Behavioral Dynamic Response Marketing with Frank Kern

Hey, it's Jim Johnson here, the head coach at Contractor Coach Pro and we are in the contractors training room and we're recording a webinar and podcast for contractor radio. And we have the maven of marketing, the wizard of words, one of the greatest marketers from digital and just regular marketing perspective. Frank Kern with us today. So welcome aboard, Frank, good to have you.

Thanks man. That was a lot of nice stuff to say. I don't even have to do any self aggrandizing. You did it.

I was just talking about how I got in contact with you. I was giving a little disclaimer. We actually know you because you are our own marketing coach and you have been extremely beneficial to us. And I want to just thank you for hanging out with us today and agreeing to do this. I am sure you get asked all the time and so I took advantage of the fact that you are my coach and said, hey, I am going to put a little pressure on him because of that and see if he will actually do this for me. So we appreciate having you today, man.

Thanks for having me. I never get asked to do these things. I have a very disagreeable personality. People are like, I don't think so. Can I get on anything? And they're like, no, no, we're full.

I have to admit I'm a bit nervous. I'm a bit nervous about what Frank's gonna say today. Like, you never know. We've been in these coaching sessions with you and they've been hilarious. They've been like shocking. They've been a little bit mind blowing. Like, God, I'm a lot dumber about marketing than I thought I was. And so I'm a little bit nervous about where what's gonna come out of Frank's mouth today. So.

Well, if there's ever been any group of people where you don't have to be like too correct and handle with kid gloves, it's gonna be a bunch of contractors.

Yeah, yeah. They're okay with it.

I'm sure about kind of tiptoeing around.

Anything with oh no, they're, they're all good. So let's go ahead and get started. You ready?

Yeah, man.

All right, cool. So I always start off with this question. It's kind of our first question. And then I'm gonna kind of give you a surprise question at the end, so be ready for that. But what's your greatest achievement to date? Like the one little qualifier cannot be family related. Not getting married, having kids and all that stuff. We know that that's the greatest achievement, I hope. But besides that, what's the greatest achievement today?

I don't know. I guess in a professional sense it.

Doesn'T have to be. It just can't be getting married or having kids.

Can I be getting divorced?

Yeah, if that's your greatest achievement, yeah, absolutely.

Good. That was a good. I am very happily married, by the way, so. But I once wasn't probably. It was the creation and invention of a methodology called serialization which was only ever taught to 100 people. I guess I could talk about it now because it's been like 12 years since I taught it, but I figured out this way to take a niche of anything. So I did it in the dog market. Like we were talking earlier, strangely, I know a lot about training dogs and I had a dog training product and I created this methodology and had software written that would go and find every breed of dog. And so you could do it with anything that this was applicable to, like every model of guitar, every make of car or whatever. Then it would go find every keyword that was related to that breed of dog and then it would go to Google and it would create an ad set specifically for that breed of dog, which would direct the traffic to a webpage and opt in form that was dynamically generated specifically about that breed of dog, which would then put people into an email sequence that was dynamically generated specifically about that breed of dog, which which enabled the user to press a button. And essentially in this case there were 640 something different breeds of dogs essentially have 640 something different websites, all tailored to the actual precise target market, built automatically and dynamically. And that was freaking cool, man. From a total dork out.

That'S like super nerd but super cool at the same time. I don't remember that in any of my coaching. I'm gonna have to catch up on that one whenever we see you next.

Well, it wouldn't necessarily apply, but it's like if you're in a broad market, you know, and you're trying to go after, let's say dog owners, you can say I want to advertise under dog training or I want to advertise under shih Tzu training. And if you advertise under shih Tzu training to the guy that's got a shih Tzu, then of course it's going to work better. And then if the guy that's got a shih Tzu sees an ad that says train your shih Tzu and then he goes to a page that says, opt in for the free report about training your Shih Tzu. And then everything that he ever sees is about the Shih Tzu. It all makes it work better. So what I invented was this thing that just automatically did that. So selling, like, car, you know, something about how to inspect a car. And it was generic enough to where it mattered for any car. You could do the same thing for every make of car. I had people do it for every make of guitar, every famous guitar player, all kinds of cool stuff. So I guess that would be it in terms of, like, neat stuff.

Yeah, that is. So I asked that question all the time. That is a unique answer. That's. That's pretty good. I get a lot of very similar ones, but that's really awesome, man. I got all kinds of questions now. I'm like, okay, I got to find out more about that stuff. So what got you to hear? I mean, what got you into this marketing thing? Maybe a little background. And why so passionate about marketing?

