How To Identify & Attract Your Ideal Customer (2 of 2)

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Today is part 2 of How to Identify and Attract Your Ideal Customer with Dan Kennedy. Now, if you haven't listened to part 1, part 1 is all about how to fish for whales, not for the minnows and all the little fish out in the ocean. How do you get the big fish? Today we're going to talk about how you hunt down those ideal customers and how to attract them to you magnetically. These are the keys. Once you have focused on the right customer. So you haven't listened to part 1 yet, go back to the previous episode, make sure you're up to date, and then listen to the rest of this.

You're going to love it. I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril.

They're not really lessons.

They're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy. Third way we can get them is wide net fishing with lead generation. So here we actually advertise whale bait, okay? And this is where pretty much everybody, regardless of the business they're in, becomes an infomarketer. And often it is a mistake not to. If you go back to the Valenti ads and the Selective Search ads and so forth, I'm going to show you a different version of them in a few minutes. The mistake that is made with those ads— so not that any of them have asked me, but if they ask, it's almost certainly I could get them a better return on investment on their ad dollars with one simple change. And it's a GKIC marketing change that you all should know, but just in case it has slipped your attention. They have one reason to respond in all their advertising, and it is a reason that has a fairly high threshold resistance. It requires you to be ready or nearly ready to hire somebody to matchmake for you, and it requires you to be willing to get on the telephone and have a personal conversation with somebody about this, knowing that they are gonna try and sell you something, and that's the only offer they make. They would immediately get more response to their ad if they had a second offer that essentially was, if you're not ready for that, but this got your attention and you're curious, here's how to take a little step instead of a bridge too far. You can get our free CD, our free DVD, you can look at a free webinar, you can get a free report, you can get a free book, et cetera. Sometimes they would find they would be better off making the entire ad about that, all about easy-to-get whale bait, and then moving people to them, but they ought to at least have it has two reasons to respond, not one. A lot of people don't do it because they fear they will trade away the immediate response and drive everybody to the easier delayed response. This rarely happens. Most of the time when you advertise, you will still get the buy now person, but you will also get a bunch of people who are not ready to buy now but are mentally moving in that direction. And you don't get any of them if you advertise the way they do. So most whale bait, not all whale bait, but most whale bait is information. It allows somebody to get information without having to engage a salesperson in order to get it. And if you stop to think about yourself in a category where you would be a whale, odds are you have frequently seen things that you might be willing to buy, seen advertisers who interest you, but not enough to immediately engage with a salesperson. But had you an opportunity to get some more information, you might have taken up that opportunity and then moved in that direction. So wide net fishing is really all about that. So I'll show you a direct whale whistle, very simple one, for starters. So this is a client of mine who had just done a lot of work for us, so you were seeing raw work, not finished work. But who is a very high-end financial advisor who only— he only deals with whales. He wants no others, and he has a very specific whale. The whale is somebody who has recently sold their company for a certain amount of money. That's his client, and he doesn't want anybody else. So the lead generation ad has a direct whale whistle in it. If you intend to sell, are selling, or have recently sold a company worth $10 million to $40 million or more, that's the whale whistle. Okay? Which clearly says, if you aren't selling a company, if you haven't sold a company, if you're selling one for $2 million, don't bother me. I'm not your guy. Go someplace else. Here's who this is for. I have vital experience-based information your own CPA, attorney, and other intermediaries may not tell you and may not even know. And this is an information offer. In this case, it drives to a free video. So this is a direct whale whistle ad. Some can be more subtle. Uh, those of you that are info marketers, if you were like A to Z, uh, blueprints I showed, which I did not bring to show, I have other things to show, but I showed the campaign that Matt Segula and I did in the financial advisor niche where we used the trust book, the precursor to the No BS Trust-Based Marketing book, has the whale bait as the lead generation magnet. We made it clear that it was only for advisors earning a certain amount of income. When they got to the website to request