Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
This is the reason most sales and marketing efforts often struggle, and fail to hit their business goals.
Do you realize that many of the biggest brands in the world offer loss leaders on what many might expect are their actual profit making products?
Here are a few examples…
McDonald’s makes almost no profit on their hamburgers and sandwiches? Sandwiches are their core offer, it’s the profits from soft drinks and fries that are the gold in the Golden Arches.
Best Buy sells laptops and TVs on wafer slim margins and makes up for it on warranties, installation and peripherals. They really make up for it on Geek Squad Support.
The world’s most successful companies do this for a very good reason. The reason is something called the Business Value Optimization Funnel.
I’d encourage you to take 15 minutes out of you day right now to read this.
I’m going to walk you through the Business Value Optimization Funnel but before we get started I need to make one thing very clear before we get started.
This cycle is not new. I did not invent it. It’s been around for literally hundreds of years.
At Honeypot Marketing we’ve put this type of a funnel (and many unique variations of this funnel) in place hundreds of times with everyone from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, delivering consistent and ongoing successful results.
Ironically – we’ve also noticed that 90% of all companies do not implement these funnels in their businesses.
THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT: Before we get started, I want to make absolutely sure you are not simply learning to use Google AdWords, creating a social plan or putting in place Search Engine Optimizations on your website without understanding the entire lifecycle listed below and the critical importance of the funnel.
If you do not implement a thoughtful customer experience, you will simply be marketing for the sake marketing, you will exhaust your marketing budget and you WILL spin your wheels unsuccessfully.
It’s why so many marketers, business owners and start-ups are on a continuous treadmill of frustrated marketing efforts and you will not be.
Step 1 – Determine Your Product/Market Fit (Does anyone want your product or service?)
Step 2 – Select Your Traffic Source (Monkeys with machine guns need not apply).
Step 3 – Offer a Lead Magnet or Lead Acquisition (Perceived Value is EVERYTHING).
Step 4 – The Trip Wire or Engagement (It’s About The Customer and NOT About You).
Step 5 – Offer Your Core Product or Activation (It’s Important To Date Before Getting Married).
Step 6 – The Value Maximizer (We Care About Customers And The Community).
Step 7 – Create the Retention Path or Retention (We Don’t Forget About Our Favourite People In The Whole Wide World).
If you want to learn more about how we do marketing, and get more in depth teaching about the Business Value Optimization process we covered here you can access our FREE Marketing Bootcamp right here. It’s taught in 6 easy to digest lessons and is 100% free for you.
Still not convinced this is a sound digital marketing strategy? Then please, read on…
This is the part of the discussion that requires brutal honesty and self-reflection. You’ve worked hard to develop your product or your service, the real question to ask yourself is: does anyone want or need it?
You’ve taken the time to develop a product.
It truly doesn’t matter if you’ve invented the product or if you’re reselling a product offered by another provider.
Now we need to determine if anyone actually cares about your product. This is the ever elusive Product/Market fit and it’s shockingly easy to determine if you’ve got a good fit.
It’s simple: in business we want to get our customers from the “Before” state to the “After” state.
And customers want the “After” state. It’s why they’re interested in buying that extra insurance, the new car, the new iPhone or that new monthly online subscription. It’s what they’re willing to spend their hard earned money on.
Great offers will move a customer into the “After” state.
Great marketing simply explains the move from the “Before” State to the “After” state for our customer.
There are two fundamental reasons businesses and marketing fail: The “After” state is not of value to the customer.
Also known as a crappy product.
The explanation of the “Before” to the “After” state also fails. This know also known as crappy marketing.
We’re going to work together to determine if you’ve got that fit, and if you don’t well why not make a change to get that perfect fit?
Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
Getting traffic is easy.
Getting great traffic is tricky, but it’s not hard.
The trick to selecting your traffic source(s) and how you acquire that new audience to explain your amazing whiz-bang product is simply this: do the people seeing your offer and your message actually care about it at all?
