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What if I told you that the marketing tasks eating up most of your time are actually keeping you broke? While you’re obsessing over funnel aesthetics and adding more bells and whistles, successful entrepreneurs are quietly focusing on two things that actually move the needle.

In this episode, I’m exposing the two biggest time-wasters that are sabotaging your marketing results and revealing the behind-the-scenes story of how I completely transformed a struggling client’s funnel without changing a single piece of content.

If you’ve been wondering why your marketing feels so hard despite all your effort, this episode will be a wake-up call about where your energy should actually go.

Key Takeaways:

• The shocking truth about “perfect” funnels—why a mediocre offer with great messaging will always crush a beautiful funnel with weak positioning
• The disguised shiny object trap—how jumping to new strategies is secretly stealing the optimization gold sitting right under your nose
• The solopreneur-to-CEO shift—the uncomfortable transition that separates six-figure entrepreneurs from seven-figure ones

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More ways Embodied Marketing can support you: If you’re ready to hand off your entire marketing strategy (from funnels to ads to copy) and finally get the expert team you can trust, apply here and let’s talk: helpmystrategy.com

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh: 

Marketing is actually very easy. Shiny object syndrome can be very disguised. Start showing up as a CEO. How would a CEO show up and make the decisions for their future company? Until you get to the root answer, intuition is one thing, but just like throw spaghetti at the wall is another, there’s no way you’ll get this perfect out the gate.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission. Hello you guys and welcome back to the podcast. Oh, I’m coming at You post retreat last week. It was incredible. I think it was the best one yet.

Definitely the best to elevate Mastermind retreat. I got to integrate and incorporate a lot of Joe Dispenza work. Not like directly, you know, teaching Joe Dispenza, but specific workshops I was able to do that just came from. The work I’ve been doing, which is so special and I just, I’ve said it so many times on the podcast, but I love my in-person experiences because the impact and the ripple effect is so huge.

I’m so sweet. I had one of the girls at the retreat. As someone who I know here in Austin and our families are connected. And after getting to know her, she’s got a 13-year-old daughter who just babysat for my kids and I drove her home. And so we had a fun chat, me and her in the car, and she said you know, after my mom is hangs out with you, she just really comes back so excited and so much more clear.

And she’s 13 years old. And I was like, that’s. So freaking cool like you just made my entire day. Because the fact you as the child of someone who attended my retreat understands the impact and can feel the difference when your mom comes home from the retreat. Actually makes me emotional because I mean so much of, of the time, especially when our parents, it’s like the work that we do.

A lot of times the motivation is to do it. Not the motivation, but the. A ripple effect of that work is it impacts your kids, and that was really special. So. I am coming off that retreat and then prepping in two weeks for Embodied Marketing Live the big event in Austin. And I’m so excited. I got to kind of test some workshops out for the Elevate Mastermind that I’m gonna bring into the bigger event and I can’t wait.

So today I was inspired because I had a one-on-one call and I’ll shout her out ’cause she told me to shout her out. I was like, that was a good question and I’m gonna do a podcast on that. So Caroline Thor, who’s in one of our programs, had a bonus one-on-one call with me. And she asked some really good questions and it really motivated me to record this episode.

One of the questions that she asked me, there’s two that really inspired me, but one of the questions that she asked me was, what are the biggest mistakes that I see people making when it comes to where they put their time in their marketing and in their funnels? And I loved that because she’s in the boat of solo entrepreneur.

Like every minute of her time matters right now. And I think a lot of people experience that where it’s like. I have so much I need to do and I could do. That’s kind of the overall experience with marketing is like there’s so much I could be doing. Where do I put my time that’s gonna make the biggest impact and going to actually get results.

And I don’t wanna waste any time doing things that are not gonna move the needle, that are not going to get results. And so she said, where do I see people make the biggest mistakes when it comes to waste? Their time, which I really like that question. Not just biggest mistakes on things that don’t work, but actually waste their time.

So here was my answer, and then I’m gonna go into a few more things that I said to her on the call that I think will help all of you. So my answer to that question was, I think that people, there’s two places that they waste their time. One, it could be on too many steps in complication within their funnel.

So. If you have the mentality like me, which is you want everything to be like really perfect out the gate, and I think it’s a skill to. Be able to launch something and have it go live and then optimize it after, and to move with speed at actually getting something live and the foundation of something.

So a lead magnet, you know, a webinar funnel, something that’s bringing you leads consistently and going to grow your audience. Those two things are so important and so critical for the growth of your company, and I think that people. Spend so much time overcomplicating it. ’cause they want it to be perfect.

So they have all these steps and they have this really long email sequence and they want text message marketing and they wanna have a Facebook group and they wanna have all these things blended into their strategy before they even launch. Where if you’re in the boat of, I need to launch this, you know, on my own, build my funnel, do the copy, you know, I’m, I’m on my own implementing it then.

