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How do you know you’re ready for ads? I haven’t ever heard someone explain it the way I’m going to explain it in this episode.

I think people make marketing way too complicated. They think they need a funnel, they need all these platforms, they need to create all this content… and they end up overwhelmed because they’re focused on the wrong things.

In this episode, I walk through the phases of marketing, why I built our offers around this framework, and how to know what your business actually needs right now.

Key Takeaways

• The biggest paid ads mistake people make
• Why you should ignore ads until you’ve had 100 conversations
• The 3 stages every business goes through (and exactly when you should run ads)

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

When you first start a business, your main goal is the deep understanding of who it is you’re trying to help and serve in your business. And my opinion is that the more simple you can keep it, the better, the faster you’re going to win. You’re not building the webinar. You’re not building the live launch. You’re not building all these emails. Keep it as simple as possible. I think overwhelm that then leads to scattered marketing strategies but none are really working together and that’s why at the beginning phases I’m like, “Keep it as simple as you possibly can.”

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, everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a great start to your July. I am excited about this episode. It was inspired after I was chatting with, a client of ours who had a bonus call with me and asked me some good questions, and then I was like, “I should explain this on the podcast.”

So before I dive fully into that, I wanna make sure you know about the live challenge that is happening next week, starting July 14th. So this is our most popular challenge that I run. This is when I actually live with you launch ads that reach 1,000-plus of your ideal customers in a few days. And we have actual tech trainings and how to set it up and the strategy behind it.

We… I don’t think we’ve done this challenge for six months, and it is the most popular experience I put on. I could very easily charge for it. The ultimate Facebook Ads challenge. So embodiedmarketing.com/challenge. You can register for free. I don’t know if I’ll do another one this year, honestly. With our weekly webinar cadence, I just haven’t been doing these as much.

But I’m gonna go big on this one because it has been a while since I’ve done one. So make sure you are registered for that. You will get a lot of value out of it. Whether you’ve never run ads before, you have run ads, this will show you the targeting, the way we set it up. Lots of detail on that.

So what I wanna talk about today and get into is the journey of marketing and the phases and the steps of marketing. And a question I get asked a lot is “How do I know I’m ready for ads? How do I know when I’m ready for ads?” And then when you’re in that more kickstart phase of your business what does that look like?

And I haven’t ever heard someone really explain it the way I’m gonna explain it, and it’s actually the inspiration and vision behind the offers that I have and why I have them at Embodied Marketing the way I do, the tiers that we have, because it is exactly what I think somebody should focus on at certain levels of their business.

So I wanna explain that and then talk about, when should you be running ads? When is the right time? When is the wrong time? When does it make strategic sense? And what are those steps, those milestones in marketing a business? And I haven’t talked about this in a really long time. So when you’re first starting a business, this is where I think that, and regardless if you haven’t, you should listen to this just because I think it helps you build on top of it When someone first starts a business, because of all of the noise online, I personally think they make it way too complicated, and they get focused on, “I need a funnel.

I need all these platforms. I need to create all this content. I need to do all these things.” And then they get really overwhelmed. And honestly, they’re trying to do it themselves ’cause they probably don’t have money to really invest in help, and it’s coming out subpar, medium quality, and it’s just not working.

When you first start a business, your main goal and where your energy should go are really two things, okay? The first thing is your messaging, is your brand identity and your messaging. And that is actually before you even think about selling your offer or finalizing what your offer should be. It is the deep understanding of who it is you’re trying to help and serve in your business.

And then it is the brand identity that you’re going to carry. What do you believe? What do you not believe? I’ve talked about this before, so I’m not gonna go too in depth in that, but that’s the first thing you have to do. Before you can make a website, before you can make a funnel, before you should create content, any of that, this is what you have to start with.

And I share this because I actually think most people skip over this, right? They go straight to, “I’m starting a business. I need to build the offer. I need to sell my offer,” because obviously, sell your offer and you’re proving the concept of your business. And then they have to come back, and they have to fix this.

