time’. Last week when she was shopping at her local farmers market and
browsing Instagram, an ad popped up with an invitation to download a new
app for environmentally-friendly cleaning products’.
The end result is a much deeper, more intimate understanding of where and
how to reach your dream buyers, and how to speak to them. The
compounding result will cause massive breakthroughs that geometrically
grow your business and allow you to dominate your market.
Defining your target market is one of the hardest parts of starting a business.
The good news is that once you do it, everything else will quickly start falling
into place. You just have to figure out which medium to use to effectively
reach them, and which marketing strategies they respond to.
Action Points
Identify the 20% of customers who account for 80% of your sales
volume and profits, and your Power 4% of customers.
Using The Halo Strategy, identify what they struggle with.
Organise your findings.
Create your dream buyer customer.
PHASE 2:
Create The Perfect Bait For Your
Dream Buyer
I’m about to describe the most unsuspecting way to outsell the most
ferocious competition in your marketplace, even when their marketing is
brilliant, their budget is huge, and their products and services are half the
price of yours.
I’m going to show you how to create a High-Value Content Offer that sucks
in leads like a vacuum cleaner on steroids!
With the insights gained in Phase 1, your next move is to create the most
irresistible bait for your dream buyer. In this chapter, I will help you identify
the prospects who are interested in what you’re selling but who want more
information, which you’re going to give to them. This way, they’ll have more
of what they need to make an informed decision and move up the pyramid
from the research phase to the buying phase.
This allows you to generate hundreds of leads while positioning yourself as a
trusted authority almost instantly – even if nobody’s heard of you!
As an example, we’ll take a homebuilding company because it’s easy to see
how a small shift has huge benefits.
The typical full-page new home ad has the company name at the top and
some sort of ‘SALE’ or ‘DISPLAY HOMES NOW OPEN’ headline
predominantly placed.
It’s exactly the same as all the other homebuilders taking up all the other
advertisement pages. They’re practically leaving it to random chance to
compete for their share of that 3% of people who are buying now. Now
imagine the ad began with this headline:
WARNING: Do Not Buy A New House Before Reading This Shocking Free
Report…
What You Don’t Know About Building A New House That Could
Cost You Tens-Of-Thousands Of Dollars And Threaten The Financial
Livelihood Of Your Family
11 Things No Homebuilder Would Dare Tell You Before Taking A
Deposit (Number 5 Could Cost You $100,000S)
6 Fatal Traps Of Buying A New Home Exposed! The Dirty Little Lies
No Real Estate Agent, Builder, Or Even A Buyers Advocate Would
Dare Tell You!
So many more people would be compelled to read your ad and get in touch
with you for your free report, right?
If you present information that reads like a public service announcement,
you’re guaranteed to stand out from the crowd in a huge way. Ads like this
incentivise prospects, drawing them towards you with the promise of value
and, importantly, no sales pitch.
The valuable information you’re offering here is called a High-Value
Content Offer (HVCO), and it draws leads to you like moths to a flame.
HVCOs come in multiple forms – free reports, ebooks, videos, cheat sheets –
but the goal is always the same: to offer your prospects incredible value,
typically in the form of the solution to a problem they’re struggling with,
without asking them to purchase anything in return. In return for all the value
you’re providing, all you ask for is their name and email address.
Now you have their attention, you can include information in your report that
will move them up the pyramid more quickly. For example, you could get
prospects who are still saving money and in research mode to consider
buying a new house right away by showing them finance packages that don’t
require a huge deposit.
IMPORTANT: It’s called a High-Value Content Offer for a reason! There
not only needs to be perceived high value, but it must deliver on that promise.
When you offer information as an incentive, make sure it’s substantive rather
than the cheap gibberish that clogs the Internet.
This is the very first exchange of value your prospect makes with your
business. They receive the information you have on offer in exchange for
providing their contact details.
You can’t simply trick people into giving you their contact details and then
send them a crappy two-page free ‘report’ that is simply a promotional piece
about your company.
The goal is to wow them with this experience. If done right, this will prompt
a conversation to take place in their mind: ‘If this is what they’re giving away
for free, imagine what their paid products/services are like!’
You want to lead with your best foot forward and deliver incredible value.
But first, to stop you from lighting your money on fire, this is what you
absolutely must do immediately before creating a HVCO, setting up a
website, landing page or running ads of any kind.
