. Today I want to get a little more into the tactics of what it means and what I’m seeing like on the front lines in digital marketing with our clients, with myself and things that we’re shifting because of that. Just to reiterate something that’s really important is At the root of all of this, I think that we are in a time where the pull to really show up authentically and to really dig deep and understand who you are so that you can show up authentically, so that you can stand out, so that you can tap into your creativity and the ways that you inspire and attract and become magnetic. I think that’s at the root of it. 

So yesterday I talked a lot about how You know, what if you just pretended like there were no rules with marketing for a second? There’s no like you have to send this many emails and you have to be on this many profiles, I mean this many platforms and create this much content and it needs to be long form, it needs to be this. What if you just said screw it? I’m going to sit with and execute what I believe is going to attract and garner the attention of my audience, of my ideal customer, and serve them the best, whatever that is. And there will always be foundational marketing principles that are true. But I think more than ever, we’re in a time where it’s like, screw what everybody else thinks. Screw like these boxed in one size fits all recommendations or strategies or ways to do things as if one way is right and the other way is wrong. And I see this so much because this is what draws people in but it’s like you see ads where people are saying only live launches or only evergreen webinars or webinars are dead or sales calls are dead or you need to have a low ticket offer. It’s like all of them are right and wrong, depending on the business. 

And so seriously, if I could give you one big takeaway from this week, it is an invitation and an encouragement to tune out the noise, to get very selective with the noise that you allow in when it comes to people giving you advice about your business because unless somebody truly understands your business and the depths of it and you and all of the uniqueness of it, your ideal customer and the offer you sell, the advice may not be right. And it’s okay to have a few select people that you garner inspiration from, but even then you should still run that through a filter of what do I think about that? What do I think is the right thing? Because if we boil it down, what’s the number one thing I said yesterday, the number one thing that we are trying to do with our marketing? Garner attention. Attention is the number one currency.

And our business is also here to serve our ideal customer. So connecting to what they’re going through and realizing that no matter the state of the economy, they still have problems. They still have desires and they still want those addressed means all we need to do is focus on how do I garner attention, quality, engaged attention from my ideal customers and how do I Serve them. How do I serve them? Right? With what they’re going through. That’s it. That’s the foundation of it. Now, to do that today because of the volume of the noise that is out there, you must become a lot more intentional with how authentic and really connected to who you are specifically and what makes you stand out because that’s your brand. For most of you guys, you’re probably a personal brand and even companies where the CEO is not the face and not the personal brand, the CEO’s values and who they are drives the company 100%. So if you’re disconnected from that or you try to be somebody else because you have so much noise convincing you that that’s what you think you should do, it’s going to impact your marketing. So I know I said some of this yesterday but I’m repeating it again because it’s so important and that is what nobody is saying.

That is what nobody realizes and nobody’s teaching because most people when they teach digital marketing are saying, do my strategy. I did a webinar and it was successful or I launched seven low ticket offers and that is what was successful. And whenever I develop a strategy every single time, it’s custom. Because the only way I know how to develop a strategy and my team knows how to develop a strategy for a business is by understanding the root core desire and core problem we’re trying to solve for the ideal customer, who they are, and what would be the best experience for them, which is going to be different And we also tie in what is the magic and the superpower that the CEO has that we can leverage the crap out of. That is the power that nobody can beat. When you get yourself in a place where you’ve identified

This is my identifying align process. When someone onboards to work with us in any option working with us, they go through this process and it identifies your superpowers, your gifts, what makes you different, what makes you better, what makes you stand out. We all have them. And then aligning your marketing strategy and the way that you connect with your audience and your potential customers with those superpowers. Because if you can do that, it’s unstoppable. You can’t put that in a box in a templated strategy. Okay, so I have some points on specifically marketing today. So first of all, if you haven’t caught on yet, templated strategies, especially in the business to business space, they just are not working. And I mean things like the same exact webinar as everybody else because you followed Russell Brunson’s perfect webinar script. Like everybody has seen it.

Right? It’s the same thing. Even to get somebody to come to a webinar is a feat. And I’m not saying, oh, webinars don’t work anymore. A lot of times they’re not enough on their own anymore. And there’s some industries, like I have clients who target industries who have no idea what a webinar is still one of our one of our top clients targets people ages like 55 plus. She’s run the same webinar for years since working with us and it still converts, right? So there’s nuances definitely, but more often than not, to be successful today and to stand out and to have a strategy that actually converts, you have to be a little more creative. You have to be a little more intentional with the experience you create. And this is where allowing yourself the space and the creativity to say, okay, if I was to create an epic free experience for my ideal customers, with the intention of giving them some sort of clarity around what they need to do to get to their desired outcome, what they maybe were doing wrong before, and just making them feel very clear on their path forward.

