Become a Master Marketer - Hailey Friedman - FHR #277

Why Dave Decided to talk to Hailey:

Head of Marketing at Improvado.io and Co-Founder of Growth Marketing Pro, Hailey Friedman has helped hundreds of companies grow their bottom line through digital marketing. Hailey will discuss digital marketing basics and how to integrate it into your funnel, as well as give her tips on what works and what doesn’t when you are marketing your business.

Tips and Tricks for You and Your Business:

• How to get customers (1:25)
• Getting started with Google Ads (6:25)
• What is most important in a marketing funnel (10:45)
• The allowable cost per acquisition (16:40)

Quotable Moments:

"Websites are dying"

"As a marketer, I never send traffic to a website"

Other Tidbits: Websites are becoming obsolete.  Instead of sending customers to a website, try sending them to a landing page that is designed specifically to push them down a sales funnel.

Links: FunnelHackerRadio.com FunnelHackerRadio.com/freetrial FunnelHackerRadio.com/dreamcar

---Transcript---

Speaker 1:   00:00     Welcome to funnel hacker radio podcast, where we go behind the scenes and uncover the tactics and strategies top entrepreneurs are using to make more sales, dominate their markets, and how you can get those same results. Here's your host, Dave Woodward. Art, everybody. Welcome back to funnel hacker

Speaker 2:   00:19     radio. I'm your host Dave Woodward, and today have the opportunity to having Hailey Friedman on the show. Haley, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3:   00:23     Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2:   00:26     I'm excited. So Haley's the head marketing or is head of marketing over at [inaudible] dot io. She's also the cofounder of growth marketing pro where she sells literally hundreds of companies grow their bottom line through digital marketing is one of the main reasons we wanted to have her on today is what you thought about really growing your audience. In addition to that, we're going to talk about some of the metrics and things that she's said loves to geek out on. So in addition to that, she also serves as the president Badass marketers and founders and I would just write, and I think you said there's over like 20,000 members that right?

Speaker 3:   00:54     Yeah. There's 20,000 members globally.

Speaker 2:   00:56     Crazy and I think you're running the, the primary group up in the Silicon Valley area.

Speaker 3:   01:01     Yeah. I'm the president of the San Francisco chapter.

Speaker 2:   01:05     Awesome. Well, I'm going to dive right into this and one of the things you and I were talking about just briefly here was this whole idea as far as how to get customers. I think that's the biggest struggle most people have is they get this wonderful idea and trying to find a way of, of getting that out to the market. So what are some of the things that you've seen? I know you spend a lot of time looking at different platforms and technology and it's not as much about the tech as it is about some of the other stuff. So how do you actually help people get customers?

Speaker 3:   01:33     Yeah, I mean this is a challenge that I personally faced myself. I was a founder. Um, I tried to start something on my own and the biggest lesson that I took away from it was no, you can have an incredible team and you can have an amazing product, but if you don't know how to get customers and you don't have anything worth very much at all. So that's kind of what set me off on this journey to figure out like how do you get Joe Schmoe to buy something and I'm just like big gray box that I really did not understand and to an unwrapped how, how this works. And so, um, I just, I lived across the country from New York to San Francisco. I joined a startup at the ground floor. I just became a sponge and I just learned everything that I possibly could about marketing.

Speaker 3:   02:18     I read blogs and conferences and the experts. Um, and then I implemented them not only at my job but for my friends and my family, like anyone who would let me. And I really kind of got my feet wet, figuring, figuring this stuff out. And so there's, there's really nothing better than trial and error. You learn a lot, but at this point I've probably done it like so many times that I've gathered this book of knowledge in my brain about what actually works and what doesn't work and it really depends on what the part of it that I think is so fun is that it's different for every business. Every business has different customers. You have different goals, you have different marketing budget and resources timeline that you need to hit those goals. And so like all those things need to be considered when you're figuring out what is the lowest hanging fruit thing I can do to get customers.

Speaker 3:   03:08     And so it's hard to give a blanket statement, which is why through growth marketing pro we're often helping founders one off like marketing marketers and founders that need one off helpful. We'll, we'll customize a plan for them. But overall I like to think of it like this. Like where is the highest intent? Customers like where, where are your highest intent customers? So for example, um, referral programs always have the highest intent because people who are visiting your website that were referred by a friend and they were already sold and educated by their close friend or family and now they're visiting your site and they're going to convert at like 25 percent, whereas the average trapped under convert converted one percent. So if you already have customers start a referral program, that's how you'll get like the highest intent people to your website.

Speaker 2:   04:03     Similar to I hear a ton about different types of referral programs. What are some of the things and referral problems you've seen that really work well?