The self-deception most businesses and marketers fall into is how important you think you’re own product might be.
Why do you expect anyone to care? What value does your offer and your product make to their lives.
They are important. We are not.
Selecting traffic sources is not simply a matter of Google versus Bing versus Facebook versus Email Partners.
Selecting your traffic sources really requires a thoughtful understanding of your customer, how to reach them, where they interact and what they care about.
Ok, now that we understand why traffic source selection is so important to getting the right customers, let’s talk about providing them with something that can get their attention in an increasingly noise filled world.
Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
Do you know what I see every day?
Marketers and businesses blowing their brains out by front loading large marketing budgets asking for people to make a core product purchase immediately.
It’s expensive.
It will not convert well.
You will get frustrated.
Your client, CFO, Partner or Finance Team will get very upset with you, very quickly.
The lead magnet is the offer or message that will allow you to gain their interest.
We’ll show you how our lead magnets have generated hundreds of thousands of leads.
Poorly thought out lead magnets often look something like this: Subscribe to our Blog. Register for our Newsletter.
Why?
Because those lead magnets are all about you and have nothing to do with your customer, the person reading the message.
Why would I bother joining your list?
I don’t need more email. I certainly don’t need you coming back to me every week trying to get my attention.
Great lead magnets do a couple of things and have one very important property: they provide your customer with real value, they solve a problem and they’re specific rather than general.
Great lead magnets look something like this:
Grab your free social media swipe file containing our most successful posts from 2015 on Facebook and Twitter. We’ll even show you how to customize every post for your business.
Or….
Download our conversion and KPI tracking template. This template (that we use daily) drills down into every detail of your campaign. Let’s make sure your next campaign is loved by everyone!
Lead Magnets do not need to be annoying or over done either, they should be targeted, thoughtful and strategic.
Now that we’re on the same page with respect to Lead Magnets and why they’re important, it’s time to introduce the TripWire.
Ladies and Gentlemen, (drum roll please), let’s all meet the Trip Wire!
Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
You know the Trip Wire even if you’ve never heard of it before.
Trip wires are all around us.
It’s the ridiculous flat screen TV deal at Best Buy.
It’s the $5 domain from GoDaddy.
It’s the rock-bottom price of a Kindle Fire.
It’s the $20 for $200 worth of Yoga Classes Groupon offer.
It’s every service offered for $5 = bucks on Fiverr. If you’ve never heard of Fiverr then read on, you’re in the right place!
Have a look at these trip wires from GoDaddy…do you think this hugely successful company is profiting from the offers listed below?
The strategy behind the Tripwire is simple:
Convert the maximum number of Lead Magnet leads into paying customers, even at the expense of your profit margin, with the understanding that acquiring a paying customer will deliver profit through the next three steps:
Your Core Product or Offer
Ok, now that you understand how to acquire new leads through lead magnets and warm a sales relationship with them through the trip wire…
Let’s talk about leveraging the relationship you’ve developed into a sales relationship based on trust and then increasing the average transaction value per customer
Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
You’re going to get nowhere by offering your Core Product to cold leads unfamiliar with you, your company, your team and what you do.
It’s a simple (and age old) matter of relationship sales.
You will however see your Core Offer sales drastically increase with the addition of the Lead Magnet and Tripwire Offer.
This is why it’s critical to over deliver with the Lead Magnet and Tripwire.
In some cases, sales from the Core Offer will make you profitable.
But it doesn’t have to. If you follow through on this process, you could take everything you make from the Core Offer and reinvest it to acquire more customers.
Again, this is how you become unstoppable. You build a system in which you can spend more to acquire a customer than your competitors.
Your competitors are leading with a Core Offer and trying to make a living from it.
Read this 6 times out loud (sounds crazy I know): I don’t need to make a dime on my Core Offer.
Remember, as Jeff Bezos says, your competitor’s margin is an opportunity. It is your opportunity to, for example, spend more on traffic acquisition, conversion rate optimization or increase the value of your offers.
