Meet Product Advertising Expert Ian Smith

Protect your brand, product or invention from the hazards of consumer product launching and go from idea to product to big brand. With guidance from retail product design and development experts Tracy and Tom Hazzard. Get the insider secrets to put the right things in the right order with the right resources so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to retail success.

Hey, product launchers, Tracy Hazard here and I have got a new expert for you guys to meet. I have got Ian Smith from Evolve Media and we are going to talk about some really cool marketing and advertising. We're going to talk about ManyChat, Facebook messenger and all kinds of cool stuff like that today. So a little bit different than we normally do. And I know you guys know if you've been listening to the podcast or watching these videos for a while, you know that I have a been there, done that again and again rule. However, Facebook hasn't been around for us to have 25 years of experience on Facebook or marketing and social media. So we have a different rule that we apply to. Been there, done that again and again. I say been there, done that again and again for different types of clients. And so that's what we do. So Ian has come to us as a referral and a friend of Brenda Cremy, who you guys know because she's a big face on this platform and she's an expert here who just advises us on all amazing things Amazon. And so Ian and I have sort of developed this friendship over the last couple of months as we've been getting to know each other. And he's got some cool ideas. So I definitely wanted to bring you his ideas, but. And everyone has a sort of story about where they started and everything. But I want to part of our been there, done that again and again says that there are some good practices that put in place. So you probably have some great marketing experiences. So as you tell us about where you started and how you came into this, tell us a little bit about those marketing practices that you sort of evolved and realized these work.

Okay, Well, I mean, I started initially in the old school print advertising industry, so.

So there you go. Some marketing practices that have been around for decades, century at least.

Yeah, I was working for a magazine here, Local, in Orlando and this magazine is called Orlando Weekly and it's a very local, like all about the local stuff that happens in Orlando. And I was actually selling advertising space inside that magazine. So I was helping a lot of different businesses get exposure inside the magazine by doing print advertising. And the next step from there was Going to a digital marketing agency. The magazine went to a digital marketing agency. And that's where I really learned a lot about Google Ads and Facebook ads and running media online. Basically my friend of mine recruited me from that company to work for his business. So I was doing sales and marketing for his business, doing all of these Internet marketing tactics like Facebook ads and building landing pages and SEO, creating content online, stuff like that. And then eventually me and that guy started our own business and we partnered up with one of the sharks from Shark Tank named Kevin Harrington.

We know Kevin well on this platform. Seth Green is also one of our marketing partner friends. And so, yeah, Kevin, definitely a name in this industry.

Awesome. So, yeah, me, Jeremy, Max, Kevin, his son, we all started a digital marketing agency called Quantum Media. We did very well in our first year. I think it was around $5 million in our first year of business, which was awesome.

That's really good.

So in that first year we were doing Facebook ads, click funnels, sales funnels, social media, Shopify sites, all this Internet marketing stuff. And we were doing that for clients. But we started to get into our own ventures where we launched our own products online. So we were doing agency services as well as our own ventures. Just insane amount of sales and growth in that first year of business. And then we ended up splitting up the company, kind of going our own way. So now we all kind of have our own digital marketing agencies. So now I'm running my own agency called Evolve Media, where we do kind of marketing services as well as templates and building out messenger marketing templates, click funnels, templates and things like that for those people that are more wanting to do it themselves. But then we have our done for you services for the people that are.

Just wanting to out, which we are big fans of here. We're big fans of having both. Because there are times when you should do it yourself, in the early days maybe when you're testing some things out. And then there are times when you really should not be doing that and you should be growing your brand into a bigger brand and you should not be handling these things yourself. So we're a big fan of people who have both, which is one of the other reasons I invited you on here. But I hope you guys product launchers caught where he was saying that they had done this for $5 million worth of business over the course of those years. Because that is really where you're getting into what works and what doesn't work. And it's not about what's hacked and what works On Facebook today, it's about what messaging work, what strategy works, what we should be presenting, how we should be presenting. But a lot of that was product based. Right. And so you weren't just selling, doing marketing for services, you were marketing products, which is different than marketing services, don't you find?

Oh yeah. I mean, especially if you're marketing services and you're marketing two other businesses, then that's going to be a whole different strategy than targeting really, than when you're marketing services to consumers. Right. So with the agency, a lot of our marketing was towards business owners. So it's B2B. And then with the products that we were selling online, that was all pretty much B2C. So it is, I mean the core foundation is pretty much the same as far as creating content, getting people engaged with your content, building that trust, credibility, familiarity, so that you can introduce the offer and get them to build that customer relationship, basically. But definitely a different approach when you want to target business owners versus consumers.

Yeah, really different. Right. And then sometimes it's a platform difference too, sometimes it's just not right on certain platforms.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I found I've had some great, great success with LinkedIn messenger style programs. Right. So you know, you put in and not using bots of course, but just even just a strategy of having the right templates and the right messages you send to people, great ones for consulting work. And I use it really successfully and have used that for some time. But when you go to try to do that and try to find someone who's an Amazon seller, for instance, they don't self define. And so it's a platform where you almost can't find the right people and you end up sifting through so many that don't work. And I think that's where people are like, oh, Facebook's a cool place to be to be running messenger programs, but if you're not, if the right people aren't there, it's not going to work.