the book, that was re-verified. Literally, if you don't fit this criteria and you'd like the book, please go to Amazon and buy it. But if you fit this criteria, we'd be happy to give it to you for free. Another part of this, which many of you have seen versions of, again, I'm gonna show you a financial advisor one, really quick, is the match them up piece or copy where we tell the profile of who our best clients are and you can see if you fit one of these profiles. So this is a different financial advisor campaign. This is what kind of people rely on Phyllis. And there's a photo for each one and there's copy for each one. I'm not going to show you all the photos, but just so you get a feel. So this is retirees who want complete peace of mind about their finances so they can fully enjoy life. And we got, you know, the rugged-looking guy next to the classic car. And then we have copy all about why people who want to really enjoy their life use Phyllis. Then we have seniors with a need for income. From their life savings without undue risk, and there's a bunch of copy about that. We have investors still seeking growth from their investment portfolio. We have women responsible for their own finances or who may become responsible for their own finances. So if you're slowly poisoning him, and you know you're getting close, You're for us. You're our client, okay? People with tax bombs embedded in IRAs, 401(k)s, pension accounts, and so forth. People with health problems or family histories of serious medical problems. I think I'm out. Oh, present business owners for retired business owners. And there's a page of copy, which I am not gonna take time to wade through, for each one of these people. So we're not advertising really Phyllis, and we're not advertising her services. We'll get to that. We're advertising for the people who match up with the profile of the customer that we want. Saying, "Fit one of these profiles? You're for us, we're for you. Come forward, get more, find out more." I'll take you through a few more examples. So this is— I just, in this matchmaking field, I just did a lot of work for a client in the It's Just Lunch network, if you're familiar with It's Just Lunch. And they unfortunately have, much like these other ads, They have a sales culture business rather than a marketing culture business. So they have, "Raise your hand if you're ready for us to match you with somebody and call up and talk to a salesperson who will now try and sell you." That's a sales culture business. We really want a marketing culture business that will get whales. So I'll just show you some of the ad copy very quickly and make a couple of points. So this is Washington, D.C. area where they have an operation. So single and divorced men are wanted now by elite, intelligent, sexy women in Montgomery and Fairfax County in Washington, D.C. And now it says who we want: busy professionals, executives, entrepreneurs, and retired military officers who are fed up with dead-end dates and who know how to treat a lady are desired now for casual dating and for committed relationships. All the way down to a number of our clients are members of the Kennedy Center. Now that happens to be a bias of their clients. It's real. And so some of their best clients happen to be members of and donors to the Kennedy Center. So okay, if that's the case, why don't we say that so we maybe will attract some more of them? They are concerned with their privacy and their reputations. You will see, if you studied all this copy, you would see a lot of alarm all the way through it. This is purely an information offer. This is not a call. So this is, "To get the whole story about dating smart, go to," and it drives to a website. Okay? Here's another ad. "New free report, After Divorce Dating." Okay? We want the person who's been out of the game for a while and now doesn't know how to play the game. "Reveals what the busy, successful, recently divorced professional man must know about today's dating scene, online dating websites," et cetera, et cetera. The drive is to a free report, which they get at afterdivorcedating.com. This is, "How can the busy, successful, single dentist escape dead-end dating once and for all?" Dentists fed up with— none of the rest of the copy changes, by the way. The rest of it's all generic, okay? But there's a dentist version, there's a lawyer version, there's a CPA version, there's a pretty much any high-income profession that has a city or state journal in which we can run an ad, there's a version of this ad. Then there's the matchup thing like I just showed you with Phyllis. So here, men who do not dare date their associates, colleagues, or peers. And there's a whole page of copy about that. Men who value their privacy. And here's a great alarm paragraph, because this is Washington, D.C. Some of our clients hold security clearance status, have positions with federal government agencies, and have worked hard out of necessity to keep their personal lives private. Okay? One of the things about It's Just Lunch, by the way, is the first date, you don't even know last names. You meet first name only and decide whether you want to go any further. Men who— Men who are