Audience Building : Creating Loyal Buyers to Scale Your Brand Beyond 7 Figures

What's up everybody? I'm Ryan Daniel Pants Moran and what you see in front of you is a nice spread of examples that I'm going to go through with you of physical products, brands that have done a few things really, really well that have set them above the rest of their competitors. So I work with, I invest in physical products brands and what I see a lot of the time is brands that get a product up and moving in the marketplace and then they run into certain sticking points, they get stuck at certain points. It often happens right around the million dollar point, right? It happens when somebody has a product and they're bringing it to the marketplace and they can get to like $100,000 a month, sometimes as high as like $250,000 a month. And then they plateau, they run into certain constraints. So what I'm going to be doing is putting together some training for you that is specifically designed to give you some things that you can do right now that will take you through those plate. And specifically what we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about working with influencers, building audiences, crafting offers and cash flow management. Because there are certain levers that if you pull will allow you to sail through those constraints. And what I have seen is if you do a few of these things really, really well, in fact, if you were to only do one of these things really, really well, it will give you a new level that you can sail into. So of the information in this world in our community is about going for the low hanging fruit. So in this series we're not going to talk about the low hanging fruit. For example, we're not going to talk about ranking on Amazon. But if you do any of the things that I'm going to be sharing with you, it will help you rank on Amazon much faster. As a side benefit, we're not going to talk about getting Amazon reviews. We're not to going. But if you do any of these things as a side benefit, it's going to help you get reviews. But what this will do for you is it will give you independence of Amazon or wherever you're taking your sales, it's gonna give you your own control of your sales processes. Next, it's gonna allow you to charge higher prices. In fact, several of the examples that we're gonna go through together are, are twice, sometimes three times the price of their competitors, which makes building a profitable business way easier. If you can charge three times the price of your competitors for sometimes the exact same product, or maybe just A slight tweak on the product. It's also going to give you new sales opportunities. So when you've got other people talking about you and you're able to get customers that not everybody else is scrambling for, that makes it a lot easier to build a business. It makes it much easier to scale. So we're going to be talking about going from six figures a month to seven figures a month and sometimes beyond, using these examples and using these things that you can start putting into your business. And in this video specifically, we're going to talk about building audiences that you can launch products to and how you can position your products in front of them so that you charge higher prices. And you have brand loyalty, whether you're on Amazon or Kickstarter or Shopify or a funnel. And you have customers who follow you and want to buy product after product after product at high profit margins. That's what we'll talk about today. Let's dive in. Okay, so I work with a lot of physical product sellers who they bring an idea to the marketplace. And that's a lot of work. Choosing your first product or your first series of products, even choosing the niche that you want to be in can take a lot of mental energy and mental drain. And what a lot of entrepreneurs will do is they put so much energy into that that then at the end they go, what the heck? Now what do I do now? Or what I see even more commonly than that is entrepreneurs who release products in the marketplace and they get to like $100,000 a month or $250,000 a month, sometimes even more. And then they run into challenges because they're addicted to the sales on Amazon, or they've got one source of traffic and they don't know how to diversify that traffic. So we hit plateaus, right? Even if you're a retail brand, if you're in Walmarts all over the world, if that's the only place that people know to find you, eventually you're going to plateau, because there's only so many Walmarts and there's only so many people who shop at Walmart. The same thing with Amazon, for example. Even if you are the best Amazon marketer in the world.