Yeah, I mean LinkedIn is a really tough nut to crack. Really. I do a whole bunch of LinkedIn, I have a VA and they help me with messaging people, with connecting with people. I've built out my LinkedIn, I've invested money in hiring a consultant to help me build out my entire LinkedIn profile, get that geared up. And so I'm constantly using LinkedIn for posting content, post all my new content. Every single day I'm posting content, connecting with people, messaging people. The reason why I say LinkedIn is tough is because from a paid standpoint I haven't seen the greatest results with actually running ads on LinkedIn. It's actually very expensive when you compare it to Google Ads and Facebook ads, Instagram, all that kind of stuff. YouTube. So from a paid perspective, I wouldn't suggest it. But on an organic level, posting content, connecting with people. And even when you message people after you've connected with them, there's a whole strategy there because you don't want to rub them the wrong way. There's really a way that you message them to kind of ease into building a relationship through LinkedIn.

Yeah, no, definitely. Because I get some of those messages all the time that are all wrong, but I get them on Facebook too. That's what I want to kind of really dive into today is really. Because you've had so much marketing experience and so much of that direct connection kind of messaging experience. I think this is where a lot of people go wrong. It is actually in the messaging that things are going wrong. It's not in that they didn't spend enough money or they didn't put it in the right place, but more often it's probably the message that is a mismatch. And so how do you strategize? How do you guide people to building the right message? How do you get them to find it? Because you don't just necessarily know it.

Yeah, yeah. So I would say content is the backbone of all messaging. When you message somebody, you don't want to message them an offer or pitch them right out the gate, right off.

The bat, you want to buy my thing?

Yeah. You want to provide free value for them. Say, hey, we've created this excellent piece of content where you're going to learn XYZ for free, prove you can help them by first actually helping them with a piece of content. And still people are going to be a little bit off put when you are still messaging them and reaching out to them. Even if it is a piece of content, if it's a free value just because you're reaching out to them, they have their wallet. Right. But it definitely helps when you are reaching out to them and just giving them free value, Just driving them to a YouTube video, just driving them to a piece of content where they're going to learn something for free. I wouldn't even recommend driving them to opt in for a free piece of content. I would say when you message people, no matter the platform, whether it's Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, however you're getting in touch with people, just drive them to a piece of content that is not contact walled, as they say. You don't have to give them your contact information. It is just a goodwill piece of content. Here's a video link, check it out. And then I would say in that video, when you're giving them the content, have your call to action be that free offer where you get their contact information. Maybe it's their email address. You get them to opt in to your messenger bot or things like that.

Right? So for those of you who are perusing the product launch hazards website, you're going to see that exact thing, right? We don't have the content as you put contact walled. Right. You don't have to give your email there. But if you do want our downloads, we want to know that you're downloading them. And so we ask you, even though they're free, we ask you to put in your email address and send us that. You can unsubscribe. I mean, we, we'd rather you were fierce unsubscribers if it wasn't really what you wanted. You just wanted this thing and you're done. Fine. But we want to know people downloaded it and we want to know why. And so we have a really quick, like ask a quick little question. It's just one simple question and an email address and that's it, and it's yours. And we do that, though it's for our benefit. Should we put up more of this content? Should we give more? You know, we need that to be able to serve you better. And so we can't just have everything be blind and be relying on our Google Analytics for everything. It doesn't tell you enough about why people want stuff and what they need more of. That's where we draw the line is we say, okay, when we get to a point at which we need more information, then we ask for a contact information, but that's it. We really try to keep it really loose and open and organic everywhere else. And it works really well for us, as I'm sure you're finding that it does. But product sales are a little different because people feel pushier about product sales. And so how do you differentiate that when you're doing services versus contact?

So with products, it really, I mean, it kind of comes down to the same fundamentals as far as building the relationship. First, they need to meet your brand and understand what you stand for as a brand. Understand what you sell, the problem your brand solves, your whole messaging and your whole vibe of your brand. You need to kind of establish that first. Then when you introduce an offer, they're more likely to be receptive to that offer. When you tell them the benefits and the problem that that solves, and you tell them the stories of people that have gone through these problems, and then they found the solution of your product or service, that's going to be a lot more impactful when you first built the relationship there. So really, what I would say is, whether you're selling a product or you're selling a service, you want to first make your goal of just building that relationship, and how I personally build a relationship is by using content, giving them free value, helping them out first. And then when I want to provide more value or say, like, hey, we have this really powerful piece of content, this really powerful free digital download, then that's when I kind of do the contact wall, and I say, just give us your email address and we'll send it to you right now. Just click here and we'll send it to you via Facebook messenger right now. And so really, that's how we can kind of get them to the next step. And with our content, we always try to make the call to action of that first freebie, that free download kind of relative, so that it's not like way out of left field, like the freebie that we're trying to give them.

Yeah, that can sometimes happen. Do you think that people, though, are getting a little bit desensitized or sort of like it's too recognizable? This formulaic. Like the formulaic funnel, I would guess, is the best way to say it. It's like they're getting desensitized to it and we need to shake them up a little bit.

