Relationship building should be a priority for business owners. It does not only reach customers, but also keeps them with you. Ian Smith of Evolve Media talks about that in relation to marketing and advertising. He pushes forward the importance of having the right and consistent message through content while providing you tools to grow—from ManyChat to Facebook messenger. Touching also on reviews and social proof as well as the importance of follow-ups and giving your customers a way out, he urges business owners to build that customer relationship.

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I have got a new expert for you to meet. I have got Ian Smith from Evolve Media. We’re going to talk about some cool marketing and advertising things. We’re going to talk ManyChat, Facebook Messenger and all kinds of cool stuff like that. It’s a little bit different than we normally do. If you’ve been reading these blogs 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 around marketing and social media. We have a different rule that we apply to that rule. I’d say, “Been there, done that again and again,” for different types of clients. That’s what we do.

Ian has come to us as a referral and a friend of Brenda Crimi. She’s a big face on this platform and she’s an expert here who advises us on all amazing things Amazon. Ian and I have developed this friendship as we’ve been getting to know each other and he’s got some cool ideas. I definitely wanted to bring you his ideas. Ian, everyone has a story about where they started and everything. Part of our “Been there, done that again and again,” says that there are some good practices that are put in place. You probably have some great marketing experiences. 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 evolved and realized, “These work.”

I started initially in the old school print advertising industries.

There you go, marketing practices that have been around for decades.

I was working for a local magazine here in Orlando and this magazine is called Orlando Weekly. It’s all about the local stuff that happens in Orlando. I was selling advertising space inside that magazine. I was helping a lot of different businesses get exposure inside the magazine by doing print advertising. The next step from there was going to a digital marketing agency. I left the magazine, went to a digital marketing agency, and that’s where I learned a lot about Google Ads, Facebook Ads and running media online. A friend of mine recruited me from that company to work for his business. I was doing sales and marketing for his business. I was doing all of these internet marketing tactics like Facebook Ads, building landing pages, SEO, creating content online and stuff like that. 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 Greene is also one of our marketing partner friends. Kevin is definitely a name in this industry.

Me, Jeremy, Max, Kevin and his son, we all started a digital marketing agency called Quantum Media. We did very well. It was around $5 million on our first year of business. In that first year, we were doing Facebook Ads, ClickFunnels, sales funnels, social media, Shopify sites, and all this entire internet marketing stuff. We were doing that for clients, but we started to get into our own ventures where we launched our own products online. We were doing agency services as well as our own ventures. It was an insane amount of sales and growth in that first year of business. We ended up splitting up the company, going our own ways. We all have our own digital marketing agency. I’m running my own agency called Evolve Media where we do marketing services as well as templates and building out Messenger marketing templates, ClickFunnels templates and things like that. For those people that want to do it themselves, we have our Done For You Services for the people that are wanting outsource.

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. There are times when you should not be doing that. You should be growing your brand into a bigger brand and you should not be handling these things yourself. We’re a big fan of people who have both, which is one of the other reasons I invited you on here. I hope you, Product Launchers, caught where he was saying that they had done this for $5 million-worth of business over the course of those years. That is where you’re getting into what works and what doesn’t work. It’s not about what’s hacked and what works on Facebook now, it’s about what messaging works, what strategy works, what we should be presenting, and how we should be presenting. A lot of that was product-based. You weren’t doing marketing for services, you are marketing products, which is different than marketing services.

If you’re marketing services and you’re marketing to other businesses, then that’s going to be a whole different strategy and targeting than when you’re marketing services to consumers. With the agency, a lot of our marketing was towards business owners, it’s B2B. With the products that we were selling online, that was all pretty much B2C. 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. It’s definitely a different approach when you want to target business owners versus consumers.

Relationship Building: It is in the messaging that things are going wrong.

Sometimes it’s a platform difference too. Sometimes it’s not right on certain platforms. I’ve had some great success with LinkedIn Messenger style programs and not using bots. Even the strategy of having the right templates and the right messages you send to people. The great ones for consulting work and I use it successfully and have used that for some time. 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. 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. That’s where people are like, “Facebook is a cool place to be running Messenger programs,” but if the right people aren’t there, it’s not going to work.