I don't know why I'm so passionate about marketing. I got into it because I'm an introverted weirdo and a horrible, horrible salesperson. And I don't have any formal education or any credentials of any kind. So when I was younger, I barely graduated high school. The lady that was in charge of my ability to graduate allowed me to have a passing grade in algebra because she and I both really liked the Grateful Dead. So she was like, all right, it's a C minus. Get out of here. You're my favorite Deadhead. And that's how I graduated high school, thrown out of college in the minimum amount of time you can go prior to academic dismissal, and then immediately joined a rock and roll band and was on the road for four years, which is why I can't hear anything. So once all of that ended, I did make about $40. Over the course of that 40 years. Over the course of that four years. Once all of that ended, I didn't have any, you know, like, what am I going to do? So I did food services. You know, I was a busboy. I was a cook. I was once so blasted working in the kitchen as a fry cook that I stuck my hand in the deep fryer to get the french fries out. And strangely, it didn't cause any permanent damage, which is a miracle. I think I was protected by some alcohol and drug force field or something back then. But anyway, I found myself doing what a lot of people with no marketable skills do, which is sales. Entry level sales. And I was a Door to door salesperson and sold roofing like we talked about. And I was selling credit card machines. And I got, for the nine millionth time, you know, rejected very aggressively. And I went to the computer and this is before Google, and I typed in how to sell credit card machines on the Internet, because that's what I was selling credit card machines and saw a banner ad you know about. Here's how I sold a whole bunch of stuff on the Internet and clicked it and read the 8 billion page sales letter by a guy named Corey Rudolph, who's unfortunately deceased. You know, must have read the sales letter 50 times and bought the course for $297. And that was the end of it. And that was October of 1999. And I just became obsessed with it. Number one, because you can make money without having to have people tell you to screw yourself. And that's nice. I mean, they still do it in email, but you don't have to read it. You know, they don't do it in person. So that's pretty good. It's also just became, you know, it's just so freaking cool. Like, once I started learning about it, I felt like I was let into some. I was let in on a secret, you know, because you never learn about, like, direct response or any of this kind of stuff in school. You have to actually seek it out and get lucky enough to find the right books and everything. So I kind of felt like I was in a secret society or something. Was great. Still do.

Yeah. That's actually super interesting because, you know, my son Braden, we brought him to meet with you, and we got done with those first two days that we met with you and something. I don't know if you know about Braden or not. He has a degree in business and marketing from college. And so I asked him after that first couple days, I said, hey, what'd you think? He goes, I learned more in the last two days than I learned in my entire time getting my degree in business and marketing. Like, I learned more in that just about people and how to get people to respond. And so it is that, like, this passionate thing going, wow, this is super cool about understanding. I've always been this guy that's all about understanding human behavior, body language, and just personalities and stuff like that. So it really kind of trips my trigger too. And I've become a bit more passionate about it. I thought it was gonna be all about, like, just hooking, braiding up with you and getting that done, but it is kind of affected me as well. So Maybe I can join that secret society at some point.

Well, there isn't actually a secret society, but I just kind of felt like I was in Nobody really. I mean, I guess it's a blanket generalization. I mean obviously people know how to do this, but if you compare the amount of people who know how to do marketing to the overall population of the world, it's pretty freaking small, you know, and it's, it's cool. Yeah.

The ones that know how to do it well, like you see all kinds of marketing, but the ones that actually make you react, make you do something, I think they're kind of far and few between. I'm going to get to that in just a second. But before I get there, who's like if these guys were wanting to do, you know, and learn more about market. Who are some of the people that influenced you? Some of the books, like some of those key ones that our good foundational stuff.

Oh man. Hands down. Gary Halbert for one. And I think it is the GaryHalbertLetter.com I always get this wrong. I should know this. He published and he's dead also he published a newsletter for a couple hundred bucks a year for a long time. And all of the archives, or at least the majority of them are available for free on that website. And it's just ridiculous, you know, how good it is. So that Anything by Dan Kennedy, probably the ultimate sales letter would be the best choice from Dan Kennedy. So that's about 11 bucks on Amazon.

Great book.

Yeah. Can't be Anything by Dan Kennedy is going to be a good call for sure. I would start with those two and if you. Oh, I didn't know he made it into a book.

Oh, he's got magnetic marketing. This is his new book that just came up and reading that, it's really good. Really?

Really. So when I got that, that was like a $200 like cassettes and three ring binder thing.

I'm not gonna tell you. I got it for free with shipping for 495 or something like that.

Oh, good. All right. This. Damn if it's the equivalent of the thing that I bought all those years ago. It's really, really good. So well done with that. So he was a tremendous influence on me, you know, and continues to be like I was listening to his influential copywriting seminar on the way here today for the eight millionth freaking time, you know, and so those two guys, hands down, really, really influential.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Yeah, so that's, that's kind of my thing. I've Been like, studying all these people and. And I'm looking like books and things like that. Then I'm also looking at, like, branding and kind of understanding some of that kind of stuff. And just, man, there's so much noise out there. It's like, who do you listen to? So I thought it'd be important to hear from one of the experts who he listens to as an expert.

Well, I'll tell you, another one too, is Claude Hopkins, Gary and Dan. So there's a lineage, all of this stuff. All right, like, the secret society has a lineage. And the lineage started really in the contemporary world in the past hundred years with a guy named Albert Lasker. So there's a book about him called the man who Sold America. He created an ad agency or took over an ad agency, and I can't remember the name of it, embarrassingly, but he hired John E. Kennedy and another copywriter named Claude Hopkins. Claude Hopkins wrote a book called Scientific Advertising, and Scientific Advertising was a huge influence on Gary and Dan and me and everybody else who's ever studied all of this kind of stuff. Bandwidth get weird on us for a minute.

Yeah. And just so everybody knows, there's a tornado watch where Frank is. So a lot of these guys are like, oh, yay, roofing sounds good.

Come on down to South Florida. Yeah. So anyway, there's. I forgot what book I left off. Oh, Eugene Schwartz is another one to study Breakthrough Advertising. Real hard book to read, though. He talks all grown up in there.

Yeah, I don't like that at all.

Those dudes from that era from, like Eugene Schwartz era, you know, the late. From Claude Hopkins, up until stuff that was written in the 70s was written real weird, like, all fancy. It's a bitch to read.

