EP 69: Is Marketing a Cost or Investment?

Welcome to the making of a DM Marketing. Is it a cost or an investment? Your answers will tell me which one you think it is. Stay tuned, listen to the show, and be ready for your mind to be expanded. So with that said, let's get started.

Couple freedom. There ain't no question mark. Kevin's when he stepping the doubt, he's closing deals. Time to tell him what the DM stand for. I'm a deal maker. A deal maker. But I'm not just a deal maker. I'm a dream maker.

Hey there, it's your boy, Mark Evans, dm. That's right. You might hear the birds chirping, the turkeys gobbling and the deer rustling and maybe a couple black squirrels and some robins and actually saw a couple cardinals today. Thank you for being here. Today's show can change your life. I mean that 1000%. This is going to make you feel very uncomfortable. More than likely it's going to challenge what you think. I know for sure. This is something I wish I would have learned 25 years ago. Shit, I wish I would have learned this in fifth grade, to be honest with you. Because what I'm going to share with you can literally make you as much money as humanly possible. And that's why you're here, I hope, is because you want to make a shit ton of money. You want to have a better life. You want to be able to spend more time with your family, because that's what really money's buying you time. And that's at least that's what it buys me. Some people keep making more, working harder to make more, to work harder to make more. But I really just want to make a lot of money to use the money to buy me time to enjoy life and do other cool stuff. As I'm sitting here today, out back again here overlooking this ravine, beautiful summer day. I have a lot of things to share with you, but I want to stop for a second and say again, thank you so much, you guys. Last week's episode was huge. Got so much feedback and positive feedback, which is awesome about the new economy and understanding what that really means, where you're at and where you're going. So I always appreciate you guys messaging me. More importantly, I appreciate you guys sharing it. I get messages every day. It's very humbling. I'm just honored that you would, you know, take two minutes out of your day and shoot me a message or go over to Amazon, leave a review for the book economy or go over to itunes and leave a Five star review and all that shit. It's very important to me and it means a lot and I appreciate that. So today's show, I just want to share something, like I said, that will change your life. It continues to change my life every day. It's something I'm putting forth effort all the time. And I know we talk a lot about mindset and all this shit because at the end of the day, that's all this stuff really is. But once you have the mindset, then you start gaining the knowledge, adding the mindset, growing the mindset, growing the knowledge base. All these things start growing your health, your wealth and everything in between. So today's show is about marketing, the power of marketing. My first question to you is, how much money do you spend on marketing per month? These are notes that you should be asking yourself. How much money? And something that drives me nuts. The reason the show's so timely. I was talking with an individual over the weekend and I was like, hey man, what kind of marketing you doing? Oh, I, I don't do any marketing. I have word of mouth marketing. Do you know how fucking stupid that is to say if you're a business owner, the only thing you're doing is word of mouth? First of all, word of mouth marketing is amazing. But truthfully, it's only icing on the cake. It's not a behavior you can actually manage. Like, I can't sit here and build a business saying, okay, today I'm gonna get 17 leads because of word of mouth marketing. No, I gotta say, hey, I gotta get in front of 10,000 people, I gotta have 1400 downloads and out of those 1400 downloads, I gotta get 25x. And then out of those 25x, I'm X, right? It's a formula. Word of mouth marketing, don't get me wrong, is something we all want, right? By the way, word of mouth marketing works in both ways too, good and bad. Actually, when it's bad, it works against you a lot faster than the good word of mouth marketing. Again, I'm not saying don't strive to have great word of mouth marketing, but trust me when I tell you that is not a business model. There is no fucking way you're ever going to be able to sell a real business with just basic word of mouth marketing. You have to constantly be marketing. And by the way, I see a lot of guys out there, big guys, is like, I don't fucking spend any money marketing my podcast show or my books. Well, yes you do, fuckwad. You have a podcast show, that's called marketing. You have a book that's called marketing. You're cross marketing both environments. Your book references your podcast, your podcast references your book. So yeah, you do market. You're just doing it in a different manner. Oh, by the way, your social media posts that you fucking post 17 times a day, driving them to your podcast, driving them to your books, and driving them to your website, et cetera. That's called marketing as well, you know, so don't get it twisted when people say, I don't spend any money on marketing. Well, listen, spending money, first of all, you're not spending, you're investing. Because for every dollar you put in, there couldn't be an equation that comes out on the back end. Like, for example, If I spend $1000 today on Facebook ads using that as an example, by the way. And my goal is to get $10 leads, a name, email and phone number that I could, you know, I could expect a hundred leads today. That's the formula. Now listen, that doesn't happen every time. The formula might be $20 a day, tomorrow might be $7 a day for the lead. So where I see a lot of people really screw up on marketing is they get too micro, they overanalyze micro moments. And sometimes that is just fucking wonky, to be honest with you. It's like, what the hell just happened? Right? As opposed to like, look, let's look at seven days. I'm not saying not pay attention, but it's not something you should change your entire marketing message and model off of. 12 minute data, 24 hour data. Like, you have to let it slow, you have to let it work. You have to understand why you're marketing. And folks, I'm telling you this. I've invested millions of dollars with marketing gurus, by the way, over the years. Dan Kennedy, I mean, Matt