LinkedIn is a tough nut to crack. I do a whole bunch of LinkedIn. I have a VA and they help me with messaging and 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 and get that geared up. I’m constantly using LinkedIn to post all my new content. Every single day, I’m posting content, connecting with people, and messaging people. The reason why I say LinkedIn is tough is that from a paid standpoint, I haven’t seen the greatest results with running ads on LinkedIn. It’s expensive when you compare it to Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram, YouTube, and all that stuff. From a paid perspective, I wouldn’t suggest it. On an organic level, hosting 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 a way that you message them to ease into building a relationship through LinkedIn.

I get some of those messages all the time that are all wrong, but I get them on Facebook too. You’ve had so much marketing and direct connection messaging experience, I think this is where a lot of people go wrong. It is 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. 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 necessarily just know it?

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 off the bat. You want to provide free value to them. Say, “We’ve created this excellent piece of content where you’re going to learn X, Y, Z for free.” Prove you can help them by first helping them with a piece of content. 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 that’s a free value because you’re reaching out to them they have their wallet. It definitely helps when you are reaching out to them and giving them free value, driving them to a YouTube video, and 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, drive them to a piece of content that is not a contact wall. You don’t have to give them your contact information. It is a goodwill piece of content, “Here’s a video link. Check it out.” Then I would say in that video when you’re giving them the content, have your call to action be that that free offer where you get their contact information. Maybe it’s their email address where you get them to opt-in to your Messenger bot or things like that.

For those of you are perusing the Product Launch Hazzards website, you’re going to see that exact thing. We don’t have the contact walled. 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. Even though they’re free, we ask you to put in your email address and set it in the site. You can unsubscribe. 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. We want to know people downloaded it and we want to know why. We have one ask a quick little question, it’s one simple question and an email address and that’s it. It’s yours.

Relationship Building: It’s important to go through the same steps when building the relationship even though it gets boring and monotonous.

We do that though, it’s for our benefit. Should we put up more of this content? Should we give more? We need that to be able to serve you better. We can’t have everything be blind and 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 as we say, “When we get to a point at which we need more information then we ask for contact information,” but that’s it. We try to keep it loose, open, and organic everywhere else and it works well for us. Product sales are a little different because people feel pushier about product sales. How do you differentiate that when you’re doing services versus contact?

With products, it 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. They need to understand what you sell, the problem your brand solves, your whole messaging, and the whole vibe of your brand. You need to establish that first. 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. You tell them the stories of people that have gone through these problems and then they found the solution through your product or service. That’s going to be a lot more impactful when you first build the relationship there. Whether you’re selling a product or you’re selling a service, you want to first make your goal of building that relationship.

How I personally build the relationship is by using content, giving them free value, and helping them out first. When I want to provide more value or say like, “We have this powerful piece of content, this really powerful free digital download,” then that’s when I do the contact wall and I say, “Give us your email address and we’ll send it to you. Click here and we’ll send it to you via Facebook Messenger.” That’s how we can get them to the next step. With our content, we always try to make the call to action of that free download relative so that it’s not way out of left field, the freebie that we’re trying to give them.

Do you think that people though are getting a little bit desensitized or it’s too recognizable this formulaic funnel? They’re getting desensitized to it and we need to shake them up a little bit.

This is definitely the funnel that a lot of people use. When you look at the dating scene and this whole dating strategy of how you first meet them, whether it’s on an app, in a bar or in a social gathering. No matter where you meet them, you’re going to follow certain steps first. Even though going through those steps in your head, you’re thinking, “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 told them my favorite music and where I like to eat.” It’s important to go through those same steps when building the relationship. Even though it does get boring, monotonous and the same thing over and over, it’s what has to be done unfortunately when building that relationship with people.

There’s a bunch of new tools that people are getting excited about and we’re hearing lots of things about that. Tell us some about how you stay up on these things? How you test them out before you roll them out with your clients?

