Todd Brown — How To Make A Product Appeal To The Most People

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear.

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolf. I'm here with my business partner, Joe Fear. Hola. And we've got an awesome, awesome guest today. This is actually one of the episodes that I'm the most excited about because this is someone that I've really looked up to. I've really followed his, his career and a lot of the processes that he teaches, and I've been a customer of a lot of his products. And so. So it's gonna be a really fun episode. And he talks a lot about automation. His business is called Marketing Funnel Automation.

So it's kind of perfect for us.

So there's.

We're gonna. We're gonna talk about a lot of automation strategies and a lot of techniques that anybody can implement in their business. And we're so excited to welcome Todd Brown to the show. So thanks so much for joining us, Todd.

You got it. I'm excited to be here with you guys.

Sweet. Awesome. Well, let's. Let's start a little bit with some of your backstory. Just for anybody who may not know who you are, let's chat a little bit about how you kind of got into the industry and.

Your progression to what you're doing now.

Yeah, I'll skip a lot of the gruesome details and I'll say this. So I've been doing this. I've been in the direct response world for a little bit over 15 years. When I first got started in direct response, I had no idea what direct response or direct marketing or long form copy was about. I always thought marketing and advertising were really kind of the same. The same thing. I got a direct mail piece, obviously in the mail. At the time, I was working for a health club company, a company that owned a number of health clubs in New Jersey. And this mail piece, this direct mail piece, was offering a training course for how to market and sell more fitness services. And so I remember I went to my boss, I asked my boss at the time if I could expense it. It was about 300 some odd dollars. He said, yeah, I went, I bought this, this gentleman's course. And that was all she wrote. I was immediately just enamored and blown away with this whole idea of, at the time, salesmanship and print and, you know, long form copy and just the whole psychology, communication aspect to it. I remember I immediately called him up, the dude who created the program. And I said, who did you learn from? And he mentioned a couple people. One of the people that he mentioned was Dan Kennedy. And then I began to study Dan Kennedy and that was really kind of my introduction into the world of direct response. I immediately began using what it is that I learned from that dude's course within the role that I had at the fitness company. And I took my department from, from an average run of the mill department to the shining star in the company. It was at that time that I decided I wanted to try to take what it is that I had done in the health club company and I wanted to bring it to other professionals. And so I started working with massage therapists and kind of sharing with them what it is that I had done, how I took this dude's approach and tweaked it for our situation. And then from there the rest is just history. I went on from massage therapist to working chiropractors and then it was martial arts school owners and dentists and carpet cleaners. And then through the years, eventually, just a handful of years ago, decided that I wanted to work with entrepreneurs as it relates to setting up their customer acquisition campaigns, their back end funnels and all that jazz.

Right on, man. That's. Yeah, I mean Dan Kennedy is the master. So if you guys, I mean, I think everyone's heard of Dan Kennedy by now, but if you haven't, check him out. Read some of the. No, no BS books and all that.

You want to hear a great, a great little nugget in that story is, is this. That probably, I would say, I don't know, maybe four years ago, something like that, the dude that I originally bought that very first course from, that introduced me to the world of direct response marketing, became a customer of mine and bought one of my programs. And it was just such an unbelievable like, wow, right? For even for me, like I was just like, wow, how cool is that? And so.

Yeah, yeah, that's amazing. Yeah. I actually think the very first sort of info product that I ever purchased online was the Glaser Kennedy Inner Circle newsletter. That was my first sort of investment going down, going down the marketing path. So yeah, he's, he's one of the sort of godfathers for me and one of the people that, that I highly respect and learned a lot from in the early days. So that's, that's awesome.

Yeah, Dan, Kenneth, Dan Kennedy is, he is, he's the godfather of certainly of the, the info product, you know, info publishing world. Anybody who's anybody within that space today in some way shape or form education growth back to Dan, Whether it be that they learn directly from Dan or they learn from somebody who learned directly from Dan?

Oh yeah, and yeah, so, but I know, so I want to get into a little bit of how you approach marketing because I know we've chatted before and you have kind of a, like this almost awareness escalation process of how you approach your marketing and you know, from, from kind of like brand new to a little bit higher touch. Can you kind of get into that and explain the levels?

Yeah, so I think, you know, when I first got started with, when I first got started, you know, with really what I would call online marketing, taking the direct response stuff and going online, which was very quickly after I started learning direct response, you know, I was kind of brought immediately into this world of like what you would refer, like the three of us and probably many of your listeners as the, the IM community, the Internet marketing community. And so, so much of what I learned early on and what I was taught taught and what I did in terms of selling online, you know, came directly out of, out of the IM community. And it wasn't until I was introduced to a gentleman by the name of Mark Ford, who many of your listeners may know by his pen name, Michael Masterson. He is the marketing wizard behind Agora, which today is legitimately a billion dollar a year.

Publishing behemoth. They are the, you know, they're the 800 pound gorilla in that world. They virtually eliminated their competition in that world like the, the company that is in second. I would say this, that Agora probably does not, probably does more in revenue than all of their competitor competitors combined today, I believe. Yeah, it's, it's incredible. And, and so I got the chance to meet Mark and spend a bunch of time with him and he became really a mentor. And today I'm blessed to say a friend. And Mark really opened my eyes to something that I want to share first and foremost. And that's the difference between marketing and selling. And I really didn't understand it early on. And I think that.

A lot of entrepreneurs really don't understand the difference between marketing and selling. They talk about marketing online selling, online marketing funnels, sales funnels, as if they are, are the same thing and they conflate the two, they mix it up, they kind of use those words interchangeably. But the reality is that it wasn't until I really learned that there is a tremendous difference between those two activities. Selling is all about the product it's all about the features, advantages, benefits, the price, the terms, the guarantee, the risk reversal, the premiums, bonuses. It's all about you, your company. And it's selling is what you do when you're talking to a prospect who, let's say they already know that, they already know that they want your type of product or service and they want to know from you what makes yours better than the other options. Why should they choose you and your product or service over all the other options out there? But marketing is all about the prospect and it's all about their situation, their needs, their wants, their fears, their, their emotional state, their beliefs. And marketing is all about shaping the prospect's belie, turning their desire into demand for your product before you ever even talk about the product, right? You are creating demand for your product. You're not creating desire, you're leveraging existing desire within the prospect, their desire for a result, an outcome, a transformation, a benefit, a change. You're taking that and you're turning it into demand.