I know I didn’t do this in the beginning of my business. No one told me, “Build a brand identity,” right? I built it over time, and I learned this over time, and I learned this through the marketing experience that I gained, but that’s the first thing you should do. So the first thing we do when I bring a new person on, so we’ve got a level that’s called Activate, and this is for somebody who has never sold their offer before.

And then here’s the difference. You’re gonna get people who are like, “You need a funnel. You need a lead gen. Sell your offer in webinars.” And my opinion is that the more simple you can keep it, the better, the faster you’re going to win. So the very first three or four sales that you make as a business, I actually don’t think you should use paid ads unless you have money to invest and you are intentionally saying, “I’m gonna choose to use paid ads in exchange for I don’t have time,” because that’s what paid ads do, okay?

So the second thing, you fo- you focus on your brand identity. The second thing is now your offer. And it is, how do I make the most irresistible offer that people have no option but to buy when they hear about it? And not just how do I create that offer, but how do I sell that offer? How do I position it?

How do I talk about it? How do I make the connection? This is what somebody wants, and this is what I’m selling. How do I do those things? Those are the only two things that you need to focus on. So when I work with a business at this stage, has not sold their offer before, maybe just starting out, doesn’t really have a super established brand, those are the only two things that we focus on.

And instead of building a full lead gen funnel and a webinar and go make all this content, actually all that we build the first phase is a sales page. And you don’t even need a website. You could just have a sales page. It’s what I’m doing for this new business. It’s not a full-blown website with a bunch of pages and tabs.

It’s one offer. Anyways Build that sales page and you focus on the offer positioning, the way that you position the offer, the way that you talk about it, the way that you sell it, the way that you connect it to your ideal customer’s pain, frustration, desire, its outcomes, all of that. And all you have is a sales page.

That is your funnel, okay? This is very against what a lot of people teach. And then from there, you sell that offer through having actual connecting conversations with your ideal customer. So I teach this process in our Activate program, where I have people go into communities, some have a little bit of an audience, wherever they need to go, to have 100 conversations with their ideal customer.

Actual conversations. Not cold DM, I’m trying to sell my offer. But actual conversations where they’re trying to create a connection and see where it goes. And I teach some scripts and how to do it and where to find people. And I don’t talk about this very much, but this is actually how I built my business.

In the very beginning stages of my business, I definitely didn’t have money for ads. I didn’t even really know how to do that yet, ’cause I started as a virtual assistant. I wasn’t even into the marketing yet. I would go in Facebook groups, and every single day I had 15 Facebook groups, and I would just cycle through them, and I would make connections, and I would start conversations, and I would help somebody out, or I would reply to somebody and say, “I could help with that.”

And over time it blew up so much, like I had more work than I could handle. I know things have changed from 10 years ago, but going into a community is still effective. And remember, this is i- in i- instead of using money to invest. So people come to me and they’re like I don’t have money for ads yet.

I haven’t sold my offer.” Okay. You have to use the resource of time. There’s only the time and money, right? You’ve got to choose which one you can use. If you don’t have the resource of money, you have to hustle. You have to use the resource of time to make the sales. So I have people go in and do 100 conversations Most people make their first sales within the first 20 conversations.

And what I say, this is what I guarantee. If you go through this process if you have the strong brand identity, you have the irresistible offer, you have the offer positioning and that sales page ready to sell, and you have 100 conversations, I can guarantee you, you will either make sales or you will have the full clarity at what you need to change and what you need to shift around your offer in order to make the sales.

Guarantee you, have never not seen it work. The only time it doesn’t work is when people don’t have the 100 conversations. That’s what you have to do. And again, it’s not cold DM-ing conversations. It’s genuine connection. So the goal in this stage, we’ll call this beginner hustle stage. You are hustling, right?

I an analogy of this right now is in my new business, we’re hiring, right? We’re trying to find cleaners. If you go back and listen to the previous episode, we’re trying to find cleaners. And I have to do this. I have to go in Facebook groups. I am going and posting on Marketplace, posting on Indeed, and I’m like, “It’s just volume.”

