What Startups Can Learn from ‘Tax Relief’ PPC Campaigns

Old-school industries don’t get the credit they deserve.

Every blog online focuses on the hot new startup.

People write case study after case study on the trendy new subscription box.

But no one ever talks about offline companies.

Even though, many times, there’s WAY more money at stake.

Take ‘tax relief,’ for example.

The latest IRS numbers show that people fail to pay $458 billion a year in taxes. That accounts for almost 69% of our annual deficit.

Obviously, people don’t get away with avoiding taxes for too long. Eventually, they’ll be caught.

And then they’ll need to pay back the IRS.

The problem, of course, is that they probably won’t have the money on hand.

So what will these desperate people do?

They’ll start looking for help from tax relief companies.

These companies specialize in helping people reduce or avoid certain debts.

What’s the problem?

This is a heavily commoditized market. Many of these providers are offering the same services, more or less.

If a ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ refers to uncontested markets, tax relief is a very, very, molten lava, red-hot, competitive market.

It’s among the most competitive in the world. You have massive companies all chasing the same few people who owe lots and lots of money.

You know what else that means?

There is no room for error.

These companies literally cannot afford to make a mistake.

They’re among the highest-priced PPC terms, for instance, reaching up to around $40-50 bucks a click.

And that’s just for a single visit!

They still have to try and convert those visitors. So the actual cost per lead is well into the hundreds of dollars, easy.

That’s why we should be studying these old school industries. They might not have the flashiest designs or most cutting-edge tech.

But they are slogging it out, day in and day out, with competitors who’re all spending a TON of money.

In this article, I’m going to show you strategies from the best in the tax relief business. At the very end, you’ll be able to take these tips and instantly increase your own PPC campaigns.

First, however, we need to start by getting a lay of the land.

How to research an industry you know nothing about

PPC is one of my favorite marketing tactics.

I love it because it produces results almost immediately. You can turn campaigns on and make adjustments on the fly.

Do it right and customers start flowing in within a few days.

I also love it because it’s consistent. You can predict what kind of results you’re going to get.

And you can predict them, because a simple competitive analysis will give you almost all the data you need.

For example, before this post, I knew nothing about tax relief. Thankfully!

My trick to uncovering the best marketing tips isn’t to watch what people say. It’s to watch what they do.

If you want to know more about ‘tax relief,’ let’s start by Googling the competition.

So far so good. The first four ad results show they know what they’re doing.

My search query was “tax relief Seattle.”

But all of them do a good job bringing up benefits of their service.

Why does that matter? Because just over a year ago, Google opened up the ‘expanded’ headline.

This way, you could hit the keyword in the first headline. And then add a secondary benefit to get people to click.

Here’s an awesome example:

“Take 60 seconds to cut taxes” helps the searcher hop over the first objection hurdle: It’s going to be too long or boring.

When this new expanded headline debuted, WordStream ran a study and found that adding an additional benefit like this can increase your click-through rate by 400%!

Just a few simple queries like this will help you quickly find a whole slew of companies.

Stick to big, popular queries at this point.

The reason? Keywords like “tax relief” will also be among the most expensive in the space.

Which means the companies you see advertising on them will have the big bucks.

They’ll be the most aggressive.

And you can use them as a benchmark.

For example, Precision Tax Relief had an excellent ad earlier. They used ad extensions like star ratings and reviews.

So you know they’re legit.

Now, I’m going to grab their URL and drop them into two tools.

First, let’s see what their site brings up in SpyFu:

Check that out.

Two seconds and you can see:

1. The number of keywords they’re bidding on
2. An estimate of clicks they’re receiving
3. Their total monthly budget

And then, you can even drill down into the individual keywords in their account.

Each one will show a cost per click, the total ad budget on each, and where they’re showing up for them.

SEMrush will show you similar data:

In this case, you’re able to sort the keywords they’re bidding on by search position.

See something interesting already?

Precision Tax Relief is paying for the #1 position of a competitor, Optima Tax Relief.

Judging by this traffic estimate, they’re also stealing a TON of their clicks, too.

Look further down the list and you see more of the same.

Why should we spend time looking up competitors?

Because these tools will uncover the strategies the best companies in the industry are using.

So far, we can see that Precision Tax is using a branded search strategy.

Instead of just dominating their own name, they’re actively bidding against the competition’s.

But that’s not the most important thing buried in here.

For starters, they’re giving us the 800LB gorilla in the tax relief space: Optima.

Which means we can now go research them to see what’s making them so successful.

Let’s start with reverse-engineering their keyword strategy.

Analyze the best in the business to see what works

There’s a trick I use to shortcut keyword research for SEO.

Instead of wasting tons of time on inaccurate tools like the Google Keyword Planner, I do the same thing every time I get a new site:

Fire up an AdWords campaign.

The reason? It saves me a ton of time.

The hardest part about optimizing a brand new website is that you don’t know the ‘money’ keywords.

You have no idea which keywords will deliver the best bang for your buck. Or hours.

AdWords can help you solve that.

You can add a bunch of keywords from five minutes of research. Set up a decent daily budget.

Then, the AdWords Search Terms report will tell you exactly which keywords are worth focusing on.

That’s what we want to replicate in this case, too.

Right now, we still have no idea which keywords perform best.

