Mixed Media In Funnels: The Strategy Smart Marketers Still Ignore

Welcome to the 220th episode of the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. This episode, we have a very special treat for you. We thought about keeping it until 222, but you know, 220 sounded absolutely great. In this episode, we get to listen to Dan Kennedy as he interviews somebody who is a very special friend of ours. Her name is Darcy Juarez, and as of this moment, she is currently the Chief Business Strategist at Magnetic Marketing. Now, at the time of interview, It's a little bit different. You're going to hear her backstory. You're going to hear the ideas, but pay close attention because right now she works with an internet marketing company promoting Dan Kennedy's business and the strategies taught by Dan Kennedy. Ask yourself, did she start in online marketing or offline? Also ask yourself, how do you get somebody to say, yes, I want more complexity in my funnel? This is a very interesting presentation that I cannot wait for you to listen to. So let's jump into Mixed Media in Funnels: The Strategy Smart Marketers Still Ignore with our very own Darcy Juarez and Dan Kennedy.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy.

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Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

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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. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Diamond Call. If that's where you're supposed to be, you are in the right place. In just a few minutes, we have GKIC's own or quasi-own or part of her GKIC owns or something like that, Darcy, master or mistress of marketing funnels, and we're going to talk about mistakes people make and how to tighten those things up and make them work better. And now we'll start, Darcy, with me letting you introduce yourself, not going all the way back to mom and dad and backseat of car and however all that happened, but sort of how you found your way into the information business industry and what you do besides GKIC. And how you are where you are.

Great. Well, we'll start with that. How I found you, I guess. I had held corporate jobs, I had held small business jobs, and a friend of mine was looking for someone to help him with a business that he was starting that I then came to find was information marketing. And through attending events with him, I met you and fell into all of GKIC and everything that they had to offer and really self-taught myself everything about it and had to figure out, since we were only 2 people or 3 people in that business, it seemed like you couldn't even take a vacation. You couldn't do anything. So I had to figure out ways to automate myself so that I could be gone and out of the business for a day or 2 and it would still make money. And I found that to be one of the most, you know, fun things is to be able to go on vacation and have your business making money while you're gone, or at times more money than when you were there. And kind of fell in love with info marketing, and that was about 13, 14 years ago. And since then have worked at GKIC as the Director of Marketing, went out on my own and have been working with private clients, and then have come back to GKIC as their Chief Business Strategist this year and am doing that part-time as well. So that's the shortened version of where I'm at today.

I lose track. So 13 years ago when you started in that info business, how much online was there versus offline?

None. It was all offline. Email was kind of just being used. There was no Facebook. There was no e-blasts. There was none of that yet.

Come from a simpler time to a very complicated time.

Yeah.

And so today's— well, let's define it first of all. How do you want to define marketing funnel?

Well, I define it as a sequence of events that take place with one end goal in mind.

Okay.

And if you want to go back to the simple times, right, those would take, those funnels would take 30 to, they would normally be 30 to 40, 30 to 60 days without batting an eye. You wouldn't think about that twice. That would be a normal funnel.

Right, because you had to allow time for, I mean, your follow-up options were mail and telemarketing, right?

Right, right.

Yeah.

So the time span has shortened in many people's minds as to how long a marketing funnel should be.

Do we think they're right or wrong?

Wrong. The biggest mistake, I think— I think the biggest mistake— so as email came out and as a lot of the internet stuff kind of came out, you saw many marketers shortening— thinking— making the mistake of shortening their marketing funnel and expecting that everybody would move quicker. And now you've gotten down to if somebody doesn't respond on the initial, you know, landing page or the initial sales page, they've Nobody's building out funnels past that. And now you have this big opportunity to take it or just underestimating the time in which it takes a prospect or even a current client or a current member to convert on the next offer.

So the current marketing funnel, just talk about it structurally for a second. From your standpoint, it really starts when somebody raises their hand and acknowledges interest in product, service, or business X. Now kind of paint a picture of it structurally.