But those folks actually have an education.

Ads, they didn't write fancy, but when they books, they wrote fancy. It's like, why don't you write the damn book like you write the ad so we can understand what you're talking about.

Yeah, exactly. That's one of the things I've noticed is the books have gotten a little bit more easily digestible here in the last few years. So. So you have this thing on your website, it's called Behavioral Dynamic Response Marketing. And then there's also this other thing that you taught us called Intent Based Branding. And I asked you earlier, are they different? You said, yeah. So can you kind of give us like, Readers Digest what those two things are and why they're different?

Mm, yeah. So if you were to take a piece of paper, draw a Line down the middle. That line represents the point at which someone clicks on your website. So intent based branding is all the stuff that happens before the line. Right? So that's advertising and marketing. That is designed to make someone feel a specific way with the intent on your behalf of them wanting to do business with you. Now once we cross over that line, we now venture into behavioral dynamic response stuff which is post click marketing. And it's primarily done via email and retargeting. So do you want me to get like techie in that or like, yeah.

Go into a little bit of detail on the behavioral one. Like I think most people get the intent based branding, we might come back to that a little bit because there's some nuance to that as well. But this behavioral dynamic thing, like they click and then something's going to happen. What gets them to do what you want them to do.

A whole lot of trying gets them to do what you want them to do, you know? So generally speaking, a process would look like this. Someone sees your stuff online, they decide that they might want to do business with you, they'll go to your website. And the website needs to have a singular focus, which is to get them to enter into your sales process and whatever that sales process may be. So for the sake of our conversation, that's going to be probably fill out some information and request that someone come out to your house, take a look at it, give you an estimate or something. Either that or call in. Right? So let's just assume for the sake of making everything easy, that the mission of the website is to get Mr. Jones, whose roof is leaking, to fill in the thing that says, please come over here, my roof is leaking. So that's the mission of the website. So now what behavioral dynamic response does is it takes a look at everything Mr. Jones does after he has filled out that form and sends him marketing messages accordingly. So for example, what if he fills out the form but he doesn't answer the telephone? Or what if he answers the telephone and then books the estimate meeting? There should be some stuff that happens between those two periods where you have your initial conversation and then your guys are going to go out and meet with him in person. What if the estimate is written up and sent to him but he doesn't respond or doesn't open it? Or what if he does open it but doesn't sign it? So behavioral dynamic response is understanding all of the behaviors that can occur when someone comes into your process and then building an appropriate response for every single behavior there with the Idea, the overarching idea being that a sales process, which is all we're talking about, right? Fill out form, phone call, appointment, estimate, close. That's the machine, the parts of your process. So all a process is is a bunch of moving parts. In this case, we just described them in this rudimentary version. So what behavioral dynamic response does is deliver messages to the prospect based on where they are in that process, designed to get them forward to the next part of the process, you know.

Okay, so that sounds like a lot of work. First off, you got to think a little bit like, what's every possibility that could happen along this path? And then for every one of those possibilities, what's the. Is it a campaign that you're building from there? Like it starts here but finishes over here. It's not just, if I remember right from our coaching, it's not just one email to somebody. They might get a couple, if I remember correctly. So is that like you plan out all of those?

Mm, yeah, absolutely. So you just look at where things can break. Right. So with this one, let's say the guy goes to the fill out forum. Well, we need something to have as a contingency plan for that. So that would be retargeting. So that's part of behavioral dynamic response. We are responding dynamically to his behavior, which was not filling out the form. So now that person would be added to a retargeting list. He's going to be shown different ads and say, hey, your roof's done got a hole in it. You started to fill out the form but probably got busy. Let's come over there and fix it before it ruins the carpet or something, you know. So now let's say he does fill out the form but doesn't answer the phone. Well, we need to dynamically, based on his behavior of not answering the phone, have a response which is a series of emails. It's like I'm trying to call you. Text me back, email me back, call me at this number or whatever. So it's, it's not like you have to have a billion different things. You know, you basically just look at your process and understand what, where your break points are and then build contingency plans for the breakpoints.

Gotcha, gotcha. So let's come back to intent based branding. So I get the after now, like their behavior. So that's after we cross the line, right? So and we call that line, like for us, we call it a threshold.

Right.

It's like the threshold of a door. How do you like get in to actually start having that conversation, engagement and stuff like that. And so I think of Matt very similar. So this intent based fancy.

I'm from Georgia. So we're just like, well, you got a line down a sheet of paper. And on the left is before they see the website. Okay. And now on the right of that, some bitch is after they've gone to the site. You know, that's the proper way.

I, I get you. And I actually understood that. I'm from Texas, so we talk much like that here. And so I actually understood that thicker.

With the more beer you drink. The 19th one, it's just syrup, you know.

Oh, man. So this is how our meetings go. Just so everybody knows. Like, if you go to a meeting with Frank, there's going to be a lot of humor involved with it as well. And it makes it a lot of fun. It's enjoyable.

I mean, otherwise this stuff can be just so horribly boring. We're talking about programming email sequences, for God's sake. You know, so you got to make it less boring in order to get someone to want to do it. Or else they're like, yeah, exactly.

Like that's, that's the whole thing. Like this should be fun and even fun for like the consumer, this person that you're trying to talk to, you know, and get to behave a certain way. Humor goes a long ways with that. I've noticed, as we start putting our stuff out as well. So intent based branding, dive into that a little bit more. What does that like actually mean? Cool.