If you're only marketing on Amazon and you're waiting for Amazon to send you all the customers, there's lots and lots of money to be made there, but you're eventually going to plateau at that process. And so what I want to introduce to you is some things that you can do right now to help you clear through some of those constraints. By the way, I have more examples and interviews with people who have done pieces of this process well as, as well as an accompanying guide which will help those of you who have products up and moving in the marketplace. And you can get that over@capitalism.com million. So there is a free guide, and there's also a series that we did with a bunch of case studies and a bunch of training, some of our best stuff that you can get for free. And it's@capitalism.com million. All right, let's dive in first of all, to an example right here. This is a company that I'm familiar with. I advised them for a while called Athletic Greens. In fact, they've spoken at our yearly event, which is called the Capitalism Conference. And one of the things that they've done really well is their entire thesis is on building audiences. It's on putting a premium product in front of their ideal customer. And as a result, they can charge 79 or $89 for a product where a lot of competitors are selling, I won't say the same product, but similar products for 19 to 29 dollars. Now, some of that is the difference in the product itself and the packaging. But the real, real secret is that they're in front of audiences, is they've built up an audience of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people over time. And as a result, they can literally pull a lever, hit send, and launch a new product. That makes launching new products in the marketplace much, much easier, right? If you could hit send and be in front of tens of thousands of people, that would make life a lot easier, right? Well, how do you do that? Is the question that comes up. And there are ways to do it at scale, quickly, which we'll talk about in future videos in this series. But what I want to talk to you about today is how we start building the audience so that over time we have compounding results to give us profitable product promotions and independence of Amazon or wherever we are taking our sales. Now, first things first. There are two places, two, where I would suggest that you put most of your energy, most of your emphasis, and they are email and manychat, manychat being Facebook Messenger. It's a Facebook messenger app or a bot. Now, the reason for that, the reason why I emphasize putting your energy into email and, and messenger is because they are direct distribution mechanisms. Everything else is traffic. So for all of you who are spending a ton of time on Instagram, for example, that is awesome as a traffic source. But if you're expecting to be able to put up a post on Instagram and make sales, you're going to have a hard time. The direct sales component comes when you can send a message directly to someone. And you know, in the olden days it would be like telemarketers or direct mail, but the Internet, it's email and it's messenger. And to some extent text messaging would probably be another direct way to do it. Something that I don't focus on, so I can't speak to that. But when we're talking about audience building and the ability to collect a sale, we need to be able to get a message in front of people directly. And that's going to come from email and messenger. Everything else is traffic. Everything else is traffic. Video ads are traffic. Instagram is traffic, Pinterest is traffic. Alright? The purpose of all of that is, is to bring them into a mechanism like Facebook, messenger or email. I have built all of my businesses on email marketing because it's a skill set of mine. So that is where I put my focus. Putting it in front of traffic, putting content in front of traffic, bringing it back to email and launching products via email. Something that athletic greens does really, really well. Putting out content, bringing them to email and then doing the sales on email. Now how do we get this process moving?

Well, company like Quest, I'm a super fan of Quest. Quest has been around for six, seven years. They've done about a billion dollars in sales during that time. Crazy, like crazy growth trajectory. I'll tell you when I became a super fan of Quest was when I learned that you could cook with it. You could cook with protein powder. Well, now you have opened up this whole new world for me because now I have all these different ways to use their product. How did I discover that you could cook with Quest.

Recipes on the Quest blog? Alright, so what they did was they started putting out content directed to me, the customer, on how I could use the product and do it in a way that really had an impact in my life. And then they collected my email address. So I started cooking with Quest products and now I opt into their email list to get more of that content. And now I'm a super fan. When they do launches, I buy them. When they do new products like these tortilla chips are a fairly new product on the marketplace. I, I buy them. I recently had a guy night at my house, which you might have seen on my Instagram, which is ryandaniel Moran. Plug right there. Plug for my traffic source right there. And I just bought A bunch of quest chips, put them in a bowl and like. And everybody loved them, right? New product. I'm a super fan. I'm an early adopter. I buy a bunch of these. Why? Because I became a loyal fan as a result of using their product in a way that I learned from content. So the first thing that we need to be thinking about when we are building an audience is what content do we put in front of our ideal customer that allows us to draw them into an opt in email address or Facebook Messenger. Now we're going to put the content on Instagram, YouTube, our blog, Facebook. We're going to put them on these traffic sources. So you might, if I was in front of the whiteboard, I would draw this out of like we've got traffic sources that lead over into.

The way that we capture their data. Email Facebook messenger, preferably. And we're gonna keep throwing a bunch of content out into those traffic sources and bring them into the conversion mechanism. Email Facebook Messenger. I'm gonna beat this into your head. And as that compounds, content's gonna live for a long time. As that continues to bring in new leads and new traffic, we're building up a list and that gives us the ability to launch product products profitably and predictably to our audience. So nothing is built overnight. But if we're putting out content onto places like Instagram or YouTube or Facebook and directly driving them back to an opt in, we can start getting results this afternoon. We can start getting results really, really quickly. So one of the things we'll talk about in future videos is amplifying content, spending money to make that content show up in front of more people and then driving them back to an opt in. And the thing that many, many people miss in this process is they think that content leads to sales or content leads to audience building. But there has to be a middle point. There has to be the point where we get them to give the give us their email address or their contact information so we can start making offers to them and we'll talk more about crafting really good offers later. But we have to have the middle point, the in between, between content and sale. That happens at the lead capturing process. Put out content to the world, capture the lead. That equals sales. That's how it works. Now what's going to be the thing that gets their email address? If you want to make this super simple, just start with a coupon. That is going to be the most direct way for somebody to raise their hand and say, I want more about this company. And I want to buy the product. So for example, we might see. Which example do I want to pick here? Native Deodorant Company, which sold for $100 million a couple years ago, founded by my buddy Moise Ali. And the way that they sold was they were not on Amazon. They're in Target now, which is where I bought this one. But the way that they built up their following and their customer base was they had auto ship offers, they had their own funnel, and they were advertising to drive traffic to their funnel. And they were doing kind of like a dollar shave club every month ordering process. So what you might do here is you have content. What's their hook? Their, their, their hook is that this is a natural deodorant that works. So on the back here you see like chemical free, paraben free. Is that right? Paraben, yeah, paraben and aluminum free. And if you were to put out content into the world that was about the dangers of paraben or the dangers of aluminum, guess what? We're speaking directly to the pain point that our product solves. So all we have to do is talk about the dangers of aluminum, the dangers of chemicals. Did you know this was in your deodorant? And the more that you speak to that pain point. And then we draw it back to, hey, if you go over to nativedeodorant.com trial, you're gonna be able to try your first month for free. And guess what you're gonna do there? You're gonna capture the email address. Now, I don't know if that was an offer that they made. I just made that up. But we're talking about content that we put on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram, and driving them back to the direct conversion mechanism, which is the email address or Facebook messenger. Another example here would be. I have so many examples to go through here. Here would be one. You recognize this guy? I was actually. I was with my daughter at the bookstore. And this is my buddy Aubrey. And I said, look, look, Esther, it's Aubrey. She knows a lot of my friends and she looks at him and she says, is he mad?