The funny thing is in my mind it hasn't changed much. It's just like you were saying, the deliverables have. So you've got from the time in which a prospect raises their hand until they make goal number 1. And so that might be raising their hand for your next offer or that might be actually actually converting to your next offer. And that can still take anywhere between, I think the mistake most people make is, oh well, it should only be 3 to 5 days long because then they've lost interest in me. And they haven't necessarily lost interest in you, they may have lost interest in that topic or they may not be ready to move on that topic and so now it's required us to present multiple problems that they might face to get them to move to the same solution that we originally wanted them to move., and it requires us using multiple, more medias to be in front of them. So I cringe and I have, you know, what I've done and what I see is that the video sales letters don't work in every industry. And so just assuming that we should send everything out via video and not converting it to a written format for readers and not having an audio format for auditory listeners and not having short versions and long versions and, you know, sending people who haven't opened or consumed one piece to the next piece. And the ability now that we have thanks to different funnel builders is the ability really to continue to communicate with people until they meet many goals inside of our funnel. And it allows us to track our funnels better, and it allows us to see better results for that. And with Facebook retargeting, we can add that into our funnel so that we're staying in front of people until they really are ready to do what it is that we wanted them to do, because as we all know, we don't know when they're going to be ready to buy. We don't know when their need is going to switch over from just being interested to it's a necessity right now that I make this move or that I schedule a call with you or that I buy your product or that I have access to this or that I attend your event. And so that has, for the smart marketer, has lengthened their marketing funnel and given them the ability to really talk to their prospect in the modality that their prospect wants to be spoken to. And will best respond from.

So I want to go back. I'm not going to unpack all of that, but I want to zero in on— I'll get it as close to what you said as I can— presenting them sequentially with different solutions, different offers that ultimately get to the same product or service that somebody wants to sell. Talk a little bit about that and if you can even give a specific example, that would be great.

Yeah, I'm thinking like let's say I was selling marketing services and one of the problems that most business owners have is they need more new clients. That's their business problem. Maybe they were attracted to a Facebook marketing lead generation post or a report on how to do or a download on how to do Facebook marketing. They get that and what we don't know is maybe that's overwhelming, that's too much. I just need new clients. Throughout that marketing funnel, I'm talking about Facebook advertising is one way, but then if they're not responding to that, I might switch and say, you know, if you're looking for new clients, then, you know, here's another solution I have. Try this on your blog, or try this as a referral campaign. And I might provide multiple different ways that they can solve the problem of new clients, but, and take them down some different paths if they didn't like the first one that they responded to. The solution still remains my membership, it remains my product on traffic, it remains my product on, you know, acquiring new clients.

So, so one mistake that we both agree is abbreviating the total, um, length of time of follow-up on a lead, right? Another mistake is just continuing to put the same fundamental 'here's how you get from point A to point B' message in front of people. Rather than varying and rotating the answers to that question. I would argue that a third mistake, which is message, more structure, so I don't want to spend a lot of time on it, but it's not even backing up to, we'll use your example, John raised his hand to a how to get more clients. Bait. But if you back that up further, what's John's reason for wanting more clients, right? I mean, does he want more income? Does he want to make the business more valuable so he can sell it? Does he not know that through a variety of other strategies he could get to the higher income without more new clients, etc., etc.? I think even those varied messages ought to get explored during a sequence. Now I'll go to media. So you raised the issue of a video sales letter is a wonderful thing, but not necessarily effective with everybody. So when you mix media, in a funnel? Are you formulaic about it, meaning 3 emails for every 1 offline and a video sales letter every 5th step? Are you situational about it, and if so, how are you winding up at your decisions?