Okay, so branding is a dangerous, dangerous word. All right? And by dangerous, I mean it can be a real big vortex of money that you put your money into and it never goes out. So I'm going to define branding as for the sake of our conversation and what it means to me as deliberately creating someone's opinion about your business prior to them crossing the line. Right. So if they're going to think about you anyway, we want to deliberately create stuff that's going to cause them to think about you in a certain way. And so that is the definition of branding for our purposes. And then when we say intent based branding, it means we are doing that branding with the intention of having them do something, which in this case, you know, for our contractors would be probably go here and fill out a form so we can come give you an estimate and fix your roof.

Gotcha. So there's this conversation, I won't call it an argument or discussion maybe that I have with marketing folks all the time because we have a Lot of vendors that do that kind of stuff in our space. And I always ask them what's more important, branding or lead generation. And I'm talking with you about doing this the other day I asked you the same question, so I'll let you answer that in just a second. But most everybody says branding, like you gotta get, you gotta have this brand. You gotta have this brand, you gotta have this brand. And then there's me over there. I was like, no, I gotta have these leads. I gotta have these leads. I gotta have these leads. Because without leads you don't have business. So what's your opinion on what's more important?

I don't think that they're, I don't think that they should be separated. So when people talk about having a brand, that can be, I'm generalizing, but that can be glaringly indicative of the individual knowing absolutely nothing about actual marketing. So if you're talking to like a traditional advertising agency or something like that, of course they're gonna say you need a brand because what they're doing is they're selling you. Let's get your name out there. And however much money you're spending on the ads to get your name out there and build the brand, typically they're getting a commission on that. So thus the motivation to educate a small business that, hey, you gotta build the brand. There's a way to build the brand and generate leads simultaneously, which is intent based branding. So that's why I say, in my opinion, they shouldn't really be separated. We should do both at the same time. Build a brand while generating leads. So if you're doing the branding stuff, causing them to formulate an opinion about you while they're in the lead gen process, by the time they become a lead, they already like you. Which now makes everything behind the line lot easier. Right. So if they already like you before you go out and give them an estimate, you're not. That you shouldn't try to do a good job on the estimate, obviously, but it's going to be an easier task for you because the trust has already been built, the relationship has already been built through the intent based branding stuff.

So that intent based branding stuff really kind of comes down to getting them to trust, know who you are, trust you, like you, and so you're probably generating some value would be my guess. Like you're giving them something that they might go, hey, I could actually use that and it's free, it doesn't cost me anything. It's kind of a start. And then as they start to engage with you, then it's like, hey, maybe buy a little something and then maybe buy a little more or something and then maybe buy this big huge thing. Is that kind of how it's supposed to work?

Sort of depending on the business model. So in a contractor sense it might not. Because what you're describing is like an info marketing ascension model, you know, where you buy the book and then you buy the next thing and next thing you know you're in the 20 year long super deluxe platinum Mastermind experience or whatever.

So we've been thinking about this like ever since you brought this up. Like, how could I apply that same like model to the roofing world or to the painting world or the fencing world or whatever type of contractor you are. And so there's, there's lots of different things that are available in, in the roofing or any contracting world you mentioned. Like the most common one, you know, free estimate, like, hey, fill out this form, get a free estimate, we'll come out and do that for you. And no cost, right? So a lot of these guys have kind of stepped their game up a little bit and they've got these reports that they'll do as a full report on like the status of their roof and grade it and all this other cool stuff and like, you know, you can educate and build up some value there and then probably get them to do some type of report first. Even if they don't need an inspection. Maybe, maybe the roof's just 10 years old and maybe they need to start thinking about what's going to happen with their roof and start getting them into our world by providing them this report. That's $49 or whatever the number may be going out doing that first, giving that report, noticing, hey, there's something wrong here. And doing a minor repair, then keeping them in that world saying, hey, why don't you get on our maintenance program? That's $249 a year. We'll clean your gutters, clean your valleys. We'll make sure that everything's nailed right, seal all the plumbing and stuff like that. It's only $249 a year and they stay in your world and you can keep marketing to them the whole time. Would that be something that you think these guys could try? That would, that would work well for them. We're kind of just thinking it through at this point if that's a good track or not. But what do you think?

I wouldn't sell them a report. I'd sell them the gutter cleaning. So what you're describing is getting the foot in the door and establishing the customer relationship through a transaction and then upselling to a longer term relationship on the annual plan. So if it were me, I'd be like, hey, we'll come clean your gutters for $30. And the reason we'll do it is because we're hoping you'll really like it and you'll want to sign up for our annual plan. Before I ever made that pitch, they would see a lot of stuff for me where they already liked me.

Okay, cool. So kind of wondering, so it seems like that might be something these guys could do. Matt Morrison, earlier, when you said marketing was boring, he said, like, that doesn't sound boring. He's all nerding out all over this stuff.

Oh, good. All right.

I know Matt pretty well, so he likes this kind of stuff. So you mentioned this being a roofer thing. Like, I didn't, I didn't know that. Like, I had no idea that you had any of that background. And so kind of tell us that story a little bit of like, how you. You got into that and said, hey, I don't want to do that anymore because I don't like the sales thing. But, like, what was your approach?