So Aubrey is the owner of this company right here on it. Now, if you watch what they do, they're doing a ton of content all the time. And guess what? He has a book written in his personal name. This is one form of content, one form of content that builds the audience that is eventually gonna drive people back to.

Giving you their email address so they buy more products. So guess what? You can kind of see the web of how it all ties Together, Aubrey writes a book. Aubrey goes on other podcasts to promote his book. His book promotes his podcast and his company. And his podcast promotes company products. Now that's a long web, right? But that's a long term brand. He's been doing this for six, seven years. Another example would be my buddy, Pat Flynn. This is kind of more on the personal brand side of things. My buddy Pat Flynn runs SmartPassiveIncome.com he puts out a ton of blog posts, YouTube content, Facebook content, and he's talking a lot about how to information about building an online business. So Pat will do podcasting courses like how to set up your podcast, how to promote your podcast, and guess what? He has an app that he sells called the Smart Podcast Player. Forgive me if I got that wrong, Pat, don't shoot me. Pat's too nice. He wouldn't shoot me. He would do it much more quiet and make it look like an accident. But Pat has a podcast player that he sells or he might be an affiliate for a podcast mic like this one here, the Blue Snowball. Another way you could do this is if Blue Snowball had content about setting up your mic to eliminate background noise. If you had how to promote your podcast and it was just free content going out in the world, doing good. And it was, hey, by the way, you know, here at Blue Snowball, we're about empowering people who have messages that they want to get out to the world. Order bluesnowball.com new we give new customers 20% off our blue Snowball microphones. Guess what? You're making an offer that leads to an opt in and you're gonna follow up with them for the sale. Now, some physical product sellers don't know what type of content to put out into the world because they're so focused on their product. They're so focused on the product so that what they try to do is they go product first and then, and then they go, I'm not, I don't know what, I don't know what content to talk about. Like, do I talk about why cedar wood is a good essential oil? No. We're gonna step it back one step and we're gonna speak to the person that would end up being a customer for that brand. So we have to identify the person behind that purchase. So let's say, for example, that your product is essential oils. My desk is getting a little messy here. Actually. This would be a good mix here. So this is my buddy James company. I advise them Swanik sleep. So they do a good job of this, which is why I'm gonna include this in this example. But let's say that your product was essential oils. Well, essential oils. What most people are doing is they come up with a cedarwood essential oil, they put it on Amazon, they talk about why it's better and cheaper than the competitor and why it has more reviews. Then they're trying to go for the low hanging fruit constantly. Well, what if we were willing to climb one branch higher than the low hanging fruit? There's a lot more fruit up there and there's a lot fewer people trying to get those apples. The way we do that is we start talking to the person one step before they're ready to buy cedarwood essential oil. Now, why is someone buying cedarwood essential oil? Well, the reason I have it in my office is because I learned once on a podcast, and I don't remember, it might have been on the Ben Greenfield podcast. The Ben. I'm just gonna say it was the Ben Greenfield podcast. It was definitely some podcast. There was an episode about the benefits of being in the woods, that your body had a physiological response to reducing stress when you were out in the woods. Because that's how we evolve. We didn't evolve to be in high rises. We evolved to be in nature and have nature sounds, nature smells. That's why when you go to the beach, you relax. It's why when you're out on a hike, you kind of start to feel like yourself again. Your stress levels come down. Well, what this person on the podcast argued was that if you are not outside but you're burning wood based essential oils, it's one of the ways that you can trick your brain into reducing cortisol, reducing stress producing hormones, and start to relax. So I diffuse wood based essential oils in my home as a way of calming my nervous system and staying low stress. I have no idea if that's true, but I learned something that gave me an insight that made me a buyer of essential oils. And if that person, that person was not a seller of essential oils. But if they had been and they had said, go over to cedarwoodoils.com new new customers save 20% on their first order. You can absolutely bank on the fact that I would have gone over, got my coupon and bought from them. So that's how we start to produce content. We're not saying six benefits of cedarwood. We are saying we're speaking to the pain point or the one step in front of that person. It's the how to set up your podcast it's.