Speaker 3:   04:11     Yeah. So surprisingly people are not as motivated to referred friends when you pay them as much as they are to offer something of value to their friend. So people in when, when they're socially interacting with friends, they want to kind of be able to gift them something. So if you can create that vibe, then you're, your referral program will likely perform better.

Speaker 2:   04:40     I've seen that they get a discount and you get a discount at the same time by offering a coupon code like that.

Speaker 3:   04:51     Yeah, definitely. Um, and that works better than just having you get a discount and nothing for your friend. Yeah. Um, yeah. So I think, um, referral programs can be really difficult to track if you are going to implement one. I recommend using a tool I've used ambassador in the past. There's a lot of different tools you could use but definitely can get really hairy if you don't get super organized with your tracking links and things. So I'm tracking can become a nightmare. But um, yeah, along the same lines of, of high intent channels, I think affiliate programs with you can get like bloggers and influencers mentioning your product and sending traffic. That's also a great way to get like really trustworthy people doing the selling for you kind of thing. So those are high intent and then, you know, if you're looking at paid channels, if you have a budget and you're trying to figure out, you know, do I spend money on Google ads or do I spend money on facebook or, or whatever. Um, again, like think about intent, you know, someone who is searching a specific keyword related to your business as far higher intent than someone who's just browsing through facebook looking their friends' photos. Right? So a while facebook is not some channel for a lot of things. I would if there is search volume related to your product, then I would always recommend starting with intense is highest, which would be on google ads

Speaker 2:   06:13     in Google ads seem to be the holy grail, but at the same time it's one most confusing things for most marketers. Everyone seems to kind of first of all go to facebook. It's easier to work with and things as you've worked inside of the Google ad network and the platform. What are some of the things that you've seen that work really well for a person who's just trying to kind of get the feet wet with Google? Where would you tell them that they should start?

Speaker 3:   06:35     Yeah. I always start with like your branded keywords that someone literally searches for the name of your brand. You want to be there and then your competitors' keywords. So the names of your competitors, you want to be there too. That's content, lowest hanging fruit. Those people are already well educated, either about the name of your business or the name of your competitors. And so that's always the best place to start. And from there it's really just like careful testing. But again, thinking about when you're thinking about keywords like which of these keywords, long tail keywords are gonna be customers who have already thought very deeply about this and um, and if you are going to go higher funnel, more broad keywords, then you're likely going to want to serve content that's going to act as a funnel to your adapt to your purchase.

Speaker 2:   07:32     So, speaking of funnels, I know you're in the process of creating your own and your first click funnels here, expert secrets. When you start thinking about a funnel, especially, you just made the mention as far as you know, top of the funnel, high end funnel. Explain to people exactly what that means.

Speaker 3:   07:48     So I think people, people are at different stages of their purchase journey. And when I think about the top of the funnel, I think about the beginning of that journey, maybe someone doesn't know that they need your product. And so at the top of the funnel, people are doing their initial research, if you can create content that captured them at that stage and then you can become the teacher, the person who's being the educator, you can kind of like walk them down the funnel down to purchase product. Um, so basically people that are high in the funnel may not be super high intense quite yet. And as they get lower into the funnel, their intent becomes higher and higher and conserve them different types of content. So as they're deeper in the funnel, it becomes maybe not as much educational content, more not as broad educational concept, but it gets more narrow into your product. So you can serve them content that maybe shows a product walkthrough of your product or testimonials of people who purchase your products. And so there's kind of this sequential messaging that happens as someone goes from top of funnel.

Speaker 2:   08:54     I love, I had this conversation with

Speaker 3:   08:56     my son earlier this morning. He's doing some affiliate marketing for me inside of click funnels and I would sit there, I sit there talking to him about it and he's like, you had. It's really hard to get someone just to take a free trial of clickfunnels, and I'm like, yeah, you're right. Especially if they don't even know what a funnel is. I said, we're in the process right now of creating this whole idea as far as the death of the website and trying to help a lot of local business owners who think, Gosh, all I need is a website to help them understand that really websites are dying. They're not already getting some industries and really how a funnel works and so if you start with funnel jargon, people are going to go, I don't even know what a funnel is, what are you talking about it?

Speaker 3:   09:34     So I love that idea. I just appreciate just kind of hitting home as far as where in that actual funnel are they top of the funnel, mid funnel, bottom of the funnel, and it totally changes the experience as well as the conversation that you're having with them. So I appreciate your going through that. Totally. That's so funny that you say that about the websites because we talked with marketing part talks a lot of, um, people that are just getting started and they have this website now. Like I have this amazing website, I to my website that is just not how it works. There's so much more intention that goes as a marketer, I never send traffic to a website, never ever. So as a marketer, I'm always sending traffic to landing pages that are specifically pushing people down a funnel, a very specific funnel. They have a very specific call to action, just one button on a page. And so websites that have menus with lots of different options, it's like you're, um, you're spending money to get traffic to that page and then you're losing people. You're giving them a million different places to click options and you're not helping them get through the funnel.

