686: Get Measurable Results from Direct Response Marketing and Combine with Branding with JD Dwyer

Speaker 1 0:00 Marketer of the day, Episode 686, get measurable results from direct response marketing and combine with branding with JD Dwyer.

Speaker 2 0:14 Welcome everybody. John Dwyer is my name, and Robert plank has kindly invited me to put together this podcast, and this is exclusively for the marketer of the day. Okay, so this podcast that I'm putting together is exclusively for Robert and the marketer of the day podcast. And you're probably thinking, well, who is John Dwyer? As you can tell from the accent. I'm from Down Under Australia, and I tend to specialize in what we call direct response marketing for businesses. And direct response marketing is very, very different from your general, overall marketing. So the word marketing incorporates a whole bunch of things, but one of the things that incorporates, of course, is branding. And a lot of people get branding and direct response marketing, I guess they get it wrong, because they separate it and it shouldn't be separated. My belief is, is that you can use direct response marketing tactics, which is all about getting measurable responses, and you can combine that with branding at the same time. They shouldn't be mutually exclusive. And my view is, is that if you're putting together a marketing plan for your product or your services, there's probably five things that you should think about. And number one, identifying your most profitable target audience, and that's not just your target audience, by saying, Look, if you're a hardware store, it's all men, it would be saying, well, look, we're a hardware store in an upmarket suburb in Los Angeles or New York or wherever it may be. And the men that we're after are more than likely earning $100,000 a year. They drive a BMW, and they live in a in an up market suburb, and more than likely, because of all of those demographic profile components, they're probably going to be over 40 years of age. And if you know that that's your most profitable target audience, then all of your advertising should be geared towards them, whether it be on LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram, whatever it may be, letterbox bros that should be geared towards over 40 men who fall into that particular demographic. So it's all about identifying your most profitable audience and then looking for more people who look like them. Number two of the five components that I believe you need to do if you're putting together a direct response marketing plan for your product or service is adding a wow factor to your offer. There's very, very few smaller businesses who can take on Walmart and win. You know that if you were to take on Kmart or Walmart or any of these big box stores, there's very little chance, if you're a smaller player, that you're going to beat them on price. I We have a big hardware chain here in Australia. It's like a Walmart, I guess it's called Bunnings, and it's about the size of a Walmart, so it's probably two or three football fields in size, and they advertise that from a hardware point of view, they will beat any price that you bring to them by 10% so that means, if you're a little hardware store, there's no way in the world that, if you were marketing your wheelbarrow for $64 that that's going to beat Bunnings here in Australia, there's no way in the world be the same thing with Walmart in the US. However, if you said, look, we've got a special deal on this week, if you buy a wheelbarrow from us, we will give you a free pitchfork and a free shovel, as in a spade a shovel. Then there's no way that the big box store, Bunnings or Walmart will beat you, and the reason they won't is because they'd have to have 64 committee meetings at their head office in order to consider whether they can add what I call a Happy Meal toy to the wheelbarrow, whereas you can put a shovel, or you can put a pitchfork or garden equipment, whatever it may be, basically overnight if you're a small business, and you and your spouse make the decisions. And so I always sort of, I guess, encourage small business owners to think outside the square and think of what we call an artificial wow factor that the big boys probably won't be able to match, not in a hurry anyway. And of course, if you're talking about incentive based marketing, or wow factor marketing, that takes your eyes off the price, a very good example would be McDonald's Happy Meals. Okay, for quite a few decades now, McDonald's have been putting a free plastic toy in the Happy Meals. And as a result, there's a lot of parents who, you know you might be listening to this as a parent, or maybe a grandparent, and I bet you you couldn't tell me what a happy meal costs at McDonald's, because they've been able to take your eyes off the price and onto the value add, with the value add, or the incentive being that free plastic toy and I'm the father of six children. They're millennials, so they're all in their 20s these days, but at one stage, my wife, Gail and myself had six children under 12, and I'll tell you what, we had a busy Tarago van in those days, and we bought a lot of happy meals, and it had nothing at. To all to do with the hamburger. I don't think the kids ate the hamburger that went out, you know, in the garbage bin, and it was all about the toy. And we couldn't tell you what the price of the happy meal was, because it was all about the toy. And so that's what you want to do. Number one, identify your most profitable target audience and look for more people who look like them. Number which is a lot easier these days, given the laser targeting that the