Lead Craft and Messenger Bots with Scott Oldford

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All right, welcome back to Bacon Wrap Business. This is Brad Costanzo and I am welcoming everybody who has been a subscriber for mine for the past three years. We just passed our three year anniversary about a week ago and I can't believe how fast time has flown. And in that time, I've gotten a chance to chat and speak with a lot of just amazing entrepreneurs and thought leaders and business people and some people who don't even fit in that box. And this is for those of you who are just tuning in once more. My name is Brad and this is my platform for doing exactly that. I get to have conversations with people who are doing really kick ass things that I'm excited about and I have authentic curiosity about. So I get to reach out to them and chat with them and find out, you know, what is working and what's not and what they're excited about. And I love to the fact that I get to let you eavesdrop on these conversations and that's really what this show is all about, is you learning while I'm learning as well. So today's episode is with a guy that I had been paying attention to here for a little while and I was watching some of the stuff that he was putting out and on, especially on Facebook. And I started what really got my attention is I started seeing him talk about messenger bots and I don't know if you're familiar with that, but if you're not, you will be today. And Scott Oldford, who's joining me here today, go ahead and say hi, Scott.

What's up?

Brad?

Awesome to be here.

Yeah, you too. Scott is the founder and CEO of a company called Leadcraft and he's also partners in a company called Bots for Business. And I've just been impressed with a lot of the things that I've seen. And on a previous episode I was talking to a guest and he was saying one of the most exciting things that he's seen in the world of lead generation really is these messenger bots. And it's kind of like semi AI style stuff. And we're going to dive into that. But I want to welcome Scott to the show, we're gonna find out a little bit more about what Scott does and then stay, you know, stay on the episode because we're going to dive into not only about why bots, how bots work, but I've recently built a couple of messenger bots to generate leads for some of the clients that I'm working with. And I'll bring up what I'm doing and I'll see if I can get Scott's feedback. You cool with that, Scott?

Of course, brother. That sounds like fun.

Awesome. Let's do it. So, man, tell me a little bit about yourself, what leadcraft is and what you typically do for your clients.

Yeah, for sure. Well, you know, I've been, I've been an entrepreneur for, since I was literally seven, selling eggs on my parents acreage. And by the time I was, you know, 11 or 12, I was doing honestly a lot of this online marketing stuff by mistake. And this was like, you know, this is like early 2000s, mid 2000s. So it was a very different world than it is today. And so from there, you know, by the time I was 16, I had, you know, all kinds of people working for me all over the world. And it was honestly a little bit, you know, a little bit of a surreal experience brought me to being 21. And by then I had three failures in a row, almost three quarters a million dollars in debt. But I had, I had lots of, you know, I had lots of online marketing experience, lots of entrepreneur experience. I, you know, ran SaaS based companies, I had fitness companies, you know, you name it, I've tried it. So through many different things for the last five years or so, I really kind of rebuilt from ground zero. What I do today is I help entrepreneurs that are below seven figures, typically between 60k to half a million, grow their business utilizing online lead generation and very, very high growth tactics and strategies to get them to seven figures. So I've grown four different businesses to a million in less than 12 months. My own businesses and dozens of others of people I work with. But for the most part, our entire business model is based on training. So I don't take on like, I don't have clients per se in terms of, like, I don't do their marketing for them or anything like that. We're fully, you know, more on the educational side and helping entrepreneurs figure out their own stuff and get their own lead generation working. And then of course, allowing them to, you know, kind of graduate past the hustle, you know, the hustle stage, which is like the first 100k and then graduate past what I call the six figure hamster wheel, so they can actually have a sustainable and scalable business. So that's what I do.

Nice. I like it. So you're not working with clients, but you are educating. Your, in essence is an education based thing and that's great now.

Yeah.

What have you found? A lot of us. And I know over the past three years I've covered the concept of Facebook advertising for leads a lot. And I mean, that's kind of the, you know, for the past several years it's been the hottest thing and I know it's still pretty hot. Are there other avenues that you also specialize in? You're really excited about that.

Yeah, I mean, you know, listen, I mean, at the end of the day, I always approach things from a risk mitigation perspective. And so, you know, I'm always recommending that people listen. You know, there's organic, there's partner, and there's paid traffic. Is Facebook the holy grail? I know. Not. Not at all. You know, can it be used for very, very effectively generation? Of course it can be. But you know, inside of what we do, you know, we have a partner program that, you know, we have, you know, almost 300 affiliates now. So that. So that's a really, really good source. I have a pretty intensive PR strategy that is active and working quite well. So that's another stream about to use. Utilize YouTube and, you know, organic and all these different types of things. So myself, you know, I utilize, I try to, I try to utilize at least half a dozen different sources. And we, you know, we do teach more than just Facebook because Facebook's not for everybody by any stretch of imagination. It's for most. I will say that. And it still works for most. But one of the biggest things that we teach and what we talk about, and I don't get it, because we're in like, we're in like 2017 and it's as if everyone forgot about the fact that like, you know, we're selling to human beings. Right. And so, so we have all this competition. We've gone from 3 million advertisers to 5 million on Facebook in the last 14 months. Wow. You know, we have the gold. More goldfish mentality than we've ever had. Attention is the most difficult. You know, attention is the most sought after currency in the world right now. And. And I think the biggest thing that, you know, really allows our customers to become successful is the fact that they actually are thinking about and what we teach is awareness and understanding of buyer awareness and the fact that not everyone's ready to buy today. And if you really want to build a sustainable business, you get leads that are not ready to buy today, but they're ready to buy two weeks from now, two months from now, six months from now. And you nurture them because those are the, you know, quote, unquote, cheapest leads. Easiest way to build your audience, easier way, easiest way to future proof. And so what we end up kind of doing is help people implement this methodology we call the SSF method.

