Ep 018: Daniel Burstein Uses Psychology To Drive Conversions

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Growing Your Agency. I'm your host Ryan Shank. Today, super excited, we have Daniel Burstein, MechLabs. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today.

Hey, thanks for being here, Ryan.

Hey, so Daniel, you have an interesting business. I would love to just hear a little bit about, you know, your business and what you're seeing out there with a lot of your clients and some of the success that they're having.

Yeah, so I'll just tell you about us briefly at a high level, 'cause honestly, your audience doesn't care about us, they care about them, right? Let's just start with just some credibility so they understand where we're coming from. MechLabs Institute, for more than 20 years, we've been researching to understand the answer to a fundamental question, why do people say yes? So we've got a lot of research about that, a lot of methodologies, we're gonna talk about that briefly today, and we publish through two pretty widely known websites, Marketing Sherpa and Marketing Experiments, where we have data and case studies and how-to information, all that type of stuff. And that's what I bring you today, some of the information we've published that can help your listeners, your viewers improve how they're using the phone, improve their marketing in general for themselves and their clients.

[Speaker:RYAN_SHANKER] Yeah, awesome. So tying into that, what are some— I know a lot of our listeners are, they're driving ads or they're driving traffic through ads, referral marketing, all that sort of thing to either website or landing pages. And then I think that they run into some questions. How can I capture a lot of that traffic and really turn it into warm leads that I can then deliver to the client or to themselves if they are the client. So what are you seeing out there? You know, what are some things that people are doing in terms of best practices and using either phone or forms that they're able to then convert that traffic into actual people and conversations?

Yeah, sure. So let's— we'll talk about digital in a minute because digital is huge, right? Everyone's talking about digital. That's the popular kid at the party. But when you think about it, a phone call itself, that is an offline media, right? We're stepping away from the computer and having an interaction. So let me tell you about a surprising finding we had with some research a few years ago. So we surveyed 1,200 consumers here in the US, and it was a representative sample. So it was a sample of young people and old people, males and females, and all different regions. And we asked them, "Which type of advertising channels do you trust more when you're about to make a purchase decision?" Right? So this is a fundamental question. It's not, "Hey, what do you like to go to on the weekend? Where do you kill your time?" or anything like this. It's when you're gonna make a purchase decision, which advertising channels do you focus most on? And the number one answer, this maligned media that, you know, is kind of getting killed lately, was print, newspapers and magazines. That's the number one place people go. And it makes sense when you think about it, right? At first, yeah, I was like, wow, I would think, you know, Google or something like that, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it makes sense when you think about it because print, you know, it's just, it's got that trust factor. And so but why is print getting killed so much when it comes to media buyers and marketers? It's that lack of tracking, right? We love that Facebook ad, we love that Google ad, we can see exactly how many people viewed it and where did they go and did they buy, but with print it's kinda hard to make that connection. And so that's where things like having right URL structures so you can track clicks, having coupons, having post surveys, but also tracking phone calls and knowing and attributing Hey, it's coming from this print ad, it's driving this amount of business. But then it brings up the fundamental question, like you said, well, how do you get people to make that phone call? How do you get people to visit that website? How do you get people to go to that landing page? Can't get too deep into it today, but I wanna talk about the value proposition, right? You're probably familiar with the value proposition, you've heard that term, right?

[Speaker:RYAN_SHANKER] Absolutely, yeah.

[Speaker:ADAM_STONE] Yeah, but so we have an entire methodology we've built after more than 20 years of research into how to have an effective value proposition. And sometimes when we talk about value proposition, we're thinking about, hey, you're the CEO of a company. You're thinking, what's the value proposition of my overall company? What do I tell investors? Right? What do I tell the customers? But the value proposition exists at many levels. And one of the levels that's often overlooked is we call the process-level value proposition. So you're looking at a print ad. It's not just, okay, the value proposition for the entire company. Someone sees a print ad for, let's say, PhoneWagon. They're not ready to just buy right away.

Sure.

What you're trying to do is say, what value proposition can I give to get them to take that next step? How can I get them to make that phone call, visit that landing page, whatever step I want them to take? And so when you're looking at your offline ads, and we'll get to landing pages in a minute, you gotta think about that. You're not selling the company yet, you're selling the action. How can I just get them to take that action?

Does that make sense? [Speaker:RYAN_SHANKER] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's absolutely interesting. And I was talking to someone recently and they were talking about the value of copy, kinda what you're saying, copy being, you know, being able to express the value proposition in a way that gets them to move on. This particular client was doing it with like, you know, video sales letters and that sort of thing. But, you know, because my first reaction when I was looking at their site, I was like, ah, that kind of looks like sloppy. It actually doesn't matter. Like, sort of design at this stage, like, doesn't matter. People want to be able to resonate and like hear the value proposition and say like, oh, I really have those pain points, and really sell into pain points. So, totally, totally makes sense. So what happens, what happens next, right? So you craft a good value proposition. How do you get people to kind of move down the funnel and further along?