For your product or service before you ever even talk about your product or service. And that's why.

Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management gurus ever said that the objective of marketing is to make selling superfluous, to make selling unnecessary, right? When you do a great job of marketing, when you do a great job of creating demand for your product or service before you ever even talk about your product or service, the quote unquote selling portion is really just presenting an over the top, irresistible superior and no brainer offer. And it wasn't until I learned that and really came to understand that selling is what happens at the end of a marketing campaign. If I want to be able, like look and without getting too deep for your, for your listeners. You know, you mentioned, you kind of referenced when you asked the question this whole idea of there are different levels of, of, of, of awareness that prospects have, right? And there, there are really what are, what are. Typically.

They'Re talked about in five different levels. There are five different levels of what's called prospect awareness. And this really came from, from Gene Schwartz, one of the godfathers, the legends of direct response marketing. Direct response copy. And what these different levels, these different levels. Let's start with the bottom. The bottom one is, call it, it's unaware. And that's the awareness of you, your product. The other solutions like your product, they have no awareness even of a problem or a need that would warrant your type of product or service, right? Then above that, you've got what's called problem Aware and problem aware is the prospect that is aware that they have a problem, but they're not sure yet of the different solutions out there. They might not even know that there are solutions out there. They haven't narrowed it down to a particular solution or anything like that. The only awareness that they have is that they've got a problem. Right? Then you've got solution aware. And solution aware is.

The prospect is now aware that they've got a problem and they're aware of the different solutions out there, the different types of solutions. And then you've got product aware. And product aware or service aware is really this prospect that is now they're aware of the problem, they're aware of the different types, types of solutions. And now they're kind of, they're, they're, they've chosen a type of solution and now they want to understand what is the best within that category of solution. And then there's most aware. And most aware is typically, I would say it's your customer base, it's your house list of customers, right? They know you, they like you, they trust you. And the way you approach those different levels of prospect awareness is ultimately going to determine how successful you are with them from a marketing and selling perspective. Because the type of message that you use needs to be different for those different levels of awareness. For example, very quickly, for example, here, let's say you were a chiropractor and you were marketing chiropractic care. Well, now that you know those five levels of awareness, completely, right? Unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, most awareness. Well, think about what type of marketing message if we, if we rolled it out with an ad that said how to choose the best chiropractor in West Palm Beach, Florida. Well, which levels of awareness is that appropriate for? Well, right off the bat, we know that it's not appropriate for the unaware segment because they're not even aware that they've got, let's say, low back pain and therefore they're not even looking for a chiropractor. Right? Then you've got. Right. It's not really appropriate for problem aware because those people are aware that they've got back pain, maybe, but they're not aware yet that they've got a choice between chiropractic, massage cream, surgery, inversion tables, physical therapy, blah, blah, blah. Right? And so you have to recognize that you have to understand who you are, who you are, who you are talking to. Now here's the thing, and you'll see how this fits in with this whole lesson of Marketing and selling. So the thing that I came to understand, that I really came to learn from Mark, was that the lower you go on that prospect awareness pyramid, and let me say this, every market is made up of prospects at all five of those levels. So it's not right. There are prospects at all five of those levels in, in your market. It's a matter of, of understanding, of deciding which segment, which, which level of awareness you're going to go after. And understand that the lower you go in terms of, right, you go. The lower you go, the closer you get to unaware, the more difficult it is to convert to generate the sale, the longer the marketing campaign needs to be right? Because really, if you think about it, if we go all the way down to unaware, you, you're not, you're not selling chiropractic, you're marketing and you're building demand for chiropractic before you ever even talk about it. Because that person doesn't even, they're not even aware of any need for chiropractic or want for chiropractic. We have to create that, we have to establish that. We have to build that in the marketing campaign. And so the lower you go on the pyramid, and I put it in a pyramid, these, these awareness levels, the more difficult it is, right? The longer the campaign needs to be, but, but the much bigger the universe and opportunity is.

Right?

And that's why companies like Agora create campaigns that are typically designed for the unaware segment or problem aware, mostly the unaware, because it gives them the biggest potential for growth. And so it's very, very different from the way the typical marketer has been taught to find a problem, you know, find a desperate need, find somebody who knows that they want your, you know, your type of solution, and then sell to them. Right? That's a totally different approach than, than a company like Agora. And that's why Agora has been able to grow so big so quickly. And, and that's why we've got so many crazy case studies that have come out of MFA by teaching other marketers and entrepreneurs this, and they just open up a massive universe. Does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense. So I wanted to ask you, or at least maybe you can give us some examples of types of marketing. Or maybe it's content, because I would assume the lower on the pyramid, it's more content, focused, you're doing a little bit more educating, eye opening, you know, and it gets a little bit more refined, maybe into like a sales letter or a very direct sales pitch at the Very top of the pyramid. Can you, can you give us some kind of examples all the way throughout that thing?