Fury. There's many, many, many marketing great marketers out there that would smoke me any day. These guys are copywriters, slash marketers. You've definitely seen their products on tv, products that they've helped create infomercials for really cool stuff. But I've invested since 05, when I really start. Actually, yeah, probably 2000, early 2000s, when I really started investing, because 1996, I had my. That's when I had the gutter company. I had no clue that marketing was a thing because the phone just rang. But what happened is if you want to get massive consistency, you got to be consistent on the marketing. And if you're like me for first, like 10 years of my life. I was riding the financial rollercoaster up and down, like wondering why the hell am I making massive amounts of money this month? But next month is really rough and really if what it all dialed down to, and I've talked about this as well, I've actually fired an accountant because of it. I was having a bad month financially and they said, hey, you need to stop marketing. I literally looked at em as if they were from Mars, which when you say stupid shit like that, you clearly are, and fired them on the spot because they clearly have no fucking clue how real business is done. I'd rather not take a salary and market straight up. See, the thing is, with marketing is like I keep saying, it's a formula. Marketing genuinely is a formula of paid marketing. I see a lot of people using social media, which is awesome. And the more followers you have, the more opportunities, more eyeballs. The game of marketing really comes down to eyeballs and ears, right? Hence you're listening to this podcast show. I have your attention for however long I talk and share knowledge with you. I'm marketing without marketing. I'm not paying anything to market. Actually. I am just in a different way, taking time away from my business. This is something I genuinely love to do and want to do. But the truth is there's a percentage of people that will listen to this show and want to do business with me, by the way, that many people have. I don't even have the formula because I'm not here for the formula. I'm here for the. The share. But I do know people that build podcast shows just for formulas and figure out how to extract. I know a buddy, I know a guy, has seven different podcast shows and all he does is do podcast shows. That's his marketing channel. Pretty cool channel by the way. He makes a lot of money, but it's a grind. Seven shows every single week. It's a lot of moving parts. Again, there's no right or wrong to this shit. Well, there's wrong. Not marketing's wrong, but there's no right or wrong in the channels as long as you commit to a channel and stick with it and build it. Podcast shows are amazing social media. You know, Maybe you have 200 followers today and you're thinking there's no way out. Just so you know, newsflash, we all started with zero, all of us. I think I have a little over a hundred thousand now and I want to get to a million and then I want to get to 2 million. Then I want to get to 5 million. Why? The more eyeballs, the more ears that you have access to, the more revenue you're going to generate. That's just the way it works. What's really cool about social media is you got the stories, then you got, you know, your post. And by the way, I'm talking about Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, anything. I don't really do LinkedIn. I'm mostly focused on Facebook and Instagram. Not because one's better than the other, it's just I'm comfortable inside of Facebook. I'm comfortable inside of ig. I've invested a lot of time and energy and money with different people helping me, so I get those. I understand those platforms are easy, they tie together obviously, but LinkedIn's good too, if you're in the business world. I know a lot of people use LinkedIn. It's just, I do know the way I work is if I spread myself too wide, nothing gets done. I have to just get singular focus, build Facebook, Facebook. IG comes out. It took me a long time to get on ig. I was a little late to the party, but I got to the party finally and I'm starting to get a little bit of traction. If you follow me on Instagram, which I hope you do, Ark Evans dm I'm constantly showing like real life. I think that's what's cool about Instagram and whatever other platforms have this capabilities is I just shoot quick little snippets, 15, you know, to 30 to 45, 60 second clips of me hanging out with my family recently. I was on, you know, my son, he has these little electric bikes, we have three of them, motorcycles. And me, my wife and my daughter, my son are rolling around on it. So it's just fun. Like I'm just sharing real life stuff that's going on in my life. And by the way, that's marketing, you know what I mean? I'm not, I'm not like there to sell you anything. I'm there to ingrain my belief system of what I believe in and what I'm passionate about, I. E. My family. I don't talk about it as much, I just show you. So, you know, a lot of people say, oh dude, I'm a great family man. Thirteen seconds later they're at the strip club trying to bang the stripper and they go, you know, then and they don't want to go home because they hate their wife or their kids or whatever. So I'm just sharing straight up again. I'm not judging that person. If that's what they do. Fuck it, let them do what they want to do. But for me, marketing is about the world we live in today. It's never been easier. Like, you don't need huge budgets, by the way. I spend massive six figures a month. I'm trying to get the millions a month in marketing and different businesses I own. One company does over $500,000 a month and spend another one. I mean, we have a bunch of different companies globally definitely spend over a million dollars plus a month in advertising, on email, on Instagram, on Facebook, etc. So we're spending a decent amount of money. I want to spend a lot more. Why? Well, the more you spend, the more you typically make. Obviously, you got to have the back end to handle the influx. You got to have the infrastructure, etc. The team. And, you know, you're always zigging and zagging. And if anybody's ever advertised with Facebook, you know, sometimes Facebook can be a little fidgety. But I can tell you this. If you're not marketing, if you're not, if you don't have a monthly budget, more importantly, that monthly budget's growing. Your company, or what you call a company, is shrinking every day. You should