Value-Based Marketing
Built on the simple premise of ‘giving before asking’, value-based marketing
is about offering value to your customers without asking for a sale in return.
In my business, we use this in everything we do to create goodwill in the
marketplace. Because when you deliver massive value to your prospects, you
score a double whammy:
First, your prospects thank you for the materials.
Second, you position yourself as the trusted expert.
So while everyone else is just screaming, ‘Buy, buy, buy!’ you’re building
goodwill by showing people you could help them… by actually helping
them!
What’s more, with this kind of marketing you’re speaking to people who
aren’t yet ready to buy but who are curious about what you sell. Remember –
that’s a whopping 97% of prospects!
Most people get this wrong and immediately try to sell to the 97%, but the
fact is, fast selling doesn’t work with cold traffic. These people have no idea
who you are – it’s like asking someone to marry you on a first date! We will
look at this again later, but for now, remember this rule:
The temperature of your marketing message must match the temperature of
your traffic.
Now don’t be sceptical. Value-based marketing isn’t some new-fangled
strategy or shiny new object. It’s just one that’s been grossly forgotten. And
it’s how you’ll outsell your competitors – even if you’re up against an
industry giant and only have a small budget.
Let me tell you a little s
tory...
It’s a forgotten case study on how one ad pulled in three million leads – and
how you can model this strategy to create a stampede of new customers to
your own business.
Imagine you do a promotion, you run an ad, and you generate some leads and
then some sales... and it’s pretty good. But then you go to your mailbox and
you open it and find handwritten letters... like, a lot of them! And they say
things like, ‘God bless you!’ and ‘I’ve been searching for this information my
entire life!’
And then imagine, you say, gosh... I’m going to run that ad again! And you
do, and over time it generates three million leads for you and millions of
customers.
Guess what? This actually happened! This sales and marketing methodology
was conceived in 1948 by a man named Louis Engel.
Engel was a frustrated editor from Jacksonville, Florida. He graduated with a
degree in philosophy, had a few jobs, and bounced around a bit as an editor
for several organisations. He got fed up with journalism and ended up in a
position as an advertising and sales promotion manager for the prestigious
Wall Street investment firm of Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane.
He wasn’t a seasoned marketing guy, but he had a crazy idea and suggested
to his bosses, ‘Instead of running ads telling everybody how great we are,
why don’t we run an ad and give away some useful information, something
that educates our prospects, and then offer to give away some more useful
information?’
His bosses replied, ‘No, that’s a ridiculous idea, and it’s not going to work.
This is advertising, and we’re going to run an ordinary ad’.
They went back and forth, and eventually Engel said, ‘Let’s just test it, and if
it works it works, and if it doesn’t I’ll go away’.
They said, ‘Ok, fine’.
He wrote an ad and they were scared to death of it – it was 6,540 words long
and filled an entire full page with tiny six or eight point type!
They said, ‘There’s no way this thing is going to work’. But they agreed to
test it in a small regional newspaper, and in its first week it pulled in 5,000
leads. And this was in 1948, so in order to respond, readers had to clip out
some stuff, write their name and details on it, and actually physically post
back their information. 5,000 people did this! Engel’s bosses said, ‘Ok,
maybe this guy is onto something’. On October 19, 1948, they published his
ad in The New York Times.
The good news is that this approach may have been forgotten over the years,
but it still works better than probably anything you’ve seen before. You
might be thinking, I don’t want to run newspaper ads. Well, the first thing I
want you to know is that you can use this strategy for all types of media – on
a website or landing page, blog posts, email, Facebook ads, or Google ads.
It begins with a brilliantly-written headline that you could model for your
own business, beginning with ‘What everybody ought to know about’. This is
a great headline because it presupposes that everybody wants to know about
the stock and bond business and also assumes there are things you don’t
know. (Personally, I’d like to split test with the use of numbers – ‘The 11
things that everybody ought to know about…’)
But this is where it gets really powerful. Because while your competitors are
pretending they don’t want to sell anything or they’re just screaming ‘Buy!
Buy! Buy!’, this ad straight out of the gate addresses reader scepticism by
having a box that reads, ‘Why are we publishing this information?’ The ‘This
is why’ strategy is brilliant and you should model it for your business to
increase trust in your marketplace and ultimately your sales.