extremely busy, work a lot— by the way, I'm showing you the male version. There's a female version of this for the female prospects, and much of it is the same. It's just the gender's changed a little bit, the language has changed just a little. Men who are extremely busy, work a lot of hours, work odd hours, and are into their work, right? Many men who put their careers or business first know this about themselves but are reluctant to voice it to someone they want to date. Or create relationship with, but you can tell us the unvarnished truth. We are very accustomed to having hard-driving, Type A alpha men as clients, as well as men who work unusual hours, travel on business, and so forth and so on. So somebody can match themselves up with that. Men who have been out of the game for a long time. If you ended a long marriage or committed relationship and find yourself returning to single life, you're in deep trouble. Exceptionally successful men with much at risk. Over 80% of online dating profiles embody false or embellished information, and the online dating sites are used by outright predators and gold diggers seeking affluent men to take advantage of them. That's why you need this service. Men who worry about emotionally unstable women. We have never had a psycho woman incident or complaint from our clients. Now, we'll shift gears. So here's B2B. Here's a client of mine who markets to real estate agents, and his whales are relatively successful, experienced real estate agents who are making okay money, but they're not happy with what they're having to do to get the money. That's his whale. His whale is not somebody going down for the third time who needs a life raft. His whale is not somebody who's woefully unsuccessful, because generally speaking, there's a reason why woefully unsuccessful people are woefully unsuccessful. They won't implement, they won't follow instructions, they won't work, they won't study. So they're of no value to him either. He needs somebody who can spend $800 a month. That's like the first criteria. So this copy is, if you keep thinking there just has to be a better way, and here's who this is for: experienced successful agent, an experienced struggling agent, or agents with a coach. So again, we are calling out specifically to the person that we want, and we know who we want, and then we are letting them come to us. Last example of his. The key words are, so why don't you have a steady and reliable inflow of good leads from your advertising, marketing, prospecting? Most agents can't accurately— but, but the key line here even after years of experience and a level of success. That's the whale whistle embedded in otherwise generic lead generation ad copy. That's the whale whistle. So there's a 3-step specific customer focus process to get you to this point. First step is intelligence, information about your target customer. So that can be demographics, which is where most people tend to go. So most people go to demographic data— age, gender, income, married, single, etc. There are very good people in our world. ROI guy is here in the exhibit hall, I think. Very good at analytics, alright? Then there are psychographics. Psychographics have to do with mindset, how people think. Alright. So for example, if you go back to the matchmaking service category, one of the mindset issues that makes somebody a better client prospect than another is that they are a professional who get paid for providing expert professional service. They're more prone to accept the idea of an expert professional doing that for them than somebody who is not in that business themselves. So psychographic issues have to do with how your whales think, and not enough is done trying to figure that out and have a profile of that in your mind. Emotional background. So emotional background gets to when, where, and how they were raised, okay? What they heard at the top of the stairs as a kid. Age benchmarks typically tied to different backgrounds, ethnicity, religion. So a good question to ask yourself about your customers are— is what are their top 5 beliefs and values? If they knew they were gonna die tomorrow and they were gonna write a belief and value document to leave to their kids, what would they talk about? For our whales, one of those 5 is pull your straps, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stand on your own 2 feet, work ethic. Most of our good customers, that's one of the 5 things they devoutly believe in. They may have somewhat fictionalized now their own behavior in that category to be a bit more heroic than it actually was. Does not make any difference. It's on their top 5 list, okay. Another good question is what are their emotional anchors? Most people's emotional anchors have to do with year they were born, year they got their first car, year they graduated from high school, year they graduated from college, year they got married. That's pretty much where you're gonna find their emotional anchors. So if you know their age generally of your whale, you can now back that up. What are the 2 or 3 years where they probably graduated from college? What are the 2 years where they probably graduated from high school? When did they