be spending money. I mean, listen, I think some people might start off with $20 a day, whatever. Like, you just have to start. And if you're, you know, you gotta get eyeballs on you. It's very interesting to me. I meet a lot of great people on different worlds and they have great products. Some people have really amazing products that could change the world, change people's lives. And I ask them, I'm like, well, who knows about this? How many sales a day are you getting? How much are you spending on marketing? These are all key indicators of if this is going to make it or not, by the way. And 99% of time, they're like, yeah, I'm just. I don't have the funds yet to market. Well, you don't need the funds necessarily to market. There's a lot of ways to market initially, right? Kind of guerrilla marketing style. Send influencers your product, get the product in their hands. You don't have to tell them to take a picture, but if the shit's good enough, they're going to take a picture and say, thanks, Mark, for the awesome product, man. It made me so much more focused and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Tag me, tag the product. Boom. There. Now I'm in front of their audience. If it's 200 people, 200,000 or 2 million or whatever, people. Now all of a sudden I'm starting to get a little bit of momentum and send that out to a hundred different people. People that you feel like are great influencers or great people you want to align your product with and start sending products with a great note. Recently I had a guy send me a pretty cool package in the mail. Handwritten letter which never hurts by the way, and a book from one of his buddies that wrote it and which is cool because I've never read it and I've never even heard of the guy, but I'm excited to read it. He actually walked the Camino de Santiago like I did. 42 day walk, 500 mile walk across Spain, which is really neat. So I kind of have instant connection with this individual. And he also sent me a little preview of his book that he's coming out with and he wrote a pretty cool note to me like that. And he's got a cool product coming out in the protein business world. So of course I'm going to share that. Of course I'm going to say, yo, what's up? Thank you. His name's Mark by the way. Thank you Mark for the great product. I'm going to tag him, he's going to get followers from me now. He's going to grow his eyeballs and ear audience and we both win. And I want you to win. But step back for a second. If you have a great product or a great service and you know it and you're not marketing it, you're a thief. You're a straight up thief. A thief to yourself, a thief to your future self, a thief to your client. So let me put this into perspective. I've had a pretty big real estate investment company and we were doing 50, 100 deals a month to do that kind of volume. If you're not, it's impossible to do unless you're marketing at a real level. So when I would bring people in and I was teaching people how to build their company, the first thing I would do is we have to scale your front end marketing. Once you understand your KPIs, let me explain that. KPI key performance indicators. See, in marketing you have your spend, right? Let's say again back to the thousand. I spent $1,000. How much does it cost to acquire a lead? You know, let's say $100. And then let's say you convert conversions is one out of 10. So you spend 1,000 to get 10 leads to close one deal. So I invested $1,000 on marketing alone. This is one piece of the KPI, and then what is your profit? Let's say in real estate, it's $5,000. So I profit five grand. I knock off 1,000 for marketing. I knock off 1,000 for the acquisition side. The company nets three grand. Again, I'm using these as basic numbers. This is not true numbers. This is just simple math numbers. This is how marketing and understanding your KPIs work. So the first thing I would ask you is, how much does it cost to acquire a customer? And in real estate, it's usually about two to three grand per deal. Right? So let's say it's $2,000. And I'm like, cool, what's your deal volume? Well, I'm doing three deals a month. Awesome. So I'm assuming you're spending about $6,000 a month. Well, probably closer to four. Huh. Well, that's weird because your average deal is $2,000 to acquire, but you're doing three deals a month. Okay, so I get it. Maybe you got some cool referral, marketing, etc. That makes sense. Okay, cool. What I'm trying to explain to you guys right now is understanding your KPI metrics. If you don't understand the numbers, you cannot scale at any level with confidence ever. So let's say he's doing three deals a month and investing 4,000amonth. But here's what always happens. They're always frustrated. And I'm like, all right, John, why are you frustrated, buddy? Well, I want to do 10 deals a month. Cool. What's your marketing budget? Well, I only have five grand a month. Well, how the fuck is that possible then? How is it possible to get 10 deals a month that costs 2,000 a piece? 20 grand? Do you know something? No one else in the world has ever figured out how to get a $2,000 lead for a quarter of the price. Like, let that set in for a minute. How are you trying to tell me you're trying to scale, but you don't have the cash to scale with? Does that make sense to you? This is the world we live in. This is why I was able to excel at real estate, because I understood marketing. See, everyone's like, dude, you're a real estate investor. No, motherfucker, I'm a marketer first period. And then whatever else I'm doing on top of that is the byproduct of marketing. I could sell anything because I understand marketing. That doesn't mean I want to sell everything in anything. I want to sell the things I believe in. I want to get behind people that I love. The products, the, the results, and the kind of clientele I want to be around. That's what I sell. And by the way, what's cool about this is once you really understand what I'm really saying, more importantly, put it into practice, you're going to start enjoying what you do more. And the more you enjoy it, the more you want to do it. The more you make, the more you help people, the more time you get. More importantly, you're building a real fucking business. To me, that's what this is about. It's a formula. So back to this real estate guy, John. I want to do 10 deals a month, but I only have 5,000amonth. This is the angst, this is the, this is the pressure, this is the stress these guys