It might stun you to find out that many of the most successful businesses in the world make no profit until they reach the next two stages, Value Maximizers and the Customer Return Path.
Here’s where things get very interesting…
Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
One of the most important metrics of any truly successful is increasing the average transaction value per customer. The Profit Maximizer does just that.
Most businesses don’t have Tripwire Offers and they don’t have Profit Maximizers. They live and die selling cold prospects on their Core Offer.
This is why they struggle and you won’t.
Would it shock you to find out that McDonald’s makes almost no money on the hamburger. The hamburger is the Core Offer, but it’s the fry and Coke Profit Maximizer that built the Golden Arches.
This type of Profit Maximizer is called an "immediate up-sell".
Best Buy sells laptops and plasma TV’s (Core Offers) on wafer thin margins you can’t resist and makes it up on warranties, installation and Geek Squad support (Profit Maximizers).
Amazon makes a Cross-Sell Profit Maximizer offer when they show you, “People that bought this product, also bought that product” to increase the Average Basket Value, also known as maximizing profit.
But Amazon also makes a Bundle Profit Maximizer offer with their “Frequently Bought Together” offer…
And Premium Subscriptions (recurring billing) such as membership websites and other continuity offers make fantastic Profit Maximizer offers…
Any offer made after the initial sale is a Profit Maximizer.
Because the single biggest expense companies will incur is the cost of acquiring a new customer (which is the job of the Tripwire Offer) and everything else increases the customer’s immediate and lifetime value.
What could you be offering as an up-sell or cross-sell? What could you bundle with your Core Offer? How can you incorporate a subscription or membership site into your business model?
Find your Profit Maximizer and you begin to become unstoppable.
But there is one more way to grow…
Most businesses today, regardless if they are an online service, technology start-up or established business enterprise, live and die selling cold prospects on their core offer.
The last way to grow a business is to increase the number of transactions per customer.
Enter the Return Path.
The goal of the Return Path is to have frequent, strategic communication with your buyers and prospects that cause them to buy again and again.
Because you have received their contact information through the Lead Magnet you have the ability to continue marketing.
You can offer new Lead Magnets, Tripwires, Core Offers and Profit Maximizers because you have permission to market to them or bring them back to the Tripwire, Core Offer or Profit Maximizer that they didn’t buy the first time around.
The Return Path is the part of your funnel that brings the customer or prospect back more frequently including:
… but none is more powerful than the automated email follow-up.
The single most impactful action you can take right now is to join our FREE Marketing Bootcamp…
If you want to learn more about how we do marketing, and get more in depth teaching about the Business Value Optimization process we covered here…
… you can access our FREE Marketing Bootcamp right here.
This training is taught by me and contains 6 lessons, each of which is designed to double your sales and provide you with a rock solid repeatable marketing system…
Lesson 1 – Defining Your Business Formula – There is a formula for business growth, and in this lesson I’ll give it to you.
Lesson 2 – Product Positioning – Even if you already have a flagship product or service, knowing how to perfectly position your offer so it gives your prospects EXACTLY what they want is the simplest way to increase sales
Lesson 3 – Collecting Leads -You’ll discover the 3 vital elements of any lead magnet, and see proven examples you can use and deploy for your brand…
Lesson 4 – Increasing Conversions – In this lesson, you’re going to discover the most under-utilized business asset that can literally double…even TRIPLE your conversion rates overnight. And no…that’s not an exaggeration.
Lesson 5 – Maximizing Your Profit – Do you know the 3-word phrase that can DOUBLE your average profit per customer? I do, and in this lesson I’m going to tell you what it is, and how you can implement this “Magic Question” in your business.
Lesson 6 – Automation Secrets – In this lesson, I’ll show you how to setup a “Selling Machine” for your business, so you can deploy automated followup to DOUBLE your sales frequency… <<< This is where you’ll learn our email marketing system.
This membership is ABSOLUTELY FREE and, if you’ve read this far, I know you will be absolutely stunned by the value you will receive from these lessons.
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