9. Social proof
You must build credibility and believability in your business and your offer.
Use third-party validation to build authority, such as research statistics or
quotes from credible or authoritative sources.
10. Make your godfather offer
In order to convert, your offer must be:
Clear and easy to understand: There should be no question as to what your
audience is getting in return for their email/purchase/registration.
Value-based: Your offer copy should be focused on how it will fill a need or
solve a problem.
Concise: Keeping it short and to the point will drive more conversions.
Persuasive: If there ever was a place to bust out your salesperson chops, your
offer is it.
Irresistible: It must be such a good offer that it’s a no-brainer for your
prospect and even leaves them asking themselves, ‘How can they possibly
offer so much value?’ Make it so compelling that only a lunatic would refuse!
11. Add bonuses
Add relevant bonuses or sweeteners to the offer. These should be highly
desirable but not essential to reaching the desired outcome – prospects simply
need to want them.
12. Stack the value
Use the value stack to do just that… stack up the total value and benefits of
everything in your offer. Tell them how much everything is worth then paint
a vivid picture with benefit explanations to raise your offer’s perceived value.
13. Reveal your price
Add prices together to calculate value, then reveal a price that’s much
cheaper. Explain why the price is what it is and why it’s such great value. If
your goal is lead generation and you’re pitching a free consult, it’s important
that you put a dollar value on what the consult is worth. This is not to be
confused with the price of your services; you can cover that on the call.
14. Inject scarcity
Offers without scarcity don’t sell as well, but it needs to be genuine or you’ll
destroy your reputation. Think about it: If you don’t need to take action now,
when will you take it? Never.
Examples of scarcity include:
Putting an expiration date on your offer
Countdown clocks
‘Doors are closing’
‘Only X left at this price’
‘Buy before X to avoid a price hike’
Scarcity has been shown time and time again to skyrocket conversion rates.
The best marketers use it because it works.
15. Give a powerful guarantee
Remove, eliminate, reverse, and take out perceived risks. Longer guarantee =
less returns. A guarantee transfers the risk from the buyer to the seller. And it
shows the buyer that if the product doesn’t deliver, they won’t be at a loss of
time or money, thus eliminating the pain of buying. Whether it’s a no-risk
money-back guarantee or a promise to not share their information, guarantees
remove the risk associated with your offer.
16. Call to action (CTA)
The call to action is a command. Be specific and tell them exactly what to do.
Keep it clear and direct – your audience shouldn’t have to play 21 Questions
to figure out what you want them to do. Ask them to do just one thing,
because the more hoops you ask them to jump through, the more likely
they’ll be to say ‘screw this’ and leave.
17. Close with a P.S. that includes a warning and a reminder
Always include a closing point or P.S. It’s the third most read element of
your letter. Remind them of your irresistible Godfather Offer. Warn them
against the consequence of what will happen if they don’t buy. Include your
call to action and remind them of the limited time or quantity.
Action Points
Write down the most irresistible and absolute best offer you can come
up with. Even if it scares you – then you know you have a great offer.
Create an irresistible landing page, video sales letter, or whatever
delivery mechanism will work best for you and your prospect, using
my exclusive 17-Part Secret Selling System and example templates
provided.
Pitch the phone call and not the sale. While you ultimately want to
convert your prospects into paying clients, in order for that to happen
you’ll need to speak with them. With that in mind, make your
Godfather Offer centred around a free phone consultation, analysis,
strategy session, or roadmap.
PHASE 5:
Traffic
Send Your Offers into the Endless Raging River of Online Traffic to Reach
Larger Numbers of Your Dream Buyers
Once you’ve got Phases 1, 2, 3, and 4 in place, you’re now ready to
put the machine in motion. You’ve done your research and
identified your Dream Buyer, you have created your HVCO, an
opt-in page, and presented your Godfather Offer on your landing page to get
prospects signed up. Now it’s time to look at what traffic channels are right
for your business, and then craft the most irresistible click-worthy ads to pull
prospects into your machine.
But before you do, it’s essential you get your head around the critical
importance of unit economics. These are the fundamental numbers your
business growth hinges on. With this information, you can work out exactly
how much you can spend to acquire a customer while still turning a healthy
profit.