put themselves through. Guys and gals, their expectations are so out of whack, by the way. I'm not talking emotions, I'm talking fucking math. 101, 2000 elite 2000 a deal. To do 10 deals a month on average, I need to budget 20,000amonth. But here's what most people do. Well, Jesus, 20,000amonth, that's a lot of money. My house payment's only 1200amonth. My car payment's 500amonth, blah, blah, blah. If I had 20,000amonth, fuck, I wouldn't even be doing real estate. I'd be doing blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? They don't understand marketing. Again, for every dollar you put in, there's money's coming back. So let's go back to the basic math. If I spent 20 grand and I was making five grand a deal, on average, I would net three of the 5,000 because it cost two grand to do the deal. Again, these numbers are very way off. It's usually 10,000, 12,000, 50,000, depending what market you're in. But again, the higher profit margin markets, the higher cost to acquire that deal. So like, if you're in California, it might cost $30,000 to acquire a deal, but that deal you might make $100,000 on. That's a 300% return on your money, if you understand the math. In Ohio, which I've done thousands and thousands of deals, it might cost 1200-2000 to do a deal. But our average deal, we're making 10 to $20,000. Still not too fucking shabby, by the way. That's like going to the bank and handing them $2,000 and saying, Give me my five grand. They're going to look at you like you're nuts. They'll probably call the cops. That's what's cool about marketing. It really is just math. Once you understand the dynamics, obviously you gotta have a great product, you gotta have a great service, you gotta, you know, you gotta do what you say you're going to do and all that shit. But like, that's a given. I hope you understand that. So I don't care if you're selling jewelry. I have a custom jewelry guy I do a lot of stuff with. I have many different companies I've been involved with. I don't do stuff with Nick, but I've bought jewelry from him. He understands his metrics, he generates a lot of revenue. I've, I've seen people do this in the car industry. Marketing is everywhere, all the time. And this is the real secret to wealth. If you meet anybody that's ultra confident in business, it's because they understand marketing. They believe in their product, they love their product. By the way, guys and gals, I meet a lot of great people that fucking have the best products in the world, but they will never see the day of light until they get out of their own way. This is why they need partners that understand marketing. Truthfully, they've been so busy in the dungeon, if you will, creating this product or service that they actually, it's so fucking good, they forgot to tell anybody about it. You know what I mean? And I've seen it, I've done it myself. So this will take a lot of stress off of you once you understand your KPIs. KPIs. Let me share some other cool secret tricks that I do in my companies as well. Number one, we send out a lot of gifts daily. Daily, not weekly, not monthly, but daily. Depending on where you're financially at, you might not be able to do this, but we send out five figures a month in gifts. Cool gifts, very thoughtful gifts. Not just stuff off, you know, run of the mill, hey, here's a $10 gift card, stuff like that. Shit. But let me give you an example. And by the way, anybody can do this. Everyone can do it. Because social media, everyone tells you what's going on in their life. Hey, I just had a baby. Hey, I just got a new job. Hey, I just became financially free. Hey, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Hey, I just got married. There's, there's a million times to do gifts. By the way. Let me just share another second layer of insight for you. I like to kind of do case study stuff with you guys in social media. And recently I was at the Four Seasons in Palm beach, and I was sharing it. I normally don't share when I'm present because I don't want people to, like, make a big deal of it. But I'm like, yo, I'm here. Happy Thursday. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And Palm beach with the fam hanging out for the night or two or whatever. We were there and one guy knew I was going, and guess what? He did. This is very smart move, by the way. He contacted the hotel and put a $100 gift voucher. He paid $100 for me to do, you know, put towards my room or put towards food and Bev, or put towards the spot. Whatever I want, right? $100. So then they obviously, they tell you, hey, Mr. So and so called in and wanted to give you a hundred dollars, xyz. It's a power player move. It's a very cool thing. By the way. He's the only one that did it. Out of thousands, tens of thousands of people. Not to say everyone should do that. Whatever. I'm just. These are things I do when I see someone that I like or follow or respect or appreciate. It's a cool way to send a little gift. Just let them know, hey, man, enjoy the cocktail on me. I love buying. I love picking up people's meals. People are telling you, hey, I'm hanging out with the fam. I'm at blah, blah, blah, blah Steakhouse. Call the steakhouse, tell them, yo, if you see a guy wearing a blue shirt, you know, nice slacks, xyz, you know, I want to pick up his tab. His name's Steve Johnson. Here's what it is. Here's my credit card info. And then they go tell him, Obviously, it's a huge, impressionable piece. That's marketing, by the way. It's marketing. It's the way to get noticed. It's the way to get recognized. And that's what marketing's about, Getting people to stop, pay attention to your shit. And again, by the way, he might not acknowledge it. That's cool. I'm not doing it for acknowledgement, to be honest with you. It never hurts to be acknowledged, but I'm not doing it for that. But I do know when it happens to me, I always acknowledge the individual. Why would you not? So there's a cool thing I learned in marketing back in the day, Dan Kennedy taught this, where you send out a letter. This. This is like, shows you if you have balls or not, by the way. But you send out a one page letter, and on top of the letter, you put a dollar bill, a real dollar bill, you tape it or staple it to the top of the thing and says, hey, now that I got your attention, I want to give you a dollar for your time. Because this will take about 27 seconds. I know your time's worth something, so no strings attached, the dollar is yours. Take it off, just go do whatever