Sure, we saw that some companies are going after the competition hard.

But you often can’t rely only on competitive brand queries.

Instead, let’s look up the top keywords for Optima Tax Relief. They were one of the biggest in the space.

So they probably have a pretty good keyword strategy already in place.

Here’s what that looks like in SEMrush:

Notice what they’re doing?

They’re employing a location-based keyword strategy.

A lot of the estimate monthly volume is really low, too. ~200-300 monthly queries is nothing.

“Tax relief,” by comparison, gets over ~8,000 monthly searches alone. It’s also expensive, with CPC’s that can range up to ~$40 a click:

Instead of going after just those big keywords, Optima is going after a ton of long-tail keywords.

That’s good and bad news.

It’s good news because long-tail keywords should offer better conversions and cost less per lead.

But it’s bad news because there’s often not enough of them to go around.

In other words, you have to piece them all together to get the end results you’re looking for.

You can’t grow a business off one or two conversions each month. Instead, you need to stack those like bricks.

You need thousands to really take off.

Clicking on those individual keywords they’re running will also show you the different ad creatives they’re using.

And you’ll get to see the other similar search terms their ads are appearing on.

For example, here’s what it looks like when you click on “tax attorney nyc”:

Now, you’re seeing all of those little long-tail variations that go together.

And you’re looking at the exact ad copy they’re using to drive clicks.

See how this works?

With about ten minutes of research, you can start piecing together a winning campaign.

Even in an industry where you have no prior experience.

Of course, this is just a start.

There’s actually a whole lot more involved in a successful ad campaign.

We’re only scratching the surface right now.

Keywords and ads get people to click. But they’re not why people convert.

Most of the time, that happens when people start interacting with your site.

Your site’s landing pages not only determine conversions, though. They also can end up determining how much you’re going to pay for each click.

Here’s how.

Mimic the customer’s process to understand their experience

Back in the day, when I first started out, AdWords didn’t have a Quality Score.

That meant anyone could advertise on any keywords and there was no penalty.

As long as you had the money to spend, it was fine.

That created a problem for users, though. The results were often irrelevant.

Google’s Quality Score changed all that.

It factors in a bunch of different variables, like ad relevance or expected click-through rate, to determine which ads are best.

Generally speaking, the better the score and your Ad Rank, the less you often end up paying.

In this video, I give 5 tips for increasing your Quality Score:

So while AdWords is an auction, you can sometimes pay less than the people showing up below you. If your scores are better.

Years ago, Larry Kim analyzed millions in ad spend and found a 16% cost difference based on Quality Score. A point higher and you paid less. A point lower and you paid more.

Jacob Baadsgaard repeated this experiment a few years later and found a 13% correlation.

In other words, your Quality Score can often directly influence your costs.

Now, here’s the kicker:

A huge component of your Quality Score comes down to message match.

Here’s what that means:

1. How well does your keyword selection represent someone’s search intent?
2. How well does your ad text match the keyword you’re bidding on?
3. And how well does your landing page match both the ad text and keyword?

Those three elements should be in perfect harmony.

The more they’re aligned, the better the message match, the higher the Quality Score, and the lower cost you pay.

Still with me so far?

Let’s go back to our original example from Precision Tax Relief.

Here’s what their ad looked like again:

Notice how the headline is: “Best Tax Relief Seattle”?

The ad copy below also uses “attorneys,” among other keywords.

Compare that ad to the landing page people see when they click:

Not bad, right?

Technically speaking, the headline on this page (“Best Seattle Tax Attorney”) is a little off. Ideally, you’d make them the exact same as the ad and keyword.

But think through what that means, now.

Earlier, we saw how Optima tax relief was using a bunch of different long-tail keywords, sorted by location.

That means you’d have to create unique landing pages for almost every one!

You’d probably want to keep the same overall design to make your life a little easier.

However, you’d want to at least customize the text to better reflect what sent people here in the first place.

That means you might have one example for attorneys, specifically:

And then you’d have another targeting physicians and dentists:

There are a few ways you can pull this off.

You could have designers and developers help create custom pages for you.

But not everyone has that luxury.

Instead, I also like using dynamic text replacement wherever possible.

I’m all about ROI. The best solution is often the one that scales the best.

Landing page tools like Unbounce have features that will automatically replace text on a page, depending on where they came from.

That means you can create just one single landing page template.

Then, you can simply switch up the words.

Here’s a location-based example, just like those keywords from earlier.

This landing page says “Caribbean” right now.

You can highlight the location-based text, then click the “Dynamic Text” button on the right-hand side of Unbounce.

Now, we can customize the text based on the location or “destination”:

Now, repeat this process for all of the different keywords you’re bidding on.

You’ll get a simple, customized URL to copy and place in your ad campaigns.

That way, when someone clicks on the ad for “California” beach getaways, they’re going to land on a page with “California” all over it.

And you never had to create more than a single landing page.

Let’s go back to tax relief.

Because I came across a landing page that uses another advanced feature. You have to see it.

Here’s how Optima tax relief uses qualifying questions to convert more users.

Qualify and lead new customers to your doorstep

Clicking on an Optima Tax ad will bring you to the following landing page:

Here’s what it looks like if you want to play along at home.

Notice what you don’t see here?

You don’t see a Name field. You also don’t see Email or Phone.