Well, there was no approach. I had a job, and I was the installer and salesperson for Invisible Fences. So that's a company that puts this little wire in the ground, hooks it up to a radio transmitter. Your dog wears the collar, and if the dog tries to get out of the yard, it shocks him. And I didn't like the job, particularly because it was really, really hard manual labor. Just how in the world companies got away with this? Like, first of all, Invisible fencing is a great company. It was a pretty fun job. But, dude, they had me run in. And they're all independently owned, by the way. So the franchise I worked for had me running a rototiller that had had the tills removed and replaced with a diamond tipped saw blade that then had this little metal tube that was behind the saw blade that would go into the ground and lay the wire. So I'd be running this tiller with a saw blade, you know, cutting a little trench into the ground, laying the wire, which sounds great until you realize I was doing it in Macon freaking Georgia, which is 8 billion degrees, and Georgia red clay is not soft. So what would happen is you're tilling along and it's working, and then that damn thing would catch and the ground would get real hard, and instead of cutting through the ground. It would just start rolling and yanking. So it would pull me along. And ultimately the front of the tiller, because, you know, tillers like this and the motors in the front, the front would hit the ground and stop, and then you end up like inches from the freaking saw blade, face first in the ground. So I was doing that, you know, and I didn't care for that very much. And a dude who had a roofing company said, hey, do you want a job in sales for my company? I was like, can I make $300 a week? And he was like, yeah, you can probably make more. So I said, okay. And I got a job with him. And he was like, okay, go sell commercial roofing. And that was my training. I did get to go to a seminar on modified bitumen. And I don't remember anything other than the words modified bitumen from the seminar. And I never mentioned those words when selling roofs, But I know that such a thing exists. So what I decided to do was get a clipboard, because if you have a clipboard, you're official, and put on a golf shirt. Because if you have on a golf shirt and the clipboard, you're probably not a degenerate dope fiend, rock and roller, which is what I was at the time, you know, because, I mean, you got clipboard and golf shirt, clearly you're legitimate. So then I would go into commercial spaces, like stores, department stores and stuff, with the clipboard, which had just a piece of paper on it. There's, you know, it was a prop. And I'd go around, I'd look up at the ceiling, and if I saw brown spots, I take polaroids of them. Because this was like 90 something. I don't know, 96 or 7 or something like that. I take polaroids of them. Then I would go to the cashier at the store, which would be like a dollar store or whatever, and I'd say, who manages the property here? And they would tell me the name of the property manager. And then I would just call them and I say, hey, man, I was over at the dollar store on spring street, and you got about six brown spots on your ceiling tiles there, and there's probably. Probably a roof leak. I got some pictures of it. What do you want me to do? You want us to fix it? It was like I told you earlier, I was like, I think it was 100% close rate, but it couldn't possibly have been. But I don't remember anyone ever saying no. I remember the most common response being Hell yes. Dude. Are you serious? We've been trying to get this fixed forever and nobody shows up. And I was like, okay, well, yeah, we'll go fix it. So then, you know, I'd have the guys go and fix it. And then one day, one of the dudes that worked at the roofing company said, hey, we should do this on our own. So I said, okay. He's like, I, you know, it's classic Georgia, you know, he's like, my uncle's got a. I don't know what the hell you call it, but it's the thing that makes the tar hot. My uncle's got the tar hot thing. And, you know, we just get us a truck, we can go and we can do this shit on our own. I was like, cool. So that's how I got into commercial roof repair, which was like, you know, slapping taro and like, just fixing, coping and stuff, like, not actually doing the really hard stuff. And then we did some residential stuff. And I was like, that's the end of that. That's too much work. You know, I'm not good at that, nor do I know what the hell I'm doing. So it was short lived, you know, I was probably 24, 25 years old.

Yeah, it gives you some background into what these guys are dealing with. Right. And the thing that I think that kind of sunk home whenever we had that conversation was the lack of follow up by anybody else. Like, we've been trying to get that thing fixed and nobody even shows up. And you came out all on your own to do that.

I could not believe it. I mean, it was like, I still think it would work, you know, Y', all, listen, go just get one of the guys that work for you that look less horrible and give them a clipboard and a golf shirt, tell them to go in and take pictures of the damn tiles and call the property manager and chances are you'll get the gig.

Yeah, we, you know, a lot of the guys that we work with are. They got some pretty professional sales guys. And that technique would work really, really well, I think. Just, hey, you do have a leak. It's a problem. Have you addressed it? No, I haven't. Well, we can. And that's a good first foot in the door. We got a question here. You up for a question?

Sure, as long as it doesn't involve math or geography.

No, neither one of those. I don't think we'll find out here in just a second. So Brooke, she. She's one of our really good followers and she says, how do you use behavioral dynamic marketing through Facebook? Could you give us an example? Is social media best or email? So I think that's a two part question.

Oh, you use both. So when you get into this stuff and you're real hardcore about it, if somebody goes to your website, you have a little Facebook pixel on there, which Facebook just gives you, like call your Facebook person and tell them to do this. And so then if they opt in and schedule an appointment, the pixel will fire and it'll put them in an audience that says hey, this person opted in. So if someone hits page, doesn't opt in, you now have them in a retargeting audience and you can show them ads and say, hey man, go opt in. And then when they do, and when I say opt in, I mean request the appointment. You know, when they do it takes them out of that audience. And now it'll put them in an audience where the messaging might be hey, don't forget to show up or don't forget to answer or here's what to look out for from us as you're awaiting your appointment, etc. So I like to do them concurrently.

