My $250,000 Lesson On Marketing

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast, episode 130

SPEAKER_2 (0:07)

You're listening to the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast, the number one resource for running a profitable home recording studio.

Brian Hood (0:19)

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Home Studio Podcast. I am your host, Brian Hood, and I'm here solo today to try to bring you a little value. And since Chris isn't here, I am going to skip the pre-show banter and just get straight into what I'm going to talk about today. And it's related to our marketing funnels as recording studios. This is something I've talked about a lot in the past. I had a whole email sequence, like a whole email course thing that I put out at the end of last year called Jumpstart Your Marketing.

And it walked people through everything they need to be thinking about when it comes to their sales funnels as a recording studio. This topic is something we talked about last week on the interview with Mark Eckert. It's something we talked about on the interview with Joe Wadsworth of the online recording studio. And this is something that I eat, sleep, breathe, and live every day of my life. And it's because I'm in this unique position where I'm kind of straddling two worlds.

I've got one foot in the world of recording studios, mixing studios, mastering studios, anything in that world that you would consider part of the audio industry. And I've got the other foot in the online business world with the six-figure studio and with FilePass.

And this gives me a unique perspective on how these two worlds are different, but also how they're the same. And the reason I'm talking about this is because one of the things I see in the online business world, so software company and education company, I see a lot of information on how to market your products or market your services or market whatever it is that you're trying to sell.

And all of the education is centered around marketing. And at the center of marketing is a sales funnel. And this is something that I have to really, really dial in if I'm going to make paid marketing an effective thing for my online businesses. I was looking into things recently, and I've spent over a quarter of a million dollars on paid advertising. And this has forced me to learn a lot of things about funnels in order for those marketing dollars not to just be completely wasted, because it's so easy in paid marketing specifically to lose a lot of money if you don't know what you're doing. Anyone who's ever just dabbled in Facebook ads and just lost money, you know what I'm talking about. So let me bring this back to recording studios because this is relevant, I promise you.

In the recording world, no one takes their sales funnels seriously. Typically people just throw a website up, if that at all. A lot of times they don't even have a website, but if they do, it's just a website they put up real quick. They took my website course one weekend, had a Wix website put up, and then they're done with it. That's their sales funnel.

And that's the extent of effort they put towards this.

And this is to the detriment of your business. If you go look at the episode I did with Joe Wadsworth, episode 125, Joe's recording studio can feed the mouths of 30 audio engineers, over 30 audio engineers, because he understands marketing better than most studios that I've seen. He treats his recording business like an online business, just like I would treat FilePass, just like I would treat the 6 Figure Studio. And because of this, he has set himself up to take in a lot of clients. So quickly, let me just make sure everyone's on the same page here. When I'm talking about your marketing funnels, there's three main areas that I'm talking about. There's top of funnel, and that's what I consider your generating awareness about your studio. So anyone who knows about your studio, that's the top of your funnel.

The middle of your funnel, that is generating interest for your studio or for your services or for your product.

Anyone who is interested in working with you or interested in learning more about you, they are now in the middle of your funnel. And the bottom of your funnel is anyone that has paid you money. And each of those groups is progressively smaller, so it's shaped like a funnel. That's the quick and dirty version of a sales funnel.

Most recording studios that I have seen screw up the middle of the funnel worse than any other part of the funnel. And I want to spend some time talking about that today. I don't really have an idea where this conversation is going. Or at least have an idea. I don't have a proper outline. So this may be really rambly, but I think it's gonna be relevant for a lot of our listeners right now, because this is the part, especially today when everyone's stuck at home during quarantine, this is the part that is most important, because if you cannot make someone interested in hiring you, you will not get a stranger to hire you ever. So the middle of your funnel can be represented by a few things. Basically anything that generates interest for your recording studio.