VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
You guys.
We need to stop using “advertisement.”
Advertisement or Sponsored Action?
It has this bad connotation of you have to present yourself 10, 12, 100 times to someone before they remember you. And before they decide to take action. It’s literally the equivalent of cold calling someone, which cold prospecting is probably a good way to build a pipeline initially, but it’s really bad at continuing growth. So, I have a couple examples of ads here that we’re probably all familiar with. We’ve all seen the McDonald’s representation of advertisement where we just, we show ourselves 100 times to someone, you know, show them the “M” and they’ll remember you; they’ll think of you when they’re hungry, they’ll think of you when they want french fries. So this repetitiveness is great in some capacity, is when you’re much larger and you need to build across a large platform in large areas, like McDonald’s does, but it makes it very difficult for small businesses to keep up. Small businesses can’t be omnipresent like McDonald’s. It’s just not possible there are billions and billions of dollars full with selling burgers. So McDonald’s is doing pretty well with omnipresence by advertising like that, but it doesn’t make sense for a lot of businesses. We have another add too.
A Numbers Game
We all probably know this: 877-cash-now it’s JG Wentworth! JG Wentworth has this super catchy ad everybody knows their number: 877-cash-now… that’s great, but cash now for what? Are they selling a loan? Are they trying to get you to be part of a pyramid scheme? We don’t know what it is. We just know it’s JG Wentworth, we know their phone number, and we know that they’re getting cash now, which really doesn’t help people take action. I wonder how many people have actually called JG Wentworth right after they see the commercial. That’s a great question to pose to them… Everyone knows it but no one knows what they do. I don’t know how to opt into them other than calling them for cash now, which doesn’t make sense to me. So the other methods are TV, where you’re just blasting yourself out there. Billboard where you’re just posting yourself up, hoping someone drives by and needs your service, or even something like mailers where you’re just hitting a neighborhood and you’re saying, you know, you can say that you have targeted mailers but you really don’t have targeted mailers because you’re hitting people at random times, you know, when they’re checking mail and when they’re sort of just, like, not expecting that they’re just trying to look for like important information. Obviously, if your coupon or something stands out, great, but you still don’t have a chance that they’re gonna opt in directly then. So, this… the logic behind advertisement is that there’s this numbers game out there.
And there totally is.
The Sponsored Action Method and Building Value
Anyone who’s ever done sales will tell you, you know, if you call 300 people you’re going to get 10 people who are interested and you’re gonna get one sale. Like, that’s the cold call standard. 300 calls, one sale. So numbers game. Present yourself 12 times to someone and they’ll probably come in and get a burger. Numbers game. What I want to push forward is this idea of “Sponsored Action.” It’s literally the same thing as an ad. So you run this ad, except the expectation and the intent is entirely different. So what you want to do with the “Sponsored action” is to capture people, nurture them, and qualify them for your sales process. So when you run this 877-cash-now commercial, you’re not qualifying anyone, you’re not nurturing them because you’re just repeatedly paying for the advertisement, so you can’t nurture them, and they’re not capturing any information… they don’t know who is seeing that. You can say, “Oh, someone, you know, my ad is on ESPN and so I’m capturing people who enjoy sports.” Maybe. So with this “Sponsored Action” method what you can do is start looking at how you can get the best prospects, nurture them, and then qualify them for the sale. You want to entice the action… now. Like, literally while you have their attention. A Billboard if you were trying to entice someone action with a Billboard you probably have to say, “Call now as soon as you see this Billboard and get 5 percent or whatever, you know?” offer them in a deal which you can’t do, you literally can’t do that with a Billboard, it’d be ridiculous you couldn’t keep up. You’d be giving too many people too many first time value offers. So in order to entice the action and have them present themselves right then and there, you have to sort of build this value system. That’s the number one thing: is building that value. No one knows that they need cash now right when they watch the commercial. They don’t. They probably don’t know what the option is… they don’t know what their options are they didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “you know what? I really need cash now,” and then they gave JG Wentworth a call. It never happened. I’m sure. Because you don’t know, you don’t know what you don’t know. So you have to provide this value, you have to give someone something and say, hey, this is how you can do this is the result that you’ll get from partaking in this offer, partaking with this advertisement, partaking with this “Sponsored Action.” So by delivering them value, you can educate someone on what your service or product can provide and then take them to the step where they’re ready to purchase.
Educating and Helping People Take Action
That’s when they wake up and say, “You know what, I read 3 blog posts, this morning I’m going to look at getting my 247 IT plan done.” Because you’ve educated them on being proactive. So the other thing is too: “Sponsored Action,” the biggest and most powerful aspect, I think, is that you’re consistently and continuously building your pipeline. Advertisement like this, what it excels at is cold prospecting. Which is, you know, if you need it you need it, you gotta call prospect if you’re starving and you’re hungry you need a cold prospect. But if you’re not starving and you’re not hungry, but you do want to sell, you want more money, right, you want more action going to your business you can build a pipeline that just continues to grow continues to grow in freshness as well. So the logic behind “Sponsored Action” is that your want to sell is greater than or equal to the peoples want to be sold to. So what I mean by that is you as a business person or a sales person, a marketing person, your want to sell should be infinity. Because all you want to do, your entire job revolves around growing revenue for your business. So your entire job is based on building revenue, so your want to sell is incredibly high. And people probably don’t want to be sold to they just don’t want to, it doesn’t happen. The cases are very very slim where people actually want to be sold to. You have to recognize the gap between your want to sell and their want or need to be sold to because they have tons of other products are tons of other services that they could go to, there’s tons of options for them.
Ads or Sponsored Action – A Judgement Call
So their want to be sold to by you specifically is almost, they’re almost indifferent most the time. They just knew what works best for them. So in that manner, you can educate people and bring them to this action that you want without having to present yourself 12 times to them because what you can do is build this sweet remarking pipeline that automatically nurtures them and then qualifies them into your sales process. So rather than making 300 calls to get one sale, you’re making 12 calls and making 8 sales. So that’s the largest difference–it’s kind of this quantity versus quality thing and I don’t want to see “verses,” in fact I put this arrow, like this back and forth because it’s really not “versus,” it’s you ultimately need both as use as you grow, as you’re small, as you’re big, you know, it’s a judgment call that you need to make, but what ends up happening is, you know, you’ll need both, but usually quality you can scale up and grow much quicker and better because you’re not having to make 300 calls to get one sale, you’re making 12 calls to get 8 sales. So the omnipresence is wonderful, right. But you gotta make the judgment call here. I’m pushing for “Sponsored Action” all the time.
So guys, Attilio, Hone Marketing–thanks much.
