How To Increase Sales By Using Psychological Triggers With Growth Hacker Justin Mares

How do you make business problems disappear? Wrap them in bacon. For business owners, marketing execs, and anyone trying to grow your business, pump your profits and make more while doing less. Welcome to Bacon Wrapped Business with Brad Costanzo. Sizzling hot business advice guaranteed to make you fat profits. Every week, our chefs will serve you proven recipes for ramping up your revenue. Now, here's your host, Brad Costanzo.

All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrapped Business. This is Brad. And if you have just tuned in, stumbled across this show because you saw the title or the. You saw the guest's name on here and you're like, what is this? And why is this all about bacon and business? What do they have to do with each other? This is my platform to interview some really inspirational, amazing, successful entrepreneurs, people that I want to pick their brains and. And this is me allowing you to eavesdrop on these conversations where you can guarantee I'm going to be asking some highly selfish questions, picking their brains as clean as I can, and letting you listen in and hopefully gathering some actionable strategies, the same strategies that I'm going to be using for myself and just enjoying the conversation. If you like what you hear, I encourage you to share this on social media and get in touch and go snoop out the links that I give you in the show notes for my guest. And if you are not a subscriber on itunes, make sure you click that subscribe button or jump on the newsletter. And if you ever have any questions, if you have any suggestions or you just want to chat with me, send an email. My personal email is askbradakenratbusiness.com I love emails from my listeners and this is the best way to get ahold of me that way. Okay, so today I am bringing back a guest. I don't do this very often, but today's guest was so nice, I invited him twice. Justin Harris from a previous episode called How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, which is also the name of his previous book. It's a great episode. I'll link back to it where we just talked about a lot of customer acquisition strategies. But Justin is back with a couple of cool things to talk about today, especially if you're in the world of e commerce at all. So, Justin, welcome back.

Thanks for having me, man. Glad to be back.

So, God, man, when was the. I don't even have the date on there when the last time it was. It's probably been a year since we've really chatted.

Yeah, it's been about eight, ten months.

All right, so what have you been up to lately?

I'll let people.

By the way, if people really want to hear your backstory and stuff, they can go listen to the other episode. So I just want to jump into this and talk about what's cool.

Let's do it. So basically, I founded a company called Kettle and Fire. We're the first shelf stable bone broth company. And you know, we launched about 10 months ago and have grown to multiple seven figures in revenue in a very short period of time. Yeah. So that's going really well. And then, you know, more more recently, I acquired an app and I'm now running an app called FOMO. It's useful.com. formerly it was called Notify. That helps ecommerce stores, or really any store, improve their conversion rates by showing social data and like, what your customers are doing on your website.

Okay, that's awesome. So I want to get back to that in just a moment because I think that's really super interesting, especially as a guy who has an E Comm website. But let's talk about the Kettle and Fire. Now, it used to be called. Was it Bone Brothers or something like that?

Yeah, it was basically the worst branding hack job you could imagine. It was called Bone Brothers. Yeah. Terrible.

It's funny.

So it was a very lean test.

I love Kettle and Fire, though. That's cool. That's like really a cool name.

Thank you.

Yeah. Did you come up with that?

I did.

Nice. So we were talking a little bit offline about some of the things that you did to grow that to multiple seven figures. But tell me, I mean, so it's a. Yeah, it's a bone broth company. If anybody out there is not really familiar with this from a health standpoint, bone broth is an extremely healthy. What do you call it? It's a broth.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So bone broth is similar but different to the ones that you buy, like broths and the stocks that you buy in the grocery store. So bone broth in general, it uses actual bones, which many of the broths and stocks in the grocery store don't. It's cooked with an apple cider vinegar and it has really long cook time, so 24 hours, as opposed to the two to four hours that normal broth and stocks have. And that that extra time allows it to. Allows the bones, the marrow, the collagen to really seep into the broth so that you get a much, much healthier drink than just your standard salty, overly beef flavored kind of broth or stock.

Right on Yeah, I gotta buy some. I wanna try, try that stuff out. Looks really good. So, alright, so now you got this bone broth company and you've grown it so quickly. What has been, you know, offline, you told me influencers and content marketing. Have those been the two biggest drivers of growth for you?

Absolutely. I mean, so in a short period of time. Yeah, in a short period of time. I mean we've, we've put out enough content where we're ranking really well for different terms. We put out some cool stuff around, you know, helping, helping with recovery from leaky gut with aiding digestion with a bunch of different content pieces that our target audience really, really cares about. And so that in conjunction with a really strong brand and you know, kind of a one of a kind product, has put us in a position where influencers, especially a lot of people in health, if they want to talk about bone broth, which many of them do, you know, and they want to tell their listeners where, or readers, whoever, where they can actually get this stuff that can help improve their health, there's really only one recommendation they can make. Which is, which is us right now. And that, that puts us in a very strong position in terms of building these relationships.

Yeah, it really does. A couple questions on the content marketing. So the first two questions come to mind is like where and how often. So with the content marketing, you create great articles. Are they primarily posted upon your blog or are you posting elsewhere?

Nope. So we have done one guest post so far, but everything else is just on our own website and then we're just taking it into our own, you know, taking responsibility for marketing that and driving people to our site on our own.

So are you doing that? Like, are you doing paid ads to content?

