Successful Product Marketing For Sharks with Seth Greene

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 Hazard. 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 there product launchers. Super excited to bring you a really great marketing resource. For you I have Seth Green, who is the ultimate marketing magician. I think it might be self titled, but I agree wholeheartedly. He has seven bestselling books including A Market Domination for Podcast Inc. Which is on the shelves and in Barnes and Noble right now. Yep, there it is. And actually that's kind of how we met. I wrote an article about him for Inc. And we were talking about how podcasting can help boost your business, of which we are one of those people who wholeheartedly believe in it. And so Seth is one of our partners that we work on in our podcasting business, but he's also one of our referral partners that we bring lots of our product clients to. And so I want to share him with you. I also want you to know about his podcast, the Sharkpreneur podcast that he co hosts with Kevin Harrington. Woo hoo. Like that's amazing. So I'm going to have him talk to you a little bit about that, but first let's get a little background on Seth and let's chat with him. Hey Seth, thanks for joining us.

Thank you so much for having me. It is an honor to be here serving your listeners.

So tell me a little bit how you got to doing a lot more product work and you do a lot more product work than most of the marketing people that I've approached we do.

So we drive traffic and conversion, which are the only two things that matter in your business. If you're selling product, you need the right people to see your product and then you need them to actually buy it and then hopefully, if it's consumable, buy more than once. So we encompass that all in the traffic and conversion departments, whether traffic is online advertising, all the way from whether that's Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Google or LinkedIn, all the way down to good old fashioned wonderful direct mail. And then whether that conversion is taking place online via what we call a marketing funnel that takes people through a series of steps designed to get them to punch in their credit card, or whether it's taking them to a physical bricks and mortar outlet to punch in a credit card, either way, however they end up consuming that purchase, whether they mail in a check via the mail, fill out an order form, that runs the gamut of what we do in terms of taking a company and driving their sales as high as they want them to go.

This is a big problem for a lot of product companies. They think, oh great, I have my product on Amazon, I've got it listed or I've made it to the shelf. But they don't realize that they still have to drive a lot of sales in themselves. And that's where you really come in. And so these types of marketing tools and other things. Let's talk about them a little bit after, we'll get to that. But I mean, they're so critically important in the process and we maybe don't budget for them and realize it. And that's one of the reasons why I'm bringing you on as an early resource for them to consult with and understand what you can do for them.

Absolutely. And that's completely true. It's funny, we were just writing some promotional copy for Shark Tank's Kevin Harrington, one of my business partners and podcast co host, and he was talking about a company he was involved in called Celsius, which is a negative calorie energy drink. Literally, you drink it and calories, you burn calories by drinking the drink, which my wife is like, oh my God, give me a case of it. Right?

Can I have one too, please?

So it's funny because he talked about sometimes the worst thing you can end up with is the deal where you now have shell space at Walmart, because if you're on there and don't have a marketing plan to move it off the shelf, then your test is going to fail, Walmart's going to ship it all back and you never get a second chance. Whereas what's really important is not just the shelf space in the first place, but the plan. Because Walmart's not going to move it off the shelves, how is anyone going to know to go look for it? How is anybody going to know to find it? The $8 an hour greeter at Walmart isn't going to steer anybody over to go buy it. So what are you going to do to make sure that people buy it off the shelves or off Amazon? Because just having it on Amazon isn't enough. It's probably not the only product of its type in the world. None of us have a monopoly, unfortunately. You probably have competition. How are you going to get your ideal buyers to find it on Amazon, where they erode Your margins to next to nothing these days anyway. But how are you going to get them to find it and buy it as opposed to your competition, I think is critically important.

Well, you touched on something that we talk about. Timothy Bush is one of our experts here on the platform and he and I, along with Joe Tarnowski from ecrm, I mean, we're the sort of retail experts, if you want to call us that, like we're the ones who have had the most products on the shelf or with our clients have had the most products. So we really understand that getting on the shelf is a feat in and of itself. But actually staying on that shelf is harder. And so getting a test can happen, but getting that test to be successful is really difficult. It used to be harder than it is. And that's the tricks that most people don't understand. That because we have so much geolocation tools and we have so much ability to actually do marketing that the retailer doesn't even know about, that we can make a test fly in a particular region. And we couldn't do that before. There used to be like all sorts of exposes about companies who would finally get their tests and then they'd go in and they send people to buy it so that it would turn and so. And then they would get caught and then they'd get booted out completely. But there is no rules about not doing a geolocation Facebook program letting people know that you've got this special product for a limited time only in a particular region. You can totally do that and send them to Costco, send them to Walmart. So that is, I mean, this is something people should be planning as a part of their launch of any product or a test run of any product.