Yeah, I mean, this is definitely the funnel that a lot of people use. But when you look at the dating scene, right, it's like this whole dating strategy of like, okay, first you meet them. Whether it's on an app or whether it's in a bar or in a social gathering, no matter where you meet them, you're gonna follow certain steps first. And even though going through those steps in your head, you're thinking, God, this is the same thing over and over. I've introduced myself, I've told them what I do for a living. I know what they do for a living. I've told them my favorite music and my favorite where I like to eat. And so you kind of. I think it's important to go through those same steps when building the relationship. And that even though it does get boring and monotonous and the same thing over and over, I feel like it's kind of has to be done, unfortunately, when building that relationship with people.

Interesting. So now there's a bunch of new tools that people are getting excited about, and we're hearing lots of things about them. Tell us some about how you stay up on these things and how you really test them out before you roll them out with your clients.

Yeah, so how I stay up is really through consuming content. Really. It's consuming podcasts. It's through watching YouTube videos. It's. I don't follow the mainstream news, really, like Fox News and all the news channels that you see on local TV and stuff. I don't even have local cable. Right. I don't watch any of that stuff.

So all of you're not alone. There's so many nowadays.

So I get all of my news through YouTube, through Reddit, through these podcasts, through Digital Marketer and all these different online media channels. So a lot of them are telling me about these awesome tools, but a lot of the tools that I'm using right now are ones that I've been using for the last year, I would say. So Zapier is definitely a very powerful tool that I love. Zapier.com it is an automation tool.

I agree. I use Zap stuff all the time here.

Yeah, Zapier.

If you don't know what it is, you may not be ready for it yet. But if you're struggling with these automation kind of things where you do routine things every day. Zapier.

Yeah. It's a great way to connect your different platforms. So if you're using Shopify and you have your email software connect a new customer over to your email software. If we're using ManyChat and you collect all this information through ManyChat and Facebook messenger, you can easily zap all that information over to a Google sheet or to an email notification so that when a new lead comes in through your Click funnels landing page or your manychat, then you'll get email notified immediately once it comes in. And you definitely want to.

If your eyes are glazing over right now, then you are in the done for model. Right. Like, this is where I want you to understand the difference. If you already just went like, oh, I don't know what he's talking about, like, that sounds so complicated. This is what it takes to be successful. This is where you mine every lead. You make sure you're not missing out on people. You make sure no one's falling through the cracks. You make sure you're utilizing the full force. This is the thing that gets me all the time, like, gets me really riled up. It's like when we made a lot of content, we've spent a lot of time and energy building out beautiful websites, shopify shops, and we have wonderful information about how to use our products. And we've got hundreds of videos of like every exercise you could use to sell this fitness product. And, like, spent all that time and energy and then people come and watch it and you fail to follow up with them.

Yeah.

And why do you fail? Because it's hard. Because you have to, like, go into YouTube, figure out who the people are who watched your video, like, who subscribed to your channel. How am I going to get them over to my email server? Like, you got to have people in place, you've got to have a full team. And when you're a solopreneur, which so many product sellers and so many of my product inventors are, you guys know what you're. It's like, right? You're so busy, you're trying to work on your product, you're trying to get the next thing out there, you're trying to get your sales going. So it feels like it's wasted time for you, but it is not. Because the ones that are successful, the ones that grow into multimillion dollar brands, this is what they're doing. But they're not doing it manually. They're utilizing tools like Ian's talking about, they're utilizing these things. They're hiring companies like Ian's. That's why I bring people like Ian on for you guys to listen to. So go ahead, Ian, what were you going to say?

A really important thing of the follow up. I think a lot of people, a lot of people underestimate the follow up. And the whole way that you build a relationship with somebody is through multiple touch points, multiple conversations over a period of time. The three most important things to getting a customer is credibility, trust, and familiarity. And you have to build that familiarity through a series of touch points. Like when you meet somebody, think about if you went to a networking event and you met somebody that night for the first time and then you never met them again. You only built so much of a relationship on that first meeting, talking to them for 30 minutes. But if you follow up with them and you have a coffee together maybe a couple days later, and then you have a lunch a couple days later, and then you have a phone call and you talk and you keep in touch, that relationship is getting so much more stronger. And the likelihood of Them either sending you business or them being a customer of yours is increased like 1000% because of the follow up, right?

Absolutely. Because it continues to have that brand awareness. So that's an older term that we use in brand building and in product design areas. Right. You used to have a brand awareness marketing and advertising campaign and that was really where you didn't expect to get a lot of people out of it. But you were like making sure that you always had an ad in the circular, you always had an ad in the newspaper. Right. And these are things that you used to do in the product world because you needed to make sure that you were up in comparison against your competitors that were out there and that were doing that, that were spending dollars if you wanted to get your brand up to that level. So it was a brand awareness campaign. That's what we're talking about here is that's what familiarity is built from and brand awareness. You can skip some of the steps. Right. So you want to talk about like the sort of courtship stages as you were talking about earlier, but you can jump some of those stages if you get a personal introduction. Right. So if my best friend says to me, you should try this, I'm way more likely to do that because I already have familiarity and trust with her or with him. And from there I'm willing to like at least take a test, especially if it's low cost. So I would certainly put my email address in for something like that because a friend said that. So that's where you get that social proof. Right. And so when you talk about that, the one thing that is in is hard today is credibility because reviews are fake. People know that they have disregarded. I mean the amount of reviews are down so low compared to four years ago. I mean just the number of reviews on even some of the best selling products.