As well as making them feel confident that they would be able to get to where they want to be. So if I was to create an experience that puts my ideal customer in an ideal state and in a state that is full of clarity and full of confidence and there were no rules, about what that experience was, what would you create and sit with that. That’s where I came up with my challenge I did a couple of weeks ago, my embodied CEO challenge. I sat with this and I said, you know, I want to create an experience where CEOs feel inspired again in their business and in their marketing. And I don’t want to just throw marketing tactics at them because there is so much of that out there. I want to actually have them sit with the hard questions, sit with the deep questions and find the inspiration and the clarity within without me teaching.

And so I was like, you know what, I’m going to host this challenge and it’s going to be so simple. I’m just going to send a daily action and a daily question to journal and that’s it. And it was one of the most transformational experiences I created for people. It was very intimate. Yes, it converted to sales on the backend, but I didn’t come at it from that place. I knew it would convert if I created the experience that fulfilled that intention of creating clarity, creating confidence, and even inspiration. And I came up with the challenge not by looking at what somebody else did, but by me sitting with what is something epic I could create that would make my audience, my ideal customer feel what I want them to feel. And that’s how it was born.

So maybe you have a strategy that’s working. That’s awesome. Maybe you come up with a few ideas that you can add into it that are really creative. Maybe you don’t have a strategy that’s working or you’re not really sure and you sit with this. If my only intention was to connect and serve my audience, but also it’s very important that you understand that doesn’t mean overwhelm them. That is a foundational marketing principle that will never change. If you overwhelm a potential buyer, they’re not going to buy.

So any free experience that you create needs to provide clarity and confidence. That’s why taking them through an experience that shows them the path forward but doesn’t give them all the how is very powerful. Because all the how in a short period of time is never even beneficial. People won’t retain it, right? But if you take them through an experience where they now understand the path forward and they maybe understand what they were doing wrong before, that’s really powerful. So I believe that right now in marketing, in digital marketing, what I’m seeing is a lot of room for creativity, a lot of room for testing and trying new things. Because a lot of the standard practices are not working right now. Specifically webinars, there are some people who are still crushing it with webinars.

But I’ve seen a lot of clients and people coming to us where it’s like I had a webinar and it’s stopped working, especially evergreen webinars. I just think it’s so much harder to get somebody to consume it, number one, and actually watch it and then purchase on the backend. And again, I’m not saying everybody, like there are definitely clients I have that are still crushing it with their evergreen webinar, but it’s definitely not what it used to be. And it’s because of the tremendous amount of noise and the other options out there. And it’s just in a lot of industries, webinars are really overdone. Does that mean I’m never going to do a webinar again? No.

but I’m really intentional with how I do it. Sometimes they might be a workshop. Sometimes they might be on the tail end of a three day series or a three day challenge, something different. And so because a lot of the standard strategies that you see out there are struggling to convert, it’s like, why not just try something totally different? Like seriously, you guys,

Number one, you could choose the option of working with my team. We’ll come up with this with you and we’ll come up with the strategy. So that’s an option. And you can go to helpmystrategy.com to explore that because that’s what we’re doing for all our clients is like, what if we try this? What if we try this? Like we just onboarded a client and came up with Such a cool strategy that is a whole experience with a three-part series and then a Behind the scenes. It’s not a webinar. It’s more like a behind the scenes I’m gonna show you case study, but it’s not being called a case study to get people to want to want to come to this quote training, but just very unique so number one you can come and brainstorm with my team and we’ll do this for you and or my encouragement is for you to sit with, throw away all the things that I think I should be doing that I’ve put in my head from other mentors, other programs, other courses, and what is my ideas for an experience that I could create. And one of the things I also like to do is pull from things that people might be familiar with. So doing things like a challenge, okay, people have an association with that word. So you can still do a challenge, but how you structure it might be creative. Or maybe it’s like, I’m going to host a happy hour or a coffee chat or a town hall meeting or a workshop or you know things that people have an association with the word, but how can you make it creative? so I had another client of ours in one of my workshops because I teach a monthly workshop for all of our clients and then I open it up for hot seats. and

She asked me and said, you know, I really want to create a way for people to connect and create community. And I love what you’re doing um around creating community. And like, should I create a telegram group? Should I create a, you know, a so using circle, the back end in community? And I said, what if you just hosted? a monthly happy hour for all of these people and it was like fun and you were able to create this community and connection and then you could also have a little topic you talked on and she loved it she’s like oh my gosh that’s so perfect for my people and like they’ll love that like a social hour so little stuff like that you know i may not right i probably wouldn’t recommend that to someone else but it was perfect for her and that’s so creative so sit with that i think that Right now that is the biggest shift I’m seeing is that the standard strategies that people have been running for the last decade are struggling to convert and the need for creativity which that creativity has to stem from you and your authentic gifts. And that’s why, you know, even when you hire my team and you bring in someone to help in your marketing, however that looks, you’re still collaborating and you’re still a part of that because it needs to come from you at the root. Right now,

