Quiz funnels for lead generation with Brian Cassingena

G', day guys. Dan here with another episode of the Video Business Accelerator podcast. Now this week we are going into part two of our chat with Brian Casagena. Now, if you didn't hear last week's episode, go and check it out, but I'll give you a bit of recap about who Brian is. Brian is the number one email resurrection specialist in the world and the secret weapon behind a number of world class experts including AdSchool.com's Justin Brooklyn and Mindvalley's Vishen Lakhiani, as well as self help gurus Marisa Peer and Bob Proctor. His marketing campaigns have generated at least $35 million over the past few years and he's only taken on a very small number of clients. He's a 15 year veteran of high converting campaigns and Brian spends much of his time working on projects. He loves living the international lifestyle with his wife. He's an international speaker, a published author, a consultant, and a high conversion specialist. Brian is dedicated to boosting the sales and profits of smart companies everywhere. And I'm thrilled that Brian gave us his time. He was literally about to fly off to Europe. He was in Bangkok and we managed to grab just an hour with him and we did two podcast episodes. Now, one of the things that Brian did very, very effectively at Mindvalley was use quiz funnels as a front end lead generator. And I wanted to ask Brian how filmmakers and video production companies could use quiz funnels to take clients through a journey prior to having a call. And so Brian very kindly took us through that and also gave us some great gold that we very valuable. And you know, this is a guy who knows his shit. So like, listen up, take notes. This is great. Apologies for my audio. I had a setting messed up and I'm a bit distorted. But Brian sounds great and he's the most important person to be listening to. So enjoy the episode.

Welcome to the Video Business Accelerator Podcast. Each week we uncover the secrets to creating a wildly successful and scalable video production business. With your host, Dan Lenny, discover how the accelerator program is transforming the lives of our members at www.videobusinessaccelerator.com. enjoy this episode.

Well, guys, I'm back with Brian, who's very kindly agreed to do a second episode with us. Now, Brian was hit copywriter at Mindvalley and I was very fortunate. I've listened to Brian speak a number of times, but one of the things Brian's an absolute gun at is quiz funnels. And I wanted to ask you, Brian, why quizzes are so powerful as a marketing lead generation tool.

Yeah, thanks for having me back, Dan. And you're absolutely right, they are very powerful. And I did a number of quiz funnels and setups for smaller clients. But like you mentioned, I did a lot at Mindvalley. Some of the really big funnels that are making seven figures on Autopilot I did at Mindvalley. And the quiz part of that.

Is an integral part. And the reason why is because the way that we use them is.

For segmentation and personalization where we are able to customize the sales message based on how they answer that quiz. So if they chose answer A, they would get the video sales letter based for answer A. And we found and same for B and C. And however many we had what we found, that that gave an instant.

40% increase in sales conversions, which is a massive number to experience.

What I like about them is if you take a video production company, for example, I think the stats that most people are aware of is that less than 1% of anyone who visits your website will take any meaningful action. If you have lead magnet on there, you might increase that to 10%. But with a quiz funnel, two things I think are happening is that you're getting someone on the page who's clearly looking for a solution, actively engaging and answering questions about the problem they've got and they're dwelling on your website for longer. Is that something you found to be key triggers in engagement and people taking action?

Yeah, definitely. And it's really interesting for some of the.

Quizzes that we've done in an area like a video production company because.

While you may not have a video sales letter like an online product, what they're really good for besides that engagement, besides that time on page, what we found was that the time on page increased. It's led to an increase in Google rankings. While Mindvalley is very big on paid traffic, we are finding a lot of organic SEO traffic increase because simply because Google knew that the people were spending more time on our pages. And that's very important because people are doing that engagement, they're sitting on the page and they're interacting with the quiz and they're answering questions. And the psychology behind that is because people like to tell you about themselves, they like to tell you about the situation, they like to tell you their story. Because when you go on your average website, you know, it's just that website talking at us, you know, we don't have a chance for two way communication.

People like to be heard and they like to tell you about their situation. This is why different types of quizzes work. But the other thing that the quizzes are really good for is qualifying the prospect so that when they come into your marketing ecosystem, you already know a little bit of information about them.

You mentioned marketing ecosystem. We talked about a little bit of that in the last episode. But I'd like to just delve a little bit deeper into that because what I find typically with video production company is that they rely heavily on word of mouth and they've gotten to where they are today through word of mouth. But then what typically happens is they rely on one or two major clients and then one of those clients stops spending and they suddenly get hit with this, all right now, the dreaded day I'm going to start marketing. And oftentimes they can see marketing as this big scary thing. What is it? Break down what a marketing ecosystem might be for someone like a video production company.

So the basic principle behind it is just.

An ongoing, ever working system that brings you leads and deals into your pipeline.

And this is the same across the board for any kind of business. But what you want as a service provider is you want.

Good prospects coming in who you might be able to get on the phone with and close a deal or start talking to and make business that way.

So.

Your whole marketing ecosystem is designed to do that. And for a professional service provider, a quiz can be a really big part of that.