probably get their first car? Then you can go look at what was going on during those years. What were the songs? Okay, so the big brand advertisers are playing that game aggressively these days. They are going and licensing songs that fit certain age markers within the life experience of their target customers, and they're using those songs in their commercials. So you can go back and you can see what the price of milk was, you can see what the price of a house was, you can see what the song was that year, you can see what the big historical event was that year. Those are all anchors that are very meaningful to those customers. Current state of mind, okay? So that's the, you know, what are they staying awake at night worrying about, what are the 5 trends that are affecting them most, What are the top 5 opinions that they hold right now? So most people have 4 or 5 really profoundly held opinions that they state all the time, alright, in a lot of conversations. In the same conversation, so you get together with your buddy, to play golf, your top 5 opinions come up probably every time you play golf. And your buddy probably agrees with at least 4 or 5 out of them, or you wouldn't be playing golf with him. So he has the same opinions, and you guys spend half the time on your golf course talking about your top 5 opinions. Alright, that's what goes on. Alright. So it's useful for us to know what those are if we want to sell this guy something. Where does he stand on Obamacare? Where does he stand politically generally? What's his opinion about kids his adult children's age behavior today? How does he and she feel about the big trend of the adult kids moving back in with their parents? For? Against? Terrified? Angry? Bricked up the room? Where are they? Right? So you really have— most people spend most of their thought and conversational time, and it's important for you to know this because you would be exceptions, alright? And so it's important for us to know that, but most people spend most of their time just in 4 places. Okay. Family stuff, occupation stuff, which is mostly complaining, their chief recreational pursuit, and money. And so you kind of need to know where they are mentally and emotionally about those 4 things in order to connect with them real well. Weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Okay? What are your customers' vulnerability buttons that you can really push hard? So we learned— so I'm back doing a lot of work, I mentioned it this morning, in the arthritis field, and I'm using customer intelligence that I got some years ago when I spent 5 days interviewing testimonials for an arthritis product and doing the videotaping of these testimonials. And so men react to arthritis and to aging in general very differently than women react to arthritis and aging in general. So aging in general Men, their primary emotional response is anger and rage. Women's primary emotional response is depression. Now those are two very different things. Men are mad about what they can't do that they used to be able to do, or that now they fictionally believe they used to be able to do. Alright? Women really don't get mad about it. Women just get depressed about it, and specific to arthritis. So men's reaction to arthritis is rage at having to go to someone to get a cuff buttoned. They are pissed off. Alright? Women aren't really mad about it. They're just depressed that they can't garden like they always used to be able to garden. They find that sad. So, if you're gonna have this conversation, you have to have one conversation with the men, one conversation with the women. There is no one-size-fits-all conversation in selling anti-age in general, or certainly arthritis in specific. So now we know what his weakness is and we know what her weakness is. In the hearing aid business, when I did a lot of work in the hearing aid business, we learned very quickly that the greatest vulnerability of all, if you want to sell hearing aids, is fear of being stuck in the home. Because when they can't hear, their adult children start to think they're addled. They may or may not be addled. They're probably not. They just can't hear. So they start behaving like they're addled. And then the adult kids are heard saying, "You know, it's probably about time we stick Dad in a home where he can't hurt himself." Nobody wants to be stuck in the home. Number 1 fear as people age is being in the nursing home, okay? So the hearing aid sale is about don't act addled. They will stick you in the home. And if you're acting addled because you can't hear, this little doohickey will keep you out of the home. Now you have to say it. A tick more elegantly than that, but that's a weakness and vulnerability. Almost every customer group has them, and as does the best customer have them. Language issues, right? So language, who do they read, who do they listen to, what's their tribal language, and what are dog whistle language terms? That are meaningful to them and wouldn't be heard by anybody but them. So good copywriters, when they decide to write to a profile or to a category of consumers, sit down and create a vocabulary list. So what a good copywriter will do is take the magazines