Alright, so let's talk about, we'll talk about the two different places they can go, right? One of them would be the landing page. Yeah. So once you have that process level value proposition, again, you're not selling them on the entire company, right? You're just selling them to take that next action. Then there's the landing page itself. So we had a really interesting experiment with a health insurance company recently. It was within Aetna. There was a startup called Healthspire and they're selling Medicare and Medicare Advantage programs. And they were trying to get people to, you know, from that landing page, which they sent traffic to from digital sources, trying to get people to make a call, get on a phone call with one of their tele-advisors, right? So they can pick the right Medicare, Medicare Advantage plan. And so they had a short landing page, right? Because I'm sure you've heard this a lot, like you just mentioned about the long sales letter. A lot of people hear, hey, you know, you can't have a long landing page, no one's gonna read it. Yeah, right. A major problem I see, especially, you know, with some younger marketers, is they see a long landing page and they say, I would never read that. right? Well, the challenge, especially if you're a younger marketer, you're not necessarily your customer, you're not your audience. If that person is that right ideal prospect for that product, they might read a lot of information, they might need to take in a lot of information before they're willing to take the next step. So in this case, we did an experiment. And as we talked, we have links with visuals and interviews and people can click through after we're done with this and see all the details about this. We did an experiment with actually a much longer landing page. And it got 638% more calls, more leads into their call center. And the reason for it, getting to that process level value proposition with that short landing page, they were just trying to get people to act, right? We have this kind of company-focused mentality.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We want people to do a thing, so let's just tell them to do it, right? But with that longer landing page, they weren't selling the company as much. They were selling that process level value proposition. They were selling the value proposition of getting on the phone with someone. Because most of us, when you think about, oh, make a phone call, you think about, I'm going to make a phone call, I'm going to be sold to. Nobody wants that, right? Why do they want to make a phone call? They want to be helped. And so laying out that value proposition, if they wanted them to take the action of making that phone call, they laid out the value proposition. Here's who you're going to talk to. Here's why you want to talk to them. You're going to get value out of it. It's not about the company getting value. It's about the person making that phone call. At the end of the day, they got a lot more people to pick up the phone and make a call.

Got it, got it. That's, uh, yeah, that's incredible. So in talks, in terms of like measuring that, so what, what does that look like? You know, are you measuring, you know, each stage of it from, you know, people who picked up the phone and called, and then from the next step picked up the phone and then, you know, went on to even the next, you know, action down the funnel in terms of like completed a consultation? I guess what does it look like in terms of like funnel metrics?

Yeah, exactly. So The funnel metrics, great point. What we call it is the customer journey. I'm sure you've heard that before.

Sure, yep.

The way we look at it is you gotta flip the funnel. So when you see the traditional funnel, it's kind of like this here. Let's see if people can see what I'm saying, right? And it doesn't look beautiful because people just come in at the top. When you see that funnel, they're just gonna fall down to the bottom.

Straight on down, yeah.

Right? But we say you gotta flip that funnel, look at it this way, right? Because you gotta push people up that funnel every step of the way, right? Gravity is gonna— people are gonna wanna fall out. You know, everything's working against you. They're bored, they're indifferent, there's another product, all these things. You have to think about what value proposition do they need at each step of the funnel to keep them moving to the next stage. So to your point, you gotta map out that customer journey. And I can send you an example of this. And you say, okay, at each level, what do people need to understand to move to the next step? And let's track it at each level. And then we can see where we have the biggest fall-off. So in one case it might be, for example, hey, they need to see the print ad, right? Then they need to go to the landing page. Then they need to make the phone call. And then from the phone call, they need to buy the product, whatever that is. And then you can track it each step, how your conversion's doing, and you see where you have the biggest fall-off. But also what you're tracking, what you're looking at is what value, what information do people need to know at each step along the way to keep them moving up that funnel?

Yeah. And then do you, how do you craft that? I guess is my next question. Like, how do you understand, you know, How do you build out, I guess, the initial funnel? I know it's going to vary based on industry, based on product. How do you actually, once you're, let's say, going into a funnel building session, you're whiteboarding it out, how do you say, "All right, this industry, this insurance industry right here, they're going to need 5 touchpoints," versus maybe an e-commerce site, like, "Boom, we can just drive them to maybe 1, 2 touchpoints." I guess the question is, how do you figure out? Is it trial and error? Is it, "Hey, I know best practices," or Is there like a lot of assumptions for some of these funnels?