you want with it. And what's cool about it is it actually, you guys understand how we're raised. When someone walks by you and says, hey man, nice shirt, you tip. The average person typically says hey, thank you, nice shirt yourself. As opposed to just saying thank you and moving on. So when you get a dollar in the mail, you almost instinctively want to reply and say, hey, thank you for the dollar and or hey, I'm not interested, but thank you for the dollar. It's a cool piece because again, marketing is not just about selling and closing on the first sale. It's about being recognized, acknowledged. More importantly, connecting. Today maybe is just not the day. Maybe your offer wasn't what they wanted. And I see so many people in business like, dude, my product sucks. No one likes it, it's just not working. Well, maybe that's some of the truth too. But at the end of the day, stop making it about you. Make it about the client. Maybe you don't even know who your fucking client is. This is called an avatar by the way, right? I'm not going to send dick pills to some 22 year old kid that wants to like, doesn't need them. That's not the thing. Right? But with that said, I would ask myself, what does the 22 year old kid want? Well, they typically probably healthy Mel. My audience would be Mel, you know, and they like working out and they like feeling jacked when they work out. So I might sell them some kind of front end supplement that gets their end their skin bubbling when they're working out, itching and scratching and feeling on fire when they're at the gym feeling like they can bench £500 instead of 200 or whatever. Like that's maybe that's the market I go after. And again, there's no right or wrong. This, if you're not marketing, it's the only wrong thing you can do. But you got to know who your avatar is, you got to talk with them, not just put your out there. Don't just throw spaghetti on the wall and see what sticks. That's not how business works. Sometimes it is, but that's not direct. Marketing is not, that's not what you want to do. I. You guys, I talk to you like I would talk to anybody. You know, this is me marketing. I say, if you don't like it, get the out of here. Right? Like that's who I am. I don't, I'm not trying to be your friend. I'm trying to help you. And I hope that comes across that way because it is the truth. And I believe you know that. That's why you're still here. So back to this marketing and gifts. So these are some cool secret tricks. So when you see people advertising, when I say advertising, when you see people in their stories posting like, yo, I'm in Cabo St. Lucas or hey, I'm hanging out, blah, blah, blah, Steakhouse or what you could. By the way, you don't. If you don't have $500 to buy their mill or whatever it might be, it's a mystery number. Typically you just send them, Send them a bottle of wine, buy them one drink, acknowledge them, let them know the followers are paying attention. They know people are watching. They see their. 1200 people just saw their story that day, but zero took action. If you just did this once or twice, don't be a fucking stalker by the way either. Don't be a weirdo about it, by the way. But there's no. I've never felt, I've never noticed, felt gracious when people like send me a thing and say, hey man, you know, thank you for doing that. I've never, I don't think anybody's never not responded to me. Actually, one time it did. I did a donation, which is very interesting. That's another thing too is I do donations on behalf of other people. I see them, I want to support the people I like. So I saw the guy do something, but again, that's about me. That's not about him. He didn't have to acknowledge me. I wasn't doing it for that. But it just felt weird when he didn't because it was a pretty decent sized guy donation. But again, three years from now, maybe I meet this guy in person and he's like, dude, fuck, I totally forgot. But thank you. What you did changed XYZ's lives. You just never know when that time is right. It does happen. You got to remember people are busy. So more back to the gift giving. One thing in my companies as well, because my teams are talking to lots and lots of people every day. So unfortunately, sometimes they're talking to people and they have a tragic situation in their life that is a Death. And this happens often at our. At our scalability. There's a lot of. A lot of bad things happen. Right. Unfortunate things I should say, too. But let's say, hey, my. Their mother just passed away, and they're getting ready to sell the person. Well, in our company, you stop selling, there's no selling going on. What you do is say, hey, you know, Matt, sorry to hear the news. We can. We can. Let's. Let's put this on. You know, let's table this for the next week or two. Get through all. Everything you're going through. I'm here for you if you're ready. I'm ready when you are. But more importantly, you know, this is a. This is a sad time, and, you know, I wish you well. As soon as they hang up the phone or stop the texting, emailing, or whatever's going on at that moment, my team alerts my assistant Kim, and we get the individual's address. We send them sympathy flowers from the individual. And, you know, like, it's like, hey, sorry to hear about the news. You know, prayers and thoughts to you and your family. Like, what company does that? Think about this for real? What company's doing that? I'm very intentional with gift giving at all levels, by the way. It's something I've really worked on really hard over the years. Gift giving has been very impactful for me. I do it for myself first and foremost, but to other people as well. People remember me as the great giver, the great gift giver. That very thoughtful, very, you know, very neat gifts, like, stuff that's very. And by the way, it doesn't have to be expensive. One of my buddies recently bought a Ferrari. I sent him a $20 Ferrari flag, right? But. But it's not about one, it's about the Acknowledging the accomplishment, which guys like us don't do it for that, but it's cool when it happens. And then two, the note that goes inside of that, that's the magic inside of that gift as well. So it stops him in his tracks. He reads it that there's power to that. But anyway, so even my neighbor, I live here in Cleveland part time, like I said, in mentor area, and he invited me over to a bocce party. I went over there a couple weeks ago, and he kept borrowing my lighter because we're smoking cigars, drinking