So do they move from like Facebook being like the intent based branding area and then cross that line? Do they go into more, more of an email and maybe messaging through social media and that kind of stuff for the behavioral dynamics?

Yeah, but you can still put them on a, in what's called a custom audience based on the email campaign they're in. So if we were to take a piece of paper and we drew one box that said request estimate, right? And then we drew and weekly it says request estimate email series, right? And then there's another box that says pre appointment email series. So the request estimate email series is the email series that's going out, getting them to answer the phone or call you back or whatever to actually make the appointment. The pre appointment series is the emails they're getting before you show up. They say, hey, we're really great. Here's some testimonials, here's some stuff that we're gonna do, here's who's coming to your house, we're not murderers. And all the stuff that people are gonna worry about. So in those email sequences, imagine that you also have like a little button that says while sending these email sequences also show these dudes this particular ad on Facebook. And so that's how that works. And that works through automation tools. Like I use something called plus this for us. For it, there's another one called Sync Sumo. There's like a gazillion of them, but that's how you do that. So they're seeing corresponding messages in their newsfeed as they're going through the email parts of the sequence.

All right, good. I think that answered the question. So you're a roofer, like everything just ends tomorrow, right? And you, you've got to, got to go back to. Roofing would be the first thing you do to generate leads from a digital perspective. Not using clipboards or anything like that. And it's residential. You can't do any commercial. It's just residential. I know, I just end it. All right, but what would you do? What would be the first thing?

Alright, so I'm residential, okay. So I would a pick the right audience to target. Okay. So in the digital world, one of the cool things about digital is you can target, like, let's say you're using Facebook, which I think is the lowest hanging fruit for this kind of thing. You can target specific neighborhoods, meaning you can choose an address like in the middle of a subdivision called Turtle Creek or something. I'm making that up. Although there must be a real subdivision called that. And then you could set it up to where you're only showing ads. And then you can do the same thing with other neighborhoods that are meeting the. Where everyone in that neighborhood is highly likely they're the homeowner and it's a nice home versus apartment buildings or whatever. So step number one, right. Step number two is you look for something that I call indicators. And these are things that a prospect would have and would experience that would indicate they are probably either in need or will be in need of your services. So in this case, for roofing, classic would be brown spot on the ceiling. Dude's got a brown spot on the ceiling. It's either the AC thing screwed up or there's a leak somewhere. So I would create content, like a video, for example, that says, here's how to tell where that brown spot's coming from. Right? And then it'd be, you know, three, four minutes, nothing fancy shot with the phone and tell them, okay, you got a brown spot on your ceiling, no bueno, you got to get it fixed. Couple of places it could be coming from. Here's some ways to try to figure it out. And then during that whole thing, I'd be saying, by the way, if you want us to come out and just take a look at it for you, happy to do it, no charge, go here. Crazyfrankshouseofroofing.com Fill out the little form and I'll call you. And then I would look for every possible situation alone indicator like that and start creating content that addresses it and then pushes it. And then if somebody watches that content, I can retarget them. That's part of behavioral, not behavioral dynamics. That's actually part of intent based branding, which is you put useful content out there and if they watch it, even if they don't go to my website, I know that the fact that they watch something like that is pretty indicative of them being in the market for some roofing. Otherwise, like, why the hell would you watch it? You know, it's like you're either really bored or really like watching an ugly 47 year old redneck guy or you got something going on with your roof. Right. So it's highly likely it's gonna be the latter. So if they watch it and they don't fill out the form, I just keep hitting them with more ads going, hey, call us, we'll figure out what's wrong with your roof, we'll help you out. You know, and that's pretty much the basic process for it. And I would do that in mass. And what's cool about that is it's relatively cheap to do, which is good.

Yeah. So the question that came up with that Facebook video or YouTube or both? I would say both, like do your Facebook videos. But I mean, you got the video already. Why wouldn't you put that out there on YouTube and use that as well? Would you agree with that, Frank?

Yeah, I would. Facebook is a little easier for me. So if I had to choose one and I had to 8020 it, I would start with the Facebooks.

All right, cool. So you kind of answered my next question. I was gonna ask you what are some of the key things contractors should remember or do to improve their marketing and increase leads. But you kind of laid out that whole thing right there as it wasn't just this one thing, it was like several things all put together. What do you think about door knocking? Like these guys, There's a lot of guys that are out there in this roofing world that from a insurance restoration side of things. So thousands of homes get damaged by hurricane, they get damaged by hail, whatever it is. There's these armies of sales guys, they go around these neighborhoods knocking doors, saying, hey, you've got damage. Let me take some pictures. I'll do a free estimate for you. I work with your insurance company, get everything taken care of. So that makes a lot of sense, knocking doors. I mean, it's ready market, go knock doors. And you're probably going to get some people. If you're, if you can breathe pretty well, it's like, hey, somebody else is paying for it. So let us do your roofing. Right, but in a retail aspect of things, like going out retail wise. And what would you do? Like, would you even suggest door knocking? Because low cost marketing, it doesn't cost.

A but yes, dude. And there's a great technique for it which is called the surgical strike method. So let's say that we're gonna go out and we're gonna target this mythical Turtle Creek subdivision.

Okay?