That adds a lot of time, and anybody who’s tried to do that, you know, knows how long funnel copy takes and building a funnel takes and all these things. It’s why in my program, as I build up my digital products into platforms, I’m trying to save that time by generating for you guys the opted page and the emails.

So trying to do too much before you even launch is one. Mistake where you waste your time in the bells and the whistles and the things that, yeah, they move the needle, but they’re not the foundation. So if you look at the foundation of a funnel, the foundation of a funnel is. The offer, the paid offer, and the free offer because that is also gonna sell somebody on clicking on an ad and signing up for something.

So what that offer is and what the promise of that offer is, matters a lot. That’s the most important of the foundation and your clarity in explaining it. So not just, Hey, here’s my offer, here’s my lead magnet, here’s my webinar. But if I was having a conversation with you about it, or I was reading your landing page about it, would I be super clear in why I should download it and why I should watch it, and why I should buy it?

So the messaging of the offer, the offer itself, that’s the foundation. You can take an offer that is a seven out of 10, right? You compare it with really good messaging, and then you can have an okay strategy. You can have an okay landing page. It doesn’t look beautiful. You know, you’ve designed it yourself, you’ve done it yourself.

You’ve done the best you can and you can still do well. But if you take an offer that’s like a five outta 10 or a four outta 10, and it’s not great, and then you pair it with a beautiful funnel, it’s not gonna do well because the foundation, which is the offer itself. Is that really what your ideal customer wants?

And I mean the paid offer and the free offer, is that really what they want? And then the way you explain it, that’s the foundation that has to be at least a seven outta 10. If it’s a 10 outta 10, great. You nailed what somebody wants. And the more you can do that, more successful, your funnel will be everything else.

The number of emails you have and the bells and whistles and the text messaging and all of these components of your offer really don’t. Matter as much and you could get away with it being okay and then going and optimizing it. So that’s the first mistake, wasting so much time, making something perfect before you get it out there and into the world.

That’s number one. Number two, and this was the answer I gave her because I knew where she was in her strategy development and she wasn’t wasting time on the bells and whistles. She had a great strategy, great foundation. Number two, what I said is. Once you launch it, I think one of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is they go too quickly to jump to the next thing.

And it’s the shiny object syndrome. But I feel like shiny object syndrome can be very disguised. It can feel like you’re not doing shiny object syndrome, you’re, you’ve convinced yourself you need to do this. So for example, when you launch a new funnel, a new lead generation, a new webinar. There is going to be so much opportunity for optimization, and what I explained to her is I said, you’re gonna look at your landing page today, your opt-in, that you’re getting ready to launch.

And once you launch it, you are gonna come back to it in 30 days. And I guarantee you, you’re going to immediately see opportunity for improvement that you couldn’t see today because. As you write copy, as you express in your pitches, in your emails, in all the places that your positioning comes into play, both paid offer and free offer.

All of those places, you’re going to improve the way you communicate and there’s going to be an opportunity for more depth. And she actually asked me, what do you mean by depth? And I said, you know, as you put out this first draft of this funnel. You are gonna get feedback. People are gonna ask questions or they’re gonna be like, oh my gosh, I really want this.

As it relates to one piece of it or one part of it, or a type of ad that does well, or you are gonna get better at communicating. And so what happens is the depth that which you can communicate, the transformation that somebody will have, the result they’ll have from your free or paid offer. Both the language you use, the simplicity of the language, the simplicity of the promise, this specific promise that you learn to use the language in the sense of being able to use the same language that your ideal customer uses, and just the clarity of it, the depth of it.

I teach this method that I’ve talked about on the podcast before of asking the question why, until you get to the root answer. So if, if I say to you. You know, why should I, what’s the benefit of me downloading your lead magnet? And you tell me, oh, because then you’ll be able to, let’s just make one up because you’ll be able to lose weight.

Okay, well, why do I wanna lose weight? Oh, because you. Are feeling very sick in your body. And what, why? What is that doing for me? What is that causing? So keep asking that question. Why? Until you get to the foundation answer on all of the pain, all of the frustration, all of the desire that your ideal customer is experiencing.

And then that foundational language is what you take into your messaging and. There’s no way you’ll get this perfect out the gate. There’s no way there’s gonna be room for optimization. And so the mistake I said people make is they jump onto the next thing once they’ve launched a funnel too fast without committing.

To this process of optimization. And so the blind spot is the shiny objects and going well. I launch the funnel, like check it off the list. I’m gonna obviously optimize the ads, but it’s done. Let me move on to the next thing. Let me make a new funnel. Let me launch a YouTube channel. Let me do affiliate marketing.