wine, right? So obviously it's not a big deal, but the guy's a cool dude. And by the way, this guy could buy every lighter in the universe and still have A lot of money left over. So it's not about the lighter but it's about the thought. So I went and had a custom lighter made for him with. It's not a custom lighter but a lighter customized with his name on it, Chuck. And it's a badass lighter. It's $120 lighter. And I gave it to him and he is like, holy shit. Are you like, I can't. You know the first reaction, I can't take this from you, this is expensive. Blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like dude, like I want to give you the gift. I gift books, I give time. I like you have the same things. I'm just sharing what I do. Hopefully one of these things will resonate with you that you can go out and do today as well and every day therefore after. But the reason most people don't give gifts because again, this is marketing. By the way, think about this. If someone's having an anniversary and you send them an anniversary gift. One of my best gifts that we give are when people have babies. It is a very cool gift. It's a decent amount of money. You could do it actually from $65. Our average gift basket is usually like 250, I think. And these are people I do business with and there's people I don't do business with that I send gifts to. But what it does, it creates an alertness with my team of giving. Right? Our first core value in every one of my companies Care360. So when you see someone's birthdays going on, you send them a gift. You see someone had a baby, you send a gift and it's a very personalized gift by the way. All gifts are not created equal. And what I mean by that is if someone sends you, when someone buys a property from us or whatever, let's say if you buy a Walmart automation store through lifestyle money, you're going to get a $125 bag, a nice badass bag for your computer laptop with a cool note and all this cool stuff. But that's what you're going to get. You're going to, in the real estate company, you're going to get a very cool money tree because you're going to create a lot of money together. These are things people don't throw out. When you have a baby, we're going to put your child's name on the blanket or on the bear or on both, right? You're not throwing that shit out ever. They're going to have that That's a hand me down piece. So think about that. I'm not sending chocolates. I'm not sending, you know, a fruit basket. I'm not sending a popcorn basket. I'm sending very thoughtful use usable gifts that are everlasting, you know, and have purpose. There's real purpose to them. So those are just some examples that we do on a daily basis. And you can feel free to swipe them or use them however you see fit. So this is marketing. The reason most people don't do it is because there's not a quantitative number to it. Meaning if I send out a thousand dollars in gifts today, the formula doesn't make sense. Because there is no formula. My formula is giving. But here's one thing I do know, and I'm not saying go out and run out and spend every dollar gifted giving and you're gonna make millions. But what I'm saying is I've never lost money by being a great giver ever. It might not come from you, but it's gonna come from somewhere. How couldn't it. It's impossible. The metric is impossible to fuck up. If you're giving consistently, you will be receiving consistently. I promise you that. And like I said, I put my money where my mouth is. So I'm just going to recap here. You got to start sharing stories more often. I got a buddy right now traveling around the country. He's it up by the way, and he's not sharing a story. He's a cool guy, he's making real money. He's doing some really neat. This is a big deal for him too. Traveling, you know, 30 days with him and his family and you know, you know, whatever. But I'm like, dude, you have to be sharing your, your what's going on. And it's not like, hey, I'm over here at Yellowstone national park hanging out. Thank you. That's not sharing, that's just fucking. That's telling. By the way, when I say share, I'm talking like today I Woke up at 4:30 in the morning, scared to death. My company. I felt like it was burning to the ground. The reason is I've been traveling for the last 18 days. I've talked to zero sellers, zero buyers. I've only communicated with my team 35 minutes a day. XYZ. And as I'm sitting here, I'm also kind of peaceful because I'm starting to realize that I'm building a real business that doesn't rely just on me. I haven't taken a moment to step back and realize, maybe I am up to something good. Maybe I am helping great people. And my team means a lot to me. Bubble see what I'm doing. I'm storytelling to bring in. I'm sharing vulnerability. That's realness, by the way, because that is real shit. That's shit that goes on. We all have these problems every single day, but most people don't show or share vulnerable situations. The fucking interesting thing about that is you will bring so many people closer to you by being vulnerable. My boy Sean Whalen's really good at this. He's really. By the way, you should follow him at Sean Whan and Lion's Not Sheep, his brand, but the book that, like, the story that, like, took him online. I think he's got over a billion views. And all this stuff now is he shared about, you know, wanting to kill himself and how he was so down in the dumps. He put the gun in his mouth. Thank God he didn't pull the trigger, but he easily could have, just as easy as he did not. And sharing that raw, genuine. Most vulnerable post ever. He built a brand like that, started the process, and it's really neat to see. I love seeing it. If you follow me, I share real shit. I'm not sitting here, like, trying to slim my belly down or fucking cut my jawline down or anything like that. I'm sharing real shit. That's where I'm at today. If you don't like it, get the fuck out of here. I don't care. It's my life. It's my story, and I just want to share it real with you. And what's cool about that is. Is it will separate you from the bullshitters. See, it's funny. Guys are renting Lambos or Rolls Royces to take pictures. I've had that shift for years. I don't even need to take a picture with the car. It just is in the background. You already know it exists, right? Because people know if they know. So being vulnerable is a great marketing tool for you and your business. Sharing raw, authentic content will change not just your life, but other