Lead Generation and Conversion On and Offline

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Now, often as entrepreneurs, we have a million different ideas running through our brains of things we'd like to do, businesses we'd like to start, product lines we could create, all these different things floating around until we grab one and really start to run with it. But how nice would it be to talk to somebody who's chased all those rabbits down their holes and has built multiple businesses online, offline, e-commerce, brick and mortar, and be able to state what actually worked. Today, Dan Kennedy is going to do a special interview with Darren Spindler. Darren has multiple businesses online and offline, and he's going to share with you the keys that he has discovered in lead generation and conversion. This is an open sharing opportunity where you're going to see how different varieties of generating leads and creating sales Works. So if you're looking for an idea that's just going to work instead of all of the other ones that we have floating around, this is the episode for you. Let's listen to Lead Generation and Conversion On and Offline with Dan Kennedy and Darren Spindler.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Welcome to our diamond call. If you are a DIAMOND member, you are in the right place. A goodly number of you are probably suffering as at different places our guests, Darren Spindler and I, are suffering— what are they calling it? The Arctic vortex or some such silliness. But we are at near zero real temperatures and below zero wind chills. I imagine a goodly number of you are as well. But we have a hot topic today that is always of great interest and value to everybody and somebody who is very adept at it. And our topic today is all about lead generation and conversion online, offline, for pure e-commerce businesses and for brick-and-mortar businesses. And I'm going to let Darren give you his backstory and a quick thumbnail about his current businesses. But I will tell you that I have worked with Darren and associates for some time and watched the first, the primary business, Kids Bowl Free, evolve over years and become an absolute juggernaut. You may have seen Daren on TV, on Fox News. You may be aware of the famous bus tour that was done for Kids Bowl Free. Your kids may even be in Kids Bowl Free. I believe there are 2 million and some odd families, households represented. So Darren, welcome to our call. Thank you for making the time. And I'm just going to let you give everybody kind of from beginning, from whence you came, not the womb, but your start with your businesses and with me and GKIC as well as a description of what the businesses look like today.

Yeah, so thanks a lot for having me, Dan. You know, I've been an entrepreneur basically my entire life. My family had a feed mill in a small town of about 300 people along with a general store and a tavern, and my dad built an 8-lane bowling alley the year before I was born, so I really grew up in the bowling business. My grandparents had the tavern and the feed mill, so I, you know, made a few quarters picking up the parking lot and I really enjoyed the marketing side of the bowling business more than I did the operations and quickly found that out, you know, when I was trying to fix machines and was horrible at that. But I put together a fundraiser for a family in our town that their son had leukemia when I was, I think, 13 years old. And that was really my first foray into marketing. My dad used to take me to, you know, meetings where folks would be speaking similar to what you do at GKIC. And I'd sit in the front row and take notes and I got hooked on the marketing bug at an early age. When I was 15, I started my first business, which was a mobile DJ business. So I started that with borrowed speakers and CDs and actually by the time that was done, I had an enclosed trailer with my name on the side and a huge sound system and lots of lights. But when I got to be about, I guess, 20 years old, I decided that working for my dad in this little town of 300 people was not where I wanted to be the rest of my life. So I moved to Green Bay. My parents are divorced and I became partners in a 60-lane bowling alley there in Green Bay. At the time we actually had a 60-lane and a 36-lane center, but I was primarily at the 60. That center was doing just over $1 million, which is horrific. At the time when I started there, they had no database and when I left there about, I guess, 7.5 years ago now, we had over 30,000 names and this was in the time when you couldn't get people onto a list through through automated data capture on websites and all that stuff. This was asking people one by one with paper and pencil. We grew that database to over 30,000, but more importantly, we grew the business to over $3 million. Quite honestly, it could have been $5 million, but my business partner in that was of the mindset of being the lowest price and not the highest price. I was kind of the opposite where I wanted to create a great experience. Have higher prices and we had 2-hour waiting lists, so it made no sense to be at the low price. So I left, I guess 7.5 years ago to do what I'm doing now and we took a lot of the tools that I was using in the bowling center and implemented some of the technology like Infusionsoft or other automated procedures to now help over 1,000 bowling centers in the US and Canada improve their marketing. Um, we started Kids Bowl Free, I guess this is the 7th summer, and it started as a pilot program with 20 centers. It quickly grew to 90 centers. The first year we had 100,000 kids register, and this year, 7 years later, now we're at 1,044 bowling centers. Last year, 2,097,000 kids registered from just under a million families. Um, in addition to that, now I've used my marketing skills to branch off I also have a fitness business. We actually have a brick-and-mortar location here in Green Bay, which we are starting to quickly grow. We've had really great progress over the last 2 months. We've launched an info product from that directed at brides-to-be. I'm involved in a couple other projects where we really control the marketing instead of the operations of the business.