Absolutely. And not only can you market to them in a specific area and send them to, for example, their local Costco or Walmart to take advantage of your offer. You can even geo Target down to the people whose devices are actually in the store. And you could literally run ads on people in Walmart who you know by device, IP address are literally in Walmart saying, hey, go to aisle seven.

Yes, well, and that is just. I mean, it's a little creepy on one hand, but it's so amazing. We didn't have this technology before. We didn't know who was gonna be the ideal shopper. And the other part is that you can drive in the shoppers. You want the ones with the targeted demographic, the ones who, like in your case of negative calorie, wanna lose weight. Right. Because when it starts working, they're going to rave about it to their friends and they're going to provide those essential reviews that are so hard to get that, that there's too much nefarious programming going on there on that end. And so to do it right, this is a great way to do that. So that's fantastic that you are experienced in all of that and doing all of that for your clients. But let's talk a little bit about sharkpreneur and your relationship with Kevin Harrington. What does that look like and what can we expect if we listen to and subscribe and we should, to the sharkpreneur podcast.

Of course you should. So the sharkpreneur show, Kevin and I do an episode every week together and then I do additional episodes on my own throughout the week, depending on the week, because we've got so long a waiting list of people who want to get on the show and Kevin's time, obviously he's speaking somewhere every other day. So it's extremely limited. We've done interviews in airports, we've done interviews in taxi cab and Ubers. We've literally done Uber interviews via Zoom wi fi on a plane. So what does that look like? We interview amazing entrepreneurs about what it takes to grow and scale their businesses. We interview people who are pretty much already successful and talk about how they got there, how they did mistakes that they made so we can avoid them. And, and a whole lot of amazing entrepreneurs and amazing lessons on how to take your company to the next level, whatever level that might be.

Wow. And it's really learning from these models of how people did things. Do you dive into some of the nitty gritty now and again about like how they made it successful or is.

It more mindset focused every single episode? I think we get down to the nitty gritty. So there's a percentage of the show that is mindset based. It's a small percentage. A lot more is very specific questions like, hey, what was your biggest challenge? What was your biggest mistake and what did you learn from it? How did you get from A to B and when we know what A to B are? I was doing an interview earlier today and we were asked, how did you decide when to hire? How do you recruit and train, how do you scale? So I mean, they're all practical hands on questions that any entrepreneur who wants to listen can say, oh, wow. Like for example, the interview I did literally right before this one, I have a page of notes and I said, oh man, those are writer downers. That's really good. I can go implement that now. Yeah, I think I have so much fun doing it because I get to learn from amazing entrepreneurs too.

That is my favorite part about my job as a columnist as the host of this show. And the membership group is really getting to learn something new every day. Deeper dive into any particular area. It is really amazing. And what we learn and what we gather from all this information though, we turn into refining what our resources are, refining what we sell to people, what our services are. And so I want to dive a little bit into those details like we were talking about before. So there's lots of marketing things being thrown around, like funnels. Funnels is a good one. Everyone hears about a funnel. So let's talk a little bit about that. So what does a funnel look like for a product company and how does it really work?