likes of Facebook can provide to you. Number two, identify a wow factor that would turn your audience on to take their eyes off the price. And, number three, use the problem solution formula. Now this is a big one, neurofin, the headache tablet company. They know what that's all about. They will show you a TV commercial, or if it's online, they'll show you a video ad, and it will show someone with a headache. And I've seen the classic one where it's a female skilled teacher. Kids are playing up in the classroom. They're primary school children, and she's rubbing her forehead, and of course, she's got a headache, so she actually pulls out the drawer of her desk up the front of the classroom, gets a packet of neuron takes one or two tablets with a glass of water, and before you know it, by the end of that 32nd ad, not only does she look more attractive because now she's got makeup on and blush and the whole thing, but the kids are sitting at their desk absolutely perfectly behaved. It's amazing what neurophone can do, even to even to children. So that's what we call problem solution marketing, and the headache tablet companies do it very well. Let me tell you. Who else does it very well. Jenny Craig, okay, the weight loss company. They do it extremely well, where they'll show, normally, women who might not be feeling or very good about themselves because they might be overweight. And then, of course, they go on the Jenny Craig program, weight loss program, and in four or five or six or whatever number of weeks it is. Then, of course, you see the results. And the results are that, you know, the lady who was a bit overweight and didn't look happy all of a sudden looks like a supermodel, because she's been through the process of getting on the Jenny Craig weight loss program, and that's what we call problem solution marketing. We've had clients over the years where, you know, it's just quite stunning, the transformation you can show when you've, you know, taken their product, and you can do the before and after. One of them happens to be the high pressure water blasters, you know, the high pressure water machines. Whereby, in Australia, I'm not sure in America, whether you call them Gurney, but we have a brand here called Gurney, and it's very easy to demonstrate just how good that high pressure water Blaster is. When you show someone's driveway, half of it has been cleaned by the high pressure system, and then the other half hasn't. So you can see the clean and the dirty, and that's very powerful before and after. So think about problem solution and what you're doing, or what your product or service is doing to solve someone's problems. In my instance, if you go to my website, which is the Institute of wow.com, so our business is called the Institute of WoW, then you know, you'll see that I've got case study after case study after case study of how we have, if you like, provided a direct response marketing solution to a business owner's problems, one that comes to mind, and that comes to mind because I was doing a presentation yesterday, and it was for about 100 business owners, and as it turned out when we went through the Q and A session, I tend to do that because it demonstrates one's authenticity. If you can take questions from the crowd, you know, completely unrehearsed, and give them the answer. And someone in the crowd owned a turf farm, and he just said to me, Look, can you tell me, you know, what could we do to promote my turf farm, as in grass? Okay, he said, because my turf is the same as pretty much any other turf farm. And I said, yeah, no, I understand that. So there's a me too, sort of mentality to the industry you've all got the same grass and he said, Yeah. I said, Okay, well, let me give you a case study of someone who I looked after for about 12 months. We have a 12 month coaching program, is what we do in our business. So when businesses come on to get my assistance, they join a program called the master class consult program, and they're with me for at least 12 months. Some stay for years, but they're with me at least 12 months. And this particular turf farm, he had about six miles of turf, and it was coming up to the spring season, and he wanted to get rid of what he had so that he could replant for spring. And then, you know, make some more money, because when you own a turf farm, you've got to turn the turf over pretty quickly and keep on replanting and make more money. And I said, Well, who's your target audience? And he said, Well, landscapers, and the reason that landscape is the most profitable target audience is because they're actually buying turf for multiple homes. They might be doing a landscaping job for, you know, half a dozen homes at any one time. So he said, we're not looking for mum and dads who just want to returf their front yard or backyard. And I said, Okay, well, landscapers who, in Australia, we would call them blokey blokes. Okay, they're pretty down to earth blokes. And they enjoy a beer, they enjoy a bit of a laugh with their buddies, and some of them probably even enjoy a cigarette. And so we need to do. Yes, you know, to determine what would be a wow factor, a Happy Meal toy that would be appropriate for that particular audience. And I said to the client who owned the turf farm, look, I know you're in a spot you want to get rid of this six miles worth of turf very quickly. So do you want wild or mild? And fortunately, he said wild. And that was great, because I don't do mild anyway. I said to him, Well, listen, I figure that turf landscapers, who are what we'd call the blue singlet sort of tradesmen, I think they enjoy a beer after a hard day's work. He said, Of