Yeah. So first of all, I think that you're dead on, like in what you said. You know, it's kind of, it's such an interesting thing because, because at the root of the kind of the methodology that I've developed by really, by standing on the shoulders of giants, right? Like I've, you know, I don't think I've had an original thought as it relates to marketing. Everything that I know I really, I've really gained from, you know, from others and then from experimentation in the market. But at the heart of what's called the E5 customer acquisition marketing protocol, the heart of that type of campaign, the E5 camp method, is that I'm not a salesman, you're not a salesman. Your listeners, odds are, aren't salespeople. We're marketers, not salespeople. And so I hate selling. I don't like it. I'm not good at it. Fortunately, I'm a pretty good marketer. And so the selling takes care of itself. But at the heart of a marketing message is delivering what I would call, or what I do call a marketing argument. And a marketing argument really is education based marketing. It's education not for education's sake, not to wow the prospect with your genius or your deep level of intellect, but education that methodically and strategically leads your prospect to the belief or beliefs that they need to have in order to buy. It's one of, one of the questions that like we teach clients when they're learning the E5 camp method is right. You start off by asking what does the prospect need to believe in order to buy? What do they need to believe? Right? And there is one overarching belief. It's called the marketing thesis. Like in. We could spend hours talking about just, just that. But then the entire marketing argument is designed to establish that belief and that belief, that marketing thesis, that one belief gets established before we ever introduce the product or service, before we ever even talk about the product or service, before we ever even mention the, the offer. Now let me give you, you asked for an example. Let me give you, let me give you an example that is really fresh in my mind. So the other day, just a couple of days ago, I was in Baltimore for the day spending some time with the folks, excuse me, at the Agora Financial headquarters in Baltimore. And I was there to, to really understand how they're training their new copywriters. Like they're, they have their, this Year, those guys at Agora Financial, which is a division of Agora, it's one of the fastest, if not the fastest growing divisions. They'll do about $200 million this year, that one division alone. And they've really been able to grow so fast and so big off of the back of developing copywriters. And they've got a very unique methodology that they use and whatnot. Well, while I was there, my buddy Joe Schreifer, who runs the Agora Financial division, he introduced me to a.

Gentleman that he referred to as the absolute best health copywriter that he knows, the guy who is arguably the best front end health copywriter that he's ever met. Front end, meaning he acquires customers. And so I said, all right, I want to, I want to talk to this gentleman. And so I got the chance to, to spend some time with him. And the very first thing that I, that I asked him was, I said, so tell me, like, what, you know, what's been the biggest breakthrough for you with your, your campaigns? And what he said was, the biggest breakthrough has been in the type of ideas that.

We come up with now for our health promotions. And, you know, like, you guys know, we've talked before, maybe we'll talk about it a little bit towards the end of this episode, the big idea and the value of the big idea. But so I said to this gentleman, Paul, I said, paul, I said, well, what do you mean? Give me an example. And this is what he said. And you'll see how this fits in with this whole education in just a second. Sure. He said, well, he said, what we, what we've been doing is we've been identifying what is top of the mind for our prospects. Not, not just top of the mind related to health and wellness, but what is just top of the mind for our prospects and in terms of maybe political, financial, whatever, whatever is kind of top of the mind, whatever the prospects are talking about or thinking about or discussing, right? And he said, and we develop ideas that enter into that conversation, Right? Typical Robert Collier jump into the conversation, right? But then he said, we jump into the conversation they're already having. And then we lead the conversation, we steer the conversation over to the marketing message, to the conversation we want to have. And he gave this example of there was a, let's say, a news story and forget, put the political implications aside for a second, right? He said there was a news story years ago about, you know, some legislation that President Obama in the United States was involved with. And it was whatever people were not getting the health care that they needed or the medical care. And so there was a certain number of people that were dying, that were unfortunately dying. I don't remember call it, for argument's sake, five people an hour. Right. And so they ran with this, this idea that, you know, President Obama is, you know, is killing, you know, five people an hour. And here's why you may be next and what you can do about it. And they went on to, they went on to educate the prospect on this particular legislation and how it stems from, you know, Big Pharma being, you know, in the pocket, you know, like in bed with the government. And that's also why Big Pharma is able to prevent natural, you know, cures from making their way into the market. That there are, you know, over four dozen different natural cures proven to produce this, this, you know, or eliminate this, this, this and this. And. Right. We bundled it all into a report for you and we'll send it to you for 17 bucks. Right. And like, and that's an exaggeration or, you know, a dumbed down example, but you see how they took an idea that had nothing to do with, or seemingly nothing to do with health. They got, they used it to jump into the conversation and then they led the prospect through education to the topic that they, that they wanted. Does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense. Yeah. And it's, it's. I was, you took the words out of my mind is, is, you know, jump into that conversation they already have in their heads. Robert Collier. And yeah, I mean, I think that's what a lot of people are trying to jump to a conclusion. They're trying to create a story that might not already be there, that people's eyes aren't open to. So it's, it's figuring out what is that thing for, for whoever you're going after.

Well, it's really, man, you know what it is? It's really this, like, let's just be real about it and say that. And I could say this because I do this. Yeah. What the majority of marketers are doing to try to get the attention of folks in their market is they're trying to scream a louder promise. They're trying to scream a louder promise than their competitors. They're trying to make a bigger, bolder, more audacious, more outrageous, more outlandish claim. And that's how they're trying to compete. Because the.

Right. You heard me say earlier that, you know, that the, A lot of the legends of direct response marketing, direct response copy, talked about what it is that we do as salesmanship and print. Well, it used to be salesmanship and print, but I don't believe that it is still salesmanship and print because we have the opportunity to do follow up. Follow up. We have the opportunity to drip out multiple pieces of a multi stage campaign. Therefore not every piece is going to sell. Look at the typical product launch, you know, product launch formula from, you know, our buddy Jeff Walker. You know, a brilliant, a brilliant methodology for launching a product. Well, if you follow the typical four video format that shows you right there that 3 of the videos, 75 of the campaign have nothing to do whatsoever with the product. It's not about the product. Right. It's about the right, it's about the solution, it's about the mechanism, it's about the prospect, it's shaping their perspective beliefs. And it's only until the fourth of four videos that the product is laid out and discussed in an offer presented. And so yeah man, that's the reality. That's why, you know, a lot of marketers are just trying to sell and they're trying to compete by selling harder than their, than their competitors. And what's happening is a lot of prospects today are they're more jaded, they're more skeptical than ever before because they're exposed to more marketing and advertising messages than ever before. And those, those type of, those entrepreneurs with that type of approach are only tapping into a very small segment of the market.

