Hey, what’s going on? It is Alex Branning. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast and wow, I just got to be honest with you, before I dive into the content, this has been a blast. I’m loving all the feedback.
I had a guy hit me up the other day on Facebook. He sent me a friend request and he said, “Hey Alex, I just wanted to say thank you for all of the great content. I listen to your podcast every Monday morning on my way to work. I have listened to every single episode.” How cool is that? I’m just like, “Wow.” Never met the guy before. I really have to ask him how he found me, but I’m just having a blast.
Well, let’s dive into the content. I’m moving into a whole new series on this podcast. Breakthrough Marketing Ideas. Let’s roll. All right. I am going to go over for the next, probably, twelve weeks, maybe longer, a breakthrough marketing idea. The purpose of this series is to give you a very specific action plan that you can use right away.
One of the things that I have found, when I introduce new ideas to my clients, is there is some resistance and that’s totally normal. It’s normal to have resistance to a new idea because us, in our human nature, we are generally averse to risk and trying new things. It’s just part of our survival mechanism.
As an entrepreneur, as a business owner, risk is just a part of a process. Having said that, some of the ideas that I’m going to present are going to work really, really well for you, and some of them may not be a good fit or what most likely is going to take place is I’m going to give you an idea and your mind is going to start processing how that idea could look in your business.
Even though, like today, I’m going to be specifically talking about using webinars today, I may give you specific examples that aren’t a fit for you, but I want you to look at them and evaluate, “How can I take the concept and the strategy that Alex is giving me and how can I use that in my own business?”
Now one of the things that I’m going to be doing a little bit more is using some industry jargon, and let me define some terms you’re going to hear me use, so that we’re on the same page. Number one, the term you’re going to hear from me a lot, when I talk about these breakthrough marketing ideas, is a multiplier. This is a strategic concept that is used to multiply my time.
When you do things that only have an impact in the immediate time frame that you perform the action, you’re basically producing eight hours of results for eight hours of work. However, many of the strategies that I’ll be presenting give you a 10x return on your time, some even more, so eight hours of work could produce eighty hours of results.
Now another term you’re going to hear me use is a maximizer. I learned this term at a marketing book I read and it has stuck with me for years. The idea is to capitalize on an opportunity by setting myself up for maximum impact. One of the common mistakes that we make, when we first start a new marketing idea, is that we do not include a maximizer that will help us take the ideas to the next level of results.
Another term you’re going to hear me use is time cost per lead or TCPL. As a marketer, you often hear me use stats to show the dollar cost per lead that I generate for my clients. However, as a small business owner doing your own marketing, you not only need to keep track of the dollar spend generating leads, but also the time that you spend generating each lead. Look, you only have so many hours in the day and even though the cost per lead may be cheap, the time that you spend generating that lead is something that you also need to track.
An idea of a lead that is cheap in dollars but expensive in time would be leads that you would get at a networking event. For example, I was heavily involved in my local networking. It was called TEAM Referral Network. It’s similar to BNI. There’s a lot of people that have this same kind of process.
The time cost per lead that I was getting from TEAM, when I really sat down to look at it, because I was getting probably about a lead a week, but I would look at it and go, “Okay, I’m driving to the meeting. I’m sitting in the meeting for an hour, and then I’m driving back,” and the time spent preparing and then getting myself back into the swing of things, when I get back to the office after that team meeting, it was, give or take, about two and a half hours a week for one lead.
Now when I sat down and I looked at my time that I was spending per lead, two and a half hours, and I applied my dollar value for the hours that I spend at my job … I would like to only perform tasks that are what I call a-hundred-dollar-an-hour tasks, and so those leads were costing me in value $250. Now that’s not cash out of my pocket, but that is my time cost per lead.
When that hit, when I saw that on paper, I went, “I need to change things up,” and so I started focusing more on my efforts, not only my time, but also my dollars in generating leads online because it allowed me a much lower time cost per lead.
By doing that, I noticed an impact, when I started not just looking at my dollars and cents return on investment, but also my time return on investment, I noticed a huge growth curve, so you’re going to hear me use time cost per lead while we go through this series.
Another industry term that I’m going to be using is social currency. There is an unspoken and unseen level of wealth that influencers carry. It is social currency. I define that as the amount of investment they have made in other people’s lives that they’re able to withdraw as a new business or opportunities in the future.