So some of them are probably for ease of use depending on the format in which we had it. One that I do formulaically is especially when there's webinars. So that if we're going to— if we're using a webinar and it's the follow-up sequence after a webinar. So you have the list of registration— registrants who registered. You have those who attended. You have those who registered but didn't attend. And then you have those who registered, attended, and saw your offer. And so first of all, they all need to be treated differently. But then secondly, we can't assume just because they were on the webinar that they actually consumed it or that they they wanted to consume it in a video format. The people who didn't show up, a portion of those people you could also say, well, they just don't like video. So I would want to send the next thing out to them, which is maybe you missed that, but I need them to consume it. So maybe I take that video and I create a report out of it so it's in a written format. And I personally like to do it where it's not just a transcript, where somebody can read it and not feel like it's timestamped with this stuff, but that it flows and tells the story just like the webinar did and presents the offer just like the webinar did. And so I would use that as a follow-up to that. I would use the replay or the video of that or pieces of that to entice them to go back and watch the entire video. And then I would rip out the audio and I would send that in a CD. So one of my favorites is what I call the CD mailer, in which case you can print the sales letter or you can print the report, you know, hidden, the sales letter hidden as a report and you can put the CD and DVD really in it and send it out as one piece so that regardless of how the prospect wants to consume that information, they have all of the mechanisms there. Other times situationally you're kind of forced to, here's the free report, now we've got to go have somebody read it to make the audio CD, or we've got, and then we might have to either do a talking head video or we might have to do the, PowerPoint slides that are written, you know, that somebody can speak over in order to create the video from that. So a lot of times it's based on what is available, what we have to start with, or the best mechanism to get that information from the person. So if you're a better speaker into video, then start with a video, record it that way, rip it out and transcribe it for the written. If you're better at writing a sales letter first, then write the sales letter, create the audio and the video from that. Does that kind of help?

Yeah. And so I'm going to toss you— so people's objections to all of this are good— are, A, it's just too damn complicated, and I don't have the time or the bandwidth or the whatever in order to do that. So their eyes glazed over and They're like waiting for us to stop talking about that and move on to something simple. Um, the other objection would be that, you know, you're wrong. I mean, people watch video, obviously they watch TV, so why should— and nobody reads 26 pages. And so that would be the second objection. And the third objection would be that tracking all of this is next to impossible. So take any one you like or all three of them. Okay. And have that conversation with somebody who's like fighting you on this. Right.

So we'll start at the beginning. So the first one is it's actually easier than it sounds, especially if you have a webinar. So if you've already got that, or you have a video, or you're really good at talking to your iPhone, or a Facebook Live video, and you've got that, there are transcription services. The fastest one that I know of is Rev.com, R-E-V.com, and they are now within 12 hours. You upload that video, and you can upload it as a video format, and they will transcribe that back to you in 12 hours or so with that. So you can then have— you can just send it as a transcript. I prefer to do it, take it one more step, which is either to go to an editor or have somebody in the office kind of do that. And it is hard the first time you do this stuff, but I will tell you that once you get the right resources and you have somebody to help you do this, it actually becomes really easy. So whether you have a VA do it, or you have somebody in the Philippines do it, or you have somebody in your office do it, it's actually pretty easy. And just tell them to rip the audio out, and they can go do it so that it's It's not you having to sit there and do this every time, but I will tell you that by providing it in the multiple formats, you will increase the responses that you get to your marketing funnel and to your sales, and therefore your sales of this thing. So that's what I would say for, for is it difficult or it's too difficult to do it in those formats. Your next objection was?

You really don't need all these formats. Yeah, I mean, you know, everybody watches video because everybody watches TV, so who's kidding who, right? Nobody's going to read 36 pages, etc., etc.

So the one thing is we are not our own customer, and we say that for multitudes of reasons, but the format that we like to learn in, the format that we consume the information in, is not the format that all of our prospects clients, members, patients are doing that. We have to imagine as you're riding the bus into work or the train into work or driving and you look over at the guy who's, you know, he's got his cell phone out in front of him, that's how they're consuming the information. So some of it is done on video. Others of us like to read books, have libraries full of books. And we had this argument at GKIC on some things at one point, and it was on CDs versus jump drives versus digital downloads. And the answer was you give it to them in every format. And it's an easy cost of doing business to let them throw away the format that doesn't work for them. And you could go through the trouble of tracking everybody into what formats they prefer, ask them which ones they like, and then send it to them that way. But I find that more complicated and think it's just easier to send it to them in all the formats. So depending on where it is or what they are doing, they can consume it in that way, because they might tell you I like CDs, but then be going on vacation and want to consume this information on their iPad. Dad, and as a video, or they might be jumping on a plane.