Oh yeah, yeah. And you know, another, another sort of point to the sort of targeting that sort of broader niche that's sort of unaware. I think it was the book 22 immutable laws of Marketing. I'm not sure, but there's this whole concept of whoever sort of introduces you to the problem. The person or company that introduces you to the problem is most likely the company that's going to get your business when you're looking for a solution to that problem. Even if they're not ready right now, if they introduced you to that problem, you're probably the first resource that they're going to go back to.

Yeah, that was recent Trout. And you're absolutely right. I mean, you know, I think that you're absolutely right and they are likely right. But from my perspective, the thing that I saw that just blew me away when I first was exposed to it and learned it and came to understand it was that you can convert.

A chunk of people from the unaware segment without needing a long marketing and sales cycle. So right. Like look, the, you know, it's, it's funny because, you know, at the end of the day, so many marketers get caught up in sales conversion, right? Like, they want to know, like, what's your sales conversion? It's 8%, it's 6%, it's 5%, it's 10%, it's 12% of 3%.

Right?

The truth is, I don't really care. Like, I couldn't care less about what my sales conversion rate is. I care what ROI is, right? I want to know for every dollar I put out, how much I get back, right? The reality. And I say that only in this context because, you know, I, I'm, I'm fine with going to a lower segment, a lower level of awareness, and having my sales conversion rate go way down if that means I acquire more customers and my ROI goes up. And so, right, like, things like opt in rate, sales conversion rate, order form, completion rate, upsell, take rate. Those are optimization metrics. Those are met that you use to improve a campaign. They're not metrics that you use to determine the viability of a campaign, the quality of a campaign. And so, yeah, that's huge right there.

Just, just saying that. I think a lot of people get caught up in all the weeds. It's all that little minor details, all those little metrics, because, you know, we have access to all that shit right now very easily, anybody starting out. But like you said, it's focus on the roi. It's almost bringing people into your little circle. So maybe it's a Facebook group, email list, Chatbot list, whatever the hell it is, some sphere of influence that you have over them.

It's like, you're so right, man. And it's like this, dude, I couldn't agree more. The funny thing, the weird thing is, right, no doubt there are going to be people listening to this that are like, you know, this is, this is too complicated or this is too complex, or the truth is like, first of all, don't let me scare you off in my crazy explanations of these things, because the reality is that over the years, I've really come to see how much simpler. It's simple, it's not necessarily easy, but how much simpler it really is than what I used to think, than what a lot of marketers are led to believe. The reality is that, like, look, you know, there are a couple of marketing metrics, a couple of marketing metrics that you need to know, and that's it. And you could grow a, a monster business. You know, like, you don't need crazy Google Analytics and all that. Stuff like, you don't need that. I'm not saying there's no benefit to it. I'm not saying that you can't do some cool things with it. I'm saying that you don't, you don't need it. And at the root of marketing, understand what we're really talking about, like, let's not lose sight of the fact that, that at the root of this, we're talking to somebody about.

About something that is interesting to them. It's intellectually interesting and it's emotionally compelling. Right. It' something that piques their interest. They want to hear more about it. They feel like. Right. It's something that just intellectually is, you know, it piques their curiosity and something that has a benefit to them, an exciting benefit, a benefit, a change, an improvement and alleviation of pain. And at the foundation, it's our job to show them why what we have and what we're talking about is better, more effective, more efficient, maybe faster, maybe cheaper than any other option out there. And then it's our job to present them with an offer that makes it more difficult to say no than it is. Yes. And that's it. It's psychology, communication and arithmetic. That's it. Fortunately, the arithmetic is just a small handful of some simple numbers. And then it's all about psychology, understanding who you're talking to and communication and how you present your message to tap into that psychology.

Right?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You know, one of the, one of the questions that I have and one of the struggles I have with going after sort of the unaware market is how do you target an unaware market? So say, for example, Agora Financial, how do they know what people to put their stuff in front of? Because it seems like if they just went on Facebook and said, let's advertise to just everybody.

They'D lose their shirts on it. So how do you, how do you actually target and figure out who to put this stuff in front of if it's, if you're trying to target an unaware market.

Yeah, so that's a great question. So let's move beyond Agora Financial, because Agora Financial, they've got such a track record. They know, let's say, call it for argument's sake, you know, men, you know, white males over the age of 55, you know, that are more right wing conservatives. So, but let's take, for example, let's take a kind of an easier base level or basic level example. And so you guys know that about a year and a Half ago or so, I released a tracking application called Conversion Fly. Since then, actually, as of yesterday, I was allowed to make it public, but since then it's been acquired and so I don't own it or operate the app anymore. But when we launched, the app was a tracking application. It was designed for marketers like us, direct response marketers. It tracks some 20, I think today, 20 different direct response marketing metrics. It was unlike anything else out on the market at the time. And so.