course they do. I said, Okay, well, why don't we actually give them a carton of beer for free? But it would be upmarket beer. There's a brand in Australia called crown lager, and it is the premium beer you would pay, for argument's sake, instead of for a carton of 24 beers of a regular beer, you might pay 35 or $40 this one, you'll pay $60 and he said, right. And I said, the reason we want to give them a premium beer is because these guys are, you know, tradesmen. They don't normally drink that beer, so let's take them up to the Hilton Hotel level with their beer. He said, Yep, fine. What are we going to do? I said, well, for every 500 square meters of turf that they buy, which is generally speaking, the front yard and the backyard of a normal home, we'll give them a cart and a crown lager beer, which is 24 beautiful bottles of beer. Okay? And he went, right, okay. Well, you're the advertising guy. We'll give it a shot. So we rented a mail list of about 500 landscapers in basically that city happened to be in Brisbane, in Australia and and so we sent out mailers to them. A lot of these guys were not tech savvy, so therefore we did the email blast as well. But we also sent out a brochure and a letter. And it basically said, here's the deal. We obviously showed photographs of, you know, the Crown lager beer. And we said, look, for every home's worth of grass that you buy from us, we'll give you a cart and a crown lager. And he brings me up about five days into the promotion, and said, John, we've got a problem. And I said, What's the problem? He said, we've got no more grass. And I said, What? He said, we run out of grass. In fact, the entire six miles where the turf has been sold, and now what we're doing is sourcing turf from other turf farms to keep up for the demand with the demand for the beer. This is a case of where the Happy Meal toy took over. And I said to him, Wow, that's incredible. He said, mate, this is incredible. Now, this was a few years ago, to be honest with you, this case study and study. And of course, he's been using it every year now, twice a year, and doing very well out of he's no longer a part of my program, but good on him. I wish him all the best. So that's direct response marketing. Okay, these guys knew that they could get grass from anywhere they like, but they're going to get it from the guy. I mean, he said, Look, one guy who was the biggest pain in the backside up until then, because he used to barter on price all the time. He would say how much for grass, and this particular client of mine would say $5.50 a square meter, and he'd argue that he could get it for $5.30 down the road. So my client would have to drop his prices, and it was a race to the bottom. He said, that particular guy rang up and said he needed 18 homes worth of grass. And he said he didn't mind when the grass got there, but he needed the beer by Friday, because he had a party. So that was 1818, cartons of beer. So there you go. It doesn't have to be just children, children's product, I should say, where the Happy Meal works. This was a Happy Meal toy, or Happy Meal toy works. This was a Happy Meal toy for adults, tradesmen. Okay, so, number one, identify your most profitable customer and look for more people who look like him or her. Number two, create a wow factor to take their eyes off the price. Number three, although I did get off the subject there, because that one was all about wow factor with the turf farm. But number three, use the problem solution formula. Okay, you need to be the solution, or your product or service needs to solution to someone's problem. Number four, this is a big one. Number four, look, you just need to fix your website. And the reason I say you need to fix your website is because I'm, I'm taking a stab that 80% of people who are, you know, listening to this podcast now, who own a business have got a pretty ordinary website. And I'm saying that because I've seen hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of businesses websites. And let me go through the components that you need on your website. If you are wanting it to be a Sales Machine, you don't want your website to be an Information Portal. You want it to be a Sales Machine. And the best way for it to be a Sales Machine, of course, is to clean up and fix your homepage. If I said to you, what was the most important page of a book, I know, you would say the front cover. If I said to you, what was the most important page of a women's magazine or any magazine for that front cover. And yet, it's amazing when you know people should understand that the most important page of their website, of course, is the homepage that they just let a website developer get Arty Farty about it, if you like, and create something that might look pretty, but it doesn't have the components to sell. So I just thought, Look, I guess I'm being a little sarcastic when I say this, but when I'm doing seminars, I say to people, look, the last person you ever want to go to to build a website is a website developer. And the reason is. Because they're an artist, they might be wearing a black T shirt, and they might be, you know, wearing Doc Martin shoes, and they might be pretty funky. But do they know anything about marketing? Because they might give you a pretty website, but will it sell? That's the point. So here's the things, if you've got a pin, you might like to take those down that I believe are the most important things to have on your homepage if you want your website to sell, number one, you need Surprise, surprise, a problem, solution. Headline, okay, so therefore, it may very well be that if you are, you know, for argument's sake, you