In order to visualize this concept, think about the social currency that the directors of local charity organizations have. They’re constantly investing in their community and in return, their community supports them monetarily. This is a very shallow example, but it’s an example that you have seen and can relate to.
Another example of social currency is my business coach, Eric Lofholm. He does a daily call every single day. He releases a podcast of the call recording and he talks for about fifteen minutes a day on success principles and he does it free of charge.
I know for a fact that he’s building up social currency with me and the other people on the call because we are loving the content. Those are some industry jargons. Multiplier, maximizer, time cost per lead, and social currency. You’re going to hear me use those over and over again.
Now I want to talk about my first breakthrough idea that I want to present to you is a webinar. Now you’ve seen webinars, heard webinars, been to webinars, so the term “webinar” may be in a box in your mind. You may hear that term and immediately associate it with something that you were a part of and go, “That’s not what I want to do.”
Now I want to reframe the webinar concepts. I want to talk about webinars as a strategy, and I want you to think of a webinar as a short video that you can send prospects. Here are some really cool things to consider when you look at webinars:
Number one: When you use a webinar, when you send out a recording of a webinar that you’ve done, you can rehearse that webinar over and over again, only sending it to a prospect or only making it public when you feel like you’ve done your best work.
Now one of the most powerful marketing pieces that I have in my arsenal, in my toolbox, I make these short videos that I send out to prospects that give them a very brief overview of how I’m able to help them, and I have videos that I’ve sent, that people have watched, that I made years ago and I still use them today because they still apply.
Now you can also send these short webinar videos to appointments that you have. I like to send these over to educate my client on what we’re going to be talking about. For example, if I’m going to be sitting down with a real estate firm, I have an opportunity to talk to them about maybe setting up a speaking engagement and they ask, “Alex, how can you help me,” I can send over a snippet of a webinar that I’ve created in the past, so they can see exactly what my content looks like and how I’ll be presenting it.
I also use the webinar to educate people on things that I do, so that I can not only attract the right people, but also weed out the wrong people. An example of that is a webinar that I did on search engine optimization, which is me helping people get their websites to the top of Google. It’s a service that the Branning Group has provided for years. We love it and it brings a massive ROI to our clients.
However, there’s a lot of things about SEO that people either don’t understand or that have changed over the years. Unfortunately, as many things are in the digital marketing space, SEO changes on a regular basis.
I have a webinar that I’ve shot and I’ve done a couple of different iterations on it as things have changed, and I can send that to a client that is reaching out to talk to me, and so that way they can learn about what I do and they can make sure that I’m a good fit if they’re looking to hire me for that particular service.
Sometimes, people will watch the video and go, “Alex, I love the presentation. Not where I’m going with my business” or “Not the budget” or “I’m looking for someone to do specific things that you didn’t cover in the webinar,” and so before I even jump on the phone for myself, it helps me to make sure that I am spending my phone time with a prospect that not only understands how I can help them, but also understands what I don’t do, right? A webinar’s great for that.
A webinar’s also really good because when you give free content, it draws people in. It’s a great lead magnet. Every single day, I have people watching replays of webinars that I’ve shot a year ago, six months ago. It’s a great maximizer on your time. I told you I was going to use that term and here it is. This is a great multiplier of my time and it’s a maximizer of my knowledge.
I’m able to multiply by me taking an hour to record a webinar. I am able to give a lot of thought and effort and knowledge into this relatively short presentation, where I talk about a specific topic. I just finished one up right now for the 2018 Facebook Playbook, very excited about that.
I spent my own personal time, preparing the webinar slides, building everything out, recording it, was, give or take, about 10 hours overall, and that time investment is going to climb, but I predict over the next few months, I’m going to have probably 400 people, maybe more, watch that webinar. 400 people. I spent 10 hours of my time to create a one-hour presentation. That one-hour presentation is going to be viewed 400 times. 400 times.
Now think about that. That’s 400 hours of time of my content being consumed. My time cost per lead, so I spent 10 hours, right, and I’m getting 400 views, which means that for every hour that I spent, I’m getting four qualified leads that have sat down, reviewed my content, gone through everything, and I still have that Facebook Playbook in my pocket, it’s good until the end of December, so my time cost per lead is about 15 minutes, but once the deliverable is done, it’s done.