When I launched Conversion Fly, what the typical entrepreneur would have done is the typical entrepreneur would have created or the typical marketer would have created a marketing campaign all about tracking and all about, you know, like, what's the best way to track or tracking secrets that nobody's ever taught you? Or like, right, like, or even they might have just launched it talking about, like, why, you know, the 17 things that conversion Fly does that no other tracking application does and why you need it in your business. But that's not the route that I went because I knew at the time, and it's, it's unfortunately still true today, that there's only a small percentage of the, of the market that is interested in, in tracking or a tracking application. Right? There's a monster chunk of the market that doesn't even know the value of tracking. And so they're not even thinking about the inadequacy of their tracking application or why they want a new one. They're not in the market for that. And so I created a marketing campaign that was all about the difference between a mathematical marketer and an assumption marketer and what the experience is like. And I basically started the campaign was all about tapping into the, the current experience that the average online marketer was having when trying to make decisions about their marketing, when trying to choose what they should pay per click, when trying to choose what traffic channels to tap into, when trying to choose how to a marketing campaign, when trying to understand where they, where they should invest more money and where they should spend less. I wanted to tap into that experience. And that's right, that allowed me to go down to the unaware segment, the unaware as it relates to tracking and start off with this mathematical marketer versus assumption marketer and then eventually lead them into the message. So I talked about, like, look, if, if this is you, if you're, if you're guessing at this, if you're assuming this, if you're going on opinion, if you're operating in the dark, you are what's called an assumption marketer. What you need to understand is that the best marketers operate as mathematical marketers. Here's the difference. And so I educated on the difference and I educated on the difference in experience and I even went the distance of educating on the different types of metrics that mathematical marketers use and, and, and what those metrics mean and how those met metrics drive their decisions. And I gave examples and I, and I, and I showed it. And what I did was by the end of the marketing portion of that campaign, I led prospects to recognize why they no longer wanted to operate like an assumption marketer and why they wanted to operate like a mathematical marketer. And I led them to recognize. All right, you want to understand lifetime value, you want to understand break even speed, you want to understand front end transaction value? You, you want to understand these, these handful of, of of metrics? Well, of course, the metrics that I was talking about in that campaign were inside of conversion fly.

Yep.

So it'll, so I created demand for the app before I introduced the app. So I was able to educate and I was able to target, in this case, I was able to target based on, you know, call it, you know, profession if you will, you know, online entrepreneurs. Now not everybody was, you know, that doesn't mean that every single entrepreneur is, is the market. But because we, because we, me, you and most of your listeners use two step marketing, meaning we're driving to an opt in page. We're lead generating out of the mass market, right. So we're putting out, we're putting bait in the water and then we're saying, hey, whoever wants this, this, whoever comes over and starts looking at this bait, nibbling on this bait, we know that that's, that's our target. Every other fish that doesn't come over, we know that they're not, they're not our target. And so does that make sense?

Yeah, then, and then I guess you could kind of start zeroing it in. You could start looking at the data and going, okay, our typical customer is male, over 50 and likes these magazines or something.

Sure, sure. Yeah, you can certainly get to, you can certainly eventually over time, especially after you're acquiring customers. Customers. And you can do kind of a reverse analysis of your customer database to see what are the commonalities amongst your customer database and then what are other sources that attract that exact kind of, you know, customer avatar, real customer avatar. Not just a made up one or assumed one, but initially, like I said, you know, remember that the, you know.

We'Re lead generating out of the mass, out of the mass market. And so, right, you're not investing like.

You'Re lead generating out of the mass market and then you're getting aggressive, so to speak, from a marketing and sales perspective with those people that have responded. And so, yeah, and oftentimes I'll tell you this, it's kind of a really interesting thing because you know what a lot of marketers miss when they're looking to scale their campaigns and they're looking to scale their customer acquisition is most marketers, they fight over the same pools. Right. It's kind of like there are very obvious pools, pockets of prospects and, and that's where they go. Right. They target the same, like, you know, 90% target the same. And but what you've got to realize is that there are lots of other places that your target audience, that your demographic profile, that your psychographic profile may and does congregate and you can still use those sources even like you, there may be magazines that they read that it's the Rob Report and it has nothing to do with stock investing. But that's a great place to, let's say, run a lead gen ad because even though it's not about finances and investing and whatnot, it's still being distributed to a massive chunk of your target audience, let's just say. Right, yeah.

The same reason you see all the Viagra ads in golf magazines.

There you go. Exactly.

So let's get back really quick before we get too far out. The big idea. I know you said you wanted to kind of circle back on that. Do you want to talk about that really quick?

Yeah. Just the single most valuable marketing lesson that I've Learned in the 15 plus years that, that I've been doing this and, and that again, that was one of those that came from Mark Ford. And the big idea is just this. It's, it's this idea. And today, it's, it's more important today than it's, than, than it's ever been. And the big marketing idea is, what is the idea behind your marketing campaign? Like. Right. Like it's not like it's, you know, today because your prospects are exposed to so many marketing messages and so many advertisements and so many headlines and so many claims all over the place from the Internet to radio to satellite, to TV to billboards, to cars, to road signs, like the direct mail.

It's the idea of like to cut through the clutter, to cut through the noise, to get attention and create engagement. You can't simply scream a louder promise that does not work anymore. Right. Simply exaggerating Your claim even more, blowing up your promise even more. Today, in order to get attention, you need an arresting, compelling, new and different. Different idea. Right. And a new and interesting idea. It was Mark Ford that first said to me when I asked him what's really been responsible for Agora's meteoric rise, you know, and I thought he was going to say it was our copy or it was the size of our list or our budget or the amount of traffic we got, but that's not at all what he said. What Mark said to me was that we realized early on that we are really in the idea business. That's the business that we're in. We're in the business of developing arresting, startling, compelling ideas. Fresh, timely ideas. Ideas that people want to talk about, ideas that people want to dig into, ideas that people see as new and fresh that triggers an aha moment, a feeling of discovery. And ideas that are emotionally compelling because they either are explicit or implicit about a big, exciting, audacious payoff. Not an over exaggerated payoff. Right. But a believable payoff. And so that, you know, the, when I really came to understand and really grasp the importance of the idea and how it all begins with the idea and the quality of the idea first, before you write a single word of copy, before you craft any part of your marketing campaign, that's when the game really started to change for me as an entrepreneur and a marketer. And so, yeah.

Would you call that kind of like the big why behind or even doing something in the first place? Because I feel like people just jump right into action. I'm going to sell the hell out of this software tool. But it's like, okay, let's talk about why people need to it. Why are we going to approach things in this way?

And then no, I think that, that, I think what you're talking about is insanely valuable and insanely important. And I think that more marketers and entrepreneurs need to do that for sure. No doubt.

Yeah.

