Episode #052: The Sphere of Influence in Marketing
The Sphere of Influence in Marketing
Have you ever wondered how to drive down ad costs, increase marketing efficay, and generate more bottom line revenue (and profits)? Then you'll wanna tune into this week's episode of the podcast where I'm breaking down what I call The Sphere of Influence.
This is a concept I've been working on for some time, and it's been really cool to test it with my students and now be able to share it with you.
When you tune in to learn about The Sphere of Influence you'll discover...
How The Sphere of Influence works to reduce marketing costs, while increasing sales and conversions
How to grow your own sphere so that you can increase the effectiveness of your marketing
The (6) key audiences that your sphere allows you to target
The power of monetization and how to capitalize on your sphere
Tune in to learn about this concept, and discover more about growing your audience.
Links Mentioned:
Full Transcript:
This is Not Your Average Online Marketing Podcast, episode number 52. And in this episode, we're talking about the sphere of influence, what it is, how to use it, and how to leverage it to get the most out of your marketing time and dollars. So, let's get into it.
Hey, hey, hey, not-so-average marketer. Welcome to another episode of the podcast. I'm really excited because I am going to share with you today a concept that I've been working on behind the scenes for a little while. I've shared it with some friends, and for those of you who don't know, we recently ran a Facebook and Instagram ads bootcamp where I really talked about this concept more in depth and shared it with the bootcampers. And the reception was really good, and I thought, "Wow, if people are really loving this concept, I should absolutely introduce it on the podcast so that those of you who are in my audience that didn't join the bootcamp can learn a little bit more about it and how to leverage it effectively."
So in order to talk about the sphere of influence, we first have to understand how it works and what it is. So I want you to imagine that you've got four key elements of this sphere. You've got your Facebook and Instagram ads, you've got your email list, you've got your core content, and you've got your social media. Now you might be saying if I put those four things on a piece of paper, that's a circle. But what I want you to imagine is that each piece of this links to every other piece in the circle. So, what ends up happening is you have this sphere with four key touchpoints. So you've got your ads, your email, your core content, and your social. So for example, Facebook ads may point to your email list, but it also points to your core content, and it also points to your social media.
Your email may point to your core content and social, but it also drives engagement on your ads. So all of these pieces are interconnected into what ultimately builds a sphere. So what does this sphere mean? Well, I want you to imagine that the middle of this sphere, where everything is connecting to each other is your warm audience. This is the people in your audience that are most likely to join your email list, buy your products, convert to customers, and ultimately buy from you. And so what happens is this sphere is moving, because when you put money into ads, it fuels momentum through the other pieces of the sphere. When you email your list, it pushes momentum to your core content. When you post core content and share it on social media, it pushes more people onto your email list.
So all of these elements are working together to create this sphere that's inconsistent motion. And I want you to imagine, I'm going to be a little nerdy for a second, but I want you to imagine that as this sphere is spinning, as it gets faster and faster, and you fuel it with more content, and ads, and email, and social media, it expands, because it's spinning really fast, it expands outwards. What the center of that sphere represents is, like I said, your warm audience. So what I want you to be thinking about is how do all the key elements of my marketing work together? How does my marketing all connect to each other so that I'm maximizing my warm audience? Now, what I want you to understand is that your warm audience, when we talk about it in the context of the sphere of influence, is a highly targetable with advertising audience.
So there are five to six key audiences that your sphere of influence builds. The first one is your website custom audience. So just for context, the next audiences that I'm listing are literally custom audiences that you build within the Facebook ads ecosystem. So you've got your website custom audience, because if you email your list and drive them to your website, you're going to have website traffic. If you post your content on social media, it's going to drive website traffic. If you write good content for your website or podcast, YouTube videos, it's going to drive traffic back to your website through Google, through SEO. That's the first one. The second one is your email list. So you can literally take a copy of your email list from your ConvertKit, Mailchimp, whatever, and upload it directly to Facebook and run ads to it.