How I stay up is through consuming content. It’s consuming podcasts and watching YouTube videos. I don’t follow the mainstream news like Fox News and all the news channels that you see on local TV and stuff. I don’t even have local cable. I don’t watch any of that stuff. I’ll get all of my news through YouTube, Reddit, podcasts, DigitalMarketer and all these different online media channels. A lot of them are telling you about these awesome tools. A lot of the tools that I’m using are ones that I’ve been using for the last year. Zapier is definitely a powerful tool that I love. Zapier.com is an automation tool.

We Zap stuff all the time here. If you’re struggling with these automation things where you do routine things every day, use Zapier.

It’s a great way to connect your different platforms. If you’re using Shopify and you have your email software, you can connect a new customer over to your email software. If you’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. When a new lead comes in through your ClickFunnels landing page or your ManyChat, you’ll get email notified immediately once it comes in and you definitely want to act on those.

If your eyes are glazing over, then you are in the done-for model. This is where I want you to understand the difference. If you already went, “I don’t know what he’s talking about. That sounds 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. It gets me riled up. When we’ve made a lot of content, we’ve spent a lot of time and energy building out beautiful websites and Shopify shops. We have wonderful information about how to use our products. We’ve got hundreds of videos of every exercise you could use to sell this fitness product. You spent all that time and energy and then people come and watch it and you fail to follow-up with them.

Relationship Building: If you can get video and image reviews, that is an asset that is going to help you sell a lot because they pretty much last forever.

Why do you fail? It’s because it’s hard. You have to go into YouTube, figure out who the people are who watched your video. Who subscribed to your channel? “How am I going to get them over to my email server?” You’ve got to have people in place. You’ve got to have a full team. When you’re a solopreneur, which many product sellers and many of my product inventors are, you know what it’s like. You’re 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. It feels like it’s wasted time for you, but it is not. The ones that are successful and 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 and that’s why I bring people like Ian on for you.

A really important thing is the follow-up. A lot of people underestimate the follow-up. The whole way that you build a relationship with somebody is through multiple touch points and conversations over a period of time. The three most important things to getting a customer are credibility, trust and familiarity. You have to build that familiarity through a series of touch points. 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 build so much of a relationship on that first meeting, talking to them for 30 minutes. If you follow-up with them and you have a coffee together maybe a couple of days later, you have a lunch a couple of days later, and then you have a phone call, you talk and you keep in touch. That relationship is getting so much stronger. The likelihood of them either sending you business or them being a customer of yours is increased 1,000% because of the follow-up.

It continues to have that brand awareness. That’s an older term that we use in brand building and in product design areas. You used to have a brand awareness marketing and advertising campaign. You didn’t expect to get a lot of people out of it, but you were making sure that you always had an ad in the circular. You always had an ad in the newspaper. These are things that you used to do in the product world. You needed to make sure that you were up in comparison against your competitors that were out there and that we’re doing that and spending dollars if you wanted to get your brand up to that level. It was a brand awareness campaign. That’s what familiarity is built from.

In brand awareness, you can skip some of the steps. You can jump some of those stages if you get a personal introduction. 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. From there, I’m willing to at least take a test, especially if it’s low cost. I would certainly put my email address in for something like that because a friend said that. That’s where you get that social proof. The one thing that is hard now is credibility because reviews are fake. People know that and they disregard it. The amount of reviews are down so low compared to four years ago, the number of reviews on even some of the bestselling products.

People have their hesitations with text reviews and believing that 100%. If you can get your customers to give you video reviews, they can give you a picture of them may be holding the product or a picture of them. Pictures and video go a lot further than a text review. Social proof is still powerful, especially when you don’t have the ability to get introduced through a warm customer of yours. You want to rely on that social proof like video and images. That’s what’s going to help you turn cold traffic into that warm buyer that’s ready to pay you and get started.