They’re not asking you any personal information just yet.

Instead, they’re starting with “How much tax debt do you have”?

Weird, right?!

Except, it’s not so weird when you dig below the surface.

Right off the bat, they’re qualifying new visitors.

They’re trying to see how much you owe, between 0 – $50,000+.

If you owe less than $10,000 for example, and there’s probably not enough they can help you with.

They won’t stand to gain a whole lot.

Owe over $50,000 and their hands might also be tied. They’re not miracle workers, after all.

So they’re segmenting potential visitors to customize the kind of response you’ll get.

They can automate most of the disqualifying, gently letting people know they can’t help that much.

While they can also fast-track people who do fit right in their wheelhouse.

Only then do they ask for your personal information:

Virtu did two similar tactics to skyrocket conversions.

They asked qualifying questions to figure out how to treat individual leads:

And then they add Calendly to the Thank You page for good leads to remove any remaining friction.

Their rate of leads scheduling phone calls jumped from 20% to over 60% in just the first month.

There’s another reason this inverted process works, though.

Think about it from a customer’s perspective.

They probably don’t feel great. They’re embarrassed or hesitant about reaching out.

So landing on a page that immediately asks for a bunch of personal information is a little off-putting.

Counterintuitively, asking easy questions first can increase conversions later. It lowers the barrier to entry.

KlientBoost calls this the ‘Breadcrumb Technique.’

It’s based off research from Scott Fraser and Jonathan Freedman that showed how starting with a small ‘ask’ can make it easier to get a “yes” to the big ‘ask’ after.

By as much as 76% vs. 20%!

KlientBoost tested both approaches on a mortgage landing page:

And here were the incredible results:

• The Cost Per Acquisition fell from $800+ to $35
• Total conversions went from 6 to 135 a month
• The conversion rate jumped from 1% to nearly 20%

Pretty remarkable, right?

But we’re not even done yet.

There’s still a big difference between people that apply for tax relief help, from those that go through with the service.

We still need to see how people get over that last sales hump, then.

Here’s how you can use automation to largely set-and-forget this process.

Lastly, automate and fine-tune your intake process

After submitting your personal information, Optima Tax follows up with an automate email.

That’s pretty typical, though.

You’d expect that.

What’s not so expected is the text message you’ll receive at the very same time.

It will read something like this:

• “$NAME Thanks for your interest in OptimaTaxRelief.com, we’ll be calling you soon.”

I know, because I ran through this process and received one myself. ;)

Soon after, you will receive that call, too.

So far they’ve followed up in all three primary channels:

1. Phone
2. Email
3. Text

If you don’t pick up that phone call, you’ll receive another text message with something like:

• “We were unable to reach you. Click 800-481-3615 to call a tax relief”

Fail to respond, and they’ll continue calling you throughout the next few days.

What’s happening here?

Optima Tax knows that this space is tough.

You, the customer, could have lost interest. Or you could be on the phone with the competition, comparing rates.

So they’re persistently aggressive to get ahold of you.

If and when you do get on the phone, they’ll ask you the same basic questions:

• Why are you calling us today?
• How much do you owe?
• What do you do for a living?
• Have you filed a tax return?
• Have you filed an extension?
• How did you hear about them?

And on and on.

They will also use an interview to figure out if you own any other assets, have insurance, what your household income looks like, and if you have any dependents.

The entire thing is scripted. They’re sizing you up, determining if they can win your case and how much you can afford to pay them.

They want to close you right there on the initial phone call, with costs ranging from $995 – $2995 depending on how much you owe.

Decline their first invitation to sign up, and they’ll continue sending you messages:

All of this can be choreographed ahead of time.

Based on the answers people give you, they can receive different messages.

Based on the way they act or don’t act, they can receive more, different messages.

Best of all, you can create these sequences in a matter of days with options like Drip, Infusionsoft, or Autopilot.

There are text message apps like TextMagic that can help you customize messaging based on responses or behavior, too.

The best tax relief companies have a masterful conversion funnel.

It’s no different than signing up for a new SaaS app.

You go through the trial period. Receive a bunch of emails. Then, you’ll get upgrade notices before your information is cancelled.

The same can and should apply to all businesses. You need a well-oiled funnel like this to convert the most people.

Remember: These leads and clicks are expensive!

These companies can’t afford to spend $40,000+ on ads each month and not see a significant return.

So each step of this funnel is fine-tuned, scripted, and automated. That way, they can easily isolate and tweak the parts that aren’t working.

Conclusion

“Boring” industries don’t always get the credit they deserve.

They don’t get any major press. And they don’t land on the front page of TechCrunch.

Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll see that the best are well-oiled machines.

While they might not get a lot of attention, what they do get is a whole lot of money.

They’ve been around the block. They’re not distracted by trends or other shiny hacks.

They’re just really good at routinely turning strangers into customers.

I almost learn more from watching these old school examples than new apps.

Because they just quietly go about building a huge business.

What’s the best example of a ‘boring,’ yet highly profitable company you’ve seen?

About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.

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The Art and Science of Storytelling — And How to Use Both to Reach Your Audience

Marketers are a lot like those realtors on HGTV’s “House Hunters.” The same way they’re trying to find a bungalow with beach access that also has a downtown industrial-loft feel (and stays within a $50,000 budget …), we’re constantly striving to create content that accomplishes many things.