So that's who we're gonna set loose. And we're gonna send Tim and Eddie out and we're gonna send them out from the 1st to the 10th, and that's their job. They're gonna canvas Turtle Creek. So in the two months, not two months, I'm sorry, two weeks leading up to the 1st and the 10th, I would create Facebook videos that are shown just to people in Turtle Creek that have Tim and Eddie in them. And they're designed to be shown on the phone. And it's going to say, hey, I'm Tim. And I'm Eddie. And we're going to be coming to your house and I just don't want to alarm you, but the reason we're going to be stopping by is we're with Crazy Frank's house of roofing. And chances are your roof has been impacted by yacht, yada yada. And here's what we're gonna look for. And I just want to give you a friendly heads up. So when you see us, here's what the truck looks like. Know that we're not a couple of weirdos or anything. We're actually here to take care of this roofing problem. And by the way, if you already know that you got a roofing problem and you want it fixed, do this. So it'll cost you the roofer, probably 20 cents per video completion for a 60 second video where they're introducing the person to Tim and Eddie. And so now, or whatever the names were, I already forgot. So now when Tim and Eddie show up, Mabel, who's answering the door there, she's like, oh, I saw you guys. Because this sucker right here is the television now, right? This is the new tv. So they're watching video on this guy and so you can show it on the Instagrams and on the Facebooks and on the YouTubes and an ad. And then like it gets a little bit boringly technical about this. But if you create an ad where the objective of the ad in the campaign is just to get somebody to watch it, it's real cheap. So you're literally going to be paying 20 cents or something for a Turtle Creek resident To watch 100% of that video, which is just like a TV ad, you know, being shown to them. And now it's giving that familiarity. So you're essentially building the trust, or at least some sort of familiarity before Tim and Eddie show up. Wow. That.

That right there was the golden nugget of the day surgical strike method, I.

Think I use it. I got the metaphor from the invasion of Normandy. It was like you shell the beach first, then invade the beach. This is a polite way of shelling the beach with, like, goodwill and. And trust. You know, you're softening them up before you go in there.

Yeah, we teach something somewhat similar, but yours is way better, of course. Like, we do, like, flyer the neighborhood first. Give some education who you are. Got a picture of you on it and that kind of stuff. You go put it out early in the day, and then you come back that afternoon, and you know who to knock on, because the flyers are missing. Like, they're gone. That means they walked in the house and grabbed the fire. The ones that are still there come back to those later and hit all the ones where the person has already picked it up and they're a little bit warmer. They at least know who you are. It's not like you're just cold door knocking somebody.

All right, so this one. This isn't my invention. This comes from a guy named Dean Jackson who's freaking brilliant at marketing, and he helps realtors, and he does a similar thing where they'll mail a postcard to a neighborhood, and they will correspond a Facebook video campaign with the mailer, and it'll have the realtor, and she's on video, and she's like, hi, this is Vanessa McClellan standing outside the gates of Turtle Creek subdivision, where residents are currently receiving and curious about this very interesting yellow postcard. Now, on this postcard, when you get it, you're going to see, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so now it's setting them up to one. Want to look at the damn postcard? And then she gives the same call to action that the postcard has, which is. I forgot what it was. Go here to get a, you know, comps report for the neighborhood or whatever. So you could totally do the same thing. Hey, this is Tim and Eddie from Crazy Frank's House of Roofing. Standing at the gates of Turtle Creek neighborhood where residents are receiving right now as you watch this, a flyer that looks like this now. And then go over to the actual flyer. So now they're looking at the flyer on, in person and on video and they're seeing Tim and Eddie. So I would do that in. What's the word? Conjunction, I guess at the same time. So I'm trying to say as the other videos as well, because that video stuff is real cheap. You're gonna have a hard time spending a lot of money reaching them because it just doesn't cost a lot to reach.

That's my favorite thing in marketing. Cheap marketing that works. That's pretty cool. So I know I only had you scheduled for an hour and I'm sure lots of people are going to have lots of questions and things like that. We'll get those answered on the Facebook Live feed and here in the webinar and we'll probably send something out to everybody afterwards. Matt has a comment here. So it seems to me that the key there would be to make the postcard a bright color or otherwise stand out from junk mail that they might be receiving. Tim and Eddie should be wearing something distinctive as well, something identifiable to filter through the noise. Would you agree with all that? More statement than question. Okay, cool. Yeah.

But all of that will not make up for frequency. So the big name of that game is frequency. Don't send them just one postcard. Don't show them just one video, you know, well, you can show one video but like keep that video playing all the time in front of them so they see them. Because your Facebook guy. Let's see if I even have it on my phone. Weirdly enough, I advertise a lot on Facebook, but I don't use it so well, I'm not gonna demonstrate how. Well, let's see this damn thing gonna work? Alright, so your Facebook person is looking at Facebook just like this all the time, just scrolling. So if they see, like if that little thing that you're seeing right there is the video, they might not watch it. So you're gonna want them to see that thing like a billion times until they actually watch it. And Facebook will tell you when somebody watches it. And you can say, okay, if someone watches, you know, 30% or 50% of this video, now show them a different one. You know, and all that stuff is automated and it's automated within Facebook. It requires no special tool or anything to do. So frequency versus fancy is definitely the key there.

So that was actually something you taught to us the very first time we were there. Because a lot of us, we don't want to be the spam guy.

Right?