Ssf.

Ssf. I really wish I would have named it something different like 25 years ago. You know, here I am. There's been over a hundred thousand. Yeah, over a hundred thousand entrepreneurs have been, you know, indoctrinated to that now. So I can't change it anymore.

What's that stand for?

Sidewalk, Slow lane, Fast lane. And so really what it says is that, you know, somebody in the sidewalk, they might be part of your demographic, geographic, behavioral profile, but they don't really know that they have a pain. So your job is to make a pain relevant to them. And then in the slow lane, that's in the buyer research mode. That's when somebody's looking for a mechanism, a method, a process, and they're looking for something to look up to, right? So you become the authority, the person they know like, or trust. And then finally, in the solution oriented, the fast lane, that's when someone's like, all right, you know what? I know the pain. I understand this. I trust you. Where's the buy button? And like, what does my life look like afterwards? And the problem is everybody goes to that fast lane without. And they skip the sidewalk and slow lane.

And there's fewer people in the fast lane, too. There's a lot fewer.

Only 2%, right? Like, less than 2%. So the problem, really, the overall problem is this. It's not the fact that that doesn't work, because, I mean, you know, direct marketing has taught us that that works. But majority of business owners that are not making over a million dollars don't have the, you know, the marketing budget to be able to do that. And I basically engineered this because I utilize online marketing the traditional way. And I was like, literally, I had $13,000 on my girlfriend's credit card to spend the basic. Grow my company. Yeah, okay. I was like, I can't do what everyone else does because the leads are gonna be too expensive. So for the most part. And the problem is, majority of people teaching online Marketing are utilizing these huge budgets. So it was almost like I kind of reverse engineered my own situation. Then I was like, huh, this is why majority of people that are not making a million bucks can't get online marketing working for them. Because everyone teaching, and nothing against anybody teaching them. It just so happens that that's what happened. And so it's a little bit of a different situation now because we spend six figures a month every single month on advertising. So it's very different for us as a company. But the typical person that doesn't have, you know, 25 grand a month plus to be able to spend on ads, it's difficult for them.

Absolutely. So give me an example of an ssf. I don't know if you call them an SSF campaign or if you just methodology. Yeah, give an example of that. So let's say that the company is a service based company, right. They provide a valuable service to, to their market. Give me an example of how SSF works in real life. And anything if you want to actually get real, you can do redacted names or whatever, but real.

Yeah. So I mean, this Funnel's done in 13 months. I think this is, it's done over 4 million for us. So we have a couple of different guides on the front end, right? So we might have like a Facebook guide, like, you know, the best way to do Facebook, blah, blah, blah. Or like, you know, we have one guide actually got covered in digital marketers being a really, really good lead magnet and Facebook ad, which was kind of cool to get props from them. And so essentially that one was how do you always get 50% conversion rates on your landing pages? Because most people don't know how to develop a landing page to save their life. So that's a sidewalk, right? So we pique someone's interest. So it could be a guide, could be a quiz, could be a short video, something like that. Very low commitment, very high value. And we're just kind of showing we're kind of peaking their interest a little bit. Then after that you'd have slow lane, which is like a challenge or a video series or an ebook. Something that takes somewhere between 10 to 30 minutes at each session in order for someone to go through 10 to 30 minutes in each sitting. In total, it'll typically be more than an hour or so of actual content for someone to be able to go through and digest and so on and so forth. Now keep in mind, people might say you're slow lane for six months. And that's the beautiful thing. Here we're pulling people instead of pushing them. Yeah, which, which, which will overall allow people to trust you more. You have far more advocates. You don't feel pushy and salesy and you don't have to be scarcity driven. And then like the fast lane would be say be a webinar. So we do, we do guides to our five day challenge to a webinar to our sale. Right. And so that's our, you know, that's one of our sidewalk, you know, SSF method funnels. I mean, you know, some people do a quiz to an ebook to video sales letter. It all depends on what you're selling, how, how costly it is, who your audience is. Lots of stuff like this.

Nice. Okay, cool. So on that second side of the challenge, and I like this because this is something that I'm familiar with but I want to dive down deeper a little bit. You said it, it takes them a little bit more time to go through and it's a little more engaging and it could be a quiz, it could be a challenge. So are you talking about just like a really long multi question deep dive that kind of analyzes what they're doing, et cetera? Give me a more concrete example there.