Text reviews are definitely. People have their hesitations with text reviews and believing that 100%. But if you can get your customers to give you video reviews, can give you a picture of them maybe holding the product or you a picture with them. Pictures and video go a lot further than a text review. So if you can push to get, yeah, I would say social proof is still very powerful. Especially when you don't have the ability to get introduced through a warm customer of yours, then you want to rely on those social proof like video and images and that's what's going to kind of help you turn cold traffic into that warm buyer that's ready to pay you and get started.

Right? Right. Product launchers I want to remind you that we did a recent episode with the team from Field Agent and remember we talked about that as a great way to get early reviews because this is kind of like a focus group but a really specialized focus group because they will do geolocations and they will do like photographs and videos. So in other words, if you want to know if I'm going to test out your product, you're going to send me free product and I'm going to review it and test it and you want to know that I'm a mom of two kids, 9 and 4. I can take pictures with my kids. You'll get a picture of me with my kids. You can see the toys on the floor. You'll get a video of them playing with whatever that is. That's like a part of the whole service that they provide in with their apps. So not only do they find you the right people, but then they will force that kind of visual and audio and AV style results coming out of it. So you get qualitative and quantitative information back because that's what you need to continue to develop your product or that's what you need. But you can also use it for reviews in the future for different things that you might need from marketing. And so it's a really great. It's a single amount of money you spend but you get double use out of it and that's a fantastic. I'm always looking for something where we can repurpose things.

Oh yeah, reviews. If you can get video and image reviews, that is an asset that is going to help you sell a lot and they last forever pretty much. I mean if you got a video testimonial three years ago, you could still be using it as an actual Facebook ad or as a YouTube ad. Even just linking directly to the YouTube video from an email campaign. Maybe it's a follow up email campaign. You just share a success story so you link someone over. But that is a sales asset that will generate a lot of money. Yeah.

Worth doing. So keep. They keep on giving. So yeah, I love that. So let's talk about some of these other trendy kind of things that we keep hearing about about ManyChat and Facebook messenger programs and how is that working on the product business and is it selling product?

Oh yeah, so you've heard me. Obviously I'm all about relationship building and how can we build the relationship even better? Well, manychat is that way you can build these very strong relationships versus email. So email is very one sided. You send out an email blast, whether it's regular blast or whether they're in a sequence, they're not going to reply to it, they're just going to read it. They're going to either click or not email open rates are just going down and down and down. The click rates are going down and down and down. So email is really hard to build that relationship with your prospects these days. Well, when you work with ManyChat and you're communicating with people back and forth, I mean that's really the beauty of ManyChat is it allows you to send a message to somebody. They click a button or they type in an answer and then you send them something else. And then you use maybe a GIF as like a media or you send them an audio clip or you send them a short little video right there inside the Facebook messenger platform. That's how you really build a relationship. So me personally, how I'm using manychat is when somebody opts in for my free digital download like I talked about before, they will then be put into a message sequence where they are sent a message, they're sent a follow up message a day later. But then there's two days later, two or three days that sends the next piece of content, the next one and the next one. Well, what I do is I actually record, I hold my phone up and I just record a little audio clip for each of those messages. Because then hearing my voice and them seeing a short little video clip, that's going to build that relationship and build that familiarity that I'm really looking for. And then my content is going to build that trust and credibility that I'm really looking for. And then once I my whole goal is to get them to have a strong relationship with me, really like me, really for me to give them value, then that is going to increase the chances that I can basically tell them what I would like them to do down the line. Whether it's opting in for something else for free or buying a product or maybe it's kind of like an affiliate thing where I recommend another product that they download. But when they have a strong relationship with me then I'm able to kind of. They listen to me and they do what I do.

Absolutely. So many of you probably don't even realize this, but I own two companies so I product launch hazards, it's a part of has Design, which is our design and development product company obviously. But Braincasters is the other side and we own a marketing firm. Right? It's a content marketing firm. And in that content marketing, it's primary video casting and podcasting are a crux of it. Right? Content proliferation and repurposing of content is our goal. With everything that we do and making everything automated and done for you, like that's the absolute goal. But one of the things that we've really found is, and we've been doing that for four and a half, almost five years, so five years now that we found with it is the profound effect that voice ads can have. So we run podcast ads in a really unusual way. We can run them for product, we've run them for products. In fact, we've run them for $3,000 products and had great success. We've run them where campaigns where people had to do more than enter in their email address, they had to actually give their full address to receive something. And so, you know, and we've received up to close to 37% conversion rates, which is unfounded in most of the marketplace. And there's two reasons for it. One you're referring to is that we established a fabulous relationship of give, give, give, give, give. Because before we took the first ad on a podcast, we had 100 episodes. So we'd given 100 pieces of amazing content and information before we ever took our first ad. The second thing is we only took really relevant ads, companies that we could believe in and endorse and say their products were good. And the host records that, and the host says, this is a good product. I tested it myself. There's a whole review here. You can see pictures and video and all of the things about how I used it and why I'm recommending it. And so the conversion rate goes up, up, up, up, up because of that. And so, but that is because you're tapping into someone who has that relationship. So if it's costly, if it's time consuming, if you don't have a giant product line and you're not really, or you're spread thin, this is for you Amazon sellers who have multiple brands, and I know many of you do, and your spread thin be thinking about utilizing that alliance style. Because finding someone who has access and authority and trust of the right marketplace, the right group of fitness enthusiasts, the right group of nutritional experts, whatever it might be that you want to advertise for and that you want to sell, using them in that way, in a really good way, not just placing an ad, but getting them to review your product, use your product, try it out, and then doing the audio style and the video style ads where they're Saying that it's good makes a huge, huge difference in your conversion rates overall. And the best part about it, as you know, you're treating your podcasts and your videos. You just mentioned it at the beginning of this. That's your new authority, this is the new trust economy, is the podcast hosts, are the video hosts, the YouTube channel hosts, right? Those are your authorities. Those are our new networks. And so if that's the case, then you should be tapping in now. Well, they need the funds. This is what I know for certain. You can buy ads so much cheaper on a podcast than you can anywhere else, and they will be three to five times more effective, sometimes even greater than that, depending on the market area you're in.