It's an extremely important point because people will often say one thing and yet they behave very differently. And so when, when you literally run an inmate's, you know, run the asylum approach to any aspect of a business including the marketing, you are going to make some very serious mistakes. You know, the— from a product standpoint, not a marketing standpoint, but you know, the people who say I don't really want hard goods, just give it to me and I'll upload it to my phone. They never enunciate to you that, um, 8 times in 2 years they give you $2,000 each time, and what they have to show for it are 8 jump drives. It doesn't look good on a bookshelf in their office. Now, they never enunciate that, but if you're not at the end of 2 years in the info business, if you're not occupying at least one full bookshelf in their office you probably don't have a customer. But they're never going to tell you that. And the same thing with consuming sales information, moving someone to a purchase. They're going to tell you one thing in many instances, but their behavior is going to require something very different. So you're very— you know, you're 10,000% right about this. And we would all like it to be— I keep telling everybody I'm entirely agnostic about the whole thing. As a matter of fact, if we could eliminate everything but digital for sales media, I'd be a happy camper because I would double or triple my copywriting fees because there would be all this money left over. That's now being spent on mail and CDs and DVDs and books and shock and awe packages. And I'm the first guy, the second you can strip all that away and send somebody to a site or send them a jump drive and actually have that work, I'm all in because I'm going to charge everybody more to write the copy that goes in the jump drive. But I mean, there's no, no evidence of it whatsoever. There's no major direct marketer doing it that is of a size and scope that they are able to run split tests and measure results and all that. There's just no empirical evidence to support the idea at all. So even if 100% of your customers tell you, I'm happy to go fetch everything, and if your prospects told you the same, you will see results problems nonetheless. I also think when you want to populate a long funnel, which we both agree you want long funnels, not short funnels, when you go to populate a long funnel, one of the ways to make that work is rotating and interspersing multiple forms of media. So people really need to not get in their own way about this. You know, I, I, I watch Disney a lot, and so Disney, to— for everybody that owns timeshares, at Disney, what they call Vacation Club, you periodically get offers to add points to your account at a discount, usually when they open a new property. Now they have every DVC member's email address. They have every DVC member's phone and can text them., and they are Disney. So people who are DVC members will presumably open their emails, will presumably read their texts, etc. And yet we get direct mail about this every single time that they do it. They are not idiots, and they are not just peeing away money because they got nothing better to do with it. They know that leaving out the mail costs them more than it saves them. So the third funnel objection then was— now I forget it. That's the problem with complex questions and complex answers, right?

Right.

But when you go to get people— so when you— now somebody shows you a funnel. Here's my marketing funnel. And you become the person who's going to complicate it. How do you get somebody to accept it? To dig in and do a much more complicated and much more sophisticated process than what they already have?