Product Launchers, I want to remind you that we did an episode with the team from Field Agent. Remember we talked about that as a great way to get early reviews. It’s a specialized focus group because they will do geolocations and they will do photographs and videos. 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. You want to know that I’m a mom of two kids, a nine-year-old and four-year-old, I can take pictures with my kids. You’ll get a picture of me with my kids and you can see the toys on the floor. You’ll get a video of them playing with whatever that is. That’s a part of the whole service that they provide and with their app.

Not only do they find you the right people, but then they force that visual, audio, and AV style results coming out of it. You get qualitative and quantitative information back because that’s what you need to continue to develop your product. You can also use it for reviews in the future for different things that you might need for marketing. It’s a single amount of money you spend but you get double use out of it. I’m always looking for something where we can repurpose things.

If you can get video and image reviews, that is an asset that is going to help you sell a lot. They last forever pretty much. 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 linking directly to the YouTube video from an email campaign. Maybe it’s a follow-up email campaign. You share a success story, so you link someone over. That is a sales asset that will generate a lot of money.

It’s worth doing. They keep on giving. Let’s talk about some of these other trendy things that we keep hearing about ManyChat and Facebook Messenger programs. How is that working in the product business? Is it selling a product?

I’m all about relationship building and how we can build a relationship even better. ManyChat is that way and you can build these strong relationships versus email. Email is one-sided. You send out an email blast, whether it’s a regular blast or whether they’re in a sequence. They’re not going to reply to it, they’re going to read it and they’re going to either click or not. Email open rates are going down. The click rates are going down. With email, it’s hard to build that relationship with your prospects these days, but when you work with ManyChat, you’re communicating with people back and forth. That’s one of the beauties 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. You use maybe a GIF as 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 build a relationship.

How I’m using ManyChat is when somebody opts in for my free digital download, they will then be put into a message sequence. They’re sent a follow-up message a day later, but then there are two days or three days that sends the next piece of content and the next one. What I do is I record a little audio clip for each of those messages. Hearing my voice and seeing a short little video clip is going to build that relationship and build that familiarity that I’m looking for. My content is going to build that trust and credibility that I’m looking for. My whole goal is to get them to have a strong relationship with me, really like me, and for me to give them value. That is going to increase the chances that I can tell them what I would like them to do down the line. Whether it’s opting in for something else for free, buying a product or it’s an affiliate thing where I recommend another product that they download. When they have a strong relationship with me, they listen to me.

I own two companies. Product Launch Hazzards is a part of Hazz Design, which is our design and development product company obviously. Brandcasters is the other side and we own a content marketing firm. In that content marketing, videocasting and podcasting are the crux of it. Content proliferation and repurposing of content is our goal with everything that we do and making everything automated and done-for-you. That’s the absolute goal. We’ve been doing that for five years, we found with it is the profound effect that voice ads can have.

We run podcast ads in an unusual way. 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 give their full address to receive something. We’ve received close to 37% conversion rates, which is unfounded in most of the marketplace. There are two reasons for it. One is that we established a fabulous relationship of give, give, give. Before we took the first ad on a podcast, we had 100 episodes. We’d given 100 pieces of amazing content and information before we ever took our first ad.

The second thing is we only took relevant ads, companies that we could believe in, endorse and say their products were good and the host records that. The host says, “This is a good product. I’ve 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.” The conversion rate goes up because of that. That is because you’re tapping into someone who has that relationship. If it’s costly, if it’s time-consuming, if you don’t have a giant product line and you’re spread thin, this is for you.

Amazon sellers who have multiple brands, I know many of you do and you’re spread thin, think about utilizing that alliance style. Finding someone who has access, authority, and trust in the right marketplace. The right group of fitness enthusiasts, nutritional experts, whatever it might be that you want to advertise for and that you want to sell, using them in a good way. Not just placing an ad but getting them to review your product, use your product, and try it out. Then doing the audio style and the video style ads where they’re saying that it’s good. It makes a huge difference in your conversion rates overall.