The third one is what I call forms audiences. Now I've talked about this a lot on the show, but I'm a huge advocate for Facebook lead ads. And this is where people opt into your email list directly on Facebook. You don't send them off to a landing page. You literally have them opt-in on the Facebook platform. And the reason I love these ads is because for 90 days, everyone who clicks on that ad or fills out that form is 100% retargetable, essentially. The fourth and fifth audience are Facebook and Instagram engagement. So when someone likes, comments, shares, clicks, engages, visits, your profile, sends you a DM, you can retarget them for one year with Facebook and Instagram retargeting. So this is a really powerful audience, because you can actually get somebody into your sphere and have them be retargetable for a year.
And then the sixth audience is optional, and that is your video view audience. So if you are doing Facebook Lives or you're posting videos on Instagram, or you're posting videos on Facebook, you can actually retarget those viewers with Facebook ads. So those six audiences, just to run through them again, are website viewers, email list, form submissions, Instagram engagement, Facebook engagement, and video views. Now, you might be thinking, Zach, this is all good and well, I know I want to grow my warm audience, but don't I want to run ads to cold traffic to drive people to engage with me. And yes, you do. You want to fuel this sphere with cold traffic in terms of growing your email list, maybe growing your social media, maybe driving traffic to your core content.
But what I want you to understand is that when it comes to generating sales, when it comes to generating revenue off your ads, you really want to focus on targeting the people in the sphere. So just to really cement this, what we're doing is we're driving cold traffic to grow our list, to connect with us on social media, to read our blog posts, but once someone does that, they're now within the sphere and we can retarget them with warm offers. So why would we do this? You might be thinking, "Zach, I've heard all the hype about just driving traffic directly to a low-ticket offer," or, "Can I just move people into a paid launch, or a free launch, or a webinar, or a video series?"
And here's the trend that we're noticing in our agency and with our students, you can still drive cold traffic into a launch. And in fact, I still recommend that you drive cold traffic into a launch. So let's say you're doing a webinar, you still want to target cold people to bring them to your webinar. However, the highest converting audience within the launch is people on our warm audience list. Those are the people most likely to buy our products. And so if you are saying, "I'm going to do 50% cold, 50% warm," you're leaving money on the table because it's better to do 70% to 80% warm and 20 to 30% cold because that warm audience is more likely to buy from you. And so what you should be doing in between launches is growing and engaging this sphere of influence. Let's talk about this in dollars and cents. So, we recently ran our Facebook ads bootcamp. It was $10 to join the bootcamp. 10 bucks.
We ran ads to get people to buy the bootcamp for $10. When we ran those ads to warm audiences, we spent $17.39 cents per purchase on Facebook ads. Now just to be really transparent, you might be like, "Zach, if it costs $10 and you spent $17, didn't you lose money?" Technically, yes, but we had an offer at the end of our bootcamp for Not Your Average Membership. And so we had over five figures in profit on the back end of the challenge. So our warm audience was $17.39 cents per $10 purchase. When we ran this to cold audiences, our cost per purchase was $104.57 cents. That means it was six times more expensive to get someone to buy from us cold than it was to get someone to buy from us warm.
Now, little disclaimer, I don't think our ads were the strongest. I think our copy could have used a little work to cold audiences, and I think our sales page could have been upgraded a little bit to cold audiences. But overall, we saw really good results by targeting our warm audience. Just to give you some fun stats, we ended up driving a lot of traffic to the Listbuilding Bootcamp over 4,800 views to the sales page, and we converted about 15% of people that visited the sales page, I should say, 15% of people who went to the sales page joined the offer. So we had a decent uptake. I feel like that's a really good conversion rate for us, and that's partially because we drove so much warm traffic there. We focused on the warm. So if it's cheaper to hit your warm audience, what you want to be doing between launches, between promotions, between driving traffic directly to a sales page is growing this sphere of influence.
And like I said, the more you fuel this sphere, the faster it spins, the quicker it expands. Conceptually, what that means is when you're growing your list with Facebook ads 24/7, which I recommend through lead ads, you're always growing your list, which means more people are going to read your blog or visit your podcast, which means your social media is going to grow, which means your ads get cheaper, which means your email list grows faster, which means more people read your content, which means more people follow you on social, which means your ads continue to grow faster. And so it's this cyclical spherical concept that's always expanding and getting more people to connect with you. So that's conceptually how this works and why it works so well. But the big question becomes how do you grow your sphere of influence, how do you expand that sphere?
