How a good man died because of bad marketing
My wife Laura is is by no means a “Marketing Maniac,” but she’s learned a thing or two from years of sleeping with a guy who is.
Laura is heavily involved with relief agencies that serve the poorest of the poor in India and Africa. Last winter she went to a conference in St. Louis where hundreds of charities were recruiting workers and raising funds.
Her comment to me upon arriving home:
“It’s incredibly depressing that the very people who are doing some of the most precious work in the entire world are the most abysmally horrible marketers.” And she plunks down a stack of brochures to prove the point. She says, “Half the time you had no idea what these people were doing, let alone why you would want to help them.”
A good man literally dies every day because those organizations haven’t bothered to master the art and science of communication. Heck, a 100 good men die every day because of their incompetence, maybe even 1000.
Early this morning I recorded a conversation with UK advertising legend Drayton Bird (The MP3 will be posted for Mastermind Club members). Drayton has been writing ads for literally 50 years now. In one sentence, Drayton explained why these organizations’ marketing is so bad:
“They think people are going to be interested in what they do simply because it’s good and important. They think their cause is so noble that they forget to think of anybody but themselves.”
Amen Drayton. And I gotta tell ya, this is a nearly universal affliction. I’m as guilty of it as anybody. I almost never hard sell, even when I should. I’m completely serious when I say that there are people out there whose business failed because I didn’t convince them to buy something that I sell.
Whatever it is that you do, there are people whose life is LESS good because you didn’t convince them to give THEIR money to YOU. Because what you sell is worth MORE than what you charge and you know it.
The better the product you sell, the more obligated you are to shout it from the mountain tops.
The irony is, it’s often the people with the most crappy products who invest the most effort into selling them. If you doubt me, turn on the TV and watch the infomercials. How many of them are selling some totally cheesy product that breaks after 1 week or doesn’t deliver the what’s promised, yet they’ve crafted and tested a brilliant sales pitch?
Why is it that crappy product = great marketing and saving lives = bad marketing???
Is there anything wrong with this picture?
NEVER let the virtue of what you sell lull you into laziness. If you’ve fulfilled the obligation of creating a good product that delivers the goods, then you have a 2nd obligation. Which is to sell it with gusto and enthusiasm.
You’ve got the goods. Now, stand and deliver.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: If you live in Europe, not being at my London seminar with Drayton Bird will cost you £50,000.
The most precious commodity is ATTENTION. How to get it:
There’s nothing harder to obtain – or more valuable to possess – than a few minutes of your prospect’s exclusive focus.
To get it, you don’t have to shout or be annoying or obnoxious. All you need is ONE clever idea, one arresting hook. Then suddenly she is listening to you intently.
On Thursday July 22 I’m doing a teleseminar on how to make that happen.
This session is precisely about discovering that magical, attention-getting hook. It’s at 12:30pm London Time (11:30am GMT, 9:30pm Sydney time, 6:30am US Central Time).
My guest is Drayton Bird, who for years was the right hand man of the legendary David Ogilvy. He has churned out hundreds of absolutely brilliant advertising campaigns. Now in his 70’s, he’s a legend to insiders in the business. Drayton is a guest at my London UK seminar September 10-12 (www.perrymarshall.com/uk).
He’s going to teach you his formula for finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, of making the familiar new and exciting.
If you come to this teleseminar with a desire to re-invent just one of your marketing campaigns, by the end of the hour you’ll know how to do it.
Date: July 22, 2010
Time: 12:30pm London, 11:30am GMT, 9:30pm Sydney, 6:30am US
Cost: Free
The number is a US telephone number, Country Code “1″: (+1) (646) 519-5860
Pin number 2665 followed by the # sign
Talk to you then!
Perry Marshall
Facebook cheers up nursing homes
Yesterday I heard from a very reliable source that Facebook has triggered a sea change in the nursing home industry. This comes from a client of one of my business mentors.
The #1 reason people die is their friends have died or been dispersed to the four winds; their family doesn’t visit them anymore, and they have no more reason to get up in the morning. I’m sure all of us have visited long-term care facilities and seen the blank stares and hopelessness of aged people living out their last days.
Facebook has changed that. There are many, many 77 year old folks in nursing homes who now have 60 Facebook friends and interact with them on an hourly basis. This is literally extending life spans – to the point of wreaking havoc in the long-term care industry.