people's lives. And not only that, just. And again, I'm not saying go online and say, hey, man, my business sucks. I'm losing everything, and blah, blah, blah. No, it's just like, you got to learn how to write. You got to learn how to craft the story. If you've been listening to me for years, because I have multiple podcast shows I've done over the years I've been online Doing audio podcast actually. You know, telecalls they used to call it then webinars, et cetera. Since 2002, right? So my voice and my story has evolved. It's got tighter, it's got more emotional. Just like a comic, right? They go to comic events and they, they talk to 50 people. They bomb on 90% of the stories, but they take the 10%. They do this 10 times. Fucking, you know, 10 weeks from now they have a Netflix series and it's badass because they fucking went and did all their work, captured the top 10% in each show and then put it all together and shared the story in a very controlled environment. So it's a pretty neat thing to do. So share your story. Be genuine. Let people know what you're up to. Make it a daily challenge. I challenge you here. Let's do this. Today, I challenge you. Please tag me if you join this challenge because I might do something cool for you. Tag merkevansdm But I want to challenge every one of you listening to this and there's a lot of listeners. The 30 day social media marketing challenge. And I want you to post for 30 days on social media. I don't give a fuck if it's a picture. You know, if you're like ugly, not ugly, good luck. Whatever it is ugly, like view or whatever, just say like, I'm talking to you from the bench overlooking this ravine. If it was rainy and dreary, I could take a picture and say, pretty ugly, huh? Or I could say rain or shine, I come and I show up. There's a lot of ways to craft a message with an image. Or if you'd rather just shoot a video, do a live video. Hey guys, it's Mark hanging out here at the ravine. I have a one quick tip for you. Marketing changes the game. Let me explain. Boom. And then share about marketing. And this is what you do, guys. Just do this for the next 30 days. Day one challenge. Day one of 30. Day two of 30. Day three of 30. Day four of 30. 30. See how consistent you are with that. If you stay consistent for 30 days, I can promise you 100% you will have more eyeballs, more ears, and more opportunity on day 31. I guarantee it. And beyond as I'm talking to you, my buddy Matt recently messaged me over the weekend and told me how him posting daily like I'm telling you to do or asking you to do, I'm recommending you do it. Actually. He's like, dude, I've had people reach out to Me that I haven't Talked to in 20 years, sharing stuff that I don't. I can't even believe they're sharing with me out loud. But I thankful for it because I can help them. And I sent him a text back and I said, isn't that amazing how that works when you lead with vulnerability and share your real stories, real talk, remember your message? Your message, you're just sharing you. You know, it is what it is. And this happens, you open up a door, people realize you know what you're up to. They can actually open up to you because you've opened up to them. And it will. It's changed his business. It's changed his life, actually. He writes every day now and he says he's going to forever. I believe him too, by the way. This guy's a machine, so. And he's very committed, which is awesome. So he's finally doing it. And his numbers will show that it works. It's already showing. He's on six figures a week from it. But what I want to challenge you is for the next 30 days, tag me and do the marketing challenge. 30 day social marketing challenge. And tag arc evans, DM. I want to follow you. I want to see what's up. I want to see what you're up to. And if I can help you tweak your message, I will. And please be patient if there, there could be a lot of people doing this. So I'll get back to you as fast as I can. But share and what's cool about this, you don't need any crazy thing. You already have it in your hand probably. You're listening to me on your technology, your iPhone, right? Use your iPhone, write it in notes, copy paste, put it on Facebook, copy paste, put it on Instagram, use pictures, use video. It all can be done from your smartphone. Don't worry about if the lighting's perfect. Don't worry about if they can hear you a hundred percent. Just share your fucking message. Stop overthinking it and get it in motion. You'll be thankful that you did. So, marketing, I need you to do this. Figure out how much it costs to acquire your customer. What are your top six bullet points of your avatar? Male, 22, you know, makes over 40,000 a year, works out at the gym, you know, whatever. Put this shit down. These are things that drive, depending what business you're in, of course. Find out what drives your business. I have another company. Our Average age is 57 year old. Male, 72% of them are male, 57 year old white Republicans. XYZ, right? I know who our fucking people are, right? So it depends on what company you're in, what you're trying to do. Figure out what your avatar is and start writing to them. Share your message to them, let them know how to connect. Write with your heart, not your brain by the way, right? With your heart, that is vulnerability. Share your message. And when you start doing this, your life and business will change drastically. I promise you that. And if you have a massive anxiety and you're overwhelmed because you're not getting the results you want, it's because you have terrible expectations. Again, back to the guys trying to do 10 deals a month, but only wants to spend 5,000amonth, which would only get him three deals a month. You can see the disconnect. Of course you're going to be fucking frustrated. You're trying to do something of the impossible, right? Or the ultra unlikely. It might happen once a year, but if I can create a formula and saying I'm willing to spend 20 grand a month, invest 20 grand a month to make 50 grand a month, I'm in. Now all of a sudden, it takes all. There's no emotional bullshit attached to this. It's a formula you've created. You've dog eared the amount, you know what you're doing. And as you're in the beginning stages, you're building up, you know, spend 10, 20%, maybe more, depending on the size of your company, of your profits, to put back into marketing, to grow. And the reason, the way to do that is you gotta understand your KPIs, because KPI will show you growth