Yeah, so there's a few different tactics we use. One we call forensic data analysis. So one, you know, we're actually getting with a company and teaching them how to look through the current metrics they have to understand what is that funnel. Because some of these funnels exist whether we decide to make them or not. You know, one example for us is, you know, social media. We produce a lot of charts and those sorts of things, and we don't have a Pinterest account per se, but people choose to put those charts on Pinterest. They are choosing ways to interact with your company. So one of it is simply looking at the data. Another is talking to customers, interviewing customers, surveying customers, and then also understanding what's going on individually. So one of the things we do is run a value proposition workshop where we get a lot of key members of the company inside and also see, okay, what is their sense of what customers are doing, how they're approaching it, what value they need to understand at each level. And we also do a competitive analysis to see kind of what competitors are doing. How are they walking it through? We don't want to be blindly bought into just mimicking what competitors do. Right. We want to see what they're doing and then also test, compare to that. 'Cause at the end, what we're doing is we're putting all these things together, all that data, all that information, we're creating a hypothesis and then we test. So for example, one of the tests we might give is, okay, on this landing page or in this ad, do we direct them directly to make a call now to purchase or do we direct them to just get more information and get like Say. And from those tests we can get a sense of, okay, where are they in their thought process? Where are they in their customer journey? And do we need to give them more value before they'll take the next step? Or can we just jump right ahead to the next step?

And tactically, how are you doing those, those tests? Are you, are you setting it up and actually doing paid ad buys and like driving media to, you know, to one of those sites? Like, are you doing, are you using some like user testing kind of, you know, tool where you like actually get it in front of like, users, like how are you getting statistically significant amount of data to do those tests?

So for each company, it's a different situation. For example, we're working with a major home buyer. Uh-huh. You know, they're a big enough company where they're having so much traffic driven to a specific—

They already have the traffic.

Right, where you can test on that form. For smaller companies, yeah, it's a sense of do they have to buy the traffic? Do they test in the channel? Do they test in Facebook ads? Do they test in Google ads? Because to your point, and I don't wanna get too deep into it, you need to make sure you have a statistically significant big enough sample size because if you're running on too small of a sample size, what you're seeing might just be random chance, right?

Yep, exactly. Exactly. I think so many people either give up or they declare something a wild success when they got a few conversions on like, you know, sub-20 visitors. It's like, come on, you know, that's not anything that you should be taking out as material, as a material amount of data. All right, awesome. So just a couple more questions. I'm curious, you know, when you're engaging, just going back more into your business specifically, when you're engaging with a client, what does that engagement look like? They find you, talk to us, I guess, about your own funnel and then your own kind of like sales processes of like onboarding a new client, retaining, reporting back to them.

Yeah. So we're, I mean, we're a research-driven organization. We're a very content-driven organization. What we're doing right now, this is the type of thing we tend to do all the time. We publish to our audience. So 99% of them, they'll never buy from us. They'll just get some of this helpful information. From some of our methodologies, from some of our research, and they'll help themselves. Then we have a little bit of a next level where we'll offer them training. So we have online training, we have in-person training where we can come alongside them in general, teach them. We have a whole patented methodology about how to increase the likelihood of conversion, how to test, how to maximize the effectiveness of your value proposition. There's a certain segment that they're going to just say, teach me. Then there's a much smaller segment where we're going to come alongside them, not just teach them in general, but come alongside them and work directly with them so they understand the methodology and so they can improve things themselves. So we have things, so at the content level, for example, here, I just have a copy right here. Here's a book from our CEO, The Marketer's Philosopher, kind of has a high-level paradigm shifting look at how to change your value proposition. But then when it gets to more specific working directly with companies, we have something called a Quick Win Clinic where we'll work with them for a day and a half, 2 days, specifically look at their data, look at their funnels, and help them find the biggest opportunities to increase revenue right now and further opportunities for testing, for learning about their customer. Because for us, it's not about, you know, we're not an agency or something, we're not doing things for you. We're about teaching, transferring that knowledge, coming along marketers, coming along businesses and helping them understand how they can be the heroes and how they can improve their results.

Love it. That's awesome. And then, so people are coming to you and is it, Is it a one-time fee? Is it a retainer if they want to like engage and kind of like get the, you know, get the advice, get the, you know, content that you guys have? Like what, I guess, just what does that relationship look like between you and whoever wants to engage? I know there's different tiers and stuff.