might be a landscaper, okay, and it might be, is, sorry, are the gardens around your home, basically not allowing you to get the best possible price when you sell your home, because they haven't been looked after, they're looking tired, they're looking old, and a lot of weeds, and this, that and the other Well, guess what? We can actually come in for a very, very incredible price this month, we can actually turn your garden into something that looks like it's a resort, and therefore, you know, help fix the value of your home. That's probably not the best example. I just happen to use that because we're talking about landscapers, but basically it could be dentists, you know, talking about the fact that, you know, a smile is the first thing you notice in somebody and if you have crooked teeth. And of course, you can get it fixed in the space of just X number of days with this dentistry. So it's all about problem solutions. So think of a problem solution, headline for the top of your for the top of your homepage. Next thing is an explainer video. In the world that we live in these days, we don't want to read anything. Well, we don't want to read and read and read. Okay? So therefore, my suggestion is create a two or three or four minute explainer video. Number three, what you need to do is to have a Mac as menu board. That's my nickname, but it's basically having a menu of all the things that you offer, whether it's services or whether it's products. Number four, the three big benefits of someone using you or using your products or services, that's important. And number five, some video testimonials. Now, you know, pick out your best two or three and feature them on the homepage of people saying nice things about you or your products. Don't hide them on the testimonial page. I can tell you, we've done heat mapping, and not many people go to your testimonial page. Okay, the fifth component that you need on your website, sorry, the fifth component you need if you're going to put a direct response marketing campaign together, is repetitive trade. You want to make sure that you are getting people to come back and back and back more often, and that's all about having a reward program, or something of the nature that's going to actually get people to come back. And you'll see a lot of little coffee shops these days. I mean, it's been around forever, but, you know, they have the little business card they give you, and they put, you know, a stamp on every time you get a coffee, and when you get 10 stamps, you get a free coffee. Now, that's a very basic version of it, but if you don't have a reward program, you might like to think about, you know, creating a reward program so that you get repetitive trade. And you know what? You can only really stimulate repetitive trade if you can communicate with your audience, and the only way to communicate with your audience is, guess what? Collect data. Everyone's wondering why Amazon is wiping them out. Was because Amazon have been collecting data for a long, long time, or data you might say in your particular accent, but they've been collecting data, names and contact details of people for a long time, and of course, they milk it. They actually exploit that you can walk into just about any restaurant in the US today, you can walk into just about any retail store, and they will not collect your data. Madness. They're just letting money slip through their fingers, because if you collect data, then you can market to them thereafter. And that's it, guys. It's really all about creating a marketing plan for your business that has direct response components like that, and at the same time brand building. I mean, obviously you've got to always make sure that you're protecting or building your brand. If happens to be a Hilton hotel brand, well, of course, make sure that that's the sort of image and demeanor throughout all of your advertising Well, Robert, thank you very much for inviting me to, you know, speak again. I really appreciate it. And if anyone would like a free book on this direct response marketing, I have one that I've just launched, called the avalanche leads formula. And if you go to, JD, wow, book.com so that's JD for John Dwyer. JD, wow, book.com you can get yourself a free book. You don't have to pay the normal $30 you can download it and read it straight away. So that's JD, wow. Book.com Okay, and if you're interested in this stuff, and you'd like to, you know, maybe dig your heels into not dig your heels in, sink your teeth into it. I should say, then you might like to go to another one of my web pages, and that is, yeah, obviously the www. I don't need to say that anymore. I realize that wow manifesto.com so if you go to wow manifesto.com you'll see there's a program there that runs for a number of weeks, and it's a very inexpensive investment. You might like to think about that, wow manifesto.com and if you want the free book, it's JD, wow. Book, as in, oh, wow. Okay. JD, wow. Book.com. Thank you very much, Robert for inviting me to be involved with the marketer of the day podcast. I really appreciate it. And all the very best to anyone. If you're interested in using my coaching services, by the way, at any time, just go to JD, private console. Consult.com talk about a pitch Fest and JD, JD, private consult.com Over and out. Guys, been a real pleasure to talk to you again and all the very best with your business.

Robert Plank 20:11 Check out the latest episodes of our podcast on the web at marketer of the day.com and subscribe to us on iTunes at marketer of the day.com/itunes or search the phrase Robert plank in your iTunes app to find us there

Speaker 3 20:29 you.