The Critical Importance Of Unit
Economics
In order to determine the health of your business and whether you can scale
and grow, you need to have a keen understanding of unit economics. Unit
economics is simply defined as: ‘The direct revenues and costs associated
with a particular business action, expressed on a per-unit basis’. You may
have also heard them referred to as ‘key performance indicators’.
Here are some examples of unit economics that are crucial for you to
understand:
Cost per lead (CPL): You can calculate your CPL by dividing the cost of
your advertising by the number of leads received for a particular campaign or
marketing activity.
Cost per acquisition (CPA): This is what it costs you in advertising to acquire
a new customer. In any business, this is the most important metric to
understand. It’s the only way to understand if the marketing you’re doing is
profitable.
Lifetime value (LTV): This is the projected net profit that a customer will
generate during his or her life as a customer of your business.
Why is knowing unit economics so important?
Put simply, if you have a firm grip on your unit economics, you’ll know
exactly how much a customer is worth to your business over their lifetime. In
other words, no more guessing how much to spend on your marketing –
you’ll have precise control and confidence down to the cent.
Armed with this information, you can begin to aggressively market and grow
your business as you understand fundamentally how profitable your customer
acquisition strategy is, and you can scale it faster and more efficiently than
your competitors who don’t understand these metrics. They might try Google
Ads, look at the CPC (cost per click) and think, ‘Oh wow! Th
is Google stuff
is really expensive’, and stop, when in reality it might actually be highly
profitable for their business if they knew they were making ten times that cost
from customers coming to their business through that channel.
What should my cost per acquisition (CPA) be?
How do you figure out what your CPA is? And what makes a good CPA? In
other words, how much should you be spending to get a new client? The
answer, of course, is that it varies; it all comes down to your average revenue
per customer.
There are plenty of ways to determine your average revenue per customer,
but a good starting place is to take your total revenue over a period (year or
month) and divide this by the number of customers you had during the same
period.
For example, if your total profit for the year is $500,000 and you had 1,000
customers, your average profit per customer is $500.
There are other formulas that take into account purchase frequency, lifetime
value, and average order size, but honestly, the formula above is the easiest
place to start.
Know how much you make from a customer, and you’ll know how much you
can spend to get one.
In the above example, you can spend up to $499 to acquire a customer and
you’ll still make a profit. Of course, you’d want to make more than $1 profit
per customer. I’m just using this as an extreme example, but you get where
I’m coming from.
Armed with this number, take a good hard look at your current marketing
activity. It should be obvious which channels are creating profitable
customers and which channels are costing you more than they’re worth.
Now, if you find yourself saying, ‘Google Ads is too competitive’ or ‘ Google
Ads is too expensive’ or worse, ‘I tried Google Ads and it doesn’t work for
my business’, then this thinking is going to leave your business stuck in limbo
while your competitors continue to take your market share and grab all the
low-hanging fruit.
Google Ads is simply one part of the puzzle, and when you shift your
mindset, upgrade your learning curve, and use some of the tools I’m sharing
with you, it’s going to help your business skyrocket in growth and in profits.
A business should never rely on one single source of traffic for new business.
Unfortunately, the following scenario is all too common:
A business starts advertising on an online channel, whether that be SEO,
Google Ads, or Facebook Ads. For this example, we’ll use Google Ads. They
start with a small budget of $1,000 per month. They start getting some traffic,
leads are coming in and they are converting those leads into sales. Things are
going great.
They hire more people to deal with the influx of new leads and sales, and
even increase their ad spend to get even more business. The business owner
is really happy they’ve found an advertising channel that works to scale their
business.
Then suddenly, without warning, Google changes the landscape of their ad
platform.
On a Friday in February 2016, Google did exactly this. Google decided to
remove the sidebar ads on search results. After this day, businesses who
relied solely on Google Ads to get traffic, leads, and sales were hurt... badly.
Google literally wiped off 70% of its ad real estate, so competition for the top
spots on the remaining 30% soared. And with this increase in competition
CPCs (cost per click) skyrocketed.
If such a sudden shift occurs to their primary marketing channel, the business
may find itself with far less traffic coming to their website but with many
more staff to pay. So they have to let go of the employees that they hired
when the business was growing, as they no longer have a channel that’s
bringing in the same volume of traffic, leads, and sales.