The best part about it, you’re treating your podcast and videos as your new authority. The new trust economy are the podcast hosts, video hosts, and YouTube channel hosts. Those are your authorities. Those are our new networks. If that’s the case, then you should be tapping in now while they need the funds. This is what I know for certain. You can buy ads so much cheaper on a podcast that you can anywhere else. They will be three to five times more effective, sometimes even greater than that, depending on the market area you’re in.

Relationship Building: You gain so much more brownie points from your customers because you’ve given them that “out”.

That is a good idea. I’ve never thought to buy ads on podcasts. 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. You don’t see any new visitors on your site, you flip out, and you don’t do it anymore.

It takes time. When I first decided that I was going to talk to Amazon sellers in my business. I had never worked with them before. I had only worked with $100 million to $300 million companies before. I’ve got one person who came to me and it was a fun project and I thought, “I’d like to do more of these now and again because they’re fun. What should I do?” I went on twelve podcasts in three months. I did an interview because I’m an expert. It was a little easier to do that than it is to place an ad. At that time, nobody was placing ads on podcasts. I was like, “I’ll do an interview.”

I did an interview on twelve different podcasts and I ended up with $120,000 worth of work, but it was six months later. That obviously probably led to about almost a $1 million worth of work over time because of royalties and other things that happened over time. Immediate results don’t happen because people are behind. They’re like, “I can’t catch up on all the podcasts I’m listening to.” Maybe I get two or three a day if you’re a binge listener, if you’re a serious listener, if you listen every time you work out. Most people, the average is three a week. They’re bound on the ones they want to hear. Where they go when they search, when they’re looking for information, they’re going to be looking for a fabulous relationship marketer. Where are they going to find it? Ian will pop up. 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.

Being in front of them multiple times over and over, like how the podcast host built that audience. If he puts out one podcast episode and then leads, he has been in front of them over and over. If you find a great podcast show that shares your audience and you know for a fact that those listeners are your prime demographic, you want to commit to at least three months of time period trying to be in every single episode.

I’m going to have Tom come on and talk about Podetize and Brandcasters because I realized how important this is for product sellers out there for you to get aligned with the right people. I’m going to have him talk great detail about how this works and what happens there. Ian, you bring up a good point as to how hard that is, but the big part is now you’ve got them. You’ve got 37% of the people who opted into your form. What are you going to do with them?

It comes down to continuous messaging and continuous delivering content to them. As you continue to message back and forth with them and the messaging strategy with ManyChat and with Facebook Messenger is you don’t want to use it like you would an email. Where you just say, “Here’s the message. Click or don’t click.” You want to do permission marketing where you send them a message when you say, “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. What I do is when they click yes, you send them the link to that piece of content and they go consume it.

If they click no, then you want to say, “Okay, no worries. I don’t want to annoy you. You can always unsubscribe from these messages by replying stop.” You want to give them the out. What I have found is that when I see them click no, they do not unsubscribe. I’ll tell them, “This is how you unsubscribe. You type in stop and you’re done.” The crazy thing is that they don’t unsubscribe. When giving them the out and you make it clear like, “You can unsubscribe. I don’t want to annoy you. I’m just trying to help you.” You gain so much more brownie points and they like you so much more because you’ve given them that out. I’ve seen great results with that.

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

Maybe I put out a piece of content that’s relating to ClickFunnels, but maybe they’re more interested in ManyChat and Messenger marketing. They’re like, “No, I’m not trying to learn ClickFunnels.” You do that a couple times where you’re sending in pieces of the 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. You say, “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 do your permission marketing, “Do you want me to send you the link to the landing page where you can learn more about this?” When they go to that landing page, you want it to be fully priced. You do not want to give them any discount or even say that it’s discounted in any way. You want to price anchor the highest price possible.

If it’s $1,000 that you would love to get for it and that’s the top level, then tell them it’s $1,000. 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. 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 and that the price is X.

A lot of you Amazon sellers do the reverse strategy where you go in with the low price, get your listing established, 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. Keep in mind that low price strategy works on Amazon because of Amazon’s algorithm. It 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. When you buy something and you’re buying it once and you’re trying to get your listing going. You’ve 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.