That would be like you know, eight to 10 questions. It's more of like a fun quiz versus a. You know, I'll be honest with you. Yeah, B2B. You don't want to use a quiz.

No, exactly.

B2C. You know what I mean? We have one person. Most people have 60, 70% conversion rates. If they're B2C with a quiz, B2B quizzes, I mean they're great in the slow lane in my opinion. But somebody needs to have some level of buy in because it's like why am I giving all this information to somebody I don't know exactly. What do I get out of it? You know what I mean?

Well, one of the things that made me think about that is I've got a client we were talking about offline. They're, they're in the real estate investment services. So they, they don't coach people on how to be successful. They just actually perform a service for real estate investors. And they recently developed, I think it was like too much like it was a hundred question assessment. Like it was 10. It's, it was actually really cool and useful but I couldn't even go through it and I was trying to go through it and go okay, is this going to be useful in marketing? But it was like alright, let's look at 10 different areas of your business. And let me ask you 10 different questions each, and it will automatically grade you on each area.

I was like, problem is, now they charge $197 for that. That would be amazing right now.

Exactly. And that's exactly what I was saying. You can't give this away as a lead magnet. Nobody's going to go through 100 questions for free.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that that's. I think that's a big thing that most people don't think about is what is the commitment level of someone in your industry and in your niche if you're going for someone that. Again, I'm making a little bit of a generalization, but I got a lot of data. Back this up. The more money somebody has, the more somebody's worth, the less time they're willing to spend.

Mm.

On something. Right. Just like business owners, if you're trying to get in front of somebody that's at a million dollars, they're a producer, not a consumer. So are you gonna be able to get them on a webinar? No. You want to get them. Hey, listen, here is the issue. Here's your problem. Here is, you know, here's your problem. Here's the vision, here's the gap. Here's how I can help. Boom. Yeah, Right. You know, it's so different versus somebody that's, you know, making, you know, five grand a month.

It's funny, two. Two important points you just brought up. I love that because I was talking. I don't know if this was on a podcast or just another conversation I was having the other day, which is. Yeah, for most people, if they've got. If they've got extra money, they probably don't have extra time, because if they're successful, you know, their time is at a premium. If they. If they don't have a lot of money, they got all the time in the world because they're probably doing much.

Yeah. You look at these epic, like, launch funnels, you know, the whole kind of Jeff Walker thing, and I'm just like, yes. I mean, I was. I was looking at one of these the other day, and it was a buddy of mine, and he sent me over the link, and the first video was 47 minutes long, and there's four videos, and they're all like, 40 minutes long. And I'm just like, dude, like, what the heck? Like, why would somebody listen to. Like, why? Like, I. You aren't interesting enough. Like, I'm sorry, but you are just not into, like, you know what? Stick Elon. Musk up there or, or like, you know, whoever.

I don't even know if I want to listen to Elon musk talk for 47.

Boring dude. Like, nobody's going to care about that much. That much. And it's really, you know, it's unfortunate because his launch didn't go that well. And it's because the fact that like, you know, eight minute video people can handle but like 47 minutes, come on, we're living in 2017.

Yep. Let's cut to the chase. Do you follow? I mean, I think this is a relatively standard. The rest of my audience might not. But, but do you use heavy use of retargeting in this? So you get them in on one and then you're bringing them back both.

Oh, that's our entire. Yeah, our entire strategy is based on that. I mean, I spend more money on retargeting and audience building awareness than I do on lead generation.

Absolutely. What are some of the ways you build awareness besides just. Or do you build awareness besides just a valuable bribe? Like here's an ebook, here's a super.

Oh, no, I retarget. You know, it's kind of like, you know, somebody gets herpes after they go into my funnel. You know what I mean?

Like, they can't get rid of it.

Yeah, they just can't get rid of me. You know, outside of them going like, unfollow block, Scott, see you later. You know, I will follow them until the ends of the earth. Right. And so, you know, from that side, from an awareness side, I do everything from sharing my PR articles to people to sharing, you know, any, any Facebook post that does well on my personal page. I'll go and like, I'll put that into an evergreen video content, you small, three, four, five minute videos. None of this stuff got any CTs. Yeah, none of it. There's no buy now in anything.

No, it's awareness.

Like I just want you, you know, in my opinion, from an awareness perspective, when it comes to lead generation and business growth, I want you to remember me and my company and that's it. Right. Like I'm doing that. I'm doing the net in the Nike play. I'm not, I'm not, You know, I'm in this long term, right. Like I'm looking five years, not 60 days or 30 days or 21 days. I think that's the biggest problem is a lot of people that, you know, they get into this and all they care about is lead generation and the sales aspect. Short term cash, you know. Yeah. Exactly right. And I mean, you kind of got to look at the longer term approach. And I mean, you know, I always, you know, the first five months of this business, we made half a million dollars. In 2017 or 2016, we made almost 3 million. And this year, between the businesses, I mean, you know, I mean, honestly, it depends on. We'll be at a million dollars a month by October, I think.

Nice.

In terms of revenue, so somewhere between 7 to 9 million.