Naturally, anyone reading anything these days is sceptical, especially online.
That box first addresses the deafening scepticism in the reader’s mind that
asks why they are publishing this information. If they didn’t do this, the
reader wouldn’t be able to concentrate on the content being delivered because
they’d be thinking in the back of their mind, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ and they
wouldn’t focus on the ad or absorb the message.
It also addresses the pre-established stigma of the stock and bond business
being confusing by saying, ‘Some plain talk about…’
It then goes onto address well-organised questions the reader already has.
Louis Engel likely spoke with analysts at Merrill Lynch to find out their
prospects’ most common questions, then created subheadlines and bolded
each one of them through the ad, which is simply brilliant. Not only did it
address reader scepticism but also educated the reader by providing value
well in advance of ever asking for the sale or anything in return.
All in all, this isn’t great direct response copy – there are no hooks or crazy
guarantees or hype, or even a whole bunch of intrigue other than the great
headline – just straight up education and value. However, it’s still a lead
generation ad. We want the reader to take action and do something – and look
how masterfully they did exactly that!
By today’s standards, the copy isn’t spectacular; it’s more the overall
approach that’s so brilliant – the way they phrase the call to action, which of
course is, ‘Let us know if you want more information’. The call to action
(CTA) goes on to say, ‘We can’t cover everything here as it would take
glad to send you a copy of this ad in pamphlet form, at no charge, no
obligation… just write or phone us’.
This whole approach worked incredibly well and helped make Merrill Lynch
a household name far beyond Wall Street.
Now at this stage you might be thinking, yeah this all sounds great Sabri…
But no one reads all that copy these days. People have short attention spans.
Really? Let me tell you this….
Only Marketing Morons Believe That
No One Reads Long-Form Copy
You might think that no one in today’s day and age reads long-form copy.
But the truth is, when it comes to making sales, long-form copy will beat
short-form copy every single time. I’ve spent $30 million dollars on
generating traffic and running thousands of scientific split tests, and I can tell
you without a shadow of doubt that long-form copy works.
With one caveat: The copy must be entertaining and engaging. You can’t
simply write long copy and think that it’s going to make your prospect buy.
With that said, when your copy is entertaining, people won’t care how long it
is.
You might still be saying, ‘But who reads all that text?’
The buyers are the ones who read it. They are the ones who have all the
burning questions, the ones who are looking for answers. The people who
aren’t going to read your copy aren’t going to buy in any case. So would you
rather gear your copy towards those who are never going to buy, or would
you rather convert more of the people who are deep in research mode,
genuinely interested in buying, and lookin
g to be pushed over the edge? The
answer should be very, very simple.
The approach used by Merrill Lynch was brilliantly effective for several
reasons: it created goodwill in their marketplace by giving something of
value away for free before ever asking for anything. Over the years, this
approach has been reskinned and renamed many times, from permission-
based marketing to content marketing. However, it’s not the name or the
specific tactics that you should be concerned with, rather the overarching
strategy that makes it so effective.
You see, it appeals to the exact segment of the market you want because your
message rises above the noise that’s created by loudness, hype, and the
general lameness of your competition. If all your marketing consists of you
screaming, ‘Buy my stuff!’ then you’re only appealing to a fraction of your
potential buyers and you’re missing out on a huge percentage of the total
number of potential buyers in your market.
This is a great reminder that the job of an ad is not to sell but to create
intrigue and get the prospect to raise their hand and say, ‘I’m interested’.
Why this approach is so much more effective than what everyone else is
doing
There are three ways we can influence people:
Talk about how good we are.
Have others talk about how good we are.
Demonstrate how good we are.
In sales and marketing, #3 is the most effective.
Demonstrating how good you are doesn’t only help with influencing them,
but it creates heaps of goodwill and helps you reach a much larger segment of
your market, like it did with Merrill Lynch. And let’s not forget, people are
10 times more likely to come to you to learn something than they are to be
sold to.
So, using the approach gleaned from Merrill Lynch’s ad that generated over
three million leads, we can take the information and answers we know our
prospect is craving for, and package it as a High-Value Content Offer
(HVCO).
You can see in the graphic below, a scenario that doesn’t involve anything
more complicated than some simple third grade math….
The above graph represents two different scenarios:
Scenario 1: You send 100 people to a website or landing page that is