We need a touchpoint with 100 people, and we’re gonna find at least a few. That’s just a numbers game. Same thing here. It’s hustle. It’s like, how many touchpoints, how many connections can you make? They will go somewhere. And if you want it bad enough, you will do this. So that’s that first stage. The goal with that first stage is validation.

It is to validate the offer so that you know you’ve got something that nailed the messaging, it nailed the positioning, and you can scale it. And people can skip this stage if they have money to invest because then what you’re doing is instead of having conversations where you have to go find the people, you skip it and use paid ads to go find the people for you.

But if you don’t have the money, and arguably you should validate your offer before using paid ads Not every single time do you have to do that, but a lot of times that is the best route to go. So that’s like the first phase. And the difference that I would say, the way I look at it, is number one, the conversations, and number two, you don’t- you’re not building a lead gen funnel yet.

You’re not building the webinar. You’re not building the live launch. You’re not building all these emails. Keep it as simple as possible. So I was talking to somebody who’s in our Activate program and had a bonus call with me, and she’s “I’m just starting my business, and what should I focus on?”

And my advice to her was, “There’s only two things,” right? Our team is doing a lot of stuff for her, ’cause we build the sales page and we build those things. But I said, “There’s two things I want you to focus on. That’s it. I want you to ignore everything else that you possibly can, unless you absolutely have to do it.

Those two things are your hundred conversations and content. And you’re not creating content at this stage to grow your business necessarily. Now, if it grows, great. That’s a bonus. That’s an extra bonus byproduct of it. You’re creating content at this stage to get better at speaking to your ideal customer.

You’re g- to get better at creating content, to flex the muscle of creating videos, of creating content that your ideal customer responds to, ’cause at first, if you’re just starting out, you’re probably gonna suck at it, right? Everyone does when you just start out. Some are naturally better than others.

So I said, “The two things I want you to focus on are that, and then ignore everything else. Ignore the ideas. You don’t need the lead gen funnel yet. You don’t need to ex- you know, go out to different platforms. That is all I want you to do, and I promise if you be laser focused with that, you will be successful come to the calls, get feedback, just stay accountable to those things.

So that’s that first phase, and then she said, “Okay, how do I know when I’m ready for ads?” So once as a business you have made, let’s say, three sales, just a few, two or three sales, you are now ready to say, “Okay, I’ve proven the foundation of my business. I’m pr- I’ve proven the messaging. I’ve proven the offer, at least to a small extent.

Now I want to scale it. Now I want to amplify things. I want to amplify a foundation that I know is working.” And that’s when you go into the next level of entrepreneurship. And this is where you need more consistency, and you need a system, right? Reaching out to people and having conversations is not really an automated, consistent system.

There’s a lot of manpower that goes into making that happen. It’s not sustainable long term. The goal isn’t for it to be a long-term strategy. Now we need consistency and stability, and so now we build the marketing system. And that, to me, generally what that looks like today for most people is an automated evergreen funnel, lead gen funnel, ideally one that pays for itself.

So it’s got a lead gen offer with a small priced offer on the thank you page, some call to action right on the thank you page that’s helping offset your cost, and every single day you’re generating leads because you are running ads. And then you do live launches. And you pair those two things. So the next level.

And I’m explaining this not just to pitch our offers, I swear. They are incredible. But it’s like I built the levels and the offers that I knew would serve entrepreneurs the best. And I think that in the industry, I have some of the most in-depth knowledge to what someone needs at the different stages, right?

Because what you need at the very beginning stage is different than what you need here. And so in that level, we literally call it scale because you’re scaling that foundation of your business. We build a lead generation funnel, and we build a live launch funnel, and then we either update or build your sales page.

Now, this becomes your system, right? When it’s working well, you have visibility ads running, which is what we’re gonna get live in the challenge. You have visibility ads running. You have a lead generation funnel running. You’re getting leads on your list every single day. When it’s working, those leads are getting paid for or halfway paid for with a small priced offer, and then you’re doing live launches.

And those are your main conversion events for your business. And all those things are combined and working in a system that builds on top of each other because you’re building leads every day. So the leads you get this month might convert in three months. And you’ve got this system, and now you are leveraging paid ads to grow it faster.