Okay, so a funnel is a multi step process. So if you think about it, picture like a funnel in the kitchen and you pour in a whole bunch of stuff at the top and then out the bottom comes a smaller amount of purified stuff. So in our example, so we would pour in a lot of traffic of your ideal customers at the top, they would go through multiple steps to qualify themselves and then at the bottom, outcome paying customers. So those steps might be, they might, depending on the product, they might need to consume a lead magnet, that might be an educational video, that might be a white paper, that might be a webinar, that might be, that might be just opt in for a discount coupon offer or get on our VIP notification list. So we've done funnels for everything from physical products to services to, I mean even food. So for example, we have a restaurant where the lead magnet is text in to get 20% off your first bill. And you're now on our VIP text message list. We have physical product companies where we will do a social media contest. And the lead magnet is enter to win this contest to win the product that you want. And then one person wins. And we have five, 600 or thousands of people who enter that we then will offer a consolation prize and say, sorry, you didn't win, but here's like 20% off or 10% off or wherever it is. And because those people are interested, because they entered, a significant percentage of them will now buy at the slightly discounted offer. And the cost to acquire them as customers was way less than it would been if we had tried to sell every single one of them directly. So it can be as simple as that to as complicated depending on the price point of the product, the higher the price that you're asking people to pay, the more education they need before they're ready to buy. They might buy that.

So that's when you have lots of steps, right?

Yes. So that Celsius energy drink that might be $1.99 or a free sample will send you a bottle or something. You don't need too much education. You drink it, you lose weight, and it tastes good, and it gives you energy. You were like, sign me up. Whereas if we were asking them to buy a product, a physical product that might be a couple thousand dollars, then obviously we might have them watch four or five videos and attend a webinar to get educated enough to the point where they felt comfortable punching in their credit card to a stranger online for 5,000 bucks.

Yeah. So that is harder, the more expensive a product even. We find that some of our clients who have maybe $300 products or things like that, where you really do have a much more longer education piece that has to happen. And any way in which you can get them to go through that process and watch a video here and learn a little bit more and see it in use. And we try to do it in a service way. I'm sure that you do, too. It's like whatever you can, whatever your lead magnets are, whatever those stages are. The more service that they're providing, the more like informational, like, so, okay, yeah, it is $1.99 drink, and we can give you a sample, but you do want to lose weight. So can we give you some tips? Can we give you some of these things? And those things are not that complicated to put together. I mean, there's lots of wonderful information that most of the companies we have developed their product on, and they're not utilizing it. They have a lot of assets.

Right. It's the question of what are those assets and what is the proper. Do they need to be rewritten, repurposed? Do they need to be redeveloped? What is the proper psychological formula, the ways in which those steps are distributed? What is the order of those steps that ultimately stacks those psychological triggers so that people actually take action?

Let's talk about that, because there's a term in marketing called AB testing, and we have that same term here at Product Launch Hazards. We talk about it all the time. We do AB testing in product different because we're always trying to test the market fit, the product market fit. Because we want to make sure we get a lot of people come in with great product ideas, but they don't know where to sell it, how to sell it, who to sell it to. They don't have any idea. And that actually is a lot more costly and a lot more time consuming and goes wrong 56% of the time. Like, that's the 56% failure rate. Right. There's a very exact one. If you guys haven't seen that episode yet. There's a whole thing on product market fit, and I did this research myself to determine that figure. I surveyed startup failure across the board and product market fit is the two things. The wrong market or the wrong product. Those two things go wrong 56% of the time. It's not funding, it's not the wrong resources.

It's that funny that you came up with that number with a quantifiable survey, because my marketing mentor, who I learned everything from in the beginning, Dan Kennedy, says 50% of the success or failure comes down to the target market message to market match. So you quantify he. I'm sure he made it.

Yeah.

Quantified it. It turns out you're pretty close.

He was pretty close. Well, and Dan Kennedy is a genius, so I'm not surprised. He got pretty darn close. Right. So. But yeah, if we have this, we always have to be testing it. But in your case, like assuming they've already got some amount of product, they shouldn't go as far as your services if they don't know if people want to buy it at all. However, they might want to test market through a marketing funnel. They might want to test market before you ever put it on the shelf. So doing that a B testing strategy. And so can you describe what a B testing is for those that don't know it from a marketing perspective?