We need to create content that’s thoughtful and well-crafted — content that speaks to our audiences, deeply engages them, thoroughly answers their questions, and helps them do their jobs better. And we also have to ensure our content is effective, that it ranks in search for the right terms and phrases, and that it drives results both within and beyond the marketing department. We need the quaint-modern-beachfront-cottage-mansion in the best school district. Achieving all of this can be quite difficult, which is why we’re holding a webinar on February 8th on how to get it done.

The list of things your content can accomplish could seriously go on and on. And on. I think Celine Dion sang a song about it.

via GIPHY

Creating content that meets your audiences’ needs as well as meets your monthly KPIs can be a #struggle — especially if you aren’t applying the right insights to your content creation process. Or if marketing is asking for a fenced-in backyard and sales wants a high-rise.

The best way to create that kind of content is to uncover the answers to a couple of key questions and use those insights to guide your content process.

Question 1: What do your audiences want?
Answer: An authentic story and original, valuable content they can connect with.

Question 2: What do search engines want?
Answer: Unique, long-form content that addresses searcher intent and substantiates claims with relevant data.

Enter: Qualitative and Quantitative Insights

Creating thought leadership content that shares expert insights through a compelling story and also delivers measurable results is all about looking at both sides of the coin: qualitative and quantitative insights.

In other words, it’s about bringing together art and science for the perfect content formula.

This means applying basic storytelling ideas to your content by putting your readers in the protagonist’s seat, speaking to their needs, and giving each piece an arc that they want to follow through to the end.

It also means applying hard numbers, facts, and data to each piece of content and to your strategy overall to make it more powerful.

The Results: Evergreen Content That Serves Various Departments

At Influence & Co., we’ve applied these qualitative and quantitative insights to our own content marketing, and we’ve seen great results. We create relevant content that helps us engage audiences, build our network, and generate and nurture leads. Outside these key marketing goals, we also put our content to use in our recruitment efforts and employee training, sales enablement, client service, and thought leader brand-building efforts. Basically, we’ve built the content marketing version of an open-concept kitchen that’s as functional as it is beautiful.

Want to dig deeper and learn how to use these insights, data, and storytelling to create content that fuels your business? Then join us for our webinar with Kissmetrics on Feb. 8 at 12 a.m. CST/10 a.m. PT.

Register today!

Author description: Brittni Kinney is a VP at Influence & Co. and loves discussing how content marketing can help any marketing strategy achieve its full potential. She likes her coffee black and her whiskey straight; she also enjoys traveling.

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Transcript of Using Your Personality and Authentic Self to Build a Platform

Transcript of Using Your Personality and Authentic Self to Build a Platform written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Chris Ducker. He is a serial entrepreneur. He’s been on the show before when we talked about his previous book, Virtual Freedom. He is also the host of the Youpreneur Summit Podcast. He is, as he likes to tell people, a proud Brit, and the creator of the Youpreneur community and movement, and author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Rise of the Youpreneur. Chris, thank you for joining us.

Chris Ducker: I just like to challenge people on the subtitle, John. That’s what it is. Thanks for having me back. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch: So what’s funny is a lot of people … We’ve been talking for years now about this idea of becoming an authority and having influence in your industry. I think a lot of people took that to be, “Oh, I’m going to be an online marketer, and so I have to build my influence.” But I think today, we’re finding the accountant and the attorney and the person working in their local business can really benefit from this same approach, can’t they?

Chris Ducker: Totally. Absolutely. And I think, honestly, if they don’t start focusing, those kind of people, those kind of professionals, if they don’t start focusing more on their personal brands they’re going to miss out. They’re going to miss out on a lot of opportunities to effect change, and to serve people in the right way; and, obviously, to make a lot of money in the process. When we talk specifically about the online business world, people instantly have their shields up a little bit online. From everything from giving up their email addresses to get that must have email or rather ebook that they want, they’ve got to opt in with their email to get it. Everything from that right the way down to buying the $2000 course, you know what I mean, the shields go up.

At the end of the day, and I talk about this very early on in the book, it will always just come down to trust. If people trust you, then they will do business with you, or at least they will be more likely to do business with you. So for me building that trust up in today’s world means being very, very relentless and very consistent and very focused on dropping great, valuable, high energy, useful content on a very regular basis. Then, following up with solutions to problems in the form of live events, and coaching, and online products, and everything else. People will be more than happy to invest in their problems being solved, if you’re doing it in the right way.

John Jantsch: I’ve told people this for a long time, that the real thing that’s changed is the way people buy. I think that’s what’s given this rise to the need for content. Because back in the day when I started my business, I would try to get a client listed in the newspaper. You would certainly see people who got quoted all the time, and they were then the perceived experts, and they had trust that maybe was borrowed because the Kansas City Star thought you were important enough to talk to.

Chris Ducker: Right.

John Jantsch: So, that’s not really changed. I just think the way in which people then consume and find and determine this level of trust is what’s changed.