This is because many of the payment models are based on people living only so long and their communities on Facebook are literally extending their lives.
(It’s also creating some interesting social gaffes. Like after a person dies, their friends are still getting reminders: “You haven’t reached out to Ethel for awhile. Send her a note. Click here to POKE Ethel.”)
It’s also obliterating illiteracy. Kids might be able to fake reading books in school, but they can’t fake writing comments on their friends’ pages. I seriously believe that within 5 years, nearly every single kid in the developed world will be able to read, write and type – because of Facebook.
Within 10 years, the same will be true in developing countries – because of mobile phones. Yesterday I saw a video of men with pickaxes in Rwanda digging 6 foot trenches for fiber optic cable. Rwanda is rapidly becoming the most wired country in Africa.
To hard-core, driven business types, Facebook might seem like a toy. That’s what most people thought about the Internet 10-12 years ago. It turned out to be something much bigger than that, didn’t it?
I don’t know if Facebook is a perfect fit for your business or not, but if you haven’t taken our self-evaluation you might want to do that right now. It literally takes 60 seconds and you can do it at www.IsFacebookForMe.com.
Perry Marshall
Why Fancy Often Fails
When I was getting started in marketing, my favorite part was all the “unbelievably cool super flashy” stuff that I saw the masters do. Riveting headlines, ballsy copy, daring offers.
The problem was, when I tried to do the same thing with my customers it just didn’t sound right. It was almost like trying to stick a rock music drum solo in the middle of a country music song.
One of my fave rave UK musicians is Gavin Harrison. He’s the extraordinarily talented drummer for Porcupine Tree and on this video he talks about the rivalry between “technique” and real art. And how sometimes you don’t have to try nearly so hard to pull of something that’s really beautiful and effective:
Gavin’s ideas translate *exactly* to marketing, and to cultivating relationships with customers. In my London UK seminar in September, I’m going to focus on how you can accomplish more in less time by being more relaxed. By being less technique focused not more.
Fred in Accounting: Genius or Idiot?
Us marketers have a real interesting relationship with bean counters: We use them the wrong way. In 2 areas:
(1) We FAIL to have bean counters tell us how much money our promotions and sales funnels are making for us. Seriously, most of us don’t have any “cost accounting” on our advertising and product sales at all. We shoot from the hip. Dumb.
(2) We let our bean counters scrutinize our reps, distributors and affiliates. “Hey wait a minute, I don’t really think you have to keep paying Jeff for that customer you brought him last year.” We amputate a critical piece of our sales channel and we kill the goose that lays the golden egg.
That’s backwards. It happens, by the way, because the cost accounting of #2 is a whole lot easier to perform than #1. Accountants are notoriously shortsighted about marketing and business strategy anyway.
Here’s how it should be:
(1) Our bean counters should be telling us, in dollars and cents, how much those promotions are earning. Most of us have products we should get rid of. (Myself included! As soon as I’m done with this email I’m gonna go fix this.)
(2) Our bean counters should not be allowed to make personal staff and sales channel decisions. They don’t understand the nature of the relationship.
Let’s get this right. Again, I’m guilty of this myself. Gonna change this.
Robert Serling created a document called The 8 Questions and one of my favorite sections is called “Meet the Captain of Your Ship – Fred in Accounting.”
There’s some real gold here and I think you’ll benefit from these 8 questions:
http://profitalchemy.com/the8questions/
Perry Marshall
Social Media, The Butterfly Effect & my Pal in Racine
A few years ago in the “AdWords Gold Rush,” there was a fierce battle for which Google guru was gonna land on top of the heap. A new Google e-book came out literally every 3 days and it was brutal. My most formidable competition then was Don Crowther of Racine Wisconsin. Razor sharp marketing guy if there ever was one.
The Butterfly Effect is the idea that one flap of a butterfly’s wings can change history. And it’s true. Had the butterfly flapped its wings ever so differently, today Don might be the AdWords guy instead of me. He would certainly be worthy of the title.
In fact he and I did a smoking’ hot teleseminar which we still sell today as the “AdWords Black Belt Course” (adwordsblackbelt.com). Even though it’s 6 years old (that’s like 50 years in Internet time!) and even though a handful of tech details are out of date, it stands as one of the most enduring advanced online strategy courses ever.
It also has one of the lowest refund rates of anything I sell. Again, a lot of its goodness comes from Don and the clarity of his thinking and his ability to teach.