Sure. And we. Kevin Harrington has a saying that I have heard a million times where he says test before you invest. When he was purely infomercial, it would cost a couple hundred thousand dollars to produce an infomercial and buy enough airtime in one city and get the business all set up to find out if people would buy it. And now you can do all of that same thing for a fraction of the cost online. So before I spent millions of dollars producing inventory and trying to get on the shelves at Walmart, you could spend 10, 20, 30 grand and know if you had a hit or not. So AB testing to us is changing one element and then finding out what the impact was. So, for example, there's more than one version of the market domination for podcasting book. There's a version with a different picture of me. There's A version with a slightly different title, There's a version with a different back cover. There's versions with different calls to action that we ran to ultimately arrive at this version that is the best performing version that generates the highest amount of revenue for us. So one of the easiest ways to ab test is. Is online. So if we're, for example, creating Facebook ads for a client, we will test versions of the headline versions of the body copy, we will test versions of different images, we will then test versions of. We will aim at a different target markets and see which ones respond. On average, we run about 250 different split tests to find out what is the ultimate winning formula of the perfect headline.

250. I just want people to hear that. 250 different split tests. And this is. If you're in the design world, if you're in the engineering world, you have to understand it's like a design of experiment, right?

Yes.

A doe, Right. You can only change one element at a time, or you don't get adequate results, you don't get pure results, and you don't know what went wrong or what went right.

Which is why we run 250 to find the perfect combination. And then we scale that and put all our traffic money behind the one that won't. And we have a much higher percentage, as you mentioned, chance of success than if we took our first guests. I mean, we had a campaign that we ran for a company that was an app company, and it was in the meditation space. And the image that we thought would be the best, dozens and dozens of images, we split, tested. And the one that we had picked, that we thought would one, we had picked two or three images of people meditating. It's a meditation app. Look at pictures of tranquil people, and they bombed. They didn't work. And what we found was we had picked some random images just for the heck of it. And one of them was a angry guy eating a lemon. And you could see, like, the whole lemon is his smile, and there's like flies buzzing around him and he's angry. And that one won. And we never would have guessed. I never would have picked it. When the designer said, hey, let's try this as one of the images, I literally said, there's no way that works. It's a pissed off guy eating a lemon with flies. What does that got to do with meditation? Why is he doing it? It makes no sense. And yet, because maybe pissed off people resonated with that image and go, I feel like that guy. I want to Meditate. Or they saw it and were just so curious, what the heck is this guy doing eating a lemon with flies that it worked. So you never know until you test, which is why we test a lot.

I love that. We also say the same thing here at Product Launch Hazards, which is really that when you're testing, you can't assume, you know, like, we are too in our heads. We are too in our business. We are way too in our product. Right. It's our thing. And we can't get out of that to understand that there's a perception issue. And it does not matter what we think of our product. It only matters what that market thinks of it and whether or not they're ready to plunk down money for it right at the end of the day. And so we always say that that's the important part to do is to test whether or not the dogs will eat the dog food and the owners will buy it for them. That's the key. Right.

Give it to the dogs to see if they eat it. And yes, I totally agree.

And then you got to get the owners to buy it. And it's something totally different in terms of an image.

Right. Marketing to the dog is very different than marketing to the owner.

That's right. And so we say the same thing in all kinds of areas, juvenile products and everywhere, that it really doesn't matter. All that matters is that you get past that gatekeeper of who's actually going to be doing the buying. And in the consumer product world, that's women. Women have a whole lot of power here. And so estimates run anywhere between 80 and 90%, depending on the category of influence or control over the purchases in that business. Do you see that kind of thing happening in marketing? Do you see a really gender difference in breakdown in your marketing?

It depends on the product. So, for example, we have a client in the supplement space, and we're selling a neurotropic brain supplement for Brain Fog. And we recently found, well, if you have brain fog, men don't want to admit they have brain fog. They don't want to admit they're forgetting things. They don't want to admit they need help stereotypically. So the ads that were run to men failed. The ads that were run to women that had pictures of men in it didn't do as well. And the ads that are being run to women for themselves and women on behalf of get this for your man magically work.

Wow. Yeah. So this is why you have to test, because you never really know. You may be Totally right about your target market. But how you get to them might be a completely different path than you think it's going to be.

Absolutely. I would not be selling a directional before Apple Maps eliminated Garmin and gave away their product for three. I wouldn't necessarily have run Garmin ads to men because we don't want to ask for directions. Right. Even if it's of a computer. Until Siri and Apple Maps made it normal that you put your address in, even if you're going somewhere where you know already how to get there.