Chris Ducker: It has. You’re absolutely right. And that, I think, comes down to you embracing your uniqueness as a business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are all out, going and focusing in on building a personal brand, but understand that people want to do business with other people. Big brands will always want to do business with other big brands. It’s an ego thing. But if you’re selling your wares online, or if you’re a coach or a consultant or you’re a YouTuber or a livestreamer or a podcast or a blogger, whatever the case may be, speaker, author, if you’re building this business based around you and your experience and your personality, what you’re really doing is what I call building the business of you. And that comes down to your experience, your personality, your stories, and the solutions that you can provide people. So at the end of the day, it’s about embracing your uniqueness, your differentiating factors, and then understanding that being different actually is a far easier way to be remembered in any crowded niche than just simply being better than your competitors. I have no problems being as different as I possibly can be.

John Jantsch: Well, one of the things that that leads to, and I, for years, have struggled to get small business owners to think this way; but, if you were going to build a business around you, then you also have to find that perfect customer that likes you, right? So how do you do that?

Chris Ducker: Sure. Well, great question. You’ll love this, and I know you’ll love it because you’re all about marketing. You do what I say. You market like a magnet, so you attract the best and you repel the rest at the very same time with every piece of content that you put out, every bit of knowledge that you share, every value bomb that you drop on Facebook or on your podcast or on your blog. With every single piece of content you create, you are ultimately marketing like a magnet. So you are attracting the right type of people to you and your vibe, what you stand for, the type of people that you want to serve and sell to; but at the exact same time, this is the exciting thing, you are repelling away the people that are the types of people you don’t need in your life. You don’t need the guy that’s going to pay for a $50 product, and ask for a refund on day 29 of the 30 days. You don’t need that.

You need the type of people that are going to be on board with what you stand for. They’re going to back you up. They’re going to come with you. They’re going to follow you as your varying interests change as a personal brand entrepreneur, and they’ll be happy to continue to support and buy and share and all that sort of good stuff. I think, ultimately, it comes down to being very acutely aware of the fact that you can’t please all the people all the time. So you just focus on pleasing the people that you really want to do business with.

John Jantsch: So does that require … I think that sometimes people struggle with this, because there are a lot of people that don’t want to repel anyone because, “Gosh, they might pay me.” So does that require you to have an element that is sort of intentionally polarizing?

Chris Ducker: I don’t think you have to be ridiculously intentional about it. I think that if you have a clear picture of the type of person that you want to work with … We talk in the book about building your perfect customer avatar and understanding that these are the types of people that you really like when you dream up your dream client. This is the type of person. So, it’s their background. It’s the situations they’re in. It’s their age. It’s where they live, and all those types of things; and if you do that then, you’re not really pushing people away on purpose. It’s really just being very aware of the type of people that you want to attract.

John Jantsch: So one of the things that took awhile, certainly the people that started online businesses exclusively got the need for this, but the website being your hub, really, and your online home has changed dramatically. When I started this, it was another channel almost, like we do this and we do this. “Oh, if people want to find us online, they can use the web.” I think today it really is the center of any business, online and off. Would you agree?

Chris Ducker: Absolutely, 100%, and this is why when I see people building their business on rented land, it scares the bejesus out of me. You’ve got people that start these Facebook groups, and they start charging for access to this Mastermind group or they’re putting all their content just on YouTube because they’re vloggers or whatever the case may be. Stop building your online home on rented land. You must make sure that … Yes, by all means, post those videos up on YouTube, but pay for a Wistia or a Vimeo account, and also embed them onto your blog that way as well, or at the very least have them on those other channels with free accounts.

So instead of creating a Mastermind group, and charging fifty bucks a month or whatever it is for access to a private Facebook group, bring that over to your own domain name. Put a forum on your website and do it that way. If people want to be involved in you and your community, they’ll go the way that you lead them to go. That’s the very definition of being a leader, is that people will follow you. But it drives me nuts. It scares the hell out of me when I see people doing that.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and obviously, those are great channels to create awareness, for people to find you. Top of the funnel kind of stuff, but absolutely no question, almost all of our efforts should be driving people to something, as you deemed it, that we own.

Chris Ducker: Absolutely.

John Jantsch: So you wrote, and again depending upon when people are listening to this, this was in the first month of 2018, a post on email that I checked out recently had an infographic with it that I really thought was brilliant; and again, hopefully I’m not putting you on the spot. I know sometimes people ask me about a post I wrote and I was like, “What did I say? I don’t remember that.”

Chris Ducker: Right, right.

John Jantsch: But I think … so we’ll have link to it in the show notes, but you had an infographic about the idea of using a funnel approach with email. I think a lot of people got so enamored with the Facebooks, and all the other stuff, that some people forgot that email is still really the closing tool.

Chris Ducker: It is, and I don’t think it’s going to go away any time soon. Things are changing. You’ve got these bots now. People are talking about the death of email, and all this kind of stuff. Please. Don’t-

John Jantsch: That’s about the fourth death of email, I think. Isn’t it?

Chris Ducker: Yeah, I know, if we’re counting. Just like it’s been the year of video every year for the last five years.

John Jantsch: I saw somebody predict that 2018 was going to be the year of mobile, so who knows?

Chris Ducker: I know, right? I think I remember the infographic you’re talking about. I think it was something along the lines of the super easy six step marketing funnel, something like that, it’s a couple of years old. But, let me tell you, it served us very well. It’s been shared thousands and thousands of times. I’m all about creating that kind of evergreen content, but there’s no point in doing that also and attracting people to the website and getting them onto the mailing list if you’re not going to serve them via that medium as well.

