Hirsh Marketing Doing $2.5M In Last 12 Months Selling High Ticket FB & IG Ads Services

TRANSCRIPT

What’s going on everybody. We have Emily Hirsh from Hirsh Marketing all the way out of Austin, Texas, Emily. Welcome to the Marketers Mindset podcast. What is it that you actually do? And how do you generate revenue for Hirsch marketing?

Yeah. Hi, thank you for having me. So I’m CEO of Hirsh Marketing. We are a marketing agency that specializes in Facebook and Instagram ads specifically for influencers and people selling digital products and services.

Love it. And what year did you actually start your company?

It was about five. It was five years ago. So whatever that was 2015,

2015, I will take it to a five-year-old digital marketing agency. You said specializing in Facebook and Instagram ads. Is that what it was awesome. And who’s your ideal avatar? Because obviously a lot of the people who are listening in on this podcast most of them, majority of them were all agency owners. Right. So they can definitely relate to your process, your company and everything that you’re doing. Talk to me really quick about the type of customers that you love serving, like who your ideal avatar is.

Yeah. So we really Excel with people selling digital courses or services. So a lot of coaches, authors, influencers we’ve worked with some really big influencers. So I kind of fell into that industry and we’ve done a lot of live launches and automated funnels. So people, any, anywhere in that industry, we crushed.

Okay. So safe to say, like the course, the course style space.

So coaches like one-on-one selling, you know, like a one-on-one service or a mastermind.

Yep. Which we do that. So we can definitely relate. And, and, and I know you said you worked with some pretty big name brands. Want to drop a couple here,

So we’ve ran the B-School launch several years. There’s several, I can’t say either, but you all know them that we’ve worked with. I wish I could say it.

Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. And how many team members do you guys have right now in your team? And what’s just like a quick breakdown to them.

Yeah. So I have 19 employees and about four or five contractors right now. 10 of those employees are ads managers. So those are like our, our people who manage the client accounts have client communication and the foundation of our company.

Yep. How many I’m going to, I’m going to dive deep into that really quick, because I know a lot of the people here they’re either outsourcing or they have an internal processes where they have a team, what’s it like managing 10 Facebook ad managers?

Well, I don’t personally manage them cause that would be really hard. It’s, it’s not easy. What the key is that you have to create a process that’s repeatable so that if a client gets this ads manager, they have the same experience that they get this ads manager. And that’s not easy to do. I say it as if it’s easy, it’s not easy. And it comes down to the training that they go through and then the day-to-day process, and then the ongoing training that you have for those. And it’s something we’re just constantly working on an improvement.

Got you. And what is your pricing model like? Are you, are you kind of like a high ticket agency, boutique style or are you in the low end and working in volume?

No, we’re definitely higher ticket because the client gets a full team on their account. So we also do the creative side of things. So we’re anywhere from three to $4,000 a month. And then we do charge a percentage of ad spend so that as the client spends more in scales, you know, we are compensated for that, with the additional work and creative involved

Makes sense. And how many clients are you currently managing within your agency?

We have over 55 on our roster right now.

Awesome. And all, all in the coaching and high ticket education space,

We do have some e-commerce brands. We will, we will work with e-commerce if they have that kind of like digital brand and they’re not, you know, like two things on Shopify or something. Cause that’s impossible, but we do have a handful of e-commerce clients as well, but otherwise yes. All in the digital course and product space

In your business. I know you’ve probably heard the term value ladder. Do you have the value ladder in your business where you’re starting off a little bit lower and then you’re kind of working your way up?

Yeah, I do. However, 85% is people’s come straight into agency. I do have a name out there that people, I get a lot of referrals every month. And so that’s great. I do have a done with you course though that we have successfully put people inside of that course. And then they’ve actually up-leveled into becoming a client, which is why I created it. For people who weren’t quite ready to sign on as a client. So my value ladder is those two things and they work really well together.

How much, how much is the course of courses? 24 97, 24 nine. So for 2,500 bucks, somebody comes into your course to your world. What are you teaching them in that quarter?

So inside of there, they get all the trainings, the tools, the templates that we use with clients. And so it’s a whole training course, but then they also get a done with you component. So there’s weekly support calls, Facebook groups. So that way someone can come and say, Hey, I launched my ads. Like, what do you think? What should I do? And get that kind of feedback because I think that’s so important. And hopefully get their ads to a place where then they can up-level to hiring us.

How many people do you see actually convert over to actually going out and hiring you? Let’s say you sign up a hundred people that take your course, how many out of those hundred will actually turn over?

So right now we’re at about six to 10% of people are converting into a client within 90 days. So that’s pretty good. And we do have a lot of people, you know, not even through their 90 days. So I hope to actually improve that. But you know, they honestly have to go in and do the work. And that’s the biggest battle is like, you have to get in there, do the work, get where they need to be, and then there’ll be ready for us. So right now it’s about six.

