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This episode is centered on how the shift these last 20 years that the internet has created in the minds of business owners. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s harmful. The shift I am talking about today is good.
Monumental Shift To Business On The Web
Starting in 1992, we started a consulting company. Our lead product was an electric sign in the window. We would go in teams of sales reps and do blitzes. We would get into a car and go everywhere. In groups, we would hit a city that we knew either didn’t have an electric neon sign company or any access to good quality signs. We would just knock on doors, start conversations, I see you have a wooden sign. The bottom line, we would lead very strong with data. Very specifically, from the United States. We could walk in and say listen, we want you to be aware of this. You have a wooden sign, the odds of people seeing you is small. An electric sign would explode business. And we would prepare for all kinds of responses, like, well, everybody knows me, this, that, and the other. But the bottom line is simpler times, back then, I remember walking into a Miners pizza. Two twin brothers, our first client. It was just a very simple process. Here is the deal, I would be knocking on doors having no idea if the business owner was even in? If the business owner interested in changing? Can they afford what I have?
Today we live in the world of the web. It allows so many data and access points. Please understand they are different things. Access points is ways of accessing business owner’s information. Prior to the web, there was Dunn and Bradstreet that could give you an idea of the company. What they do. There was the yellow pages, but there were not a lot of tools, or access tools. If you think of Facebook. Facebook with their drop down profiles. If you want to find a group of people who like to knit yarn, go to Facebook and find the groups. There are so many ways to access groups of people with proof that they are already interested in your space.
Business Owners Still Fight Change
A lot of people still today, 2016, they are still rooted in how their dad, grandpa did it. How their mentors taught them. They are still sending teams of sales reps to knock on doors. Today, it seems like there are so many more access points and data points to study. I will give you an idea of how we shifted. A lot of the shift is the fault of what I believe is the greatest living marketer. Seth Godin. He has been caught a couple times stating we should never spend a dollar in an area if we don’t know they are buyers. Meaning, his belief in marketing, if you get a fish finder, you show yourself where the fish are hungry and biting. Then you drop your bait which is your message or your product or self. Then you drop yourself into that frenzy. In my other podcasts you have heard me say I love getting booths in the middle of trade shows where there is a gathering of a perfect client. If you sell medical supplies and you know that every ophthalmologist is going to be in Vegas, you sell, products for ophthalmologist it’s a great place to be. You get the idea.
I want to give you guys a transition of what our company has done. Then you ask yourself, are you doing this? Does it fit your company? What I am about to share will apply to 90% of the people listening? After getting hit over the head with a number of books, talks from Seth Godin. I looked at our company and said, we are still knocking on doors. What are we doing? So, we sell an alternative investment. We sell a digital asset. We help people build revenue generating sites. We basically split revenue 50/50. Our perfect client is called an avatar. Our perfect client is anybody that is absolutely frustrated with their pile of money is currently sitting. A savings account, 401K, or nothing. If you are in a phase of life where you want to retire but I can’t. We have stuff that can escalate things.
We created a sketch video that is 4 minutes long. The video is a condensed version of the 90 minute presentation that I would do to a group of investors of accountants, attorneys, and real estate investors, whatever. We took our 90 minute presentation about everything and condensed it to 4 minute cartoon video. Let me pause for a second. The reason we choose a cartoon video is so I don’t have to go back into the room with a green screen, and $2000 a crack, I don’t have to get on a plane and go to a green room. I can call the cartoonist and ask him to make the changes. He can change product information literally 72 hours for a couple hundred books.
Never Spend a Dollar If You Know There Are No Buyers – Seth Godin
So watch what we do. Seth Godin says never spend a dollar if you know there are no buyers. So whether its google paper click, or Facebook or using verticals of proven buyers. So first thing we did
after the sketch video, is we went to Facebook and looked for lookalike campaigns, or verticals or groups. I looked for groups of people that were already talking, communicating, or proof that they were buying alternative investment products. Or franchises, or interested in rental property. The same people that like those will like our stuff. People that want to get their time back, they don’t want to put their wife to work, no second jobs, whatever. We make that 4 minute sketch video and we don’t send an ad on Facebook to our website. Your website has navigation buttons. It has stuff all over the place. It’s too confusing. We took our sketch video and we added an extension. Forward/Learn. To see the sketch video you go to incomestore.comforward/learn. Then magic happens. There is no content under the sketch, there is nothing. The only thing people can do is watch the video. If they are interested, they put in their email. Then what we do is we do a retargeting campaign to the people who watched the video. We stay in front of them for three to six months. Wherever you go, you can go to Wall Street Journal, any major place, all of a sudden you see an ad from Income Store. You say, wait I see these guys everywhere. Major companies do this. The find out if the timing is right. If we don’t stay in front of that person so they can remember us. Then the timing is not right.
Try A RetargetingCampaign
I want to give you reasons why you should do the retargeting campaign on top of Facebook ads. Our numbers, 107 different shaped Facebook ads, different texts, shapes, pictures, a lot of split testing. 5.7 leads a day. Some watching the video. About 6 leads a day. The reason we want to target the ones who never added their email is simple. There are 4 different types of personalities. There is the Choleric, the driven dominate that will will things to happen, there is the Phlegmatic that is the peace at all costs, even keeled, there is the melancholic, which is the deep thinking analytical, that becomes the engineer or accountant for some reason, then there is the sanguine. The life of the party. Loves attention. People pleaser. The cholerics and some of the sanguine are more likely to watch that video and react quickly. Have a rep call me. Doesn’t mean I am going to do anything. The others, the phlegmatic and melancholies, they need more time. They don’t ever watch a video and then put their email in. So, if you don’t understand the audience base of how people react, then you are only marketing to a smaller percentage of who is actually looking at your message. You want to give everyone a shot.
I will show you another method that everyone should consider. We also do google pay per click. What we did is we started with about 20 phrases that we thought people would be interested in. They might be looking up in the middle of the night. Top five alternate investments, or make money with real estate. We would try 20 of those. With a budget of $25 each. We set the budget at the lowest we could bid. So our budget lasts as long as it can. We are not necessarily looking for leads, we are looking for data. What I want to know is if I put $25 budgets on 20 words and 2 or 3 of those budgets were exhausted in two days that tells me right now that paper click on that phrase works very well. I can do that like a Facebook campaign and I can continue that to the landing page. More importantly, I don’t want to pay for traffic. I want to earn it, deserve it and get it for free forever. So once we get the data from the paper click, we start writing content that use the phrases that we were buying traffic on as titles in the posts of our website. In the blogroll. If we stay consistent and continually ad new content , new content, google is going to see that we are a serious player on this subject, when people google that phrase, google is going to put us up higher organically in the section on the left instead of the paid section on the right. As soon as we get into the left section in the white where we earn it and deserve it. We can stop paying for traffic on the right.
Find The Industry, Find Your Target
I can find an industry, whether its pens, dog food, carpet cleaners, I can find 10 to 20 commonly searched terms in that space. I can use paper click for testing. I will surmise the three or four most important to the world at this time. Then set an agenda to write content on those phrases so then google recognizes us as a authority of that. Then we will receive free traffic then your cost of acquisition goes down dramatically. You will still do some paper clicking and Facebook ads to stay present.
I hope this one helps. Look into the internet to jam out on paper click, jam out of Facebook and just target the people. Look at the bridge of the internet from testing with money to eventually you are earning the traffic without paying for it.
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