People open up their emails … Almost everybody will open up their email before they do anything else when they get to work every day. So it’s still probably the number one way to ultimately market and sell your wares. I think that particularly from a personal brand business owner perspective, such as authors, speakers, consultants, coaches, that kind of thing, it puts the personal in personal brand. You’re jumping into someone’s communication world at the beginning of every day or at least at the days when you’re sending them email. You’re ultimately interrupting them. You’d better have a bloody good reason for doing so. And, here’s the thing, if you do have a good reason for doing so, they’ll fall in love with you over and over again, and they’ll stay on that list. Eventually, sooner or later, they’re going to click on a link that will hopefully make you a little bit of money and at the very same time, obviously, make sure that you’re solving a problem for them as well.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think a lot of people can look at their analytics. I know if I look at mine, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of visitors are new users, new visitors. If I’m not doing something to stay in their life, like getting their email address so I can communicate with them, 70% of my traffic may be for not. That should be fair warning enough as to why you need to be capturing email.

Chris Ducker: Absolutely, and when you do that, whatever lead magnet you consider doing, whether it’s a free trial or something or a free course or a checklist or whatever the case may be, just make sure it’s providing a quick win. I talk about this in the book. It’s one thing to just help somebody, but when you help somebody solve a problem fast, you instantly win a new fan, and that’s what we want to do. We want to become somebody’s favorite. We want to be able to have someone say, “Oh, that John. Oh man, he’s incredible that guy. That guy from Duck Tape, you know what he did for me?” Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. And that’s exactly the kind of viral type of environment that we thrive on. I mean the fact that people are coming to your website, 70% of the people that come to your website are new, we want to make a good first impression on them, right? And you can do that by creating that quick win.

John Jantsch: And I think the bar’s sort of been raised. I mean, when I started this people would sign up for anything. Today I think, as you said, it’s almost like you have to build that trust initially by giving them something very consumable, very quick, addresses a very specific problem. Nobody wants the generic ebooks anymore until you’ve kind of moved them along and now they want to go deeper, but people aren’t going to invest the time to read an ebook if they don’t really know that what you put out is something that’s useful.

Chris Ducker: Absolutely.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about the book, Rise of the Youpreneur. First off, I just now after 20 years, finally figured out how to spell entrepreneur, and now we’ve got a new word that we have to look up. But, I will tell people “Get this book. This book is going to be one of your favorites for 2018.” But if nothing else, on page 191, and I know you know exactly what’s on that page, Chris, there is the sample Youpreneur Ecosystem Map that is worth the price of the book.

Chris Ducker: Thank you. I know the plan. I’m not joking. I’m getting tweets. I’m getting emails from people, like page 191, that’s what it’s all about. It’s funny, isn’t it? A lot of time when you pick up a book, you only need that one paragraph or that one line to make it all worthwhile. I have a very sneaky feeling that this is going to be the one thing in this book where everybody turns around and say, “Oh, my God. Now I see it.” I mean, it’s a graphic. It’s an image. If you remember the old spider charts that you used to do when you were brainstorming where you sort of had all the legs coming out and it would go onto more legs and another body and more legs. It’s like that, but ultimately we call it the Youpreneur Ecosystem.

This, in this book, is probably going to be one of the pages … This is one of the reasons why I independently published this book. I didn’t go traditionally, publish like I did with my last book. I can update this page whenever I want. I think it’s going to be updated quite regularly. I think that, in itself, shows you what the very incubus of an ecosystem is. It’s an ever-evolving thing, but ultimately it starts with the free content. It starts with the blog and the podcast and the video and all that sort of stuff; and then, very slowly but surely, you’ll see how you can ultimately see how you can monetize your brand and your business and your expertise and build that business of you.

So, we’ve got the online products. We’ve got books and ebooks and one-on-one coaching, and life events and one day Masterminds and high level mentoring, and services and communities, and all that sort of type of stuff. Really, for me, it was a no-brainer to include this; and, this is my ecosystem, my personal business, right here on one page. So, steal it, copy it, as much as you want, because I truly believe that I’m a 100% unique person in my industry. If you have that same mindset, you can take everything I’ve laid out on this one page, and you can plug it into you and what you stand for, and it’ll be equally as beneficial for you and the people that you’re serving and selling to.

John Jantsch: I will warn listeners that, while we’re talking about this one page being the magic, the key that unlocks this one page is the rest of the book. Because you can look at a chart, and it’ll say put out free content. Okay, that’s helpful. It’s understanding what your free content should be and how you get it in front of a hungry audience is really what’s in the rest of the book. So I don’t want to minimize that aspect, because it becomes relevant because of the context of the entire book.

One thing that I think a lot of, particularly people that haven’t done this. They have a business. And that business may be … A lot of my listeners are local businesses. So, that business may be, I’m an attorney that does a certain type of work, and they’re very used to charging for a certain type of work. They’re not so used to charging for a $50 and a $500 and a $5000 program, course, coaching. How do you get people kind of started on that whole pricing ladder?

Chris Ducker: Pricing is such a tough topic to talk about and to handle, particularly with coaching clients, and things like that. We put an entire chapter together in the book in regards to pricing effectively, and why it was important to not only look at what your competitors are doing, but understand that you’re in charge of your own pricing structure. We talk about the importance of testing your idea and validating that, and how you can even dry test certain pricing models is an old term I use from my days in the infomercial industry. At the end of the day, you won’t know until you actually pitch something whether or not it’s going to work from a price perspective.