When people hear— 1 million households, 2 million kids registered and on a local level in your fitness business you're generating significant lead flow as well. First of all, I think the first, you know, skepticism probably is there's a big difference between 2 million who register and 2 million who we somehow get money from. I would like you to talk a little, just briefly, about the money model. Then beyond that I want to get into— because really I don't care what they do, anybody who can aggregate 2 million people online through a single site is doing something and knows something. I want to then really get to the lead generation strategies that fuel this.

Let's talk about the money model first. Basically in the summer, in the bowling business, Doesn't matter if it's the Midwest, the Northeast, and even around the coast. The coasts have it a little bit better, but the majority of bowling centers, their business is very difficult in the summer, so they've got a lot of empty inventory, especially midday, midweek. So they had payroll, they had mortgages, and they had empty lanes. So many proprietors over the past 50 years had given away bowling during the summer to drive traffic. They didn't capture any data. They had no follow-up. They had no way to invite people back. Really what we did was take today's tools, capture that data. After mom registers the children, we actually have an upsell built in place. I always say mom because 85% of our people that register is the female in the family. It says, "Hey mom, if you'd like to join in the fun for anywhere between $25 and $50 a month." $50, they can bowl 2 free games every day all summer along with 3 other adults. So it's a fantastic deal for the family and it's a great way for us to now drive those people into the center to actually use their coupons. And we, you know, sell a percentage of those folks the family pass option and we share in the revenue with the bowling centers and our share of the revenue allows us to to do all the marketing like we do, like the bus tour. I mean, we invested $125,000 in that bus tour. Last year we gave away $100,000 worth of school grants to teachers because one of the ways that we get families to register is by distributing cards in the school. So as you know, some of the school districts are, you know, tough to get into because we're, you know, one of those for-profit entities. So this is a way for us to open up doors. But really, the money model is it's an opt-in, free opt-in or free registration for the families, and then if the adults would like to purchase our upsell, we share in that revenue with the bowling centers, similar to what Groupon might have done in the past.

Cool, okay. So now let's talk about driving traffic. And you already mentioned two offline things driving traffic online. One, some sort of network of school teachers who are participating and a giant $125,000 bus tour. So kind of take me through all the ways that whether for Kids Bowl Free or for the newer fitness business that you are driving traffic and not limited to, but let's spend some time on the offline to online aspect.

Yeah, so we do a lot of offline to online. This year we're going to do actually some more online because of some of the new tools allowed with Facebook and some retargeting stuff, but a lot of our stuff is done. Last year we printed 15 million 4x6 postcards that have our Kids Bowl Free message on it, and on the opposite side it has the specific bowling center, so it's got a URL for each individual bowling center. So let's just say the average bowling center gets, you know, 10,000 cards from us. We ship those cards directly to their center, and then we send them a roadmap, which is like 30 different ways to successfully implement our program. One of those is to go into schools and hand the cards out. We basically divide them up into 25s so they get distributed through the classrooms. We print and ship 15 million last year that go into those schools. That's one major way that we get the word out. One of our tips inside the 30 is people insert those into newspapers, so small community mailers or even their Sunday papers. So we've had a number of people do that. That's another way that people are driving it. We have our PR team. So we've got a full-time PR gal that her sole job is to go into each and every city where we have a participating bowling center in a major market where there's TV stations, radio stations, and get us or the local bowling center preferably on TV. She then also works the national media, so we've been featured on the NBC Nightly News as a great way for kids. We went to Flint, Michigan as a way to help kids in the terrible economy up in Flint. So I don't know what a couple minutes on Brian Williams, NBC Nightly News is worth, but it drove a lot of traffic for us. We were on Fox and Friends. We built 2 full-size bowling lanes, and over the past 2 years,. We had 13 minutes twice, 2 different years worth of coverage spread out over the 3-hour show. Those are huge ways that we're going from offline to online. We also tested last year radio in a few markets. We did have a little issue with that because of some of the political recall elections going on and some other stuff that drove the cost up that didn't quite pan out for us, but we tested it. We think that going back this year, we might be able to again test it and find a way to make that work as well. We look for any way that we can and we test a lot of stuff. Some things work, some things don't, but I would say those are the major ways that we're driving traffic for that business. The bus tour, when we did that, I mean, we would go out, we literally went 42 days on the road, 16,000 miles. We started at 4:30 in the morning. We'd go to the first TV show at 5:00 AM because our PR gal would set that up in front of us. We would show up with the bus. We'd do a bowling interview and then we'd hopefully get 2 or 3 of those at each one of the local stations. After those were done, we'd go to the local YMCA or the schools or wherever we could. We'd have a little event. Then we'd hop on the bus, drive to the next city, and we'd do an event at night. Then we'd hop on the bus, drive overnight, and take a shower at a Motel 6, and then we'd do it all over again.