The #1 thing you need to know about Don is, he has absolutely zero tolerance for smoke and mirrors and shell games. Nobody is going to sneak some sci-fi marketing fantasy past Don. He goes by numbers and results and researches everything down to its roots.
Don has mastered the science of Social Media and applied his rigorous thinking to the entire range of Social Media outlets. While most people are telling you to endlessly “like” and “tweet” and “bookmark,” which is a horrendous waste of time, Don has reduced all the complexity to its bare essentials. He’s determined what’s really profitable.
I invite you to watch Don’s new video tutorials on Social Media. I believe you’ll find more meat here than in 1000 tips and tweets from run-of-the-mill “social media experts”:
http://www.perrymarshall.com/doncrowther/
Perry
Why Facebook advertisers are cagey
“Loose lips sink ships.”
Some people are absolutely raking it in with Facebook ads but many are keeping quiet about it. I’ve got a friend named Bill who turned $12,000 of ad spend into $48,000 in 2 months. Another guy from Central America told me he’s turned $1,000 into $200,000. “Mister R” converted $10,000 of ads into $200,000 of business in one year.
Last night on Facebook FastTrack call #3, Bryan told about a guy who had a highly successful, “evergreen” promotion making money hand over fist. Bryan delivered a basic description of what he was doing. Bryan sez, “If I told you exactly who this guy is he’d kill me.”
On Facebook you *cannot* be an anonymous business. You have to be connected to a profile of a real person.
When the Google gold rush was underway, we collected hundreds and hundreds of testimonials from people all over the world. If they were easy to locate online, they probably had a complex business that was hard to knock off. If they ran a simple business, nobody knew what market they were in anyway.
Things are a little different on Facebook. Not quite as many people jumping up & down saying “Hey look how great things are going for me!” but make no mistake, there’s miles and miles of cheap real estate for sale on Facebook. And people making good coin with it.
My apologies to those on our waiting list who were unable to join Facebook FastTrack. After the deadline we only had 11 seats left and they were quickly snatched up. We wanted to deliver a quality experience. And even with attendance capped we had some logistical challenges.
We’re refining our material and formulating a condensed version. *Stay tuned.* Meanwhile, rest assured that small fortunes are getting turned into large ones on Facebook.
Perry Marshall
P.S.: If you use Firefox or Internet Explorer, every time you go to Google’s home page you get a persistent “Download Chrome” icon. Yep – Google has popups on its home page! Why???? Cuz they’re afraid of Facebook!
Facebook is the next 900 pound gorilla. If you’re not using Google’s browser while you’re on Facebook, they don’t know what you’re doing. Google wants your D-A-T-A.
Real Jobs, British Pragmatism, and Risk Reversal
The magic of the Most Dangerous Question
A couple of years ago at my Autoresponder Seminar, Glenn Livingston was speaking. He said, “One of the best brainstorm questions you can ever ask is: What is the WORST email subject line I could possibly send to my customer?”
Then he asked the audience to toss out suggestions of the worst possible email they could imagine ever sending to their customers. People started shouting:
“Nothing I told you to do last year actually works.”
“All my testimonials are fake.”
“The only thing I want is your money.”
Then Roundtable member John Fox blurted out a real zinger. He says:
“I really enjoyed having drinks with your wife last night.”
Everybody busted out laughing. I jumped up, grabbed the microphone and ran with it:
SUBJECT LINE: I really enjoyed having drinks with your wife last night
Dear FIRSTNAME,
That’s right. She and I met in a bar at 10pm. We drank martinis ’til the misty dawn. And my friend, your wife is a very unhappy woman. As a person who cares about you, I’m warning you, if you don’t turn things around right away you may very well have a divorce on your hands.
She told me: “All my husband ever does is go to these get-rich-in-real-estate seminars and I’m SICK of it. I’m sick of the tenants calling at 2am with clogged toilets. I’m sick of the endless promises that ‘THIS’ is finally the thing that’s gonna make us rich, honey. I’m sick of the high taxes and lawn crews that don’t show up and the tenants that complain.
“I’m tired of that stupid apartment building that loses $1100 per month. I’m tired of dumping our entire 401K into interest payments and I’m tired of my husband not following through on all this supposedly great advice he pays for.”
Buddy, she is NOT a happy camper.
So… here’s where I can help.