Many businesses made this mistake and suffered catastrophically in early
2016. But not all, and certainly none of the businesses I was helping to grow
at that time. Why? Simply because the most successful businesses build
multiple flows of traffic to maintain their flow of leads.
This is how you do it:
Start with one channel (SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads,
YouTube, LinkedIn, etc.). It depends on your budget as to which one you
should choose first. Once you establish an offer that converts profitably and
you’re making more than you’re spending, get clear on your cost per lead
(CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA) of getting a new client on this channel.
Assuming your goal is to scale your business, keep adding as many channels
as possible, stacking one on top of the other:
SEO
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
YouTube Ads
Retargeting
Keep at each channel until you gain momentum and receive a minimum of
50% ROI. Then roll these additional profits into experimenting on a new
channel. Use this channel as a benchmark for your CPL and CPA when
comparing the success of your new channels.
You might start with SEO, and after six months, once you start getting an
channels and ensure they are running profitably before you start scaling
(increasing) ad spend and think about adding a third channel.
Ideally, you should have at least three channels firing along profitably, which
will enable you to allocate some of your profit to other channels. If
something changes in one, like the case above where Google dramatically
changed its advertising landscape and CPCs skyrocketed, your business
won’t be as negatively affected because you can shift your ad budget for
Google Ads into another channel and shelter yourself from such changes
while you figure out how to get Google Ads back up to its original volume.
However, keep in mind that while many businesses (including marketing
agencies) often think they just need more traffic, in reality what you need is
an offer that converts traffic profitably.
For a business, having the ability to turn advertising into a profit is the single
greatest skill to ensure you won’t ever go hungry.
As a real-life example take Raphael Bender, whose ad campaign for Breathe
Education started with one traffic channel that doubled his business. Adding
more channels helped him scale his business from $200,000 to $2 million,
and now we’re taking him global. Once he had an offer that converted
complete strangers into high-value clients, he grew from using Google Ads to
SEO to Facebook Ads and so on, step by step, stacking on more traffic
channels.
Because we developed a proven funnel, where we knew that for every $1 in
traffic we put in it, it spat out $5, $8, and $10, we no longer had a traffic
problem. That’s the power of getting this system right.
As I mentioned in the introduction, most people don’t have a traffic problem,
they have an offer problem. Traffic is out there. More traffic than you know
what to do with. And accessing it is the key to aggressively marketing and
growing your business, rather than just hoping for the best.
But there are different types of traffic. You need to make your offer
extremely enticing if you want them to click. Understanding where they are
in the buying cycle – and what channel is best to reach them – is critical if
you want to tailor a message to fit.
Make sure your message matches the temperature of your audience!
In Phase 1, I introduced The Larger Market Formula and the fact there are
three different types of prospects you can attract into your business.
Three Types Of Traffic
The first type, at the tip of the pyramid, is in buy mode. These guys are on
Google, actively searching. They know they have a problem. They’re looking
for a solution in the products and services you provide. These prospects are
generally best to reach through Google Ads or SEO, and they have a very
high purchase intent. They could also be on your email list or following you
on Facebook
The second group of prospects are in the awareness stage. They’re not
actively searching but they are aware they have a problem and they’re open
to buying. Perhaps they know they need a new car, but they’re not scoping
car yards on the weekends just yet. Or it might be someone who knows they
need to lose weight but they’re not yet in hunt mode looking for a personal
trainer or a new diet program. These guys aren’t searching, however they’re
certainly open to the prospect of buying. They’re aware they have a problem,
unlike the third type – the cold prospects.
A cold prospect isn’t searching and doesn’t even know they have a problem
or a need. But they are still a good candidate for the products or services you
sell. This represents the largest segment of your market, and of any market
out there. They’re the 60% of prospects sitting at the base of The Larger
Market Formula pyramid.
So, let’s say you offer a free consultation that’s packed with value. How
could it go wrong? Well, maybe your prospects are cold and not ready for
that level of commitment just yet. Maybe it feels threatening to them. Maybe
they don’t want to speak to a salesperson.
If your message is not speaking to the temperature of your audience, it’s
never going to work. If your customers are cold, then offer a more cold-
suitable call to action (CTA) such as a quiz, free guide, or competition. If
your customers are piping hot, don’t beat around the bush – take them