Because now if you go and launch, like if you have a lead gen funnel and you go do a webinar and all you use is organic Unless you have a huge audience or you go viral, which is a less than 1% chance, right? Especially to an actual offer, you’re not gonna get a lot of people to sign up for it.

So what I see a lot is entrepreneurs put all this time into funnels. They put all this time into building a webinar funnel and putting together the webinar, and it’s a lot. Especially if you’re doing it on your own. And even, in our scale program, we do all the funnel work, but the client has to do the webinar, and th- that takes energy.

And they put all this time into it, and then they don’t have a traffic strategy. So they don’t get enough people to it, and they pour this energy into it, and they get 20 people signed up for it. And maybe they’ll get a sale, but it’s not worth one sale when you have to pour all that energy into it. And that’s where I love ads because ads is like pouring fuel on a fire, and it will massively speed up the time that you go from having that to getting people and data and feedback, okay?

Somebody else recently asked me and said, “I have a list, and I have sold my offer, and I’m gonna do a webinar for the first time. Should I run ads?” And my answer was, “Yes, absolutely you should run ads.” Because you’re gonna pour all this energy into it. And if you run ads, you’re gonna probably get three, four, five times the amount of people signed up for it than you could if you didn’t run ads, obviously depending on the budget.

But one thing I said was, “Whatever you choose to spend on the ads, you have to be okay if you don’t make back immediately.” You have to be okay financially, whatever that number is, if it doesn’t come back immediately. I think it always comes back eventually, right? Because you’re gonna build leads, and you’re gonna build your list, and you’re gonna practice the webinar, and you’re gonna get data.

But if it doesn’t come back right away, you have to be okay. So whatever that number is it $500? Is it $1,000? Choose that number. That’s your ad spend, okay? Yes, you should run ads because you’re gonna pour all this energy into a webinar and into a webinar funnel and into launching this and showing up live and pouring your heart out.

You want the most amount of people there. For me, I will not do a live launch without a significant ad spend because I’m like, “It’s not worth it to me.” I want the audience. I want the people to be able to impact if I’m gonna put the energy I am going to because it’s the same energy for me. If there’s 20 people on my webinar or 150, it’s literally the same exact amount of energy, but I have a way bigger impact.

So why would I not spend money to get more people there? So that’s the next phase, which I think people skip to this phase without the foundation, without the validated offer. They overcomplicate everything. They make themselves super overwhelmed, and then nothing they create is really working, and it’s good.

They try to run ads. They think ads don’t work for them, and it’s because they’re missing that foundation But then on the flip side, I also see people wait way too long to run ads. And they’re like, “I launched this webinar funnel and I’m waiting for people to sign up, and I’m waiting for it to take off.”

And it’s like you just don’t have the traffic, and it is very hard to get a high volume of traffic to a lead gen or a webinar funnel without ads. Very challenging. It is possible, but it’s usually a very slow process. And when you’re doing a live launch you only have so much time to promote it. You only have a window of time to promote that live launch.

And if you’re posting on organic and you’re getting a few leads, like it’s just slow. And so also, don’t be afraid to invest in ads, and understand that if you put that money in ads, then it’s just a volume game. Okay, you wanna make this many sales, we need this many leads, which means we need to spend this much.

That’s where you wanna get your business to be, because that becomes predictable and it becomes consistent. So that next level is building the system, which the system consists of the visibility, the consistent lead gen, and the live launch. And that system, it all works together, right? The people who see the visibility ads, they see the lead gen ads, they see the live launch, they get on your list, they get emails.

You do another live launch in a few months or a month, and then you reinvite them, and it becomes this ecosystem. So ads are an amplifier, okay? Ads are a traffic strategy. They are not the whole picture to your marketing. You need the system that ads are gonna amplify. And there’s two camps. There’s the people who spend money on ads fast, thinking ads are gonna save the day, but they don’t have the system, they don’t have the foundation, they don’t have the irresistible offer, they don’t have the positioning, they don’t have the messaging.