But in this context, what we're really talking about is most marketers, what they do is they immediately jump to and this, and I could say this because this is exactly what I used to do. They jump to, well, what, what's the benefit? What's the big payoff? What's the, what's the promise? Right? Like, and, and that's important and that's critical and that's at the root and found great marketing campaign. But what they, what they do is they never think about like what's the, the hook behind this entire message that I am bringing into the marketplace. It's kind of like this. They, they go to work working on the title of the movie and thinking about like, what are they going to put on the poster before they ever think about what is the idea behind this movie that's going to grab people and make them go, oh my gosh, I've never seen anything like that. I've never heard anything like that. What the heck about. Right? They go to work on the copy, on the headline and they immediately start, they take, all right, this is the benefit how to grow back hair, right? How to grow hair fast. And they say, all right, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna. Let me. What's the best headline that I could put together? And they go, and they look at competitors and they say, all right, so they, they said how to grow hair really fast or how to grow hair back in five days. So I'm gonna go like, how to grow an amazing quantity of hair back. Like if you are on steroids and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And the underlying idea behind their entire campaign is no different than everything else that the prospect has heard. And that's why when you don't build a marketing campaign on a big idea, what happens is your prospects experience what I call mental opt out. It's when they come to the first page in your marketing campaign, they read your headline, which is just the, the, it's the vehicle to communicate your idea. And then they say, oh, that, I've heard that, I've seen that. There's a book on that. There's a YouTube video on that. So and so has a blog post on that. There's a mini course on that. Oh, right. More of the same. What prevents that? Right? And let me say this. That like, look, you saying how to grow huge tomatoes, right? When your competitors are saying how to grow big tomatoes. Tomatoes, or you saying how to grow huge tomatoes in, in 24 hours, regardless of where you live, what the temperature is, or if you have any experience compared to your competitors saying how to grow big tomatoes, you're still presenting the same idea, right? Word Smithing. The headline isn't changing the idea. It's changing how the idea is being articulated, but it's not changing the idea, right? The underlying idea, like, look, if you had an idea for a movie and that idea for a movie was like a kid goes to school and he gets bullied, right? And you decided to change it where you know, all right, he's a, a young kid, a scrawny kid, he's a kid. That, right, like that has three siblings and he, and he drives a truck to school and he's. It's still the same idea underneath. Right? Right. And before you write the copy, before you try to tweak the copy, before you try to wordsmith the headline, you need to have a big idea. That's what separates Agora from, from all the other companies out there. And the really interesting thing that should be exciting to everybody listening to this, it's. It excites me to this very day, after all these years of knowing this and using this and doing this, is that the beauty is that agora is the 800 pound gorilla. And they do not do 99% of the stuff that most online marketers do attempt, buy and so on. They don't use the crazy WordPress plugins. They're not tapping into 600 different social media channels. They're not enamored with all those little kind of bells and whistles. They focus, like my friend Marielle and Trivi would say, they focus on the things that scream, not the things that whisper. And the things that scream are the big idea, the marketing argument and the offer.

That makes a lot of sense.

I love that, man. That was good. You were flowing.

Yeah. So before I move into these next couple questions we have. How much time do you have? Because we do have like two or three more questions. We wanted to dive in with you, but I wanted to be very respectful of your dad.

Yeah, fire away, man. Let's do, let's take care of all three of them, man.

Cool. So the next sort of topic I wanted to shift into was more of the automation topic because I know your blog is more marketing funnel automation and you've got some amazing content over there. So I want to talk about automation for a second and ask your opinion on what you think the most important things to start automating are versus which things you should handle yourself. You know, if somebody was just kind of diving into the world of automation, what would be your first couple items that you should say? Definitely get out of doing that.

Well, so are you talking about from a marketing perspective or are you talking about as an entrepreneur running a business?

I would say an entrepreneur running a business.

Wow, that is.

That'S a great question. I think that. Let me, let me think for one second. So from an automation perspective, as an entrepreneur, what are some of the first things that I would recommend? Well, I think, and this is going to depend on the.

This is certainly going to depend on the business, but I think that very quickly, very quickly, your Folks, the folks, your listeners should have somebody else that's doing customer support and they shouldn't be doing customer support. And one of the things that kind of one of the perspectives that I took with customer support early on, and it's a little bit different from the mainstream approach, is that instead of first focusing on how to make sure that our customer support person was dialed and they had all the right systems that they needed to execute their role, I really thought about what are the automated systems that I could put in place to cut down on the number of people that would even get to that support person. Right. So what is it that we could put in place? Like, could we put automated FAQs? Could we have a feature where if somebody asked a question that based on that question, it would immediately display three different answers for them and ask them, like, do any of these answer your question? And so I would look for, first and foremost, I would get out of customer support when the time is, is, is. Is right. And really, if you're doing like, look for, for your folks, if you're doing an hour of customer support a day, you need to delegate that. You need to bring somebody aboard, even if it's just for an hour a day, because that's an hour a day that you could be spending on marketing, on selling, on a business growth activity. And your time is worth a heck of a lot more than what you could pay somebody to do that customer support. The first thing that I would do is I would strive to automate, like I said, automate as much of the communication before people get to the support person. And so does that make sense?

That makes perfect sense. And we 100% agree with you. And it's not just the amount of time you're spending too. There's also a mental energy that's expended by handling support. If you're seeing the people that might want refunds or the people that might cancel on your subscription, membership or whatever, there's sort of like a mental bandwidth that I think entrepreneurs have to see that stuff. You know, you could have 100 customers that love your stuff and one customer that writes in pissed off about something, and your mind will go to that one person all the time that's pissed off. And there's that, that mental element that, that was important for me when we hired our support person to get that off of us.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And, and no, it's great, great point from a marketing perspective. Let me throw one out that, and if this gets a little deep or too advanced, just let Me know that's.

Gonna be my follow up question anyway, so perfect.

What was that was going to be.

My follow up question anyway is from a marketing perspective, what would you recommend to automate?