You want to make sure that they know that this is the price. When you do drop it down then say, “This is only for a limited time, this is only going to happen for that.” Put a time limit on that discount and then you’re going to see that a lot more people are going to take you up on that discounted offer and take advantage because the perceived value is there. What I see a lot of people doing which you do not want to do is instantly discount it. You say, “This is $500, but now you can only pay $200,” and it’s an instant price drop. You didn’t price anchor hard enough that it was $500. You need to introduce it as $500 and then leave it. You don’t want to discount it immediately.

Relationship Building: When you introduce an offer to customers and it doesn’t stick, then nobody will take it up.

This is one of the worst strategies that I’ve seen going out there is the cart abandonment. People are getting wise to it. I can’t tell you how many times I put stuff in my cart and see if you’ll send me an email an hour later. I’m like, “I’ve got $100 off, great.” People know it’s going to happen. 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 peruse it. They thought about it. It’s weighing on them, “I’m interested in that.” Maybe they’ve had time to finally read the content that they consumed if they went through the funnel quickly. That’s another problem that happens and now they’re getting a little more excited.

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

This exact same thing happened to me when I was doing a sign for one of our events. There was something quite wrong with the file and I needed to wait until my team revised it. The next morning I dropped it in, but by the next morning, I’ve got $100 off of it. It was their loss. I was going to buy anyway. I just realized that when I got through that process of it, the file didn’t look right.

What you want to do is follow-up with a full price because that’s going to pricing anchor even more. You’re not assuming that price is the objection. You’re assuming that it’s something else. Maybe you need to overcome that objection, so you still have that full price. Maybe you do it a third time or fourth time, that you still have that same price and then you want to discount it down. If the price was the objection, then they will purchase at that point once you’ve discounted it.

What else do you want to share with our readers?

It’s always relationships first, focus on the relationship. When you’re building an audience focus on the relationship, you can always offer them something down the line. Chances are they’re more likely to take you up on that offer when you’ve built a solid relationship. If you do introduce an offer to them and they don’t take you up on that offer, either it’s because you don’t have a strong enough relationship or they don’t see the value there. No matter how hard we try to explain that, “This is going to help you so much,” they don’t see it. Maybe they’re looking at the price and like, “$1,000 for this? It’s just not there.”

They don’t trust you yet. They need more time.

When you introduce an offer to them and it doesn’t stick, nobody takes it up, 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 like did I establish the value? Did I fully sell them that this is going to help them? Did I introduce enough social proof? Are they thinking that they don’t trust me fully? I need to introduce some reviews and video testimonials showing that I’ve helped other people. Is it my guarantee? Maybe because my return is only a 30-day return, I should extend it to a 90-day return policy or guarantee.

There are many factors. 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?

It’s always tough. Sometimes they may unsubscribe or leave right away, but retargeting your follow-up strategy can be, “Can you fill out a survey? Can we ask you a couple of questions? If you answer one question then we will give you a bigger discount,” any way that you can follow-up with them. If you can get their phone number, call them up directly and be like, “Joe, I realized that you still haven’t purchased,” or maybe it’s the opposite of that. Maybe you call up your actual customers and say, “I saw that you purchased from us recently. I was curious what was it that made you want to purchase? Where did you initially see our ads?” Pick 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 that resulted in it? A lot of people are going to be like, “I don’t know,” but you have to push them to get that answer. That’s going to help you go back into your whole sales funnel and your whole customer journey.

That’s also another follow-up strategy that we didn’t mention here. I had a conversation with Seth Greene about it. Seth was mentioning that he found out he was a 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. We have a practice when people send us referrals for a podcast. If you’re already one of our podcast clients and you refer somebody, we give you five free episodes produced. It’s a pretty hefty referral fee, a referral alliance. It’s a reward. It’s our way of saying, “Thank you for trusting us,” because we think the biggest trust is when somebody refers you.