Well, because also what it does is it gives you data, it gives you information. So when you jump on the phone with someone, you actually have answers to their questions in front of you. Do you find that that helps the sales conversation flow more easily because there's something tangible to discuss?

Yeah, it does. I mean.

For those listening who active on places like Facebook, you know, one of the funny things that happens on there is people, you know, try and try and pitch your stuff all the time. They send you a direct message. And.

The way to blow that in, the first message is to say, hi, my name, you know, what do you do when you know, it's plastered all over my Facebook profile what I do? So if they done five seconds of research, they could have skipped that whole question. See, when.

We get on a sales call with somebody, we want to have that info, we want to have that data, we want to show that person immediately that we've done our homework. It's like the old advice that I used to get for.

Preparing for a job interview. Learn as much of that company as you can. So you go in there prepared. And people like to get on the phone with somebody who they don't have to answer the most basic questions in the world with.

And a marketing ecosystem is in its basic nutshell, you could have a quiz funnel on the front end and then a series of maybe five to ten follow up emails. And the value of this of course is that it's largely automated, isn't it? So the crew can be out on location shooting jobs. The marketing funnel can be working and nurturing clients in the background. Is that something you found still is valid today and still works as well today?

Absolutely. It's even more important now than it used to be.

Everyone's attention is distracted with different things like social media and all of that. So many platforms now. But.

There'S two things here. I mean email still gives you the biggest bang for your buck. I mean you can engage people on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, but.

Email is where most of your sales will happen and you can do it. And I do do it on social media as well. But.

What I find is that.

High value prospects in particular are more likely to be talking to you by email rather than social media. But it's also the.

Quiz as well that provides real value. Here's the secret to creating a good quiz that people will enjoy taking is to make it valuable and just not just to answer, not just to ask silly questions that everyone knows the answer to, to ask really insightful questions.

And I found building my own quizzes that the real work goes into the. The options on the answers because that's what tells the actual question isn't as important as the answer options. Is that, is that how you would you agree?

Yeah, yeah. The questions are important too, but the insights that you give the answers.

At the end of the quiz.

Are very important too because like I was saying, you can't just give basic surface level stuff that everybody knows. You actually got to offer some insight. And like a good example was.

A good example of what not to do. It's the very first quiz funnel that we built for Mindvalley. Even though it worked, it could have been a lot better because we basically it was for a meditation product, of course, and we ask the question, you know, what's your.

Which of these three options is your biggest obstacle to meditating properly? And.

The answers we gave just reflected that. So if they chose my biggest obstacle to meditating regularly is I can't get focus. Our answer would be, hey, great, we've diagnosed your biggest problem as you can't focus. So that was a very basic.

Answer that wasn't insightful at all.

So as we built quizzes later on, we really focused on diving deep into who the prospect was, finding out, getting the answers to what they wanted to know, and providing those insightful answers that were genuinely valuable.

Yeah, it's very, very powerful. I'm really enjoying working with quiz funnels just for all the reasons you've explained. What advice would you give to someone who is a very newbie marketer? And I say, like, you know, someone who's a video production company, they've been getting a lot of business word of mouth, and now they're starting to think about marketing. What would be a starting point for someone who's kind of literally green.

When it comes to quizzes? There's so many. There's a lot of different platforms to use, there's different people teaching about quizzes and all of that. But the number one piece of advice is just to.

Is to get started with something. Your first quiz is going to be imperfect. I think I mentioned in the book as well, imperfect action beats meditation. Just getting something out there is going to get you some kind of result, even if it's feedback. Like, even on some of the mindvalley quizzes, you know, we would get feedback from customers that said, you know, this question doesn't really make sense. And then we go back and change that on the quiz. So that was valuable. But it was like the meditation quiz, which is our very first quiz that we rolled out that I just mentioned. You know.

Even a company that employs 200 people, we're still trying to just get something out there, throw something up, get some kind of data on how it's working and the results.

There's no sense in trying to wait until we've got it perfect and absolutely nailed down. And there's no way to do that until you get this data from your market.

I think there's a quote from the book when you talk about people being afraid to ask for the order. And I think it ties nicely into here. And I find this certainly in the creative space is a lot of people will sit there and talk themselves out of what they know is going to work because of this, as you say, the bullshit that builds up in our minds.

How do you overcome that? How do you just get that momentum going.

When it comes to asking for the order?

It's all about practice. I mean, the ability to.

Sit down in front of someone or talk to them on the phone and say.

Great, this is the price. Let's get started. And then basically you shut up. And then.

Then they either, you know, they go ahead with the order, or they have got something else that you need to address. And when you get to that position where you can just ask the order, shut up, and then take it.

That'S something that you need to practice. So here's the way to do that. The way to do that is very simple. And it's pretty much the same as what I said before. Just. Just getting in front of more people and asking for more audits more often. You know, asking for. Asking for a CTA more often to more people. It just takes. Just takes practice. And the more that you do it, the better you get at it.