Let me start a Facebook group. Let me do da, da, da. When if you put that energy into optimizing. What you have just launched and creating so much depth and intention in that it’s probably gonna go a lot longer and think about all the energy and the effort that you put into creating what you did. And if you put all your energy and effort into optimizing that, how incredible it could be.

And now I’m gonna expand on this because I know a question that people are gonna ask is, how do I know if it’s the, the strategy’s not good and I should. Alternate to another strategy. So I’m gonna talk to you about somebody that I’m currently working with right now and I’m supporting with their strategy and where I’m at with that.

So this person has a lead gen funnel and a small price offer on their thank you page. And we had it running and then we did a live launch and we’re, we’re kinda like back to optimizing the. Ongoing evergreen strategy and it worked okay. The cost per lead was above where we wanted it by about 30%, but we weren’t getting sales on the thank you page.

We got only a couple and we should have gotten more like 10 to be hitting our numbers. So when I look at that, it’s not the strategy, it’s not the strategy of opt-in to thank you page, but when I critically looked at it. I had originally looked at it, so this is with fresh set of eyes now going, okay, it’s not hitting the numbers we want.

Let’s question it a little bit more. Let’s ask ourselves, you know, what could we do better here? How can we dig deeper here? What I pulled out of that is the. Packaging of both the opt-in and the small priced offer need to be changed as if it’s new. Now, the delivery of the content of both are great. The actual download that somebody gets and the thing that they buy are really great pieces of content, but the packaging of it I knew needed to change.

It needed to get more specific. Our lead gen was kind of focused on a negative, like, don’t make these mistakes and I wanna switch it and focus it on a positive, and then our. Small priced offer has a ton of great things in it, but it’s not as clear in the name, so I wanna change it into like it’s a bundle and here’s the result of the bundle.

So you could argue I’m changing the whole strategy because I’m actually changing the name and the entire positioning of both offers, but I’m not really changing the strategy. The strategy is staying the same opt-in product. The actual delivery of the freebie and the small price product is pretty much staying the same, but we’re completely changing the wrapping paper.

That’s a very common thing to have to do, and how I know that’s the case is we tried a bunch of ads and we had. Several hundred leads come into the funnel and we’re not hitting our numbers. And I know, yes, we could optimize what we had. We could change the pages, change the copy. But it’s also this like intuitive piece of me that’s like, I think we need to overhaul the wrapping paper on both.

So how do you know if you need to change a strategy Completely. Well, there’s a lot of factors that definitely goes into that, but if you’ve tried a bunch of different angles and a bunch of different ways to get someone to take the action you want them to take and it’s not working, usually it’s the messaging, usually it’s the, the positioning of what you’re offering.

Because here’s the thing, like I can’t, I cannot stress this enough. When you have an irresistible offer, an irresistible free offer, irresistible paid offer, it’s not hard. Marketing is actually very easy. The hard part of marketing is getting the irresistible offer and then communicating it seriously.

When you have something that is so good, people are like, holy shit, I wanna download that right now. I wanna watch that right now. I want to buy that right now because it’s gonna solve my problem. It’s gonna get me where I wanna go. Marketing’s so easy. That if there’s a lot of resistance in your strategy, a lot of resistance in what you’re doing right now, a lot of like forcing something to work that’s like a red, you know, check engine light on.

We might need to have a bigger overhaul. It doesn’t mean you have to change the strategy itself. It really could just be this example of changing the positioning. So there’s lots of nuances to like, do I need to change the whole strategy? Sometimes people are like, should I even do something like a webinar?

Come back to your ideal customer. How I always make those decisions is I come back to the person we’re going after and I ask myself, is this an experience they’re gonna wanna go through? Is this an experience that’s going to give them clarity? It’s gonna give them trust, it’s gonna give them confirmation and what they’re doing.

Is this an experience that’s gonna overwhelm them? Okay, we need to change the strategy. Is this an experience that’s not enticing to them, that they wouldn’t want? That doesn’t sound great. Like if, if you go into the person that you’re trying to attract and get to take the action that’s not being taken, the answers are always there.

But be careful chasing the shiny objects because sometimes it’s just like this example of this client’s funnel that I’m changing. It seems like a big overhaul, but for her it’s easy because the actual deliverables that she put so much time into creating are still the exact same. So it’s really just the overhaul of the messaging and it’s not us chasing, okay, let’s launch a new thing.

Let’s do this. Like, no, we’re gonna commit to making this strategy work, opt-in to small price to offer, ’cause that feeds her launches like the strategy works, but there’s too much force happening in getting the cost per lead we want, and those leads to convert. So we’re overhauling the wrapping paper, which is very common that I find myself doing that with strategies.

Last thing I wanted to share on this that I was inspired to share from that conversation. At the end she asked me, is there anything you think I should be asking you? Super great questions, right? I feel like very intentional and this thing happens to me when I answer questions. And this happens to me in events too.