Because we've talked about it conceptually, but let me give you some really tactical, tangible things you can do to expand your sphere of influence. So, number one is growing your email list with Facebook lead ads. Now, again, I've talked about this before on the podcast, but I want to reiterate, this is where people opt in on Facebook with their name and email. The reason I like these ads is, number one, they tend to be a little cheaper, but number two, because I can retarget everyone who fills out my Facebook form for three months, 90 days. Growing your list 24/7 between launches means that when you go into your next launch, you have people that you've nurtured, people who have listened to your podcast, people who have downloaded your freebies, people who have watched your videos, people who have read your blog, they start to get to know you.
And familiarity breeds conversions. It just does. If you want people to buy from you, they need to know you. I think in 2023, it's going to be bigger than ever that people don't just randomly buy from strangers on the internet, because we are in a saturated space now. I don't care what you sell, people are familiar with the concept of online courses, online education. Masterclass is blowing up, Udemy, Skillshare, they're all getting bigger, and it's because people are becoming privy to online education. And so you have to stand out, and you can do that by getting aces at copy, and killing your marketing, and working with copywriters and high-end designers, and you can also create familiarity between you and your audience. And so I'm not saying that copy's not important. I'm not saying that design's not important. I'm not saying don't worry about any of that stuff.
What I am saying is that it's really, really fundamental that you start building relationships. And the sphere of influence, if we were to distill it down to one word, is relationships. It's about growing a connection with your audience. So that's the first thing. Be growing your email list 24/7 with a simple list building ad. And honestly, $5 to $10 a day is enough to start running ads. Number two, you can run engagement ads. So we generally have a low-cost engagement ad running to our sphere of influence with a really well-performing Instagram ad. And that Instagram ad is really just a post that's done well for us on Instagram. So we take a good performing Instagram post. It could be a video, it could be a static post. We take it and we run it for engagement to people in those six audiences, the website audience, the email list, the Facebook forms, the Instagram and Facebook engagement, and the video audiences.
Why do we do that? Because at $1 or $2 a day, it's going to make sure you're top of mind with your sphere of influence, and it's going to encourage those people to follow you on social. It's going to encourage them to connect with you on social, which leads to the third thing you can do to expand your sphere of influence, which is post on social. Post on social. Now, the reason that I like this concept of the sphere of influence so much is that I'm really inconsistent with social media, right? I'm not good at social media. Sometimes I'm posting. We just came out of a launch, and so I was posting really consistently. And then in between launches, I don't post as consistently. It's something I struggle with personally. With this sphere of influence, you always have that engagement ad running to stay top of mind.
But number two, when you do drop a social post, you've got new followers and engagement from this sphere that you hit with your content to encourage them to connect with you. So, regular social posting doesn't have to mean every single day, every single hour, every single... Even week. It just means that when you are hit with inspiration or when you have something to say or when you have a powerful message, you put it out on Instagram and your Facebook page. The fourth way to grow your sphere is quality content. Now I want to be really clear about when I say quality content, I'm talking about blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, that stuff that lives on the internet and serves you really well.
Now I recommend, if you're going to do a YouTube video that you actually embedded on your website with a short form or long form blog to go with it, but essentially, what you want to do is create quality content. Because naturally, as you grow your audience, you will have a piece of content that you can drive people to. And as you drive people to it, they'll comment, like, share, and that'll expand the people who see your quality content. Because quality content is easier to share. Now notice I'm not saying quantity content. I'm not saying post a blog every day, do a podcast every week. You must show up every single day to win. Guys, real talk. I missed the podcast last week. If you're a loyal listener, thank you so much, first of all. But second off, you probably noticed we missed a podcast last week, and I'm working on being more consistent on my podcast. It really is a big struggle for me to be completely candid, but my business isn't crumbling because I missed a week of the podcast.