Speaker 2:   10:37     I appreciate that. Well, here we've started to do, I'd like to kind of segway into one of the things I'm most excited about and that's this whole marketing data type of stuff that you'd love to geek out on and I know you've got kind of an awkward the end for those people want to stick around as far as a kind of exact how they can track some of this data. So tell me what, what are the things that you're paying attention to in a marketing funnel? What are the metrics that you're following? What's most important?

Speaker 3:   11:00     Alright, well the first thing I want to say is that this stuff is really hard. Um,

Speaker 2:   11:08     wait, all of my listeners right there, they're gone.

Speaker 3:   11:10     Well, no, because I was a lovely side. Thought it was really hard and I understand why you think it is hard because I used to have a really hard time with it. I was really overwhelmed. Is that started out as a marketer? I was like, okay, um, you want me to build a weekly report showing how our marketing campaigns are doing simple enough. Right. Little do I realized that that actually involves logging into facebook and export and all the data logging into google, linkedin email tool, looking at our down revenue and like pulling all this data together takes hours because you've done loggins. These platforms export all the data. Then maybe you import them into a Google spreadsheet or excel. Then you have another tab where you may be creating a dashboard and you're using formulas and you're trying to map the data all together and hopefully your formulas are right and hopefully and then even at that point you just have like a big sheet of numbers and then you're going to have to present these numbers of people who are going to want to make sense of them.

Speaker 3:   12:12     So they should probably be in charge now. It needs to be pretty in this whole thing. I swear like it used to take me two to three days of my week to prepare for the meeting with a meeting with our CEO just to be able to like pull, pull the numbers together, make them pretty enough for other people to understand. But also for me to understand like not only like putting the data together, but then so do the analytics and figure out the insights and figure out what's not going well and what needs to change. Just like the whole thing. It's so tedious. It is so time consuming and I can promise you that there is a marketer at every single company doing this, like somebody is doing this. And I was doing this annually about six months ago. I left my job, my last company, and I wanted to work at a marketing company, some kind of marketing tool that was helping marketers because I love thinking about marketing.

Speaker 3:   13:10     I wanted to market to marketers and this is all very meta, but I've heard about this company called it provato that was looking for a head of marketing. And it was a tool that basically automated that whole process that I was pretty miserable over. Um, so basically they just sink into all the different platforms like facebook and Google ads and all your crm and all the things. And then it's just like slurps up the data into one place where it just lifts in real time all the time. So you can check on any ad, any campaign across any platform in one place or you can send it to your visualization tool. So the Google data studio or tableau or looker, wherever you want to visualize it, you just have this real time reporting. So you never ever have to like do that crappy stuff that all of us marketers are wasting time that ever again.

Speaker 3:   14:03     Um, yeah. And so, and so that's, that's what my mission is now, to kind of spread the word that this is an option because I certainly didn't know it was. And um, you know, as a marketer and my favorite part is the strategy part. It's the thinking about using the tests and new ideas to try and optimizing what's working and don't want to be in spreadsheets all day. Just getting started. What are some of the most important metrics they should be paying attention to? I think a lot of times I see people making the mistake of looking at the wrong metrics. And so this is definitely an important question.

Speaker 3:   14:43     It can be easy as a marketer get excited about top of the funnel metrics. Here we go. Talking about funnel signups, right? So at my last job I was at a company called realty shares and it was a real estate investing platform online and so I was getting were doing google, Google ads and we were running ads to the keyword real estate crowd funding, which is what it's called when you invest in real estate online, not everyone knows what the word real estate crowd funding is. So the people who have typed that in have very high intent, right? And those people would convert and they would the time paying investors in great customers. And so I wanted to expand from there and try and see if it worked and follow more people. So I tested out real estate investing as a keyword, which seems like a logical next step, real estate investing. And we tested it and while we were getting tons of signups for really cheap, this was awesome. I'm like, great, let's spend more money here. A couple months later I realized none of the people that signed up from the keyword real estate investing ever made an investment

Speaker 3:   15:57     and so it's really easy to get excited by like sign up metrics, but what actually matters is like actual customers, actual paying customers, if none of those people become paying customers and that's actually not a good place to be spending money, so to kind of just like hold your excitement until you watch people go through the funnel and the different companies, different length of time, which can be challenging as a marketer to wait like a couple months to see if that thing works before you spend more money on it, but it's really about just careful testing and being able to see data from, from sign up all the way through to revenue and being able to tie that back. That revenue back to the child came from