I feel like the second somebody has to do anything in life. They just want to like farm it out. They’re like, I can’t handle this. Let me give the CEO how much he charges do it for me. So, and that’s usually happens a lot with courses. And a lot, I’ve seen a lot of models like that. We interview a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of people in the core space, they usually do that. Who will show somebody how to do something and then also have the offer would say, okay, well you, you don’t want to do it yourself after taking this whole course, we can just do it for you. Right. And that makes perfect sense. And we what’s the biggest needle mover you have in your business. Like what was the one thing in the last five years that catapulted your agency?

Focusing so much on my delivery, honestly, because you can focus on marketing and the client growth, but because I focus so much on our processes and my delivery, it’s allowed me to build a team where I’m not managing the clients and we’ve been able to scale and have great delivery. So then I get those referrals and I get people talking about my brand. So I think that when I look at all the agencies out there and I see people, you know, they miss that step of actually focusing on like the delivery and the client results. And they mean well, but you have to be able to build it to where you’re not the one doing the client work. And it’s still the quality as if you were doing it. Yeah.

How many, how, how many, I know you, obviously, I’m assuming are those Facebook ads team members, are they also acting as project managers or do you have separate project managers?

I guess I don’t have separate, so I guess you could say that they are, they do manage like the creative teams. So if they need versions of copy, they’ll be like, Hey, I need three versions of copying and doing that. So yeah.

Where do you see the cap? Like how many clients are usually attached to one Facebook ads manager before you need to go out and get another Facebook ads manager

Five, four to five clients, depending on the size of the accounts. Yeah. Which we’ve learned that we used to put too many clients on that.

Yeah. It can get tricky. And let’s talk about lead generation and prospecting for your agency. How do you guys pick up new clients? What, what are you doing daily to start conversations?

Yeah, so I do a lot. I have my own podcast that generates a lot of leads. So I consistently put out two episodes a week. I’ve done that for two years and that’s one of our biggest lead generators and just nurtures. I do usually a quarterly live webinar or some sort of experience that does bring a lot of applications. And so we’ll do kind of a layered approach where we’ll run ads to my podcast, consistently some lead gen, we have like a Hirsh marketing report case study, and then those things all drive to application, but then we’ll do a quarterly webinar and, and get a lot of people in there and, and try to get people who have maybe clicked on a podcast ad and then go to the webinars. So

Would you say podcasts is the biggest one though?

Yeah, not leads on the like leads on my list, but if someone listens to my podcast and then gets to our application and a call like their soul to my content. So I’d say it’s our best nurture tool for sure.

That makes perfect sense. We have the same route same. So we do on our end you know, for the visitors for the viewers watching very similar approach where we do, we usually do webinars. We used to do them once a week, which was crazy. We’ll never do that again. Then we switched over to once a and then now we’re doing them like probably like once every six weeks we’ll we’ll, we’ll have like, usually between three to 500 people on a webinar, which converts really well. And then same thing for podcasts. For those of you guys who were thinking about starting a podcast we do very similar, like Emily, we dropped two episodes Tuesday and Friday, twice a week. And we drip them out over a couple of months and it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s harmless. It’s painless content that you need to create this creating content can sometimes be very painful, but it’s, it’s not really that painful and it does generate a lot of leads. So it’s a good, good quality, good quality of a content source. So I’m gonna ask you a fun question. What is the most successful automation you have set up in your business that either saves you the most time or makes you the most money one or the other?

I mean, I think that I would go with the, make us the most money. We have some really solid nurture sequences set up. So when someone, you know, even gets to a sales call and then they don’t become a sale, but they’re still a good quality lead. We’ve got an actual six months sequence that they go in that gives them a ton of nurture content just helps us stay top of mind and then pushes them back to the call if they’re ready. And I tie in, so we’re talking about podcasts. I tie my podcasts into all our nurture content. So I’ll tell my copywriter like, Hey, take this podcast episode, write it into an email because it’s our best content. It’s me putting the most into what we put out there. And so we use that for emails too.

Love it. And then another fun fact for the crowd. What’s, what’s an open email rate. What’s your average?

Our average is 21%. We’ve been working on it actually. It was like 15%, about three months ago. And so our average is 21% with those nurture sequences. It’s obviously higher because it’s people going through it. But our average across our whole list is 21%.

Fair enough. And I’m sure you get a ton of leads daily coming, whether it’s coming from your website, your Facebook ads, whatever it is that you’re driving these, these pieces of contacts and where are you storing them? What CRM are you using? And what’s your process to kind of shuffle through everything, make sure everybody gets taken care of and we’ve had any bad leads bill through any good leads. Walk me through that process really quick.

Yeah. So we use Ontraport I’ve used that for a few years now. And in terms of we do a regular list cleaning. So if people go 90 days without being active on the list, there’s an automated sequence set up that kicks them into this sequence. If they don’t, you know, engage in that sequence, it’s a couple of weeks along with emails or a week or something. And then they get marked as what’s called transactional only. So then they’re basically not being emailed anymore. And that’s what helps keep our open rate up and keep the list. So that’s an automated sequence. And then we also run them through like a cleaning. I don’t know, we just did it like bot where it will take out any duplicates, like spammy, fake emails or dead emails. And so that also helps keep the open rate up and keep it clean.