There are four marketing non-negotiables for your business success, and these are not new. These are foundational principles that have been true, but it’s like the dial just gets turned up when the state of the economy shifts. First one is an offer that’s so good, people even in this current market will not say no to it. Your offer has to be in need. And unfortunately, I was talking to my team about this, but when money gets tight for people and there’s a lot of uncertainty, some of the first things to go are, offers related to someone’s health, uh, relationships, right? Because people are like, okay, I, what do I need? So that doesn’t mean those offers can’t work, but it means you might have to do some reworking of the offer. You might have to add in a downsell that’s more affordable for someone. You might have to spin the positioning a little bit so that it really comes across as a need.

Things that are like, oh, that’d be really nice for me to have, or I want to improve that. I want to achieve that outcome, but it’s not my top priority. Those offers will struggle in this economy and they need some help. They need reworking or a downsell or something. I definitely see people in the health space. And sad because it’s like our health is so important, but that’s just the way that people prioritize is money first and making sure they can pay their bills and have enough money and then their health and their relationships come after that. And so we’ve had to do some downsell additions and changes to clients’ offers that used to convert because of this. The second thing is messaging and authenticity infused throughout every part of your marketing. From your copy, to your content, to your strategy, to the experiences you create, it’s got to stand out. And I just can’t say it enough. I know I’ve said it a dozen times. The way you stand out starts with the connection to who you are authentically. Because how else are you going to stand out?

If you are implementing strategies that you saw somebody else do and you know that feeling when you go to implement it and you’re kind of just following a rule book, you’re like following a manual, you don’t want to be doing that anymore. Like it used to work that you could do that, but never as well. It’s always been that authenticity wins, but now it’s a non-negotiable.  You have to be authentic. And so my encouragement is to really tap into your creativity and who you are unapologetically and allow that to come through in every part of your marketing. And you need a strategy that successfully creates an experience for your potential customer, engaging them, nurturing them, and converting them. If you look at your marketing right now and you don’t really have a strategy that allows you to consistently attract new people into your audience, engage them through a lead generation that you can then nurture them and eventually convert them to your offer. I mean, that’s top priority. like You need to have that and it needs to come through with the authenticity and the creativity and all those things. But if you don’t have that, that’s like you’re not going to grow your business by just posting it on social media. You’ve got to have a strategy no matter what you do.

And then finally, the last thing is traffic. You need to have eyes on your business to get that attention to all levels of your marketing, ultimately using paid ads. So you don’t have to be on social media all the time. So you don’t have to be in the hamster wheel of constantly creating and posting and hoping that it works. I think paid ads allow us to get in the driver’s seat a little bit more of, okay, I’m going to take control of this. I’m going to dictate how much traffic I get. And at the root of all of this, the most important thing to remember, like write it on a sticky note, write authenticity. And the other thing you should write is connection and relationships because That is one of the most underrated components of marketing that people don’t understand is if you need to make sales like tomorrow, my advice to you is going to be go talk to as many people as you possibly can in your audience and connect with them and see where that goes. Like that’s such an easy way to create momentum in your business.

And you definitely want the backend of the strategy and the funnel and all of these systems and things in place a hundred percent because it’s not sustainable to talk to a hundred people a week. But right now, if you’re in a situation where you need to make some sales, work on your messaging, work on your authenticity, and then just freaking talk to people, connect to them. Relationships and connections are the foundation of marketing. It’s the only thing that works.

People try to overcomplicate it. They try to hack the algorithm and add in automations and overcomplicate their strategies and worry about a bunch of metrics. And it’s like at the root of it. We got to just connect to our ideal customer, which we do that through authenticity, being ourselves, powerful messaging, all of those things. So sit with, okay, what am I doing today? What is my marketing? Like if I was to sit across from you and ask you, what is your current marketing strategy? Sit with that.

And then sit with, what if I just erased all the rules and the things I thought I should be doing and best practices that people put out there? What if I erased all of those? And I allowed myself a second, just full creativity of how I could create an epic experience and nurturing and connection and relationship building with my audience and my ideal customers and see what comes to you. It really gets to be that simple. It’s not always easy, but it gets to be that simple. All right, my friends, thank you for tuning into today’s episode. I’ve got one more coming tomorrow where I’m actually going to talk about the biggest mistake I continually make in my business. That is probably costing me millions of dollars. So I’m excited to chat about that and I will see you all tomorrow.