What diet should I eat to lose weight. It's.

Green smoothie recipes. It is how to get into ketosis. It is the dangers of aluminum. It's how to reduce joint pain or how to reduce muscle soreness. It you see where I'm like, it's the thing that the person is buying your product to accomplish. I don't really want MCT oil, I want appetite suppressant. I want clear focus. That's the reason why I'm buying this. I want to get into the state of ketosis. So if my content is around those things and I'm driving that traffic back to an opt in, that's how we start to build an audience. Now what we're going to go into moving forward is how we do this at scale. So it really takes one good piece of content and one opt in for us to build an audience predictably when we can spend money to boost that traffic and our offer converts into sales when we have those two pieces. It really only takes one piece of content and one good opt in for us to be able to build an audience of thousands of people. I still think to this day the greatest opportunity staring the face of physical product sellers is that very few people are buying traffic to an opt in and then having follow up sequences promoting offers to those opt ins instead. Everyone's kind of addicted to the low hanging fruit of Amazon sales, of Kickstarter sales. And so they stay on this hamster wheel of just keeping that machine on and like, believe me, I know there's millions of dollars to be made on Kickstarter and Amazon and Shopify and all those things and they work great. But if you want to grow from six figures a month to seven figures a month, the next step for us is to be able to send an email and be in front of our ideal buyers. Or even if we don't want to go to seven figures a month, if we just want to be able to launch products profitably without giving away a bunch of product, without working ourselves to death, if we want to be able to have loyal fans that follow us just because it's you, then we have to start serving that person before they become a buyer and capturing their data and giving them a reason to buy from us. So our first step is gonna be looking at what is the person that we want to market to looking for. They're looking for stress relief, they're looking for health, they're looking for building an audience, they're looking for ketosis, they're looking for chemical free products, they're looking to reduce soreness and we create content about that and we put it in the public places. Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, our blog. And we start driving that traffic back to an opt in. That's a coupon. That's our opening move to start building an audience. Real quick example before we move on. When I launched my yoga products business, Zen ActiveSports, before I sold it, what my partner and I, Sean, did was we put all this effort into building this product, this product line. Now what, we're gonna be sitting on a boat for eight weeks. We got products sitting around. How are we gonna launch this thing? And I said to him, what we need to do now is we need to do everything we can so that when we're live on Amazon, we can take a sale without giving away a bunch of product with high profit margins. Which, by the way, all of these examples are more expensive than the competitor. All of them. This is twice the price of their competitors. This is twice the price of their competitors. This is three times the price of their competitors. This is more expensive than the competitors. Young living is like three times the price of their competitors. Why? Because they have an audience. You want to build a profitable company and not one that just has high revenue amounts. You build an audience and you run them through the process that we just talked about. So what Sean and I did was we started putting up Facebook content, driving them to an opt in. And then when it came for launch day, we had hundreds of people waiting to buy from us lining up and we had a successful launch right out of the gate. We were, you know, within about a month, we were selling 50 units a day of a $40 product in the yoga space that was twice the price of their competitors. And a year later, we sold that company. This is how you massively make a splash. And as an investor, if a company does not have an audience, I am not interested in investing because all you've proven to me is that you can show up on Amazon or show up in front of customers, but does your product actually have a loyal following that's going to buy from you for a long time? If not, I'm not sure where my dollars are gonna go. So as an investor, this is a must have in order to see a business that's going to scale. So putting out content onto the traffic sources, bringing them back to an opt in and then we're gonna follow up with them for offers. And when you do this, you have people who want to buy from you over and over again because you've given them a meaningful shift in their life, and now they're loyal to you. You're going to be able to charge higher price points, and you're going to be able to launch products predictably and profitably. What we're going to go into next is how to put together offers and how to get in front of other people's audiences so that you can do this faster, as well as manage your cash flow so that you're building a life and not just a revenue stream. Hey, thanks for watching part one of this series. Let me know what you thought in the comments, and stay tuned for part two of this series on scaling your physical products brand from six to seven figures. Talk to you soon.