Like, you don't want to be. This person is like, oh, man, I'm sending stuff to them all the time. And you were like, no, that's completely wrong. Like, the people got to see you this many times and like, if they're interested in what you have, they'll keep looking and they're not looking at it all the time. Can you kind of clue these guys into, like, how many times people need to see stuff and like, why you should keep marketing.

Marketing.

Marketing with the frequency and why it doesn't. As Matt said, it doesn't have to be genius. It has to be frequent and valuable.

Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so the average. Damn it, I forgot the stat. Okay, hang on, I've got these. Ooh, I've got them in my other monitor here. Hang on. I'm going to get you the actual statistics, assuming that I can find this without it taking forever. So hang on. This is a big deal. And the stats I'm going to give you, again, assuming I can find them, are from Nielsen, which for everybody that's.

Listening, Nielsen is the ratings company. Like you would do with TV ratings and stuff like that. They rate a lot of different things, though.

Yeah. Now, weirdly, I don't have the stupid stats. I've got all kinds of other stats, but I don't have this one. So there's like one of these numbers is going to be wrong. The average time from seeing something to purchase is like 32 days or something. So the average time it takes an average consumer to see the pair of shoes, like, huh, I'm thinking about getting a pair of shoes to actually buying the pair of shoes or whatever it may be, is 32 days or something. This data actually comes from a company called C3 Metrics, the founder of whom worked with or for Nielsen. That's where this data comes from. During those 32 days or whatever it is, there are typically 20 something, let's say 23 touch points from the brand during that consumer journey. So if you're like just thinking they're going to see you one time and be like, hot damn, I'm going call it, unfortunately doesn't work that way anymore. And what we as marketers fall into the. Into the trap of believing is that they're actually paying attention. So it's not like they see you and they look at it and they consider it. And then you keep hammering them is you keep showing them because they're doing the scroll that I just showed you. So they might physically see it, and that's called an impression in the online ad world, that doesn't mean they paid attention. Now, if they pay attention to video one, for example, you can make it where they don't see video one anymore. And if they respond and fill in the form, they're taken out of that whole thing. But if they don't respond and fill in the form, they see another ad. And all of the ads, everything in this formula or everything in this process is based on one simple formula, which is goodwill plus offers times frequency equals money. So if the ads that you're showing create that goodwill, which in this case, a classic example was, hey, you know, you ever notice, like, you get a brown spot on your ceiling and then you hope it goes away, but it doesn't and it gets bigger, well, here's three ways you can tell where the brown spots coming from. That's building goodwill. During that same piece of content, you make an offer, which is, by the way, if you want some help and figuring out what's going on and maybe talk about fixing it, give us a call over here or go to Crazy Frank's house or roofing dot com. That's the offer. The more you do that, the more money that you're going to make. And if you wrap your offer up in goodwill, it doesn't really feel like a pitch. So you're not really spammy. You're just being very, very helpful very frequently. And frequency breeds familiarity. And familiarity breeds trust. And trust breeds money.

Man, man, man, golden nuggets there thing. We brought that home pretty good. That was, that was well done. Brooke even commented. I love that. And so do I. I like that equation. We will make sure we get that written down and posted it on our walls here for our marketing. And, and like you said, the scroll thing, I related that to my email. Like, my email, I like click the button and say delete all of them at one time. Like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, delete, Right? Because I'm just busy and things are rolling. But you know, it's Sunday afternoon, I'm staring at a bad football game. Yeah. I go check my email and hey, there's a cool email from Frank Kern or a cool email from whoever it may be or Crazy Frank's House of Roofing. And I actually read that thing for the first time and I had 17 other ones that might be similar to it. So keep that in mind, folks. As you're out there marketing, they really Aren't that focused on you. They really aren't. You're going to have to be in front of them a bunch before they pay attention.

Man, if they paid as much attention to us as we thought they did, we'd be really rich.

So you've hung out with us all this time. I really appreciate it. Number one, you've been awesome. Amazing. I think there's a lot of really good, valuable stuff there, and I'm super thankful for it. So thank you very much for that. I got one last question for you.

And this is the one you wouldn't tell me. You're like, I'm kind of dreading the. The question is, like, what's the worst thing you've ever done?

No, no, I decided to stay away from that one because I was a little scared of it, what that might be. So I asked you earlier, what's the greatest thing or the best thing that you've achieved at this point? So now it's all over. You're there in the casket, people walking past. What do you want people to remember you for?

Oh, just being friendly and helpful. Good old Frank. You know, I don't care about all of that. Oh, man, this guy was. He made the biggest impact and all that kind of stuff. If they were like, that guy helped me a lot. That's plenty for me. So that's awesome. I had something like, cooler sound.

No, no, that, like, it's funny.

He was great. I remember that one time I was in truck and he helped me. That's it for me.

That's actually so simple. It's awesome. And it's why I'm aligned with you. That's my answer to, like, I just want to be that guy. Help some way shape, form, or fashion and you didn't hate me is hopefully the goal in the whole deal. So, Frank, thanks a lot, man. Really appreciate it.

All right, y', all, thanks for having me. Merry Christmas. Or what's the proper. I came up with a really good politically correct way to say it. Happy. Oh, wait, was it. I acknowledge your right to decide whether or not to celebrate this gender neutral, spiritually agnostic period of optional celebration.

That's a perfect finish to this week's contractor training request room. Once again, Frank, merry Christmas and thanks for the Christmas presents you shared with everybody today. We really appreciate it.

All right, homies, I'll see you all later.

All right. Bye, guys.

Bye.