I would definitely agree with that. And then that's actually something that I love that you just said that, because I've never seen.

We're like working on that together here.

Yeah, no, that is a really good idea. I've never actually thought to buy ads on podcasts, but I think when you buy ads on podcasts, you need to do it recurring. You need to do it for a long period of time. You don't want to just buy an ad once and then sit there by your computer looking at your data, and you don't see any new visitors on your site, and then you flip out. You don't do it anymore. You have to just like with that.

Podcast, it takes time, right? This is what I did when I very first decided that I was going to start to talk to Amazon sellers in my business. I had never worked with them before. I had only. This was many years ago, but I had only worked with multimillion, like hundred to $300 million companies before. And so I decided, you know what, I got one person who came to me, and it was a really fun project. And I thought, I'd like to do more of these now and again because they're really fun. What should I do? And so I went on 12 podcasts in three months. I did an interview because I'm an expert, so it was a little easier to do that than it is to place an ad. At that time, nobody was placing ads on podcasts, and so I was like, oh, I'll just do an interview. And I. So I did an interview on 12 different podcasts, and I ended up with $120,000 worth of work, but it was six months later. And then that honestly probably led to about almost a million dollars worth of work over time because it was just because of royalties and other things that happen over Time. But it was immediate results don't really happen because people are behind. Right. They're like, I can't catch up on all the podcasts I'm listening to. Right. And so maybe I get two or three a day. If you're like a binge listener, if you're a serious listener, if you listen every time you work out, that kind of thing. But most people, the average is like three a week. And so they're behind on the ones they want to hear, so. Or they go and they search when they're looking for information. So they're going to be looking for a fabulous relationship marketer. Where are they going to find it? Oh, well, Ian will pop up. Right. And so that's where. When they go to search for it, that's where you want to be found. Because at that time they're looking, it's easier to make a sale.

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, so being in front of them multiple times over and over and over, just like how the podcast host built that audience is he just put out one podcast episode and then lead. He's been in front of them over and over and over. So you would start to. If you start to. If you find a great podcast show that really shares your audience and you know for a fact that those listeners are your prime demographic, then you want to commit to at least I'd say, three months. Three months of time period, trying to be in every single episode.

Right, Right. So, guys, I'm going to put into product launchers, I'm going to put into the blog post for this episode and into the video description area, I'm going to put a link to Poditize, which is the platform that we host all of the. We have 120 podcasters who are following this model, who have good content proliferation. By that I mean that they are producing blog post, videos, audios, they're doing the whole gamut of it. So they're serious about this. They're not just. It's not just a casual thing or it's not just to support their own business. And so I put the link in there. If you want more information, I'm going to have Tom come on. You guys have met him before on the platform. He's one of our experts. But I'm going to have Tom come on and talk Potter ties and brandcasters, because I just realized how important this is for product sellers out there, for you to get aligned with the right people. And so I'm going to have them talk great detail about how this works and what happens there, and you bring up a really good point, is how hard that is. But the big part is now you've got them. You got 37% of the people who opted into your form. What are you going to do with them?

So then it just comes down to continuous messaging and continuous delivering content to them. And so as you continue to message back and forth with them and the messaging strategy with ManyChat and with Facebook messenger is not just you don't want to use it like you would an email, where you just say, hey, here's the message. Click or don't click. Right. You want to kind of do permission marketing where you send them a message and you say, hey, we've got this great piece of content that we created. Do you want me to send it to you? And then they're going to either click yes or no. Now what I do is when they click yes, obviously, then you send them the link to that piece of content and they go consume it. But if they click no, then you want to say, okay, no worries. By the way, I don't want to annoy you. So you can always unsubscribe from these messages just by replying stop. So you want to give them the out. And what I found is that when a lot of people, when I see them click no, they do not unsubscribe. I'll tell them, look, this is how you unsubscribe. You just type in stop and you're done. And the crazy thing is that they don't unsubscribe.

No, they don't.

When you give them the out and you make it very clear, like, look, you can unsubscribe. I don't want to annoy you. I'm just trying to help you. And it's like you gain so much more brownie points and they like you so much more because you've now given them that out. And I don't know. So I've seen great results with that.