And then I’m big on organizing the tag. So like you said, I have leads coming in from everywhere. One thing that people might find value from is we will actually manually my tech VA will look at the leads that actually apply for our agency and note, what was the first point of contact that they had to get on our list? And how long have they been there? Are they warm? Are they cold? So it’s a manual process a little bit. It doesn’t take that long once you have it in place, but it’s so valuable because I can see the actual driving force for our applications, which I obviously care the most about.

Yep. But what does it cost you? Right? Are you, are you running ads to your application or is it purely organic right now?

No, we run re-targeted ads though to the application. So I’m usually shooting. I can pay up to like 300, $400 an application cause I’m selling such high tickets. So I shoot for, for that or below that. And we hit that, especially when we do a webinar and I take in to consideration, like our last webinar was 500% ROI just off of the initial payment. And then those people are obviously monthly clients. Yeah. But I’m not running cold ads to the application. I mean, we’ll do like lead gen and webinar ads and things like that. And then those lead to the application. So,

So let’s go through some fun metrics, really quick, a hundred people come in, fill out an application, walk me through the process of how many people show up to the call. Right? Cause we know show up rate is a big thing in our industry. And then next, how many people actually convert over into an actual client? And then what do you do with the people that don’t convert?

Yeah. So my metrics are really good and I have to give credit to honorable and who, who works on my sales system with me. Because our sales page, our application page is like very direct. It’s like, you’re not a fit if you are this, if you’re this, if you are this. So we weed everybody out, we also do decline people. But at this point, 90% of people are actually approved cause they weed themselves out. Just looking in the application at this point, our show up rates like 90% on the, and our close rate is 50 to 60% on those calls. She sells agency and the done with you. So it could be either she’s selling and actually through the application, we take them through and then they get put on a call for one or the other. But my numbers are so good cause we weed everybody out before they ever get to the call.

I think that that’s, what’s costing the also at your said you’re paying three to $400 per app. You think it’s, that’s why it’s so high because if you start sprinkling in non-qualified people that might bring in that app costs down, but you’re going to have like sales cycle,

Which is why I can pay more because I’m closing 50 to 60% of people, 50, 60%. And some of those there’s like $7,000 deposit payment. So the ROI is huge.

Wow. I love it. That’s great. And how much revenue has your company generated in the last 12 months in business?

I think we’re at about 2.5 in the last 12 months. We’re at about a three run rate now. But if I look at the last 12 months, about two weeks,

Congratulations to you. And then where do you see yourself in the next 12 months? Fast forward 12 months. Where do you see yourself in 12 months? And what do you have to do to actually hit that goal?

I’m in a scaling place. Like I’ve found a lot of that’s working and we will need, we have two ads teams willing to add a third ads team. So we have to scale there. And then in terms of marketing, it’s just the continual scaling, but keeping the quality like that’s, what we’re always working on is, is scaling our applications, but then not letting those really great metrics drop by getting cold people in. So that’s the constant kind of thing we’re working on. And so we’ll just keep scaling our application which leads to both of those offers. I don’t plan on offering any future offers and it’s really just scaling those as much as I can in the next 12 months.

Love it. And I know that most people and you hit on something really good. And I want to just expand on that a little bit. I think most people would just focus on the front end of their business, which is sales. Right. And what you just said also is at the same time as making sure that the quality stays the same and does not essentially deteriorate right. And in this, in this game that we’re all playing, which is the agency game. There’s really just a stacking method, right? And the more clients you stock, the more your MRR grows, your AR grows, your run rate, things like that, like all those numbers. But the second that your churn rate for those of you advanced guys who start understanding like real business metrics, the second year churn rate starts getting high and you start losing customers, essentially, you end up with what everybody calls the famous hamster wheel.

And that’s the last thing that you want to be in where you’re just spinning your wheel. So the most important thing that you guys need to do is make sure if you’re going to scale the front end of your business, make sure that the back end of your business is able to scale the exact same time without losing any quality. So you can keep the clients that you have. That’s the only way that you will continuously grow your income, grow your revenue, and grow all those other numbers and metrics. So good point there. And last question I have for you. What is your favorite software that you use in your business today and why?

I always get asked this I’m actually not a techie person. It’s so funny. I don’t use a lot of softwares in our team. We do a lot of, I mean, we have a lot of custom Google sheets, so I guess I’ll, I don’t know.

Hey, I’ve had a bunch of people come on here. Yeah. I’ve had a bunch of people like Google sheets, Google drive.

Yeah. Google drive because we’ve customized, like all our tracking sheets and stuff for now or customized. Cause I couldn’t find a software that did what we really wanted it to do yet for the tracking. So that’s what we use the most right now.

Fair enough guys. Ladies and gentlemen, Emily Hirsh all the way out of Austin, Texas with Hirsh Marketing. Emily, thank you so much for jumping on. Hopefully we’ll speak to you again in 12 months and see where you’re at as far as a monetary goal and where your business is at as far as team growth and size and things like that. But thank you so much for joining us here on the Marketers Mindset podcast. Thanks for having me have a good one. Bye bye.