We reward that highly and he was like, “That’s the whole reason I want to come over and do even more business with you is that you recognize the value I’m adding by raving about you. You thanked me for it.” It’s not even about the dollar amount of all of that. It’s about the fact that you even take the time to do it. That follow-up when you get a repeat customer, now’s the time to pick up the phone. 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 important.

Relationship Building: The content creation and relationship building don’t stop once you’re able to sell your customers something. If anything, it should increase.

I would also say when you’re brand-new and you’re launching a new product or a new product line or something. Questioning those early customers that you’re getting is super important to figure out what was it that resonated with them for why they bought. What do they think about the product? Where did they initially see your ads? What do they think about your brand and all that stuff? Ask them for a video review. Ask them for a picture. Ask them for a written review. It’s a high-value asset for your business to then bring on other customers. Connecting with them and then you’re building that relationship with them. You’re increasing the chances of them being a recurring customer and buying from you again.

Laura Hazzard, who’s our Market Research Expert on the platform here on Product Launch Hazzards, has been working on this with us and it’s working brilliantly. Basically, it is a way for us to connect with our podcast customers. When we pick a podcaster and we say, “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 they’re wonderful. They’re great clients, so how can we find more that are like them? We’re interviewing them and asking them questions like, “What was the number one reason that you chose to go with us?” 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. At the beginning of it, she’s asking them, “Tell us all about your show. Tell us all about you and why you decided to start your show. What it’s about?” and everything like that. We’re putting out an article about that. They’re getting a little bit of promotion in the process and then they’re going to answer market research questions at the end. Rather than that, we realized that was more valuable than us giving them a free episode, us giving them $50 or you giving them free product. For them, it was more valuable. The thing they needed the most was more promotion for their show.

We’re able to give that to them and get our market research questions answered. 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. That’s where we’ve gotten into a place where that’s doing triple duty for us. We’ve got market research, testimonials, and promotion for our clients which make them super happy. If their show grows, our site grows, and our business grows with them. Think about how you can do the follow-up in a great way to get what you need, but also give them what they need. That’s that relationship building.

What I’ve 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 or when you’re picking their brain. Many times, they will either upsell or it’s a lot easier to upsell and cross-sell them to other things. There are many benefits to communicating with your current customer base.

You are going to be able to find Ian pretty consistently because he’s going to be joining us as an expert. He’ll be doing his Office Hours, which is your chance to ask him killer tech questions if that’s what you want. You can ask him these general relationship building questions and all of those things about what great marketing is or when you’re ready for it. For those of you who have been going through and doing some of the strategy work with me or have had strategy calls with me and I’ve said, “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. 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 an order to work with you. 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?

That’s a tough question because I’m all about relationship building and using content to build that relationship. If you are, let’s say six months out from launching your product, I wouldn’t say that that’s too early. If you start creating content, you start building your audience and building this list of people that are digging the information that you’re putting out there, then you have all those people as potential customers for when you are ready to start selling to them.

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.

It takes time. Think of it like making a snowball. You start with a snowflake and you’re rolling and you’re rolling. It’s getting bigger and bigger, but it takes a while to build that snowball and then you can finally leverage it and start to crank out sales. The content creation and the relationship building don’t stop once you’re able to sell them something. If anything, it should increase because you don’t want to hammer them super hard with an offer just because you can fulfill and sell them something. It’s an ongoing process.

It wouldn’t be Product Launch Hazzards if we didn’t ask you about the biggest hazards. The biggest things that go wrong, the other kind of hazards. What goes wrong most often when you figure out that something is like, “This is not working.” What is typically some of the most common mistakes or common hazards that go wrong in marketing?

It depends on what your business model is and what your whole strategy is. 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. It may be a link in your message sequence. Link number five is messed up because maybe you changed your URL. Maybe a tag is not firing, which is not triggering your Zapier automation. It’s always the small, little details that get forgotten about or overlooked, which ends up causing a bad customer experience or a hiccup and makes your brand look bad. 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 and constantly be testing. Go and buy your own products on a regular basis, opt-in for free to your own lead magnets, get your digital downloads, and constantly make sure that everything is running properly. A lot of times some random little hiccup will happen. Like right now there’s an issue happening with Facebook and ManyChat where if you’re using this certain growth tool called the Ref URL, there’s supposed to be a Get Started little button in Facebook and that’s not happening.