Yeah, like so there's so much that you know that should be automated. I mean, my gosh, the reality is that the majority, you know, should be automated. There's no reason for it not to not to be automated. But one of the things that a lot of marketers are missing is what we call at MFA a cycle. Or sometimes it's referred to as a gauntlet. And basically the easiest way to really talk about it or the most simplistic explanation would be it is a smart autoresponder. And I say smart. There are lots and lots of tools that you can use today to do this. But it's what I would call a smart autoresponder that follows up with unconverted leads and introduces them to new marketing campaigns based on what it is that they've seen or haven't seen before. So what I mean by that is let's say you've got three different marketing campaigns, right? You're, let's say that's all you know, you have three marketing campaigns in your business.

And for three different products. And so you've got A, B and C. And so let's say you run, you're running a Facebook ad and you're driving people in prospects into marketing campaign A. And so folks go into marketing campaign A and two things happen in the end, either somebody becomes a customer, client of yours, patient, you know, they buy or they don't. And so they go through that campaign and they come out the other side and they are still a prospect. Well, what happens is what a lot of marketers do is they will drop that prospect onto just a broadcast email list. Meaning that, right? They just go on a list and then when the time is right, the marketer, the entrepreneur, oral broadcast emails out to them. But the smarter thing to do is to drop them into a cycler. And in this simple example, what the cycler would then do is the cycler would check and the cycler would say, okay, this person has already gone through marketing campaign A. Let's see if they went through marketing campaign B. Okay, they have not gone through marketing campaign B. So let's send them content to see if they're interested in that topic. Topic. And then it lead generates out of its. It's kind of like we lead generate out of our own list.

For the next campaign. Now like we may send for example like, let's say we send an article. Let's say we send out an email about a blog post on up on how to romance your spouse. And. And the prospect doesn't click on that. The next day we might send out another. A video about romancing your spouse. Your spouse. Let's say the prospect doesn't click on that. The next day we move them on to the next stage of the cycler for the next marketing campaign. Now, if the prospect, if another prospect did click on that, showing interest in that topic, we take them out of the cycle, and now we put them into the marketing campaign for that particular product, assuming we had a product for romancing your. Your spouse, at the end of that, they either buy or they don't buy. If they don't buy, they go back into the cycler. The cycler checks and says, oh, this person already saw marketing campaign A. Did they see marketing campaign B? Yes, they saw marketing campaign B. Did they see marketing campaign C? No. Boom. Now it introduces them to that. That topic. And so what you're doing is you're cycling them through your different content, and the content that you're cycling them through is related to a specific offer. And so you are then determining what marketing they should be exposed to next based on their behavior, based on their expressed interest.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

Oh, no, you're marketing. Yeah, no, that's. That's pretty brilliant. We're, We're. We've actually started to set up something similar to that in our business.

Some of it makes my head spin when I'm trying to make sure that people aren't receiving 15 emails in a day. But I've actually started setting up campaigns. We actually use Drip, which does allow you to add various tags and move them to different campaigns based on the tags. And there's actually a pixel on our website from Drip. So Drip can actually see when any of our subscribers land on any of our web pages. So what it's actually doing is if somebody listens to a podcast that we did about copywriting, it's going to tag them in Drip with a copywriting interest. So we've essentially started the process of tagging people based on the stuff that they've read on our blog. But that's about as far as we've gotten. They're not going into new sequences yet based on what they're tagged with.

Yeah, but that's cool. That's the first, Right? It's one step at a time. And there's a couple things too, as it relates to automation. That I'll just throw out there. Number one, you don't have to wait until you have a complete, like, automated system. Like, you know, like, we didn't wait until we had a complete cycler. Like, I started with, like, the first two. You know, like, we had two. Two different offers in there, like, and I was just like, let's publish it. I said, public, publish the cycler with two offers, put people into the cycler, because by the time they get to the end of the second one, we're going to have the third one in there, and then we're going to have the fourth one. And we just kept updating it and so don't wait until you have the. The thing complete. The. The other thing that I would say kind of on the reverse side of that is, you know, is that make sure that the thing that you're automating works first. Right. So it's. It's. Right. Like, it's, you know, it's why you don't want to set up an automated evergreen webinar until you've tested it live, proven that it works before you automate it it, or else you're just going to have something automated that doesn't work.

Right. Yeah. No, that's great. That's some great advice.

Good stuff, man. So before getting too far, I think the E5 camp, did we want to touch on that really quick? I don't know. Did you want to ask anything about that, Matt? I know we had it on our notes here.

Actually, what I want to. What I wanted to ask first, and it'll probably segue into the E5 camp, was I wanted to talk because last time you and we talked, you were telling us a little bit about your strategy to get affiliates excited and on board with some of the products that you promote. And you do that very strategically with your sort of E5 camp process. So I wanted to touch on that and then actually go into what the E5 camp was.

Yeah. So I'll tell you that. So we don't. I don't do a whole lot with partners. I'm a big believer in the most amount of. The greatest amount of scalability in a business. The most amount of security, reliability, stability comes from cold traffic. I learned early on my buddy Rich Sheffrin, who was also an early mentor of mine, said to me one day that you don't have a business until you can afford to pay for the acquisition of customers. Right? Like, so for those folks that are reliant on search engine rankings, their business is insanely Vulnerable for those people that are reliant on affiliates for. Right. Businesses, you know, incredibly vulnerable. So I don't do a whole lot with affiliates, but very recently when I wanted to do a large public release of the E5 camp masterclass, right. This is a. This is a. The masterclass which teaches the E5 camp method is really my life's work up to this point in direct response. And so I wanted to get it out there. And so what I decided to do was I wanted to reach out to partners, as you guys know. And I didn't want to send out an email and just say, hey, would you promote me? I wanted to give value first. It's kind of at the root of what I try to do in all our marketing campaigns and everything we do. And so we sent out, we spent a bunch of money to send out these really fancy pants invitations. You know, you guys know you. You got one. You know, we spent about $40 per invitation. We had these boxes done with the satin over it, whatever, and our logo engraved in this box and blah, blah, blah. And we brought in partners. I think we had, I don't remember 40 some odd people in the room.