they read, the books they read, the stuff they pay attention to, and they'll get themselves some color highlighters, and they'll go through it all, and they'll note repetitively used terms, words, language patterns that this group uses. They'll take the thesaurus, and they'll go through it and find synonyms that can be used. They'll take the words that sell thesaurus, and they'll build themselves a vocabulary list. And that's what they'll use as they create their marketing messages. They will also get at least one qualified reader to redline their stuff. So big pet peeve of mine, by the way, is the rush to get stuff out. We do a webinar for this group, let's jump in front of the camera tomorrow and do the webinar, right? So I come from a world where we work for 3 months on that script, right? 'Cause we're gonna put half a million dollars of a client's money at stake when we put it on TV, okay? You guys aren't doing that, but you're putting half a million dollars of your time at stake, right? So almost always, if I'm working with a tribe I don't know, I'm gonna get myself at least one qualified reader. And that is somebody from that tribe who also understands direct response. And to redline, copy. Just mark the stuff that doesn't ring right to you. I don't want any other opinions. I just want you to catch my language errors. That's what I'd like you to do. So, for example, when I work on Proactiv, the stuff aimed at the kids, it has been a long time since I was a 13-year-old girl with acne. Alright? It's been a very long time. So I need a 13-year-old girl with acne who kinda understands direct response to redline for me, and I need her mom for the stuff that we're writing to the mom. So language. The character profile. You should have a clear character profile of your whale, of your ideal client, in detail, like a fiction writer creates a character profile. If you don't know how to do this, I can tell you how to do it at a Barnes Noble store. I'm sure you can do it at Amazon, but I'm not the guy to tell you how to do it, but The Barnes Noble store, there is a section of books for writers, okay, and you will find books in there strictly about character profile development. They'll even give you 26-page fill-in-the-blank character profile forms to create your fictional character. You do the same thing to build the character who you are going to sell to. What you saw last night with Sally is not just helpful about presenting you, It's helpful about building the character profile of who you are going to sell to. Info marketers, by the way, in the room, if you do what we did and you get your herd to take the F-score test and you get the data, uh, you're gonna find biases in your herd that now tell you what your character profile is of who your customers are and who you're best customers are. Assistance from an insider, befriend at least one, and I want to jump to lists. So, lists, there's just no excuse if you want to do whale hunting not to use direct mail because the whales already exist in somebody's list. So our— my go-to guy for this with my clients is Craig Simpson, who's here somewhere at Simpson Direct. Let me just show you research for the It's Just Lunch people. Okay. So here's preliminarily what's available to us. Dentists at home addresses, 35 to 49, and 50 to 65, single. And then by income or home value. Lawyers, same deal. Doctors, the same deal. I can get Brooks Brothers 12-month buyers, age, single. I can get Esquire Magazine, age, single. I can get Forbes, Investor's Business Daily, Robb Report, and Playboy by age, single, and occupation. I can get potency pill buyers, age, single. They at least have hope. They tell us a lot of their best clients belong to a gym. They already knew that. Great. Good piece of information. Can we use it for something? Yup. He can get me health and gym club members, active, 50 to age 65, $100,000 a year income, single. Kennedy Center. Surprisingly, a lot of our clients, they tell me, belong to the Kennedy Center. Great, Kennedy Center rents its list. 12-month donors, and they have a breakout of single. Hooray! The national ad works in airline magazines. Great, I can get frequent travelers at BWI, age, single, frequency of travel, and income. So I can take my profile and I can go into the list universe and I can match it. Second part of the 3-step process is now target personal positioning. So basically, whales mate with whales. So if you're gonna go hunt for a whale, you have to present yourself in a way that is really acceptable to the whale. You need some sort of affinity link. So let me show you a good affinity link example. We're not going to spend a lot of time on it because I'm going to be over time here in about 5 minutes, but I want to tell you that this affinity link thing is extremely important if you want to attract Whales. This is another way not to talk about your product, your service, your company, the thing you want to sell, but to talk about the person you want to attract and to hold yourself out to them in a way that they feel affinity with you. So the high-end financial advisor at Arizona who I showed you, Phyllis. So here's her ideal client. They're no younger than 55. The sweet spot is 65 to 80. Married to the first wife of many years, raised a family, now have an empty nest. They're patriotic. They fly the flag on Veterans Day, Fourth of July, etc. They're politically conservative, and they were either born in, or more likely moved to Arizona, and live there by preference. They have enough money to go live someplace else if they don't like living in Arizona. So, now I want to look with this profile. I want Phyllis to tell me where have we got affinity? 