I mean, it depends on the company. For some of them, it's that direct, intense, 2-day quick win intensive we have with them. And then some would like ongoing coaching and certification of their tests. For one thing you mentioned, you know, validity, making sure a test is statistically accurate. It's more than just the statistics, it's how you're running the test. There's things like history effect, right? So some of those things will have coaching and certification where we'll come alongside them for a certain amount of time each month on an ongoing basis to help them and their team. And this is important for marketing leaders too, as they're continually onboarding people. It's very difficult to train people to be effective at this, right? A lot of marketing organizations have kind of lumpy performance, right? There's that star performer and you're hiring all these other people who don't get it. We can come alongside and continually certify and coach and kind of bring them along to again, make them the stars, help them, you know, kill it in terms of conversion.

Got it. Awesome. Awesome. So this has been a great conversation. What else, what else are we forgetting to ask you that you want to, you want to share?

Well, I'll just say at a high level, we'll put a link in there. We have a whole methodology to help you increase the probability of conversion. So we offer a lot of this information free at Marketingsherpa.com, publish a ton of information, Marketingexperiments.com, Mechlabs.com, and it all comes down to this. If I could just say one essential piece of information I'd love to tell every marketer in the world, it comes down to customer-first marketing. So the challenge as a marketer, I can see, you know, you do this, I do this, we live and breathe our companies. I mean, 40, 80, 100 hours a week, you're probably thinking about phone-wagging, talking to investors, talking about customers, improving the product. So to you and to me for my product, right, we're so focused on that, but we have to do what we can to step out and try to live our customers' lives, bring that humanity to it and see life through and see our marketing through their eyes so we can ultimately improve what we do because they don't care about our company, right? I mean, that's what we said when we first hopped on. I'm like, I don't want to start talking about my company a bunch. None of your viewers care about my company. They care about their company.

Yeah, sure.

So we can kind of step out and look through that customer lens and those customer eyes. Then we really have transformative improvements and results.

Love that. I think about that a lot. I actually, I try to be very, very self-aware to not say like industry lingo all the time and not think that, you know, if I'm diving into our software or talking specifically about like what we do, we kind of in, you know, just industry lingo in general. It's like, I want to try to speak like a human, speak like someone that doesn't do this all day, every day. So, you know, and I was even talking to a marketer yesterday. They were saying like, even, even when people search, like, if they're looking for a certain type of business, they might do a search term for a completely different type of business just because they don't know the difference between chiropractor and physical therapist if they're searching for an exercise, for instance, that they need, right? Like back hurts or whatever it is. So yeah, I think it is definitely important to kind of zoom out and put yourself in the mind of a customer, especially for the messaging part of it, right? You can be the expert once you're actually in the conversation and then you feel like you're actually talking to them, but still don't go too specific where it's like you're saying things that are just like not common language.

Yeah, I'll take it one step further beyond the messaging. Like, you know, I'm sure PhoneWagon is your baby, right? You're so invested in it, you've built this beautiful thing and you want everyone to know. And this is Marketing Sherpa, Mech Labs, this is my baby. We also have to recognize what are the offers that are really gonna resonate with the customer and who is our ideal customer. And it's not always everybody. And being able to tell some people, hey, this isn't a fit for you, to better serve the people that it is a fit for. I mean, that's a challenge because no company wants to turn down customers, but you don't really have a powerful and unique value proposition unless it's laser-focused at the people you can help and you're actually helping those people and putting them first.

Yep. Yep. Awesome. Final thing. What is your morning routine?

My morning routine? Oh, I like that. Let's see. I wake up, I drink a cup of coffee, I read the paper, and then I come in. That's before, you know, I get into work. Listen to the radio coming in, and then when I get in, it's LinkedIn, Twitter, email, stuff like that. Hop on social media first thing.

Catching up on news content.

Yeah, yeah, and also just, I love, the most fun thing about content marketing is people will reach out on LinkedIn or Twitter once they see something like this, and you can really connect and help them on a one-on-one basis. And I started in print many years ago, and you didn't have that interaction. It's great getting that interaction off of social where you can actually connect with people and help them and learn from them. Some people hop on, they're like, hey, you were wrong about this. And you know, it's great to hear that too, to improve our own. Nothing was wrong today though. Just want to say this was perfect. So nothing was wrong today.

Of course, of course. And where are you guys based?

We're based out of Jacksonville, Florida.

So Jacksonville, Florida. Let's go. All right. Awesome. Thank you so much. So we're gonna wrap it up. Daniel Burstein, Mech Labs Institute. Where can everyone find you?

We're at mechlabs.com. That's our parent company. And you go to Marketingsherpa.com or MarketingExperiments.com for tons of free content.

All right, Daniel Bursti, thank you so much for joining us. Growing Your Agency, guys, that is the episode today. We'll post the show notes in the description, links back to MechLabs Institute and Marketing Sherpa. Thank you so much for joining us.