But so it's just in that case, it's not what they're looking for. They know they want something more from you and they're looking for that. It's just not quite the right thing that they wanted right at this moment. That's why they didn't go, yes, Right. And so that's a good sign that you've built trust in your community. You're building a relationship. It's just you haven't hit on the right thing they're looking for yet.

Right. Like, maybe I put out a piece of content that's relating to click funnels. But maybe they're really more interested in manychat and messenger marketing. So like, no, I'm not trying to learn clickfunnels right now. So you do that a couple times where you're sending pieces of content, you're asking for permission to send them that piece of content and then you want to make them an offer and pitch to them. So you say, hey, we've got this great product that is priced at X. Do you want me to send you the link to it? You want to again do your commission marketing? Do you want me to send you the link to the landing page where you can learn more about this? Then when they go to that landing page, you want it to be full priced. You do not want to give them any kind of discount or even say that it's discounted in any way. You want to price anchor the highest price possible. So if it's $1,000 that you would love to get for and that's the top level, then tell them it's 1000 bucks because you can always retarget them with a Facebook ad, with another message, with an email, and then you can give them the discount at that point. But the most important thing is to first price anchor on a major level, saying this is worth $1,000. They need to get it in their head that the value here is massive, that the price is X.

Right. And I want to point this out to you guys because a lot of you Amazon sellers do the reverse strategy where you go in with really low price, get your like listing established and you get going from there and then you start to raise the price slowly over time. This is the reverse. You have to establish the perceived value at the high point. So just keep that in mind that that low price strategy works on Amazon because of Amazon's algorithm doesn't work on the mindset and the relationship building with people. Perceived value needs to be set from the beginning. It's what I first saw it is. That's its value. And so keep that in mind there. When you buy something and you're buying it once and you're just trying to get your listing going and you got a bunch of people you wanted volume in and you didn't care about anything else. It's a totally reverse strategy when you're brand building.

Yeah. And you want to really make sure that they know that this is the price. And then when you do drop it down, then say this is only for a limited time. This is only going to happen for that and really put a time limit on that discount. And then you're going to see that a lot more people are going to actually take you up on that discounted offer and actually take advantage. Because now, like you just said, the perceived value is there. And what I see a lot of people doing, which you do not want to do, is instantly discount it. Like, you say this is $500, but today you can only pay $200. Just an instant price drop. Well, you didn't pricing her hard enough that it was actually $500. You need to introduce it's $500 and then just leave it. You don't want to discount it immediately.

Right. And this is one of the worst strategies that I've seen going out there is recently is like the cart abandonment. People are getting wise to it. Like, I can't tell you how many times I put stuff in my cart. See if you'll send me an email an hour later.

Yeah, exactly.

And I'm like, oh, I got a hundred bucks off. Great. Like, this is. I mean, people know it's gonna happen, so it's a little too systematized. I like to wait a day. That's my personal opinion. I like to let people sit on that and like peruse it. They thought about it. It's weighing on them. I was really interested in that. Maybe they've had time to finally read the content that they consumed. If they went through the funnel quickly. Like, that's another problem that happens. And now they're getting a little more excited.

Now when you do your abandoned cart, follow up, follow up with that full price. And don't assume that their objection, their reason for not buying, was price related. It may have been tiny. Maybe they were just standing in line at Starbucks and then it was their turn to order. Maybe it was they were at a red light and then they had to drive.

So, yeah, this exact same happened to me when I was doing a sign for one of our events. It was because I was like, there was something quite wrong with the file. And so I needed to wait till my team revised it. And the next morning I dropped it in. But by the next morning, I got a hundred bucks off of it. So it was like they're lost. Right. I was going to buy anyway. I just realized that when I got through that process of it, the file didn't look right.

Yeah. So what you want to do is follow up with a full price because again, that's going to price anchor even more. You're not assuming that price is the objection. You're assuming that maybe it's something else. Right. And maybe you need to overcome that objection. So you still have that full price, then maybe you do it a third time or a fourth time, you know that you still have that same price and then you want to discount it down. And if price was the objection, then they will purchase at that point once you've discounted it.

That's fantastic. I love that strategy. And that's so great. Well, what else do you want to share with our readers, watchers, listeners? All of the above?

Well, I would say, I mean, just relationship first. Always focus on a relationship when you're building an audience, focus on relationship. You can always offer them something down the line and chances are they're more likely to take you up on that offer. When you've built a solid relationship and if you do introduce an offer to them and they don't take you up on that offer, it either is because you don't have a strong enough relationship or they don't see the value there. They just, no matter how hard you try to explain that this is going to help you so much, they just don't see it. Like maybe they're looking at the price and like a thousand bucks for this, it's just not there.

You know, maybe I don't trust you yet. You need more time.

So when you introduce an offer to them and it just doesn't stick, nobody takes it up. Then you need to look at, don't look at the price. Everybody looks at the price and they're like, that's the problem, I need to discount it down. Look at the other things of like, did I establish the value? Did I fully sell them that this is going to help them? Did I introduce enough social proof? Like, are they just thinking that they just don't trust me full enough? So I need to introduce some reviews and video testimonials showing that I've actually helped other people. You know, is it my guarantee? Like maybe because my return is only a 30 day return, maybe I should extend it to a 90 day return policy or guarantee.