Yeah. Oh, so, so, so, so true. So besides funnels, what else do you have in your magic hat?

We have a lot of things in our magic hat. So, for example, it all depends on where your target market's hanging out. Where are they? That's the most important factor. So that's going to inform whether we need a funnel or not. That's going to inform what social media platform we're advertising on. You might be advertising on Facebook or it might be the worst place for you. Maybe you need to be on LinkedIn, maybe you need to be on Snapchat, depending on the product and the age range of the people that you're going after. So how many steps that funnel takes, what the graphic design of that funnel looks like, how it functions on mobile devices, all of that is completely based upon, again, who your target market is. So that's the most important decision is who you're selling to, and then we can start crafting a message that will work and a media for delivering that message.

And I think this is a really good case to mention to everyone out there that if you are looking at an on the shelf model, so if your goal is to be on the shelf somewhere and you're gonna utilize test services to do this kind of marketing test, in a way, you need to be clear about that from the beginning. Because if you don't make a match to, let's say, Target's market or Walmart's market, or Costco's market, which is slightly upscale. If you're not doing your test in that market that you think you're going to be able to sell in, that information is not going to be as valuable when you go to make a buyer presentation. So that is something you also have to be really clear about. This is one of the reasons that we advocate wholeheartedly that you must have a plan. Have to have a plan that you have to know where you're going and who you want to talk to when you get there and then test that all along the way, right?

Yes. So I am going to apologize in advance if I have offend any of your viewers or listeners with this personal experience story. But I normally try and avoid shopping at Walmart. Just personal customer service experiences. Don't want to go there. And at one point, for whatever reason, my wife had sent me to go to Walmart and she needed something. I think it was a present for a kid's birthday. And it was much cheaper at Walmart than Toys R Us back when Toys R Us was around. She said, no, no, no, just go to Walmart. You only have to get one thing. And I said, okay, I can handle one thing. And then I realized when I was in there, I need razor blades. So I went to the razor blade section and I am reaching up to the top shelf because the Mach 3 Turbo, Gillette, whatever blades that are like 20 bucks are on the very, very highest shelf and I'm reaching up to get them. And there is a guy next to me, and the guy next to me is on his knee, like kneeling down to get the very lowest item on the shelf, which is the like 12 pack of disposable razors for like 99 cents. And I grab mine, he grabs his, he stands up, he, he can't see what I've grabbed because the way I was facing. But he looks at me and says, holds these things up, total stranger and says, if they make these things any more expensive, I may have to give up and start growing a beard.

Wow.

And I looked at the 99 cent pack of 12 disposable razor single blades that he was holding and I'm like, I have $20 for two razor blades. And I'm like, okay then. And I walked away.

So totally different audience, right? And then this is the thing that we have to understand from the beginning is that is our product market fit going to be right. And we can't test that product without knowing more about the market and getting more market information. And that's where someone like you really comes in handy. And that's the number one reason why I wanted to bring you on as a resource here for everyone to recognize and understand it, have access to. So let's talk about the one thing that we always do at the end of all of our videos here is let's talk about the hazards of product launching. The other hazards, not this one, but we talk about the biggest failures and the thing, the failure points that you see happen too often when things don't go right with your clients. What's usually wrong what happened earlier on before you got to them, that it wasn't able to be successful.

Sure. And unfortunately nobody's perfect. We do have a few of those. So I'll give you a couple examples. One, we had another app company and the most significant thing that I couldn't get them to do is Facebook will allow you to run app install ads where you pay per app installed on the app store. On itunes, for example. Well, they refused to do those because they wanted people to get the app on their website and opt in on their website. Because when you get the app on the itunes app store, you're not that company's customer, your Apple's customer. You don't get the data, which I totally understand why they did it that way. But they limited themselves by the fact that people are used to installing apps from an app store and we couldn't run those types of ads.

So sometimes they have restrictive criteria that.

