Episode 3: Put Yourself in a Position to Win!

Hello and welcome to the podcast. My name is Alex Branning and I am your marketing coach. The topic on the podcast today is putting yourself in a position to win. What I’m going to be discussing with you right now over the next 15 minutes is really going deep into analyzing whether or not your marketing is effective and where it’s leaking.

A lot of entrepreneurs come to me and they say that their marketing is not effective and 99 times out of a 100, the problem is not in the messaging necessarily and it’s not even in the offer, it’s that they’re not putting themselves in a position to win by making it easy for the customer to understand how they can help them and also how to take the next step.

Right now, if your marketing has no concrete plan, if you have not written out your marketing plan for the next 30, 90 and 360 days, what you’re doing is what I call random acts of marketing. What that looks like is this, if you answer yes to any of the following questions, you are doing random acts of marketing.

Number one, when you see somebody who has put together a really good ad, do you immediately try to copy that for your business? If so, you are stuck in random acts of marketing. If somebody comes to you with a new idea or a new platform or a new format for an ad and you consider it and then take action on it in less than three days from first hearing about it, you are performing random acts of marketing.

If right now, if I was to ask you what you’ll be promoting in 30 days from now and you don’t know, you are stuck in random acts of marketing. Now, a lot of entrepreneurs when I talk about this to them, they’ll tell me, “Alex, I don’t have time to plan out my marketing efforts.” What they mean by that when they say that is I’m overwhelmed and I don’t really know what I’m supposed to be doing.

I want to walk through that with you right now. When I say I want to put you in a position to win, my definition of that is I want to help you so that you have a very clear marketing message. Your customers who follow you know exactly what benefits you provide to them and putting yourself in a position where they can do business with you immediately after they see your messaging.

For some of you, doing business with you may mean setting an appointment. For some of you, it may mean that they are able to pull out their credit card right there on the spot and close the deal. I was talking to a lady in Idaho, she has these fun meetings that people go to. Her entire business is bringing people to an event.

Now, I sat down with her and I was going over what her numbers were and she said, “You know, when I talk to people about these meetings, they absolutely love the idea of it, but I just cannot get them there.” When I was talking to her, I said, “Are you making it easy for them to buy it from you?”

She said, “Absolutely. When they walk in the door, I make it very easy for them to buy.” Now, here’s the problem and she didn’t know that this was a problem and so I suggested, but I said, “The next time that you’re talking to somebody, what I want you to do is I want you to be in a position where you can pull out your mobile phone and then from there, you can either text them the URL so that they can buy the ticket or pull out your mobile phone, go to a website and then actually input their credit card for them so that they’re reserving a seat at the next meeting.”

What just happened when we made that shift in her business was we changed the marketing message from you should come and now we have to depend on them, remembering the meeting, feeling good about it when the night comes, making sure that nothing comes in the way to actually putting money on the table and saying, “Okay, I’ll be there.”

Now, she no longer has a lead, she has a buyer. Even if that person is given a huge discount for that first ticket, the odds of them actually coming are very high. I want you to ask yourself this question, is there a way for me to put myself in a position to win? Now, one of the ways that I do that is that I have a very easy link for people to follow when they want to jump on the phone with me and do a free consultation.

I’ll be talking with somebody and I’ll say, “You know what? Why don’t you pull out your phone right now, go to alexbranning.com/call and grab a time on my calendar that works for you, that way, you and I can talk about it.” Now, walk them through the process while we’re sitting there. That puts them in my calendar and then when they fill out that form to reserve the spot, I have their best email address and phone number.

Now, I am no longer depending on them trying to remember my name or my email address. Hopefully they didn’t throw my business card. I don’t have to worry about any of that. I have put myself in a position to win because now I have them on my calendar. They have or committed to that next meeting.

Now, the other thing that I want to talk about. My first main point was stop doing random acts of marketing, my second main point is I want you to build in automation and upsells into your digital marketing. You know that someone left because they never heard back. This is a huge problem. Now, especially if you are an appointment-based business, in other words if you sell insurance, real estate, you have a gym, et cetera, they have to actually meet with you for you to close the deal.

Automation is going to be your best friend. I want to take you behind the scenes of what happens within the Branning Group Marketing System. Now, we use ads, our favorite is Facebook, we’re also moving into Instagram, Twitter and others then when people click on our ad, we give them a valuable piece of content that they have requested and then our next ask is either purchasing one of our programs in which case they can buy it right on the spot or they can set up a consultation call with me.

When they do that, I’ll know exactly where they came from so I’ll know what they’re interested in and I’ll give them an idea of what we’re going to be talking about on that call. Now, after they set the appointment over the next 72 hours, they get an email from me confirming the appointment. They get a text message from me telling them I’m excited and I’ll talk to them at this time.

I send them at least two separate emails about the topic with added value and client testimonials and I didn’t do any of that manually. It was all set up through our automated system. What happens? Well, they sign up for that call, they get the confirmation, they get the text, they get those two additional pieces of value with success stories.

By the time I get on the phone with them, they have a very good idea of what I provide, what my prices are and the success stories of other clients. I am making it easier on myself to close the sale. I am putting myself in a position to win. Here’s another example of the Branning Group Marketing System and how we have helped other entrepreneurs.