Good question. And on my side, normally it's I just do it because I just add it in. Sometimes without them knowing it, I've built the stuff out. But I have the good fortune of being in those businesses and having the control of that. If I'm trying to sell it to somebody to do it, that's where a lot of times they want it all in email. Because there's no risk to adding more emails in or things like that. It's really just that I think the other way is by looking at and having examples from businesses like you said, like just the Disney one. These people wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't giving them the results that they want. You're watching other good marketers who are using Facebook retargeting, let's say, because that's an easy one to to add to a funnel, to increase the time that you have them in there, to change the different offers that they see based on their customer problems or different solutions that you can be providing to them. And then what I really do is I'll start to kind of, you know, I've always called it like stacking or creating small little assets. So I might have one, initial lead generation campaign that might run anywhere from 15 if it's all online to 45 or 60 days if I've gotten them to buy into the offline with it. And you just create and test different ones of those, and when they reach the end of one, you simply throw them into the next one. And it's interesting because I've done this before with very similar offers, and each time the offer just changes slightly might be the shipping price changes for the free gift, or the free gift slightly changes, but everything else remains the same. You get a new influx of buyers, a new influx of leads who weren't responding to the previous one. And so by not— it's almost like tricking them from not extending one funnel. I've actually used 3 different ones, but now I've increased the timeframe that that prospect is going through from 30 days to 90 days easily by doing that. You can extend the time with direct mail because, as we said at the beginning, you need time for that to go out in the mail. So you're looking at, you know, if it's all local, you're looking at 7 to 14 days in between if you really want the postcards and/or mail pieces hitting what feels like one on top of the other. And if you're across the country or even worldwide, you're needing more time in between those as well for the mail to actually hit. So just by adding 2 extra postcards to the end of any campaign, you've added 30 days right there that you are staying in touch with them, that you are doing that. Blog posts become a great way to do this because now you're just sending an email or even a postcard telling somebody, hey, this is the solution to something that you were wanting. Just go over here and read it, or watch this quick video, or do that. And now your banner ads on the side of your blog, your exit intents on your blog post, built into your blog post can be additional lead generations or offers inside the blog post. It's just repositioning the sales message, repositioning what they get around it, and just giving them something different to look at. I like to extend it by using case studies, because everybody likes to hear about other people who have succeeded with it. So those work great as a direct mail piece, like a package where you have the audio or the video DVD of you interviewing a client who has succeeded, and you might write up a short little postcard or little booklet that goes with it that's all about the case study that you've done and the transcript of that, and it just gives you another reason to mail something to them which continues to extend your funnel.

There are a couple of them. Who do you think is like knocking this out of the park, has just a really great marketing funnel that people can insert themselves into and observe?

So I think that has gotten harder to do with the online, with a lot of the online and the— segmentation and stuff, because the smart marketers have been able to figure out—

yeah, you're screened out very quickly. Yeah.

So you have no answer? Not from a— you know, funny, because not from a direct mail standpoint. I keep looking for ones, and occasionally I can get a couple good pieces, but it's getting harder and harder to find somebody that you could follow their entire funnel that goes offline.

And it might be because they're not doing it. Yeah, it's probably more likely that they aren't doing it than anything else, but I find the same thing. People, the smart marketers have gotten pretty good at screening out us who want to come swipe and deploy. Let me ask you a systems question. People to whom complex and sophisticated funnels sound like building a life-size replica of Paris with Lego blocks, in which of course I would qualify as a member of that fraternity.

What are the technologies you're using? Really, it comes down to whatever you're most comfortable with and whatever is going to work best for your business. I never think that there's one right way to do it and one wrong way to do it. It's finding somebody that you trust that can build out your vision of what you see. So your job as the business owner is really to think strategically about what do I want my funnel to do, what do I want the goal of it to be, and then work with somebody who can create the technical pieces for you. But trying to outsource the copy or trying to outsource the idea of I just, I want a funnel, you know, somebody who says I want a funnel to sell this product isn't going to get a good funnel to sell that product because the person is can only do what they're told or what they, you know, what tools you give them to work with. So a better thing is to understand what it is that you want in your marketing funnel. What do you want your emails to do? What do you want your direct mail to do? And where do you want them to move to and from?

And you'll find better success, I think, with that. Yeah, look, I find a lot of frustration and a lot of vendors get negative reputations by unhappy people who made the mistake of asking a mechanic to be an architect. And the director of digital at Guthrie Ranker says there's There are 3 things you need to know to do really effective online marketing. One is you need to know what the hell it is you want to have happen. Two, you need a legal pad, and three, you need a pencil because if you can't draw it out on paper what this funnel is supposed to do, how it's supposed to function, what happens when somebody says yes here or no here, and then what happens next and what happens next. If you delegate without that to providers who are now going to build the thing for you, you're going to find yourself in trouble. And so the concept part of this and the messaging part of this You said earlier that really nothing has changed. Yeah, really nothing has changed since before Al Gore invented the internet with regard to that part of the equation. Now the tools have changed and the mechanics have changed, but the rest of it has not.

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