Why? Because I'm always growing this sphere with advertising quality content and regular social posting. So creating quality content helps people like, comment, share, and reach new people. We did a podcast a couple weeks ago that was really well received, and it got featured in a lot of people's stories. We saw an increase in downloads on that podcast compared to what we typically see. If we go look at the stats from our previous podcast, the one that we released last week actually has the most downloads in the first seven days of any of our episodes for the last, about, 15 episodes. So it worked really, really well. And that's because we created quality content. The last way to grow your sphere of influence is regular communication with your email list. I recommend that you email your list pretty much weekly. We've experimented weekly, three times a week, daily.
We're still playing around with exactly where we want to dial in our communication, but here's the key, we're communicating. So when you do come with an offer, people aren't like, "Who is this person?" I was reading a post on Facebook the other day that I found really funny. Somebody said, "This Black Friday, I got emails from people I hadn't heard from all year, and then suddenly they were selling to me and I didn't even know who they were." Ask yourself, "Does my audience know who I am? Am I promoting my content enough that people actually know who I am?" So when it comes to growing your sphere of influence to accelerating the growth of that sphere, you've got five core things you can do. Sure, there's more, but these are the five core that I've identified. Number one, growing your list consistently with ads. Number two, running engagement ads to reach people within your sphere and get them to follow you so that, number three, your social posts get seen more frequently. Number four, developing and releasing quality content that you own. And number five, regular email communication.
I want to wrap up this episode with talking about, "This is all great and this grows your sphere, and conceptually, we understand that it makes things cheaper, but how do you capitalize on your sphere of influence?" Well, number one, you can launch. So when I launch, I always target my sphere of influence. I always run ads, whether it's a free challenge, a paid challenge, a free webinar, a paid workshop, I'm always going to run ads to my warm sphere of influence. So launching, make sure that you put a healthy percentage of your budget, I say at least 50%, as you grow this sphere consistently into driving traffic to your warm audience. The second place that you can capitalize is evergreen. So a lot of times we hear people saying, "Oh, I'm going to do an automated webinar, and I'm going to drive traffic to that webinar with Facebook ads and I'm going to convert."
It's much easier to convert an audience that knows you than it is to convert an audience that just found out about you 90 minutes ago. So if you want to fuel an evergreen system, whether it be an automated webinar, a minicourse, an email funnel, driving traffic to that warm sphere is going to do really well for that. And then finally, running ads directly to an offer. So I talked about this earlier in the podcast that for our bootcamp, we charged $10 and we drove traffic directly to the offer, and most of our sales came from the warm when it came to Facebook ads side of things. Literally, we had dozens of sales of our bootcamp directly from our Facebook ads. So just keep that in mind that you can always leverage these things. You can always leverage launching or evergreen, or direct to sale, but it's easier to do when you target that sphere of influence than it is when you try and get people to buy from you cold out of the blue.
So I want to wrap up with a super quick recap, and then we'll get you over to the show notes if you have questions, or you can always DM me on Instagram, @heartsoulhustle, and I'm happy to answer. But the sphere of influences is this concept where your ads, email, core content, and social media interconnect to build this sphere that you can accelerate by feeding with traffic. We drive that traffic with list building, engagement ads, social media posts, quality content, and regular email communication, which ultimately grows our sphere of influence which we can run ads to, and to define those ads that build up that sphere. We've got website traffic, email list, Facebook forms, Instagram and Facebook engagement, and video view content. Once we use all that together, we can capitalize on our sphere by launching, driving evergreen traffic, or driving traffic directly to an offer.
And we find, at least for us, in one of our recent tests, that it can be as much as six times less expensive to hit your sphere of influence than to drive traffic directly to an offer. So there you have it, the concept of the sphere of influence. I hope this has been valuable to you. If you want to get the full transcript or the show notes, you can head over to heartsoulhustle.com/nyap052. Again, that's heartsoulhustle.com/nyap052 or Not Your Average Podcast, episode number 52. We'll have the full show notes and the transcript. And as always, if you got value, let me know. DM me on Instagram or tag me on Instagram, @heartsoulhustle. I love hearing from you guys. The last episode, we got really good feedback from you. And when I hear from you, it tells me what to create more or less of. So don't be afraid to reach out. I love hearing from you. It's never a bother. It's always a pleasure. So DM me on Instagram, @heartsoulhustle, and until next time, stay not so average.