You know, one of the things that strikes me, and then I want to ask you about the current brick and mortar, but one of the things that strikes me, pardon the pun, about what you're describing is that you could make a case that All of these things that you've done and do are really the sort of public relations outreach for the industry that its own trade association ought to be doing but that virtually no trade association does.

Yeah, you'd be 100% right and there's a lot of people that feel that way inside our industry. In fact, some of the people inside the industry feel like, they have a bit of jealousy even though they're not willing to go out and do that work. Yeah.

I mean, most industries have this same gaping hole. I've always said that when you can control lead flow for a group of businesses or for an entire industry, you really can then pretty much have everything else. Your own way and the 1,100 bowling centers that are actually your clients, as opposed to, say, most info marketers who would teach these methods but not implement them on a global scale, you really have created tail wag dog where you control the lead flow. Into the businesses. How hard has it been— how hard was it, how hard is it now to get the bowling center operators' participation and compliance?

So it's not easy, I mean, that's for sure. You know, we're out there—

And is that fundamentally just because, you know, they're small business owners who aren't very smart?

Well, I think it's a lot of— many of our people are 55+, many of them 60+. So we're teaching them tools that are today's tools. That was tough for many of them. I mean, last year we created a mobile app and we actually— the consumers had been begging for it for 4 years and we held off, but the proprietors didn't want to do it because they didn't have a paper coupon to go in their cash register. So we always have to do this kind of delicate dance between what the consumer wants and what the center wants because Without the centers, we don't have anything, and likewise, we want to make sure the consumer has a great experience. In marketing, for many years for bowling centers, they didn't need to. I mean, literally, they opened the doors and they were so darn full, they just didn't need marketing. Now they went from 12 million plus league bowlers down to under 2 million, and the game has changed, and there's a lot more options for consumers today, so in that business, They've had to start to do marketing and understand it's important, but many of them don't want to learn it, so just having us do it for them is far better and easier. But still, you had to show them and convince them, and we still have skeptics. So, you know, we went out and did seminars. So Bruce and I were all over the country doing seminars. We did that for probably, you know, 4 or 5 years before that kind of didn't become very effective anymore because the same people would show up. Now we've got sales team on the phone, so we've got 2 full-time salespeople and then we have my assistant who basically does grunt work where she's going through and surfing websites and sending one-off emails to see if they have any interest and then handing that off to the 2 skilled sales guys. It's a lot of work and we're doing— teleseminars to educate them. We just did a live broadcast in San Diego the other day, of which now we're turning that into DVDs, which will get mailed out to non-participating centers. We're doing webinars, so we're doing a lot of stuff. And, you know, now we're at the point where, quite honestly, we're at about 40% of the available market that's left, because in the summer we have centers that just close. You know, they're small centers in rural Midwest or Northeast areas and they just close. So if you take those out—

That's kind of like the Dairy Queens close here in the winter. Yep. You know, they just shut up, they just shut their doors for 3 months and go to Florida.

Yep, that's what they do. So, you know, when you take out AMF and Brunswick, the 2 biggest chains, and then you take a look at the other smaller chains that are left, we have about 40% market penetration of what we can actually get. So it's becoming increasingly difficult to get folks, but our retention rate is in the upper 90 percentile also.

And for the center operator, what is this— I mean, what does the result look like? What does this do for him?