There's so many factors. Yeah, so, so how often do you get conversations going on that side of things? Does that happen? Do you have ways to get the conversation going from those that didn't opt in? Do you find that they engage at all to find out why?

I mean, it's always tough, right? Because sometimes they may just unsubscribe or just leave right away. But your retargeting or your follow up strategy can be, can you fill out A survey. Can we ask you a couple questions? Can we. If you answer one question, then we will give you a bigger discount. Any way that you can really follow up with them, if you can get their phone number, call them up directly and just be like, hey, Joe, I realize that you still haven't purchased or maybe it's the opposite of that. So maybe you actually call up your actual customers and you say, hey, I saw that you purchased from us recently. Just curious, what was it that made you want to purchase? Where did you see us? Where did you initially see our act? What do you think really picked their brain about? Why is it that they decided to take that leap of faith with your company? What was that straw or that needle that broke the camel's back or whatever it is that resulted? And a lot of people are just going to be like, oh, I don't know. But you really have to push them to get that answer. And then that's going to help you go back into your whole sales funnel and your customer journey.

That's really interesting because that's also another follow up strategy that I think we didn't mention here, but that it's really. I had a conversation recently with Seth Green about it and Seth. And Seth was mentioning that he found out he was like a really big client of one of the services he was using and yet never got offered a discount. Never even got a thank you phone call or anything like that. And we have a practice that are when people send us referrals for podcasters. So if you're a podcaster and you refer somebody, if you're already one of our podcast clients and you refer somebody, we give you five free episodes produced. So, like, it's a pretty hefty production referral fee. Referral alliance, kind of. Yeah, exactly. It's a reward. And so it's our way of saying, wow, thank you. Thank you for trusting us. Because we think the biggest trust is when somebody refers you, right? And so we reward that really highly. And he was like, that's the whole reason I want to come over and do even more business with you is because you recognize the value I'm adding by raving about you. And so you thank me for it. And he's like, it's like not even about the dollar amount of all of that. It's about the fact that you even take the time to do it. And so that kind of follow up is when you get a repeat customer. Now's the time to really pick up the phone because they feel rewarded for that. Just by you recognizing them that they're there or sending them an email or whatever that might be, that recognition is really important.

Yeah, the recognition is important. And I would also say when you're brand new and you're launching a new product or you're launching a new product line or something, I think questioning those early customers that you're getting is super important to figure out what was it that really resonated with them for why they bought and what do they think about the product, where did they initially see your ads and what do they think about your brand and just all that kind of stuff. And then ask them for a video review, ask them for a picture, ask them for a written review. Asking them for that free asset that you can then it's a high value asset for your business to then bring on other customers. So connecting with them and then you're building that relationship with them so that you're increasing the chances of them actually being a recurring customer and buying from you again.

Yeah, that's a great way. Also, another strategy, guys, we're utilizing this as well. Lara Hazard, who's our market research expert on the platform here on Product Launch Hazards has been working on this with us and it's working brilliantly. And basically it is a way for us to connect with our customers. So we pick our, in this case, it's our podcast customers and we pick a podcaster and we say, okay, we're going to ask them why they use our services, we're going to ask them a bunch of questions. And this is market research. We want to understand more about how we can market more effectively to find more people like them. Because this is, they're wonderful, they're great clients. So how can we find more that are like them? So we're interviewing them and asking them some of the questions, like, what was the number one reason you chose to go with us? And you know, she has a whole series of questions and she's moderating that and doing that for us. In the process, though, what we decided to do was to give them something back for it. So we, at the beginning of it, she's asking them, tell us all about your show and tell us all about you and why you decided to start your show and what it's about and everything like that. And we're using that as a. And we're putting out an article about that. So they're getting a little bit of promotion in the process and then they're going to answer our market research questions at the end. So rather than that, we realized that was more valuable than us giving them a free episode or us giving them 50 bucks or you giving them free product, for them it was more valuable. The thing they needed the most was more promotion for their show. And so we're able to give that to them and get our market research questions answered. And at the same time, we have permission. If they say something wonderful and flattering about us, we get to use it as a testimonial because we've got full recorded permission. And so that's where we really have gotten into a place where that's doing triple duty for us. We got market research, we got testimonials, and we got promotion for our clients, which makes them super happy. And if their show grows, then our site grows and our business grows with them. So thinking about how you can do the follow up in a really great way to get what you need, but also give them what they need, that's that relationship building.

And what I found many times with this follow up on current customers is that you can upsell them at the exact point when you're talking to them and you're just picking their brain. Many times they will either upsell themselves or, or it's a lot easier to actually upsell and cross sell them to other things. So, I mean, there's so many benefits to just communicating with your current customer base.

Wow, wonderful. Well, everyone here are going to be able to find Ian pretty consistently because he's going to be joining us as an expert. So he'll be doing his office hours, which is your chance to ask him killer tech questions if that's what you want. Or you can ask him like these general really relationship building questions and all of those kinds of things about what great marketing is or when you're ready for it. And for those of you who've been going through and doing some of the strategy work with me or had strategy calls with me, and I've said, hey, I've got a marketing expert I'm going to introduce you to when you're ready. There's a reason you're not ready for Ian yet. And so I am hoping that over the time of you doing a lot of our expert calls, they'll realize what they need to put in place and put in order to, to work with you. And so really, what is the ideal stage for someone to come and work with you? Ian, how early is early enough for you, but not too early for them?