And also, when you've got the quiz, funnel information, if you're using a decent CRM, all of that information can be transferred. So I'm using type form go straight into pipedrive. So I mapped all of the questions so I'm in a conversation with someone. I can see all of their answers. And if you get an objection at the sales process, you can just say, hey, you know, Brian, I noticed you said this right at the beginning, and that seems to be odds with what we're discussing now. Just take me through that. Help me understand that. And you're right. You know, the more sales conversations you have, the more conversations you have, full stop, the easier it becomes, because there are. I'd say once you've done about 30 sales conversations, you've pretty much had every objection.

Yeah, yeah, but you're so right about having that data in front of you. I mean, it goes back to what I was saying about the way to blow the sales pitches is to. At least for me, at least is to ask what I do. Because.

The less data that you have on. On a person, and you can call it data or you can call it, you know, information or whatever, you can call it a conversation that you've had with the person. It really depends on the context of how you've physically done that. But I mean, if you're going up to someone at a party and you. And you know, you're saying, hi, my name's Brian, would you like to come back to my place? You know that you haven't built that relationship at all.

You know, you want to obviously do that first, and gathering all this information is a huge part of that relationship, so you really know a lot about that person and their problems. And then you can sort of customize the way that you speak to them based on all of that.

And it's all a formula, isn't it? You know, there's the Classic marked copywriting formula, ida, Attention, interest, desire, action. But you've kind of evolved that. And you don't necessarily think that IDA is, is kind of. Is what it used to be. Talk to me about how you've evolved that.

So this is probably something that I've seen around the place and I've got bits from here and bits from there.

And I first heard.

This kind of stuff talked about.

The old marketer who I think is still around. Mal Emery is one of the main guys, or he was back in the day anyway, in the Australian marketing scene. And the one that I like to use if I'm writing a long sales page or if I'm doing a video script.

We start with.

Stating the problem. So problem is the first one and that's kind of part of grabbing their attention, you know, which is the first step of ADA problem. And then you aggravate the problem. So those are the first two steps and that's, that's all part of getting the attention and kind of interest stage.

And also overlapping interest is the next one in my formula, which is to solve the problem. So now you're going to present your solution.

To the problems that they have. And then one of the most important steps that I have is proof. And that's the number four step, which kind of matches up with the desire stage of ada, which.

Once you show them that it really works and they're really going to desire that and actually have the. The same step as the A in ada, which is action, A call to action at the end. So it's problem, aggravate the problem, prove what you say is true. No problem solve.

Problem, aggravate, solve, prove, call to action.

And you can apply that to anything, can you? That, that's. That's website copy, that's videos. Yeah, yeah, is oftentimes. And something else you mentioned in your book is that we can often get too caught up in the ninja hacks and I think with filmmakers they get too caught up in the gear, so they've got all the gear and they'll just throw a video together to stand up in front of the camera and not think of this process. And I think we're all guilty of having too many apps and plugins when in actual fact there are just some very simple systems. And simplicity is the key, actually keeping things simple. And I think you talked about that when you're at Mindvalley. It's like, you know, you actually kept things very, very simple.

Yeah, yeah, Simplicity is my favorite thing of all because, you know, I'm not a tech guy. I'm probably not even that smart. So, you know, I just like to keep things, you know, simple, easy instructions to follow. You know, stuff that we can't mess up too much.

Because, you know.

Businesses should be simple. As people who are complicated, you know, we, we complicate stuff unnecessarily. And when you do that, you introduce so many other, you know, potential factors for failure. You know, it's like, you know, whichever kind of, whichever code of football you play, if you, if you try and get the ball straight up the middle of the ground up to the goal.

In one kick or whatever, that's usually the best path to success. It's when you.

Try and pass the ball to everyone else on the field and involve everyone and take a lot more steps. You introduce a lot more scope for something going wrong.

For sure. Brian, this has been fascinating. I don't want to take any more of your time. How can people find out more about you? Tell us where they can find the book.

For example, the book here is called Email Resurrection. It's on Amazon. I've just Kindle version and now a print version. This is the first copy that I've started to produce of that. It's on Amazon for now. The Kindle version will stay there. So as a, as a constant traveler, I like to have the Kindle version as well. But the, but there's something about a paperback book, so that's now on there as well. You can buy that.

Awesome. And if anyone's interested in learning about how to build a funnel.

How can you help?

So my main influencer, my main website, sorry, is called Funnel influence dot com. That's where I have a lot of information.

Links to my podcast and links to my blog posts as well. And they can get email templates there as well, which are very valuable. A lot of free information is on there as well. That's funnelinfluence.com as well as the Email Resurrection book.

Cool. Thanks, Brian. I look forward to talking again soon.

Thanks for having me on. It's been a pleasure.

You've been listening to the Video Business Accelerator podcast with your host, Den Lenny. If you are a video business owner who is tired of going it alone and would benefit from mentorship, support and weekly accountability, then mouse over to www.videobusinessaccelerator.com to learn more about how the accelerator program can help you today. Don't forget to subscribe and rate the show over on itunes. And we'd really appreciate you taking a few minutes to leave a review.

Sam.