You just solved our issue. We have these people who typed into the comments, type in, “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 a lot of people are heated about it because when you opt-in to Messenger, depending on the growth tool that you’re using, there’s supposed to be a little “Get Started” button in the type window. When you click that, now they’re a subscriber and you can communicate with them back and forth. Facebook and Messenger are not sending that Get Started button, so it’s messing up tons of people’s campaigns that are using that growth tool. Sometimes it’s not even your fault that this little, small minor detail is not happening.

This is why you need to hire experts who are up on these things. 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. Ian can’t afford to have all these funnels down. His clients are going to go crazy and it’s not going to be good for his business. This is where an expert who’s been there, done it, and does it again and again for different people all the time makes a difference in your being up on these things. Not making these rookie errors, these hazards of product launching, and these hazards of marketing.

Ian, I’m glad you’re joining us. I’m looking forward to working directly with you. You are going to be seeing some Product Launch Hazzards ads and stuff out there. That’s because we want more people to know about us. This is not about selling you more stuff because we honestly don’t have more stuff to sell you. We got amazing experts who you all should be working with when you’re ready. We want to make sure you are aware because there are a lot of nefarious launching programs out there. There are lots of stuff that doesn’t work. We want to circumvent that with the people that do and get in front of that. Ian’s going to help us do that.

You’ll be seeing more of him and of us and you can find him on the Product Launch Hazzards website, ProductLaunchHazzards.com. You will be able to click through, join his funnel, join his email campaigns, get all kinds of information and content directly from Ian. Remember, we’re not here to get in the way of that. We’re here to make sure that you can find Ian. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m 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.

Be sure to join him. You’re going to be live streaming and you’ll be able to ask him all kinds of great questions. In the meantime, reach him over the profile and you’ll be able to send them an email and ask him some questions directly that way. Thanks, Product Launchers, for joining us. We’ll be back again with yet another episode. Talk to you soon.

Thanks.

Tune in to Ian Smith‘s next Office Hours. Connect with and find out more about Ian Smith in our Experts Directory.

Important Links:

• Evolve Media
• ManyChat
• Brenda Crimi – previous episode
• Kevin Harrington
• Quantum Media
• Done For You Services
• DigitalMarketer
• Zapier.com
• ClickFunnels
• Field Agent – previous episode
• Brandcasters
• Seth Greene – previous episode
• Laura Hazzard – previous episode

About Ian Smith

We use content to gain customers online.
Learn how we do this by visiting our landing page with videos explaining our strategies.

https://EvolveMedia.Agency

Want to stand out from your competitors and build strong brand authority? Want high-quality leads and long-lasting customers?

Content Marketing is the strategy that will help you stand out from your competition and build a stronger relationship with your customers. It increases your conversion rates and average cart value, while helping your brand gain credibility with your customers.

When potential customers are able to interact with your brand through consuming high-value content, then they have a higher level of trust, your brand seems more credible, they tend to buy from you more than once, and they’re more likely to tell their friends about how incredible your products and services are.

At Evolve Media, we create and distribute HIGH-VALUE content for our clients.

Whether we’re selling products or generating leads, we create content that educates and informs Online Shoppers. The forms of content we create are videos, graphics, and written content, then distribute this content on landing pages, Facebook ads, and emails. We create sales funnels using this content which soft sell the prospects on why our client’s product or service is the solution to the prospect’s problem.

We’ve helped our clients generate millions in sales, increase their average cart value, and grow customer lists that make repeat purchases.

CONTENT PORTFOLIO Link:
https://evolvemedia.agency/ema-portfolio

For more information:
https://EvolveMedia.Agency/

To speak to an Evolve Media team member:
ian@EvolveMedia.Agency

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