No. So we're putting them in. You know, we have a pretty strong mailing list. We have a couple different influencers that we ask to share our content. Just kind of friends in the health space as well as we do a lot with the Reddit community and a couple different Facebook groups that were, you know, where we think that the types of content that we're creating would be of note and of interest to the people that read certain subreddits or in certain Facebook groups.

Okay, so like partner or getting good with the admins of the various Facebook groups. And then do you just share it with the admin and ask them to kind of share your content or are you just sharing your content inside there?

Yeah, yeah. So it'll be a mix, but generally we ask the admin because we Certainly, you know, we'll say, hey, this is a piece that we're working on. What would you want to see? Or what do you think is interesting? What do you think that hasn't been said around this topic? So we'll get their feedback, we'll bake that feedback into the post and then it makes them more likely to share once we actually launch the post.

I like that ask. I'm jotting some stuff down every time I talk to you. I like to take ask for the admin feedback. Yeah, like you said, that kind of gets them involved, you know, so this kind of just a rabbit trail for a second. I was having this conversation with somebody else the other day about who's writing a book. And I've done this for some previous clients because I used to do a lot of book publishing for people, you know, other business owners, where a book was just kind of the tip of the spear, another marketing thing. And when they were starting to write the book, especially if they had any audience going into it, there's different ways that you can go about enlisting. You know, do a pre order on Amazon as well as share it. Starting to share chapters and ask questions and build a Facebook group as you're writing it so that you can share insights with this, this group of people because they have this now vested interest because they're with you while they're writing the book. So when you launch it, they're all going to go buy it.

Exactly. And that's exactly what we did for traction as well.

See?

Oh, that's beautiful. I love that.

Maybe I learned it from you. I don't know. It's possible. I don't know where I learned half this crap, but okay, so I love that. And then. So you have not been doing paid. That's good. You haven't been even doing paid content. You've just been putting good content out there, working with some influencers, working with some Facebook groups, etc. How often are you creating content? Like daily, weekly, monthly?

About once or twice a week. Okay. We've arrived at that after a process of testing a bunch of stuff. Now we're at about once or twice a week. Pretty long form piece. Cool.

Long form. Like how many words?

Around 2,000. Okay.

Yeah, those are big ones. But it's good. Especially in stuff like this. I can't wait to kind of go through there. And by the way, if anybody wants to follow along on this, the notes, these URLs will be in the show notes, but. Kettleandfire.kettleandfire.com and then influencers. We chatted a little bit about this briefly and I was telling you about how I'm working, starting to work with some influencers for stiletto coffee.com, which is my wife and I's coffee business. So tell me some more about some of the more successful strategies. You can even repeat the ones you told me a minute ago. Because I know that influencer marketing is becoming a very hot topic, even with my audience as well, because they're starting to realize how it's the wave of the future and it's not going away anywhere, anywhere anytime soon.

Completely. Yeah. So influencer marketing has been huge for us. And that, I mean, that's basically two things. On the one hand, that's just creating personal relationships with people that have, are, you know, have an interest in health and have access to relatively large health audiences. Yeah. So that's kind of the one piece. The second piece that's been also huge, has been doing a lot of leveraging a lot of influencers on social media. And so one tactic that we've found that works pretty well is reaching out to smaller scale influencers. So say less than like 20,000 followers and just saying, like sending them a message saying, what's your PayPal email? I'll Venmo you 20 bucks or I'll PayPal you 20 bucks, 30 bucks if you post a photo that I'll send you along with a caption that I'll send you that promotes our product. And because it's so easy for them, for them to say no to that offer, they would have to say, no, I don't want $30, $20, whatever. And so because we set up the offer that way, we found a pretty high hit rate with that offer where a lot of people with decently large followings, maybe they're hanging out in the middle of the day or they think, oh, I want to go out to dinner tonight. And all of a sudden that's paid for.

Right?

Yeah, exactly. And so people don't often turn down money, but people will often, if you say, hey, would you promote this? They'll turn down an unknown opportunity or feel like you're using them or whatever. Right.

And now are you primarily using Instagram for that or are you doing.

Yes, we're using mostly Instagram for that. We tried Snapchat for a bit. We found that didn't work very well.

Yeah. So give me an example. I'm actually on your Instagram page, by the way, but give me an example. You can even just verbally describe what that photo might have been that they would share.

So it's generally a picture of our product. It's generally. And then a couple lines, just saying, like, I use bone broth for X, Y or Z reason. And then I suggest this brand or something like that.

Okay, all right, cool. And then are you having them. Are you putting a. Follow them at kettle and, you know, at kettle and fire, telling them to.

Exactly.

Okay, dude, that's. And I like that. As I mentioned earlier, this is what's cool, is that's like, you know, in the world of marketing, that's like a tripwire to an influencer. Because if you do that once and they know, shoot, this person just gave me money quick. And you give them money before they post it, don't you?

Yeah, completely.

You don't make them post it before.

You give no money. They send us their email and then we. Then we send them 20, $30 and the post.

Yeah, that's genius. And especially now when you come back to them, if you wanted to, and I don't know if you've done this, but I definitely would come back to them and say, yeah, listen, how would you like an affiliate link for this? How would you like to do exactly. Get paid more. So you don't even offer an affiliate link on the first.