'Cause I want to show that. And so, a Phyllis piece now has this on it. Not the 56 credentials and certifications she has as a financial advisor. Not how much money she has under management. No, we have a wife married for 30 years, a mother of 2. We have disciplined athlete because discipline is useful in a financial advisor. A longtime Arizonan who loves the Southwest life. Okay, I have pulled my affinity links based on the profile of my intended whale client, and I'm talking about them more than I am talking about anything else. The other financial advisor I showed you whose client is a business owner who is selling his business. So here's what Ted tells me about his client, and then I'm going to tell you Ted things that Ted was not using. So here's what Ted tells me his client is: 55 to 70, Depression-era parents or grandparents, post-World War II era upbringing. May or may not have gone to college, if so, probably with the GI Bill, and worked while attending. Millionaire next door type. Stanley Millionaire Next Door. Built up a business over many years. It's a male. He's tough-minded. He's hardworking. Okay? Now here's stuff I find out about Ted that Ted's not using in any of his marketing. Because I'm now looking for affinity links. He wants to tell them how much money he's got under management and, you know, all that stuff. Ted comes from humble beginnings, no indoor plumbing, started selling door-to-door as a teenager, worked his way through college, built a business from the ground up, owns 2 homes, and he's active with charity. So all my Ted advertising now is about who they are and then about this: You will discover we are probably kindred spirits. I come from very humble beginnings. I began working and selling things door-to-door to make money at age 8. I worked my way through college, built businesses from the ground up. Okay? Now you understand most advisors would think that irrelevant. He thinks it's kind of embarrassing to talk about. The big sales letter now has pictures, which I made him go get, of his house with the outhouse, 'cause they had no indoor plumbing. And if he didn't have pictures, we probably would have made pictures, alright? In his book ad, here's about the author. Ted's life began living with his parents and his grandmother in a tiny frame house without indoor plumbing, heated only by a fireplace. He is the first member of his family to get a college degree. Ted has built one successful company, alright? These are affinity links. They don't speak to his his efficacy as a money manager. They don't speak to his credentials. They don't speak to his money management process. They're about targeted personal positioning. Third, then we finally get to outreach and invitation. How are we gonna communicate with these people that we have selected? We want a low threshold opportunity. We want a way to bypass gatekeepers and underlings. Home addresses are best. We want to offer information but not education. Important thing about whales. They do not want to know how to do it. They want to understand it and know that you know how to do it. So very often, particularly professionals, are busy teaching their prospective client or client or patient or customer how to do things. Whales don't want to do things. They want to find somebody they can trust to do things. They have to understand enough to feel like they're making a good decision about that, but they do not want to be educated. They want to be informed. So So if you put those 3 things together, you can very, very specifically go after precisely the customer you want and say the things that will cause that customer to come to you. I will say one last thing about this. Understand that in marketing, in prospecting, in advertising, what we all do is we buy a haystack. That's what we do. And we pay for every piece of straw in it. Every haystack has some needles in it. Bad analogy, needle whale, but that's what I mean. Every haystack does. The question for you is, How big a haystack are you gonna build for yourself in order to find how few gold needles in it versus how small of a haystack are you gonna build for yourself that have a lot of gold needles in it? Most people just build haystacks and then hope to find needles. It doesn't have to be that way. You can invest in a way that builds a much smaller haystack full of needles with this 3-step process.

Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever. Designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free, just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by the mailman to your mailbox each and every month, one from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift and your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.