I was talking with another coach. His entire business depends on him, getting people on the phone so that he can share how he can help their business. He was having a hard time with that because really unless somebody knows exactly what you are going to talk about with them, they do not want to commit to even a 15-minute free call, especially if it’s free.

If it’s free, there’s no value in it for them, however, if you’re going to tell them exactly what they’ll get out of the call, now there’s a little bit more value. What we did was we set it up so that they could set aside a 15 minute free strategy session and we were very specific about the benefits that they’d get out of the call which comes down to messaging and I’m not focusing on that today, but we put him in a position where we were very clear about the outcome.

Then, if they went on the page and they did not set the appointment, we put in retargeting so that we were able to follow that person around Facebook reminding them of the ways that we can help and encouraging them to set an appointment. Again, this was done automatically. When people go to the page, when they go to the website and they have not yet set an appointment to talk with my client, if they have not ever set an appointment to talk with my client, but they have been to the website, we follow them around, encouraging them to set up an appointment, giving them a very easy way to do it straight from Facebook.

The number of appointments that my client has gotten has gone up 10 times what he had before. Why is that? We put a relatively simple marketing structure in place with the retargeting and the ability to set an appointment online and we made it easy for them to do it and we made it inviting and we use good messaging so that they didn’t feel threatened, but what happened was based on his massive amounts of success that we’re seeing now, it’s not hard for me to deduce that the number of appointments left on the table in the six months or so from before he started working with me because now he’s getting roughly 10 appointments every two weeks. About an appointment a day.

Now, if that holds true, then all we did differently was given them an easy way to set that appointment and then we re-targeted them so that they were reminded to finish setting the appointment. Now, if he was getting an appointment a day with those two simple changes, how many was he missing out on? Well, if it’s one a day, then that means in the past six months he missed out on about 150 sales appointments and you can do the Math on what that means for his revenue.

Now, we’re not here to focus on the past and focus on the loss, but I want to share with you that now he is getting about an appointment a day because of those two marketing systems that are in place and he is absolutely thrilled. Why? We put him in the position to win.

Now, the third main point that I want to share with you is to never stop marketing. Put links to your value offers everywhere. For example, I’m going to look at myself in the mirror here. I am presented with opportunities to increase my business, I’m presented with opportunities to read really good content on a regular basis and I’ve trained myself so that I don’t jump at all the shiny objects, however, there are a lot of things that I see that I would want to go back and look at if they were put back in front of my face.

A great example of that is the podcast that I listen to by Eric Lofholm every morning. I love listening to it. However, sometimes things happen and I’m not reminded about it until I see him post on Facebook and he’s all over social media and my world. I’m constantly reminded of his presence. The same way, I have put myself in a position to win with my people because I want to make sure that number one, they see me on a regular basis with high value content either in the Facebook groups that I run, the emails that they get from me on a weekly basis, the ads that I’m running to my people, etc.

I never stopped marketing and I’m always doing little things to switch up the message. That way, if my first message stays on how to use Facebook to generate leads, if that one doesn’t get them to click, maybe my video marketing seminar or my list building workshops will so I continue to put things out there so that I can put myself in a position to win some additional business by providing additional value to my audience.

I never stop marketing and there’s a lot of ways to do that without it really costing you money. One of them is your email signature. If you’ve got an email from me, you’ll notice that there’s a couple of different offers in the email signature and I change it up on a monthly basis. That way it’s always a little bit fresh and new. We do some fun things with that.

I use Facebook ads to post and follow my people around. Again, I don’t want to annoy them, but I want to make sure that they see my stuff on a regular basis. I also have email marketing. I do text message marketing. I have Facebook messenger marketing. I’m going to be using a lot more direct mail. What is the point?

The point is I’m putting myself in a position to win more business by providing more value and putting offers in front of my audience on a regular basis. Now, I learned all this from a book that I want to recommend to you and Russell Brunson does a great job of breaking it down, the book is called DotCom Secrets and he really talks a lot about how to put together a marketing plan online, what to do to set up automation. It’s absolutely phenomenal.

I would love to make you an offer and help you set up these automated marketing systems, set up these funnels, put in these retargeting ads and really help you so that you pay me to build this out and you have this lead generating system that’s going to work for you for as long as you have it on.

If you are interested in this and want to work with me on this, please reach out, you can reach out to me at alexbranning.com. You can go to my Facebook page at Alex Branning. You can even set up an appointment with me at alexbranning.com/call. We can set up a time to talk about it.

A free offer that I want to make to you, please look up and join my funnel Fridays Facebook group and I would love to have you join. We talk a lot about creating funnels in there and every single Friday, I do some free training, I’m answering questions, I’m doing live support. We have a lot of fun.

Here’s the takeaway that I want to plant. I want to plant this seed in your mind. What am I doing right now that is getting people interested and how can I leverage that with an automated system to close more business? What am I doing that’s working and how can I improve it to get more business? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you would please do me a favor and subscribe the podcast so I can see it and drop a review, I would love that. Thank you so much for your time. Have a great day everyone and I will see you soon.

 

---

EASY SHARE TOOLS: 

[addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_pmgv”]

[addthis tool=”addthis_inline_share_toolbox_pmgv”]