In Orlando. And we didn't charge anything. We fed them for, you know, for two days. We had like a cocktail dinner reception the night before. And I poured my heart and soul into it. And my kind of my perspective on that was number one, that I knew that I would wow these prospective partners with the material. First of all, I just felt good knowing that I was doing good. I was building goodwill, I was giving value, I was giving.

Second, I knew that they were going to be blown away by the methodology and the framework. But I also knew that I was tapping into the law of reciprocity. And I knew that, right, like, just for me, pouring my heart and soul into them for two days, that it was going to increase the likelihood of them wanting to give back something to me and, and promote. I also knew that I was going to have a video crew there. And the whole purpose of the video. We didn't video the whole thing, like to resell it or anything like that. I just got video of these, a room of whatever it was, 40 some odd people looking at me, right? So some of the best marketers in the Internet marketing community looking at me, watching me, I knew it could. It would only. I would do something with it. It could only benefit my positioning. And then we ended up getting a bunch of folks, about 15 of the people there on camera with me talking about how great the event was. And so it just led to a monster amount of social proof, a monster amount of reciprocity, and it led to the, you know, a big, A big, big, big chunk of those people promoting. And. Yeah, and so that's kind of. That's how we went about getting partners.

I think that's just clever because a lot of people who are getting into the game or maybe just want to dabble with getting partners, some JVs really go about it, and it kind of goes back to this whole awareness thing. They're just going for the sale, they're going for the. The pitch too fast, you know, before they actually create a friendship. I mean, creates. I mean, that's, that's just, you know, it's like dating, you know.

How often do we see emails? I'm sure Todd gets them almost a daily basis. Joe and I get them on almost a daily basis from people saying, hey, I've got this new product coming out, and it's literally a copied and pasted email with. They don't even take the time to personalize the email and say, hey, I love your blog, or anything like that. They'll just copy and paste emails to 100 people and hope to pick up affiliates.

I mean, how effective people are. You're absolutely right. And I get multiple emails like that. Either emails or, you know, or Facebook messages every day. I delete them. I don't even read them. I delete them. And here's the thing. I would say this. Here's my, My perspective on reaching out. You know, I know that it's. It's. It's a common thought, you know, like, like I've heard people talk about, like, give value to, you know, give value, do. Do something for these people. I look at it a little differently because the reality is I've had multiple people that have reached out and asked, like, what can I do for you? What can. And, And I appreciate it, and I'm honored by it, but I don't think I've ever taken anybody up on that. What does move me? What? What does.

What does move me is when. When I see one of two things being done. One is they've done something creative to get my. To get my attention, right? They've done something creative and. Or they've invested time or money in the way they've gone about reaching out to me, right? And I think that there's something from a marketing perspective, even from a persuasion and psychology perspective, that somebody sends me something in the mail and I open it, and it's whatever it's a letter that they wrote to me. I can't just throw it out like that. Like, I could never do that. I feel terrible doing that. And that's because of what the effort that I see they put into it. So when I know that somebody's put the effort in or they've done something creative, I always. I always take the time to. To go through it because I feel like they've earned it. They deserve it.

It's like, Matt, saving your box that he. That he sent. That you sent him.

Yeah.

The E5 kit box that you sent, I actually still have it on my shelf. I'm like, I can't throw this away. This thing looks too valuable.

It was $40.

Yeah. Let me tell you something. Something. I have six extras. I can't throw those six extras away.

That's awesome, man.

So I'm with you. Sweet.

Good.

Cool.

It's all about getting creative and being different, you know, so.

All right, thanks so much to Todd Brown for doing that call with us. We actually lost connection with him, unfortunately, and, you know, we didn't. We didn't get to finish asking our last couple questions, but before the cutout, we did have a chance to ask him about his favorite books that he recommends. So go ahead. What was one of them?

So one was Ready, Fire, Aim by Michael Masterson.

Yep.

And that's. That is a solid book. He mentioned Michael Masterson or Mark Ford. That's his other. Well, his pen name is Masterson.

Yeah.

Brilliant dude. He has a whole bunch of books, but that's probably one of his best ones. So he's. He's that whole guy behind Agora or one of the big brains behind there. The other one was what, Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Shorts.

Yeah. Great. Great book. A little bit harder to find these days. A little more pricey of a book, but definitely a ton of value in that book.

Well, what's the other one, Matt? The yellow book. It's not totally breakthrough advertising, but it has elements of it.

Something advertising.

The advertising solution.

Yes. So that's a. The advertising solution. That's actually one that our buddy, Omari Brassard. Shard. Sorry, Omari. He actually mentioned that on his podcast, so you could check that out there too. But that is a solid book if you want to learn. Learn copywriting and all that stuff.

And make sure to check out Marketing Funnel Automation, Todd's main website, and also his E5 camp. Joe and I are actually flying out to Orlando in what, a week and a half?

Yep.

To. To go meet with Todd Brown and learn what his E5 camp is all about. So we'll be reporting back after that and sharing more about what E5 is all about. And again, we just want to thank Todd for. For joining us. Unfortunately, we. We did lose him there at the end, but we got some amazing stuff.

Stuff. Dang Internet. It's all good. All right, we'll catch you next time. Thank you.

See you later. Bye.

Hey, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast. Now, if you want to learn more and hear from us every single month, which a lot of people do, it's pretty fun. We actually write this thing called the Evergreen Prophets Letter, and that is a printed newsletter that we actually send to hundreds of people every. Every single month to your doorstep. So you actually get it in the mail. You can read this sucker. You can highlight it, you can dog ear. You can scratch some stuff out. If you don't like that one, you say no. Joe and Matt, that's not cool for me. But you can take a lot of different strategies, about 15 or so from every single issue, and it's really cool. So basically, these are actionable strategies that you can use in your business right away to test out and pretty much build on what you already have going on.

So.

So check it out. It's at www.egpletter.com. it's pretty amazing, and you should go check it out, see what it's all about.

Boom.