Yes. And then the other one. Yes, it does. The other one we had was we had a client who had developed a physical direct to consumer product and it was in a certain niche. We took it to Kevin. I tried the product. I loved it. Kevin took the product, he tried it with his wife. She loved it. He was sold. He took it to qvc. He said, I want to do it on a test on QVC before I do an infomercial. QVC liked it. We did a meeting with the client. QVC said, we'll give you half an hour prime time like you will be a millionaire overnight type of spot. But we've done similar products in this space. Your product is higher quality, we freely admit that. But we're used, our viewers are used to this price point. We need you to knock the price down X amount to get to this comparable. It can be premium because it's a better product, but we need to get to this price point. And we knew what the client's margins were and he could afford to drop to that price point. It would drop his margins a decent chunk, but he would still be profitable and obviously selling a ton of units on qvc, leading to an infomercial where they could sell at higher prices. I mean, he'd be set for life. He said, no. He said, I refuse to budge my price. It's already for sale in certain physical outlets in this industry at that price. It's in certain catalogs at this price. I won't undercut it, even though it's for a 30 minute test on QVC. So QVC said, I said, you better budge. You're Going to blow the deal. This is like, do you want to be a millionaire or not? He said, I'm not budging. QVC said, well, then we're out. And Kevin said, if QVC won't do it, we're out. And we ended our relationship with the client over that. And he ended up not being successful because he refused to listen.

So for those of you who don't remember, priceit is our second phase and our second stage in our process. So we go. So just for your sake, Seth, in case, I'm going to recap it. It's prove it, price it, plan it, prototype it, protect it, produce it, and then promote the heck out of it.

And then profit from it.

And then profit from it. Yeah, that's the bonus. Eighth. Right.

It's funny because we made an online funnel for that product after qvc and Kevin said no. And we drove traffic and we had literally, I think probably like a thousand people who opted in for the lead magnet, watched the video, watched the consumer guide, and said, yes, I want it, but didn't buy. And we emailed, surveyed every single one and said, you liked it enough. You said you wanted it. Why didn't you buy every single one of them? Said, too expensive. He still wouldn't listen.

Yeah, I said, if you won't listen.

To Kevin QVC and your target audience, there's nothing I can do for you.

That's so, so true. And that is a case why we have price it so early in the process. Because we want that price to not be a market objection. Right. So we want to design the product to the target price. Because at the end, if you can't get on the shelf, if you can't get qvc, if you can't do the things in the price expectations that are out there and set by the market, it does not matter how great your product is. And that's the lesson learned. It will cost you so much more to change the market paradigm.

Very true. It will cost you a whole lot more to change people's perception than it would be to fix it right in the first place.

That's right.

That's why they need the hazards.

There you go. So, Seth, anything else you want to share with us before we go? About the things that you do or how people can reach you. And of course, they should subscribe to the sharkpreneur podcast and they can buy any one of your seven books. So.

So, yes, the books are on Amazon or in the case of number seven, Barnes and Noble, Walmart, Target everywhere else. It is on the planet. If they want to download kindle version, a PDF version, Market Domination LLC podcast, they can get one for free. Sharkpreneur is on iTunes, YouTube everywhere else. And if they want to talk, if they go to marketdominationllc.com there's a place where they can go grab request a free consultation. We're happy to talk to them since they came through you and we'll spend 15 to 30 minutes on the phone with them or zoom talking about their business and whether or not we're a good fit. And if we're not, obviously we'll steer them in the right direction.

That's so great. We'll make sure that all those links are in the blog post that corresponds with this video and podcast so that you can just go straight there and find Seth and take advantage of that. Because the marketing console is a key part and there are so many stages in which you can use marketing along the way in conjunction with refining your products. So it's something that you shouldn't just plan for the end, even though, yes, I say promote the heck out of at the end. You keep in mind that I told you that on our budget episode I told you to reserve 50% for your promotion and your marketing. 50% of your overall lunch budget needs to be launch budget needs to be for promotion and some of that you should spend in little bits and pieces on the way because you don't want to just wait till you're ready to launch to decide to go for it all. You want to have some of that testing refined earlier, right?

Find out that they're interested in it before you spend the rest of your money.

That's right. So you do your little bits and pieces and testing along the way. So thank you so much, Seth. We really appreciate it and we're so glad to be partners with you and we're so glad to have you as a resource to all of our members.

Thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to be on your show and to serve you and your members.

Thank you Product Launchers. Until next time, this is Tracey Hazard.

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