But one thing I do know to be very, very true, and I’m sure you’ll agree with this, is that to have several different products, services, experiences, whatever you want to call it, to have several of them available to your client base at several different price points is just the smart thing. Because ultimately what you’re doing is, you’re taking them on that customer lifetime value of “Well, you’re going to start here. Then you’re going to be ready for this. And then, you’re going to be happy to invest that.” Maybe two, three years into our relationship, you’ll be in the top 5% of my customer base that’s happy to drop 25 grand a year to spend an hour a month with me, or whatever it is. Do you know what I mean? It’s that ladder. I think Ryan Deiss from Digital Marketer talks about this from time to time, that customer value ladder, I think he calls it, but you can come up with any sexy name for it. It ultimately is just giving people options.

John Jantsch: I think there can be a logical path that people kind of climb the ladder, but I’ve also discovered that there will always be … And I think Perry Marshall talks about this all the time, the 80-20 principal in marketing. There will always be some percentage of your community that you’ve built trust around that they don’t want the fifty dollar thing. They want the five thousand dollar thing. That’s all they want. That’s how they want to get served. I think you also want to realize that as well. It’s not just about moving everybody up, it’s about having the right solution that matches up with every component of your market.

Chris Ducker: Could not agree more, which is one of the reasons why I hate seeing these launches online. These launches where you just get absolutely hammered for a week to ten days in your inbox on the latest course, or whatever the case may be. You know, the analogy that I use all the time and I believe it mentioned it in the book, now I hope I did because it’s a good one. I can’t quite remember. You write a book, and then you forget about what you put in it.

But I’m almost sure I used the analogy of, if you’re really hungry and you go out looking for a restaurant, and you say, “Oh, there’s an Italian. I love Italian food. Let’s go get a plate of fettuccine or something.” You walk up and the door’s shut, and it says, “We’re closed. We’ll be open again in six months.” What are going to do? Are you going to wait six months for your fettuccine. No. You’re going to walk down the street, and find another restaurant, and eat there. So I’m a big believer that whatever you’re offering, doesn’t matter what it is, whatever it is that you’re offering, you should give people the opportunity to get it when they need it, and not make them wait.

John Jantsch: Well, one of the things that I know you are a proponent of too, and I think this goes nicely with this idea of launching, is that everybody’s creating these complex funnels, and all these ways to generate leads on Facebook and whatnot; and I have contended for years the best source of leads is a happy customer. I know that’s certainly a component of this ecosystem is that you also create such a great experience that people want to move up the ladder perhaps, but also they want to tell their friends, neighbors and colleagues. So how do you intentionally create that experience that just so wows people that they want to tell their friends.

Chris Ducker: You care, John. There’s no tactic. There’s no silver bullet to that one. You care. We put on the Youpreneur Summit in 2017. You opened up Day Two as our opening keynote there, which was incredible, by the way. I’ll say this in front of your tribe, right now. It was great to have you speak at our inaugural event. It was a big deal for me. It had been a big dream of mine to hold a big business event like that in my home town, and not just in my home town, but a stone through from Westminster Abbey, and Big Ben and all the rise of it. You care. For weeks after putting that event on, for weeks, I was getting emails and tweets and messages from people saying just how much they appreciated the attention to detail, and the care on everything from the swag bag down to the little things on the table and lighting, and the whole kit and caboodle. You just care.

And for the first time in my career, my emotions got the end of me at the end of that event. I’ve keynoted tons of events. I’ve spoken all over the world, as you have. I’ve never choked up on stage before, but I did as I was wrapping up that event. I didn’t completely lose it or anything, but I choked up and I had to kind of just pause and get myself together a little bit. And people saying, “It was great. We wished you’d cried like a baby. It would have been so much better”, because they realized that I genuinely cared. I think that’s really, you know, if there is a magic potion that we can use as business owners, and want our customers to have those experiences to go away and start talking about us, that is that magic potion. It’s just a give a damn at the end of the day.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I wrote a book called The Referral Engine that is clearly about referrals, and there are a couple of negative reviews on Amazon because I spent the first half of the book basically saying the way to get more referrals is to be more referable. People didn’t want to hear that. They wanted the magic bullet.

Chris Ducker: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk a little bit about the community itself. You mentioned the Summit, and that Summit is sort of an outgrowth of a movement that you have kind of facilitated, that you’re calling Youpreneur; but talk a little bit about the Youpreneur community, and ways that people can, perhaps, plug in.

Chris Ducker: This was something that came about as a lot of good business ideas, over a coffee or a beer or a cocktail or a dinner table, or whenever. I was at my good friend Pay Flynn’s house in San Diego. It was July 4th, 2014, and it was the first time I had ever done July 4th in the US. I was saying to Pat, “What does one do on July 4th in the US?” He said, “Just come over, and you’ll find out.” So I came over, and we did the bar-b-que. We did beer. We did water balloon fights. I said, “I’ve been missing out. This is great.”