And then there’s the people who wait way too long to spend ads, and they wanna grow their business, but they’re… n- they don’t have time, they don’t have capacity, and they wait too long to spend money on ads, and so they don’t have enough volume. And so you are paying for speed when you run ads. You are paying for reach, you are paying for traffic volume, and what happens is you get data faster.

Even if worst case scenario, you have a webinar funnel and it doesn’t convert If you spent money on ads, you paid to get data to be able to make changes faster, to understand, okay, what’s the cost per lead? What is the show-up rate? What is the sales conversion rate? So what do I need to change? And when you spend the money on ads, you pay to get that data faster.

And then obviously the third level is our our highest level. So I move people at activate into scale, and we’ve had people successfully… We only launched this four months ago. We’ve had so many people at activate make their first ever sales, which is awesome. That’s the hardest thing to do. And then we’ve had people move from activate into scale as their next step.

And then from there it goes, “Okay, I want all my marketing off my plate,” and that means ongoing marketing of new funnels, new live launches, right? You go into optimization of the machine and that’s our full done for you. Which my goal is to build someone’s business with them and get them there And so that’s where we move them into.

And all the way up to our VIP clients where I’m part of their strategy and managing their marketing calendar and their new promotions and all the things. So first of all, if any of that sounds like you need that in your business, go to helpmystrategy.com and just chat with our team. I know I’ve talked about this on the podcast, but we shifted our offers from being a program where I would teach this and I would help somebody do it and I would give them, the videos and the copy templates and everything.

‘Cause a live launch, it’s like you’ve got invitation emails, you’ve got nurture emails, you’ve got reminder emails, you’ve got the post-live launch emails, and the urgency and the bonuses and how do you sell it. And there’s so many pieces. And we have just done it so many times that we’re masters at it. And so I was like, “Let’s just take that and make it all implementation.”

And same thing when a client is in that scale phase. What I want them doing is content. I want them creating content while we do all the ads, while we do the marketing, and I want them to be working on something like their webinar, which we have … I have a template in there and I have s- like a training on doing it how I do it.

But a webinar is like a performance and it has to … it takes time. It takes time. It has to sound like you. It has to flow like you. And so there’s … I … We don’t actually ever even offer, even for our VIP clients, I will not build someone’s webinar for them. I’ll help them. I’ll audit it. I’ll give feedback.

I’ll give them the structure. But it has to sound like the person. And if you end up reading slides that somebody else built from you, I can promise you the audience will feel it. And so I know there’s people who charge a lot of money to build a webinar. I won’t do it because it doesn’t convert as well.

So I want to explain that kind of as a business journey. And wherever you fall, a lot of you I think are in the level, who listen to the podcast, are probably in the level where you’re like our scale clients and you either have to build out the whole system or you have to optimize what you have.

And so some of our clients come in and we look at what they have, the lead gen, the live launches, and we make changes and shifts and we optimize it. But that is the trajectory, right? And you go from hustling and time investment of having those conversations to earning the right to buy back your time and use ads and use a system and use marketing.

but in those early stages it’s like keeping it as simple as possible is so important. I think overwhelm that then leads to scattered marketing strategies where it’s like you’ve got a lead gen over here and then you’ve got a mini chat funnel and content and you do a webinar and you have all these things happening but none are really working together is a really big, problem and what holds people back. And that’s why at the beginning phases I’m like, “Keep it as simple as you possibly can.” All you have to do is sell your offer. That’s what you need to do, right? Sell your offer, have that strong brand identity, build on top of that. So hopefully this was helpful.

Definitely join me in the challenge, embodiedmarketing.com/challenge. Again, I may not host another one of these this year, so get in on that. It is incredible what we offer and the support that we offer in that challenge. And then if you want to work with us in any of these offers, helpmystrategy.com.

Thank you guys so much for tuning in. I am excited for what’s to come on the podcast. After kind of summer travels, I’m gonna open up a hotline. And you guys can call and ask me questions that I can answer on the podcast. And then I am gonna be bringing guests back on soon. So thank you so much for tuning in.

Have a wonderful rest of your week. I’ll talk to you guys next time.