Well, I'll give you a really good one. You know, we just interviewed these folks live in San Diego the other day, so one of the one of the proprietors who was one of our interviews, he 5 years ago had 20 bowlers left in his youth bowling program. He took the center over from his parents. First year he was a skeptic, didn't want to do it, but he thought, well, I've got no other options. So over the past 4 years he's grown his youth bowling program from 20 kids to over 500. You know, if you take 20 to 500, that's 480 kids let's just say they're paying $10 a week for easy math, you know, it's almost $5,000 a week times 30 weeks, that's $150,000 a year built off the back end of gathering data and then properly following up and setting up phone calls and all that kind of stuff to get those kids back.

So it can be substantial.

Cool.

All right, let's leap now to You're actually sort of again coming down off of Mount Olympus and operating a brick-and-mortar business of your own at the street level using the same sort of methodology.

Yeah, I think I woke up one morning and bumped my head, but you know.

Yeah, well, yeah, I, I just authorized about 5 people a couple of weeks ago that if I ever, ever, ever, ever again anywhere near a brick-and-mortar business to just shoot me.

I was feeling that way about 2 months ago. It's been interesting because we've taken what we— Andy and I, you know Andy obviously, he's my business partner in Kids Bowl Free and a number of other things. We were both doing this workout program. We were getting results. Long story short, my trainer wasn't getting any new people. Me and 2 other girls every morning at 5 o'clock. I'm like, "Joe, let me help you out." Long story short, he didn't get it, so I'm like, "Andy, let's just hire a trainer and do this." About 6 weeks later, we were up and running with a full gym. Since then, we've generated over 1,100 leads in a local market. Out of that, we've had 200 and I think 20 or 30 now come in and try it. We're sitting at just over 100 members as of today, and over the past 2 months we've really figured out how to convert these people better and actually get them to refer better, which has been great. I can talk about in a minute, I guess, all of the different strategies we used to do that and some things we learned along the way. What's better is we actually now figured out one of our lead sources was brides-to-be. We now have created a whole program and in fact last Friday and Saturday we shot video at my house in my little gym at home for an info product for brides-to-be. Obviously now we can go out and scale that very similar to Kids Bowl Free and the universe for that is limitless almost and it continues to replenish itself.

Let me just go back through the numbers. So roughly 1,100 leads to 200 and some odd come in within the four walls and what's the free sample? It's free sample?

It's free call? We've now eliminated the free sample. That was one of the things that we learned over the first 4 months. We now have, and we can talk about the last 2 months of actually a prepaid situation. If you want, I can even share maybe some of the phone script. It's been much better, plus they're paying from day one and the results are better and their compliance is better from day one. So we got rid of the free sample, so that's better.

So are they then buying a trial class?

Yeah, so they're buying a trial 28-day transformation is what they're buying for $97.

Okay. And then out of them you've held 100? Has paying members on an ongoing basis.

Yeah, and I would say out of that 220 or so that have come in and tried it, we probably had another 50 of those that were in for a while and then dropped, and we've actually had some of them come back. So there was probably only 40 to 60 that came in and tried it that didn't stick for some period of time. But what we've learned over the past 2 months are a couple of very interesting things. We now are sending people to the telephone instead of to the website as our first lead source. So yeah, they can go to the website, they can find the website, but we really encourage them to call us. And we actually have a phone script that's set up now that's more like an interview, so we de-arm them because they're coming to us, you know, asking about price when we don't want to talk about price because we are basically the anti-gym. We have small group classes. We teach them how to eat. We have monthly events and like we had a Thanksgiving dinner where we had a bread-free, grain-free, sugar-free meal and a bunch of our members then went home and cooked that for their family and that's what we're trying to teach them. So it's a lot more of an experience than it's just like—

That sounds suspiciously to me like bottled water.

No, it was actually turkey and it was, we had a stuffing with Italian sausage, walnuts, cranberries in it. It's great. They'll send you the recipe if you want it.

Yeah, I'm just being a wiseass.

But anyway, so it's more about the experience and on a monthly basis we try to have one of those. We're going to have a Super Bowl party actually at my house where we have what we called Renegade Approved Snacks where everybody has to bring one of their favorites. So it's tough to tell them that on a website. We want to have them interviewed on the phone and we want to find out what their goals are. Once we disarm them, they are converting, once we get that phone call, at almost 90% on the phone to come in and pay $97.