I’ve designed a brand new program called “Help, my wife is about to divorce me!” and in this program we re-program your brain to stop sabotaging your success. Because, you see, the real reason that apartment is losing $1100 per month and the reason you keep paying too much for all these properties you buy is because there’s a rogue program in your mind that’s secretly driving you towards failure.
It’s time to fix that program, FIRSTNAME. Right now.
~~~~~
See how easy that was?
It pays to ask dangerous questions.
Robert Serling devised a series of 8 revolutionary business questions. I just hinted at one of them in the story I just told you. He’s got seven others. I love these questions and they’ll empower you to make simple changes with dramatic results. You can get all 8 here:
http://profitalchemy.com/the8questions/
Perry
Is the Internet constantly changing, all the time?
Just got off the phone with a guy who said, “It’s SO hard to keep up with the Internet, there’s new stuff happening every single day.”
It’s true… but it’s really a HALF truth.
If you’re paying attention, this 2 minute article will save you about a year of frustration.
If you completely believe everything’s always changing and you MUST keep up with it, you’ll be in a perpetual state of overwhelm and you’ll hardly ever manage to get anything done. Every time somebody says “jump” you’ll jump. You’ll think that the latest, coolest, bright shiny object is the Secret Of Everything.
The symptom is, 2 months after every single product launch you’re 2 months further behind in having a business that actually works.
Here’s the real truth:
90% of what’s ‘new and different’ is completely irrelevant. A waste of your precious time.
Only 10% of it is ever going to make a difference for you at all.
Case in point: From the standpoint of actually selling something to somebody, there’s only been about a dozen major developments in online marketing since the late 1990’s:
-Autoresponders
-Online Auctions
-Shopping Carts
-Paypal
-Pay Per Click
-Contextual Advertising ie Content Network
-Streaming Audio & Video
-Social Networking ie Facebook and Twitter
-Blog software
-Live Chat
-Crowdsourcing
In other words there’s about one major development per year. Not 100!
Sure, within all these things there are other smaller major developments. But my motto is, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Which is not some kind of cynical statement, it’s a massive time saver.
You may have noticed, I rarely jump up and down and yell at you about how something urgently needs your attention RIGHT NOW. That’s because success comes from mastering the basics, not from widespread panic.
When I do tell you something’s important, it’s well worth your time to sit up and pay attention.
I see the world like this: The surface is always changing but the really important stuff stays roughly the same. As you master the core principles, you quickly see how to apply them when something new comes along.
In other words:
When you can immediately recognize what part of the “brand new whiz-bang thing” is NOT new, that’s when you possess the ability to profit from it.
When Google AdWords was brand new, I immediately knew it was “Scientific Advertising” from 1918 all over again, only 10,000X faster. I knew the money was going to be made by being scientific about it. And by entering the conversation inside the person’s head.
When Facebook advertising was brand new, I immediately knew that it was just like the classified ads in “Black Belt” magazine: If you know somebody is a black belt, there’s a whole list of other things they’ll buy that don’t appear to have anything to do with Martial Arts. That’s Right Angle Marketing. What was old is new again.
I can absolutely promise you, in the next few years new innovations will come that are currently unimagined. Billion dollar empires will emerge from seemingly nowhere.
When they do, massive mobs of people will be yelling and shouting at you, urging you to pile on the bandwagon. But you will find that the hypesters don’t know how to use what’s new because they never understood what worked before.
The Social Media hype is starting to fade now. Which is precisely when real business people start to make real money from it.
One of the “rats” in our Facebook advertising research lab is a guy named Bill. Bill does NOT want me to disclose his full identity, so I have to keep him anonymous. We guided Bill as he built out his Facebook campaigns.
In the last 2 months he’s put $12,000 into Facebook ads and gotten $48,000 out.
Quietly. With no hype or fanfare.
Just skillfully applying the basics and adapting the old to the new.
I invite you to consider that when you learn from the masters . . . when you practice your craft like a master . . . then instead of being the frenetic Red Belt, you can be the serene, utterly confident, unflappable, 4th degree Black Belt.
You can be the champion who calmly and quietly steps onto the mat and demolishes his opponent with three lightning-speed strikes without so much as breaking a sweat.
Master the basics. Become a marketing black belt. Find the old within the new, and discover how to function in an entirely new level of serenity and confidence.
Perry Marshall