through numbers, not emotions. It's all fucking numbers. Business is numbers, guys. Not saying you can't be passionate about it, but business is numbers. One plus one equals two. Your real formula is how do you make one plus one equal 11? That's the goal, right? And that's through investing in marketing. So get this shit out there. A lot of great opportunities. I'm telling you. You got Instagram, you got Facebook, you got LinkedIn, you got Twitter. I mean it's endless. It's endless. The opportunities, just don't try to do them all out of the gate. Get dialed in with one or two. Stay focused, get your message out there, stop stealing from yourself and your family. Like look at yourself in the mirror. You're the one in control of this shit, no one else. You are in control. And if you get marketing dialed in, you should start asking yourself what's cool is once you get to the next level in marketing, you start asking how to spend more money, how to invest more money in marketing, where are the next marketing channels? And let me give you one more tip before we leave today, please. If you do nothing else, do this. Please get people on your email list and email them consistently. Once a day, ideally, worst case, once a week. Email them a message, connect with them, relate to them. If you already have buyers in your business, you better start fucking crafting messages and building massive amounts of money with them. Because the hardest part is getting a buyer. The easiest parts, reselling the buyer. Most people spend so much energy acquiring a buyer, they forget about the people that's the easiest to sell. I did it for years. Kicked me in the ass. I swear it's. I lost many, many, many millions chasing the next deal that I forgot to actually take and go extract more money from the people that already know me. Like me. Trust me, got results with us. It sounds so stupid saying it out loud now, but I did it for like a long time. So don't be a dummy like me. If you have buyers list, start messaging them. Don't know what they want. Simple. Ask them, hey, if I came out with a new product that could change your life or improve your life, what would that product look like? What would that product be? They'll tell you. Hey, extract from social media. If you'd like to get on my free email list, put your email in here and I'll get you on the email list. I got something free for you. Give them a reason to do it of course, but get them in the pipeline. Build your email list. Why? Glad you asked. You control and own email, right? If I give you my email address, you own that email address. You can message me until I unsubscribe social media, let's say Instagram or Facebook or any of them for that matter, they could shut me down in a second. So I could have a hundred thousand followers today and wake up tomorrow with zero. But if you have a hundred thousand followers on social or 10,000 or whatever the number is, start extracting. Get an emails list now. Maybe you have 10,000 emails on your database. If you can't shut me down, an email I could like maybe my ESP would shut me down. I'd take a copy and paste and put the emails in another system and start messaging out again tomorrow. Obviously there's ramp up phases and all that, but you're in control. Social media controls you. If you only have social media, you know, no one talks about this. I don't know why? But I'm telling you right now, extract emails. You want to be in the email email world. So we send out hundreds and hundreds of millions of emails a month and I recommend you do too. That's where you want to be for sure. That means you're generating a lot of revenue. That means you're impacting and touching and conversating with a lot of people. So please get emails. More importantly, email the people that are already on the email list and start connecting with them through email. It's a very ultra super duper duper powerful channel. You don't have to believe me. When you go to checkout anywhere in the world, what do they ask for? Your email address. Get your email. Get your email. Right. I know a lot of people are doing cell phones now, which is cool too. If you can get email and phone number, all the better. But the thing is, cell phone has some challenges right now. They're going through a lot of texting issues, whatever. And I own a pretty big texting company in the data space so there are real challenges there. But at the end of the day, email's always served us ultra very well. Direct mail, email marketing, text marketing, cold calling. I mean there's, there's many, many, many different ways to market and I'm getting excited and I'm rambling now, but I challenge you. Step your marketing game up. Please join the 30 day challenge of marketing. Tag me at Mark Evans DM Day 1 of 30. Are you in or are you out? We're about to find out. So with that said.

I'm more Kevin's dm. I'm here to help and teach him what I know and how I did it to discover freedom. There ain't no question mark Kevin's when he stepping the doubt he's closing deals. Time to tell him what the DM stand for. I'm a deal maker, a deal maker. But I'm not just a deal maker, I'm a dream maker. The journey's where it's at. It's all about the process. Time to get over to the DM project from a small town in Ohio so I know how it is. Can I come from a lot of money. I remember as a kid wanted to make a honey rat. Didn't see no one making more than that. Graduated high school with a 1.8. They should have held me back. I hope my principals and teachers are alive just to witness this. I'm a own boss. I'm out here running two way figure businesses. Walk away from it all and I'LL be good. But I've been called to help people just like y' all learn the game. It's time to ball Everybody chasing the money but I'm not chasing the money I'm out here chasing the purpose. Yo, I've been working my whole life what got us where we at? Is it going to get us where we want to go? It's time to push, time to learn, time to grow. I'm more Gavin I'm here to help and teach him what I learned, what I know and how I did it to discover freedom There ain't no question mark Kevin's when he stepped in the doubt he's closing deals Time to tell him what the DM stand for I'm a deal maker, a deal maker But I'm not just a deal maker I'm a dream maker the journey's where it's at it's all about the process Time to get over to the DM project I'm more guaranteed makeup deal maker deal maker maker deal maker deal maker.

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