Afterwards we went to his home office, and we had a cup of coffee. The kids carried on playing and everything. He asked me a question that no one’s ever asked me before. He said to me, “What do you want people to say about you when you’re dead, when you’re gone? What do you want people to say about you?” I was like, “Oh, my god. I don’t know.” We weren’t necessarily talking the legacy question, but how do I want to be remembered ultimately.I said to him, “I want to be remembered as a nice guy that helped people get stuff done.” And that’s really at the very core of what Youpreneur is all about.

It’s about me leading a group of now hundreds and hundreds of people around the world to get stuff done when it comes to building their businesses in a long term manner. I think long game and everything. I’m already planning 2020, 2021. I’m already planning those years in my business, and what I want to achieve. I think, again, your vibe attracts your tribe. And, that very day at Pat’s house, that was when the term Youpreneur was born. It took me a whole year and a bit to actually launch it and get it out there, because I’m a bit of a perfectionist, quite frankly. But once it was out, it was clear that I’d struck a nerve.

We had over 200 people join the community in like 72 hours. It was incredible. And these are recurring payment customers, so this is predictable, recurring income month in month out, year in year out, if they’re on an annual subscription. The book comes from them really. I mean a whole bunch of them, of the members, are case studies inside of the book. It comes from my interactions with them. It comes from testing what works, and what doesn’t, with hundreds of people that are building personal brand businesses.

The event, the Youpreneur Summit, also came out of that. I specifically remember one of our Mastermind calls, we were two, maybe three, months in to the membership. It would have been March 2016, or something along those lines. I said, “I’m throwing this out here you guys. I’m throwing it out. We’re going to do a big Youpreneur event at some point in 2017. We’re going to make it happen?” And, you know what happens? I did nothing, and then they started reminding me about it towards the end of 2016.

So I had to get my stuff together, and we ended up putting the event on, literally right at the end of 2017, we did the event. So it’s about support, it’s about that accountability, also for me as well, to continue to lead the way; because I believe a good leader will continue to learn himself, or herself, in able to be able to help other people along the way as well. It’s honestly, John, I think this is going to be my life’s work now. This whole Youpreneur malarkey. This is going to be what I do until I’m done, and I retire. I think this is going to be it.

John Jantsch: Well, as you mentioned, I was at the event. I can attest to what an amazing event it was in terms of how it was produced, and as you mentioned, the details. But I think the part that you can’t see unless you’re there and experience it, is how passionate and involved and engaged your community is. I think that is clearly props to you because obviously there’s a lot of people in that community that do a lot of things to support the community, but it comes from your leadership; and I think that part was on full display.

Chris Ducker: Well, thank you, man. I appreciate it, and it’s something that I don’t take for granted in any way, shape, or form. I work on that on a daily basis.

John Jantsch: So people can find more at youpreneur.com, also at chrisducker.com. Anywhere else you want to send people?

Chris Ducker: Well, the book has its own website as well, riseoftheyoupreneur.com. Or, if anybody’s interested and want to pick it up and see what’s on page 191, they can do so just by going to Amazon, as well.

John Jantsch: And you’ll find some things at chrisducker.com that are just a bit cheeky, but you can still overcome that. I actually just wanted to say cheeky. It’s the first time I’ve said it on the podcast.

Chris Ducker: There you go. How does it feel? Does it feel good to say it?

John Jantsch: It’s been said of me more than once, but I’ve never actually said it.

Chris Ducker: But, it’s good that you’ve mentioned it though, because I practice what I preach. I think who I am is I’m your cheeky, chappy Londoner. I don’t necessarily play on that, but I don’t hide it at all. What you see is what you get. I think that at the core of that Youpreneur business model, that is what should be there. There should not be any smoke and mirrors. It should be all you, all the time; and if you do that, then great things will happen.

John Jantsch: Good or bad, it’s hard to fake authenticity.

Chris Ducker: It sure is.

John Jantsch: So, speaking with Chris Ducker, author of Rise of the Youpreneur. Chris, thanks for stopping by and hopefully we’ll see you soon out there on the road.

Chris Ducker: Thank you for having me back, man. I appreciate it.

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Using Your Personality and Authentic Self to Build a Platform

Using Your Personality and Authentic Self to Build a Platform written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Chris Ducker
Podcast Transcript

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Chris Ducker. He is a serial entrepreneur and keynote speaker who has been on this show before when we talked about his bestselling book Virtual Freedom. He is also the host of the Youpreneur podcast and creator of the Youpreneur community and movement. He and I discuss his new book Rise of the Youpreneur.

A proud Brit, Ducker is known for hosting energetic live events and has founded several businesses, which combined house over 450 full-time employees. He has been featured in Entrepreneur countless times, as well as in Forbes, Inc.com, Business Insider, the Huffington Post and has graced the covers of Empowered Entrepreneur and Foundr magazines.

Questions I ask Chris Ducker:

• Why people working in any type of business need to focus on their personal brand
• Why is email still one of the most valuable tools for businesses?
• What is the Youpreneur community all about?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• Why you need to embrace your uniqueness
• How to find customers who like doing business with you because of you
• How to wow the customer to a point that they’ll want to refer you

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Chris Ducker:

• Learn more about Chris Ducker.
• Learn more about Youpreneur.
• Buy Rise of the Youpreneur.
• Access the email marketing funnel infographic.
• Connect on Facebook.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Subscribe to YouTube channel.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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