Now the maximizer, for me, it’s all about return on my investment, not only in time, which means I have to promote the webinar, but also in dollars, right? For me, I am making an offer at the end of the webinar. I believe the number is eight. If I’m able to sell eight people to close them on the offer that I’m making, then I will have succeeded at a minimum, breaking even. I believe it’ll become profitable after eight sales.
However, any sale after the eighth becomes profit, and so it’s not uncommon for these webinars that we create for ourselves to generate $20,000 or more in sales and that’s what I’m predicting here. I’m predicting that this webinar that I created, the Facebook Playbook for 2018, will generate about $40,000 in revenue.
Now, remember, I spent 10 hours on it, and so that’s $4,000 per hour of my time in revenue that’s created from the Facebook Playbook, and so the $4,000 an hour, that’s one metric to use to determine that it was successful. The one lead every 15 minutes concept, that’s another way for me to determine that it was successful, so there’s a lot of cool ways here that I can go, “Okay, this is a really good use of my time.”
Webinars are going to be the same way for you. Now you can do a webinar that is educational. You can do a webinar that is giving people a very strong call to action to set up a consultation with you. You can also use a webinar to sell.
For me, my most effective webinars are the ones that I do where I spend anywhere from 45 to 55 minutes just teaching and at the end, I make them an offer to dive deeper into the material with me or to hire me to help them out, and so you can use webinars the same way.
I’ve helped real estate agents, life insurance agents, solar salespeople, you name it. We’ve written a lot of webinars, and so webinars are a great maximizer of your time and your revenue. It’s a great multiplier of your time. You get a very low time cost per lead.
The reason why our webinar took 10 hours is because we were in a lot of fun stuff and if you watch it, you’ll see what we’re talking about. It’s a very dynamic webinar. Typically, our webinars take a little bit less time for prep, but this one was a little bit longer.
As far as social currency, my social currency rises even with the people that don’t buy because they love all the free content that they get. We’re putting together a very well done webinar, with a lot of really good action items in there, and the people that watch it appreciate it. Even if they don’t buy, they enjoy the content. It’s a great way for them to be introduced to me.
It’s one of those things that sets me apart from other people in my space. There’s a lot of people that do marketing. Not a lot of us have a podcast, which is one of the reasons why I do this. It’s a great multiplier of my time, and the webinars are a great way for me to really share exactly what my strategies are.
In this case, it’ll be for how I do Facebook marketing and Facebook ads, but it’s a great way for you to watch that webinar and either go, “Alex seems like a great fit for me” or “Alex has a slightly different way of approaching Facebook than I do, and so we’re not a good fit.” Either way, it’s totally fine. You’re going to get a lot of value from the webinar and at the end of it, if I make a sale, great. If not, that’s okay too because you got to learn a little bit more about how I do things.
While I’m going through these breakthrough marketing ideas, I hope these are inspiring for you. I want you to listen to this and go, “Man, those are some good ideas. I got a thought there” or “I got a new idea on how I can use the webinar concept.” I’d love to hear about it.
If you are listening to this right now and going, “Man, I really wish I knew how to put together a webinar,” I have a really cool resource for you. It’s called the Perfect Webinar Wizard. It is awesome.
Go to my podcast website. This one is episode 12, which is great. You can go to alexbranning.com/podcast or alexbranning.com/episode12 to find the resources for this, the perfect webinar script. It’s got a DVD. It’s got a sheet that you can use. You can get that. It’s absolutely free. You just got to pay for shipping, so grab that.
Another way that you can become part of my community is by looking me up. Look me up, Alex Branning, on Facebook, like my business page, and if you’re looking to create a webinar and you’re like, “Oh, man, I’m kind of stuck,” feel free to reach out to me. You can reach out to me at alex@branninggroup.com or find me online and just send me a message. I’m here to help you. I want to be a part of it.
Also, on our level 10 marketing group, we’re going to be talking about webinars quite a bit, so if you’re a part of my level 10, we will be diving in to webinars, and I’ll be giving you specific ideas about webinars that you can create. If you’re not a part of level 10, please join me.
Level 10 is a marketing coaching program where every single Friday, I’m giving you very specific ideas, thoughts, concepts, strategies and it’s a live call every Friday, and so I’m talking directly to you. It’s a round table mastermind call, so really, really valuable stuff. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you’ve got some great ideas out of it, please share it. Have a great rest of your day.
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Resources Mentioned in the Episode
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