Speaker 2:   16:41     kind of what you're talking about there. The most important thing I always look at is what's that cost to acquire a customer? A paying customer versus the sign sign ups are great, but you can have a whole bunch of people sign up if no one take their credit card out. They are very, very little value to you or to them. So I always look as far as what's that cost to acquire the customer, what's obviously the average cart value. If we can kind of look at that where we get in at least inside of a funnel where the average cart value, if I can get the average car value to be equal to the cost to acquire customer base, getting customers for free and then I send them up the sales ladder from there. So

Speaker 3:   17:16     keeping track, you know the customers signed up within a channel and that have gone on to make a purchase and you can have that revenue. You can just take that revenue number and divided by the number of signups that you got. And now you have your legs allowable cost per acquisition for a, for a signup. And so if you go above that, you're know you're losing money and if you go below that, you know you're making money. So

Speaker 2:   17:44     can you repeat that Formula One more time just for those people are listening to, they understand because I think it's a real important number to. To track.

Speaker 3:   17:49     Yeah. So I call the allowable the allowable cost per acquisition for a signup for someone that signed up. So within a given channel, if you keep track of, say for example your, your check, looking at facebook as a channel, you know that you got x number of signups on facebook and then he got y number of customers that actually paid and then you have a certain number of revenue. So if you take that revenue number, how much you made from people that you acquired on facebook and then you divide it by the number of signups that you got at the very start. Then you have this number that I like to call the allowable and that's kind of like your breakeven cost for acquisition, for facebook, for this specific channel, so that can rate. That can vary from channel to channel. You might have a different allowable cost per acquisition on facebook. Then you have google ads and this is really, really important when, when you're optimizing for channel two to realize that that's different. So on facebook you'll have this number and this is your allowable cost per acquisition and you want to stay below it because it's what soon as you start going, oh, if you're an addict, you're a even, that means like the, the amount that you're spending and getting

Speaker 3:   19:10     on facebook is the same and if you're over it then you're losing money on facebook and if you're under it then,

Speaker 2:   19:16     then you're awesome. So just running some numbers here. If I have 100 people sign up and they'll say 10 of those buy and it's a turtle a product. So it's a $2,000 total. So I've got basically 2000 bucks I made and divide that by 100. In other words, it means I could basically spend up to 20 bucks for a signup. That sound right. And so I think it's important for people who are listening to understand. We talked so much about what's my cost to acquire the customer? Well, that cost to acquire a customer. It could be 200 bucks because that's what they're paying me, but if it actually costs you that sign up as a 10th of that, I think that's an important number to kind of track and pay attention to. So I appreciate to appreciate you kind of go through there.

Speaker 3:   19:58     Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:   19:59     Well Haley, I know we're kind of get close to wrapping things up here where, where can people get more information on tracking this kind of stuff?

Speaker 3:   20:06     Yeah. So I actually need a blank template just for you guys who are listening, if you want to look at what my marketing dashboard looks like. Um, before I automated that. So this is when I go into Google sheets and I make all these different tabs so that I can see what's happening from a marketing perspective weekly, daily, monthly, yearly. Like how I figured out my goals. I have all these different tabs in a google sheet and I kind of took out all the data and made it blank for you in case you want to use it yourself. That's what I, when I do my marketing data manually, that's what it looks like. Do you want to automate? It can help you there, but if you just want this Google spreadsheet, definitely take a and download it for yourself. You can access it at that io slash podcast. You want spelling Pramada for us? Yes, I am t r o v a d o Dot io slash podcast. It's so funny. I had this terrible time and spelling allowed senior. I'm the table so that I. You

Speaker 2:   21:16     did a great job spelling for it, so I appreciate it.

Speaker 3:   21:18     Yeah.

Speaker 2:   21:21     Well, let any last remarks here before we got to wrap things up.

Speaker 3:   21:25     Um, let's see. Follow or connect with me on linkedin. I'd love to, uh, to chat there. That's probably the best place. My name is Haley Friedman, so you can find me on there.

Speaker 2:   21:36     Awesome. Well, Haley, thanks so much. I appreciate your time and appreciate all that you guys are doing to push marketing forward. So thank you. Thank you. This is a lot of fun.

Speaker 4:   21:45     Hey everybody, thank you so much for taking the time to listen to podcasts. If you don't mind, could you please share this with others, rate and review this podcast on itunes. It means the world to me where I'm trying to get to as a million downloads here in the next few months and just crush through over $650,000 and I just want to get the next few $100,000 so we can get to a million downloads and see really what I can do to help improve and and get this out to more people. At the same time, if there's a topic, there's something you'd like me to share or someone you'd like me to interview, I only just reach out to me on facebook. You can pm me and be more than happy to take any of your feedback as well as if people would like me to interview. I'm more than happy to reach out and have that conversation with you so I can go to itunes rate and review this, share this podcast with others and let me know how else I can improve this or can do to make this better for you guys. Thanks.