You know, I had a phone call earlier today, a private call, and the guy has a pretty successful get them in a room business model. And for the last half of last year, he walked away from it and busily tried to convert everything to digital, to online communication and online experiences and so forth. And he nearly put himself completely out of business and is rapidly returning to the physical bodies within four walls. Experience approach. I think you'd agree that just because all of the online media is available does not necessarily mean that it's the most effective way to build a business.

No, I think it's actually one of the biggest mistakes people make. I mean, I actually have a full system where I actually do online stuff for my bowling centers and actually for another niche in the tanning industry. But we, I teach them from day one that you have to still, you got to be in the mail. You have to be on the phone. You have to be doing those things because I still think that you can't have a conversation like we want to have via a website. It's impossible. Now, should you have video on your website that explains what you're doing? Absolutely. We're in the process of creating a brand new website with that. We're actually looking at launching a second location now in another city right next to us so we can leverage up like radio, TV, newspaper, and those kinds of things, bring our cost per lead down because some of the things are just not economical right now with one location. I can't do it, or at least I can't make it make sense in my mind right now. We do have a DVD we created, so if they go to our website, we'll actually ship them a book and we'll ship them a DVD that sells them. But since we've switched to this model, all of our, like for instance, our Facebook ads now, they tell people to call us, which instead of, hey, go to our website, no, it's call us to reserve your spot, and once we can get them on the phone, then we are able to have that interview with them, and it's far better.

And I would assume relatively rare in industry and on Facebook?

As far as, you know, I do a lot of studying. I'm going out and scouring different fitness people's sites because, you know, it was funny, about a month ago I said, you know, it's one of those things after you figure it out you say, why the hell didn't we do this a while ago? Then you think back to, you know, if everybody else in the industry is doing it, you should do the opposite. Everybody else is giving 2-week trials, 1-week trials, and all this stuff. But what you have to do then is you've got to convert them to a customer after that, especially in fitness. As far as anything that I have sold so far, fitness is one of the most difficult because we're dealing with folks that are out of shape for the most part because we're based more on weight loss than we are, let's say, the elite athlete trying to get better. You're dealing with a lot of mental issues that people with low confidence, and I think it's just very difficult to get them to go from an opt-in to try. And in a week, it's tough to do that as well. But if you've got their money and you've got 4 weeks— I just got an email yesterday from a girl. She's been with us 13 days. She's down 5 pounds. Her clothes are fitting better. She's feeling better. And she has now transformed the way she eats to what we teach. And she's like, this is amazing. It's great. And I'm in this for the long term.

So, and the 1,100 leads that have been generated so far In beautiful and sunny Green Bay. Yep. Tell me about the media.

Okay, so we do a lot of media, as many as we can affordably do. We tested radio on a bad station just because it had our demographic, but we did a very small test. If we get a second location, then I'm going to go to our number one station, which has our exact demographic, because I'm pretty sure it will work. We have done advertorials in the newspaper which have actually worked with the exception of one, which was the Packer playoff game a couple of weeks ago when it was freezing cold. I guess everybody was outside tailgating and didn't read the paper on Sunday.

I would not have run a Sunday ad on the day of the Packers playoff game.

We had to have it in before they knew what day they were playing.

Lesson learned, you know. When you do advertorials, are you doing newspaper ads or newspaper inserts?

This is an actual ad in the life section because most of our people are 25 to 45-year-old females. That's the section they read. Then we have done Facebook. We're very targeted and we actually have got a good amount of leads and a good amount of actual paying customers from there now that they've actually got tools that are much better than they used to have, so that's actually been working. Again, taking them to the phone instead of to the website, that switch has been far better from Facebook. We use direct mail, so we had a list that we bought that we tested. We actually have tested every door direct mail with a full-page 8.5x11. We did get leads. I haven't closed anything out of the most recent one. I think I got 7 leads out of like 3,500 pieces, which is not great, but there are 7 leads and the math works for me if I just get one of them, so I'm holding out hope there, but I don't think every door direct mail is the right answer for that business. I've made it work for some clients in Boeing and in restaurants, but not for this. I think those are probably the media that we've used so far.

Okay, cool. Alright, Darren, you've been great. I know you're a busy guy. We appreciate your time enormously. And folks on the call, thank you for being with us. And I think everybody will agree this was an important and valuable call.

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