Well, that's a tough question because, you know, I'm all about relationship building and using content to build that relationship. And so like if you are, let's say, six months out from launching your product, I wouldn't say that that's too early because me neither. Yeah, you start creating content and you start building your audience and building this list of people that are really digging the information that you're putting out there. Then you have all those people as potential customers for when you are actually ready to start selling to them in a bigger way.

So you don't have to wait for inventory in the garage or on the shelf. You don't have to wait for that. It's too late. Yeah, it is. It's harder then.

Yeah, because it takes time. I mean, think of it like making a snowball. You start with a snowflake and you're just rolling it and you're rolling it and you're rolling it and it's getting bigger and bigger. But it takes, takes a while to build that snowball and then you can finally leverage it and really start to crank out sales. But the content creation and the relationship building doesn't stop once you're now able to sell them something. If anything, it should now increase because you don't want to just hammer them super hard with an offer just because now you can actually fulfill and sell them something. So it's an ongoing process.

Well, and it wouldn't be product launch hazards if we didn't ask you about the biggest hazards, the biggest things that go wrong, the other kind of hazards with the single Z. So what goes wrong most often when you figure out that something's just like this is just not working. What is typically some of the most common mistakes, common hazards that go wrong in marketing?

Well, it really just depends on what your business model is and what your whole strategy is. But what I would say majority of the time when you're building these automation funnels, these customer journeys, a lot of times it is not paying attention to detail. And so it may be a link in your message sequence. Link number five is messed up because maybe you changed your URL or maybe a tag is not firing which is not triggering your zapier automation. Or it's always the really small little details that get forgotten about or overlooked, which ends up causing a bad customer experience or just a hiccup and makes your brand look bad. So I would say if you're building your team or you're doing things on your own, make sure that you are paying attention to the small details because.

And testing everything.

Yeah, constantly be testing, testing, testing, making sure that like go and buy your Own products on a regular basis, opt in for free to your own lead magnets and get your digital downloads and constantly make sure you that everything is running properly. Because a lot of times some random little hiccup will happen. Like right now, there's an issue happening with Facebook and manychat where you're using this certain growth tool called the Ref URL. There's supposed to be a thing that fires like you're supposed to get like a get started little button in Facebook and that's not happening.

That's where it's coming from. Oh my gosh. You just solved our issue. Wait till I tell the team. So we have these people who like type into the comments, type in get, yeah, I'm ready or get started or whatever. We didn't know where it was coming from, but it's from Facebook.

It's a Facebook issue.

And believe me, a lot of people are heated about it. Because when you opt into messenger, you're supposed to. Depending on your growth tool that you're using, there's supposed to be a little get started button in the type window in order to. Then when you click that, now they're subscriber and you can now communicate with them back and forth. Well, Facebook and Messenger is not sending that get started button. So it's messing up tons of people's campaigns that are using that growth tool. I mean, little things like that. And it's like, sometimes it's not even your fault that this little small, minor detail is not happening. It can be.

This is why you just need to hire experts who are up on these things. Because I can tell you, when you run it for yourself, it takes you a whole lot longer to diagnose these things than it does when you run hundreds of them or you run for multiple campaigns at once. And you do it because Ian can't afford to have all his funnels down. His clients are going to go crazy and it's not going to be good for his business. Right? So this is where an expert who's been there, done it and does it again and again and again, but for different people all the time. Makes a difference in your being up on these things and not making these, what I call rookie errors, right? These hazards of product launching, these hazards of marketing. So, and I'm so glad you're joining us. I'm looking forward to working directly with you. So you guys are going to be seeing some product launch hazards, ads and stuff out there. And that's because we want more people to know about us. This is not about selling you more stuff because we really honestly don't have more stuff to sell you. We just got amazing experts who you all should be working with when you're ready. And so we just want to make sure you guys are aware because there's a lot of nefarious launching programs out there. There's lots of stuff that doesn't work and we want to circumvent that with the people that really do and get in front of that. And Ian's going to help us do that. So we're really excited about that. And so you'll be seeing more of him and of us. And you can find him, of course, on the Product launch hazards website, productlaunchhazards.com with two z's h a z z a r d s dot com and you will be able to very shortly be able to click through join his funnel, join his email campaigns, get all kinds of information and content directly from Ian. Because remember, we're not here to like get in the way of that. We're here to make sure that you can find Ian. So absolutely. Well, I thank you so much for joining us and I'm so glad you're going to be one of our experts.

Ian, thank you so much for having me. I'm definitely happy to be on board too.

So be sure to join him. You're going to be live streaming next month and you'll be able to ask him all kinds of great questions, but in the meantime, reach him over the profile and you'll be able to just send him an email and ask him some questions directly that way. So thanks again guys. Thanks for watching Product Launchers for joining us and we'll be back again probably in the next day or so with yet another episode. Talk to you soon. Thanks.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Product Launch Hazards. To get the most out of your membership, visit productlaunchhazards.com to join the Expert Office Hours Live and ask us your burning questions. Check out the resource library for document templates and guides and get exclusive articles and shares each day. Don't forget, you can always book a private concert consult with any expert so you can out design, outsource and out profit your way to product launch success.