When people are doing hot seats. I will pause for a minute, sometimes close my eyes, and all of a sudden something just like comes through me. I can’t really describe it, but it’s like. I don’t know. It’s wisdom. I love these moments because it’s just, it’s something definitely bigger than me that drives my response.

Anyways, what I told her was I knew she was about to go into this season of launching ads for the first time to this new funnel and also the stage of business that she was in, doing everything herself, you know, building her business. She’s got some sales and her membership like she’s made. Progress, but it’s still a very new business.

And I told her we don’t know what we don’t know. And one of the most important things as an entrepreneur at every step of the journey, including mine, like including way above mine is perspective, is getting different perspectives because we do not know what we don’t know. And so we can’t see all of our blind spots ’cause we live in this reality where we think everything that we’re experiencing is exactly how it is and is the truth and is what it is.

And so having people to question your perspective and question those things and point out your blind spots is key for her. I knew a blind spot based on the season of business that she was in, was gonna be having to make this transition from solopreneur. Kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall, which she said that’s what she felt like her strategy was until joining our program.

Throwing spaghetti at the wall, you know, figuring things out. Kind of hamster wheel, but also like just doing things to actually thinking strategically. And you make this transition from solopreneur to CEO. And you have to start making decisions like a CEO. And I see this all the time. Solopreneurs who ha are used to like flying by the seat of their pants, making decisions based off of tomorrow and this week, don’t teach themselves how to make decisions based off of the future of their business, based off of what’s coming, based off of who they wanna become, the business they wanna come become numbers and removing the.

Fear that sometimes comes from spending more money and investing and growing in like the discomfort of that and making decisions from that future place. And so I told her like, it’s gonna feel weird and uncomfortable to start running ads and start investing in your business and having this like strategy working for you, that you’re optimizing and you’re making these decisions of like, how much do I spend on my next launch?

And here are my numbers and my conversion numbers, and I need to invest. Back in this because I proved that I could sell. She had a great sales conversion on one of her launches. I proved that I can sell that so I can invest this much. And you start making decisions for the business that you’re building in the next 3, 6, 12 months, and not just the business that you want next week.

And it’s a transition and it feels weird and it feels uncomfortable and it feels foreign. It’s very easy to stay in the place of comfort, which is your brain going like, what the hell are you doing? Like, we, why are we investing money? What if it doesn’t work? You know, we, we don’t know if this is gonna work.

All those thoughts that come up and you quiet that and you go, okay, what am I building? Where are we going with this? What are the numbers? What are the actual facts? Right? And. Marketing has a lot of data, so I told her, you have actual facts from your launch. You’re about to have actual facts from your ads.

Cost per lead sales conversion. Don’t make reactive decisions. Don’t make any panic decisions if something were to not work. Don’t make guesses, don’t make, I mean, intuition is one thing, but just like throw spaghetti at the wall is another. Be intentional. Start showing up as a CEO. How would a CEO show up and make the decisions for their future company?

And I think that takes practice. It takes, it’s very different. And I remember that transition myself, where it was like I went from a. Really just like surviving every day in my business, right? Like, I’ll try this, I’ll do this. I’m jumping around, I’m helping the client. I’m in the Facebook group trying to grow my business.

I’m eventually starting ads. I’m trying to do a webinar, like I remember those days to, okay. I. I have some things that are working now, and I get to be really intentional with my next steps. Really strategic. I get to actually step above the noise and remove the noise and make decisions from that place of, let’s pause, let’s look at this.

Let’s look at the numbers. Let’s look at where we’re going. Let’s look at how many leads we need to bring in to go where we wanna go. All of those things. That’s what A CEO does, and there’s a. A, a real transition that happens there. And it also happens when you start growing a team. You have to start making decisions as the CEO who needs to have more energy, have more capacity, have more white space, and you’ve got this team supporting you and you’ve never done it before.

So that was my answer to her that just came through to me on what she needs to, to be paying attention to in this season of her business. And I think it’s a reminder for all of you guys, you know, where. Are you making decisions and showing up and operating from a place that’s really comfortable because you want to make sure you feel safe and this is can be very subconscious.

And where is there room for you to play bigger and to really step into that CEO of the future and start making decisions as her or him. All right, everybody. I hope you guys got some value out of that. I really enjoyed that conversation today. So thank you to Caroline who asked me some really great questions, and I hope to see so many of you at Embodied Marketing Live July 17th.

We’ve got a few tickets left, I think like literally two or three. So it’s July 17th to 19 embodiedmarketing.com/live. It’s gonna be so amazing. It’s my last event of the year. I may do a retreat in the fall, a very intimate retreat, but the big event, we won’t have one again until January next year. So, all right everybody, I will talk to you next time.