You’re Invited

Wanna come and hang out with other young entrepreneurs just like you?

Wanna hear from some awesome speakers who will inspire you AND give you tips that will impact your business positively straight away?

Wanna learn more about the next Young Entrepreneurs Stepping UP Program (YESUP) and how you can get involved?

You can do all of that at The Frank Team’s Young Entrepreneurs Evening. Here is the vital info….

When: Thursday 13th November – yep that is really soon!
Where: Function Room, Baulkham Hills Shire Council - 129 Showground Road Castle Hill
What time? Arrive in time for a 6.30pm start.

Who will you hear from?

Stew Nicholls – Founder of EcoCar Wash will tell us all about setting up systems for their very first franchise & how those systems have then allowed him to create a global organisation.
Fred Schebesta, FreestyleMedia & Andrew Tucker, Customware – will let us in on their secrets to getting through tough financial times. You know those times when the cashflow is super tight and you are just not sure how you are going to manage it all?! Yep, these guys have been through exactly that and come out the other side. Learn from their experiences.
Ben, Vanessa, Melissa & Denise, YESUP Graduates – will share with everyone their experiences of The Frank Team’s YESUP and how it has benefited their businesses.

Plus we will be revealing a new Frank Team “young entrepreneurs only” service.

All of the YESUP graduates will be there receiving their certificates and celebrating their achievements over the program.  There will be networking games to ensure you are getting around and meeting all of the amazing people in the room. Representatives from DSRD will also be there.

Parking: There is plenty of free parking at this venue. Food: Snacks & drinks provided.
Cost: FREE
RSVP & Payment: anna@frankteam.com.au Ph: (02) 99664333 by Monday 10th November

Marketing is War

At 6:30am on the 6th of June 1944 the allied army focused its armies and landed on the Axis controlled European mainland for what would become the turning point of World War 2. Your marketing war will intensify when the customers dry up and your targets remain. Michael Kiely always said, “Marketing is War” and your battle is going to intensify.

How to fight in a downturned market

Focus
When the allied army landed they didn’t just send troops to all different parts of Europe, they focused their armies and boarded one spot. They did this because they needed to create one location which they definitively owned and controlled. A disparate attack would have resulted in scattered results. Just like the allies, focus your marketing efforts on a tighter group of prospects and refrain from combat in marginal areas.

Top 3 areas to focus your marketing

1. Current customers – Upsell, Resell and Service your customers.
2. Prospects who have contacted you – Remarket to existing prospects and convert them.
3. 80 / 20 rule – Focus on the responsive markets and ease up on trying to conquer new difficult markets. Give yourself a reality check on who your core customers are and focus on these. The easy way to figure this out is to: Profile your customers to determine their lifetime value and figure out which group you have the most of. Usually 20% of your customers will be making you 80% of your profit. Focus on attracting more of these with your limited campaigns.

Top 7 online marketing tactics that are performing in this current market

I can appreciate having a positioning is important although when it comes to marketing it and gaining customers we can’t just muck around with branding campaigns in this market. Performance marketing is required – Reallocate budget to activities which deliver results.

• Search engine marketing – Quality customers searching for things you have.
• Reuse templates – Reuse campaign creative which has already performed well. Just change the images and text slightly to save costs on production. The creative will be refreshed in this process and will probably continue to perform.
• Distressed inventory – Why pay rack rate? Negotiate for performance buys as most media publishers will start to flounder in meeting their targets. They will start offering very cheap rates in a response. Hold off on your schedules and wait for the pressure to be applied, resist the lie that you will miss bookings as there will be less competition for the spots you wish to buy.
• Existing customer databases – Continue and engage in meaningful conversations with your prospects. Since you do not need to spend huge amounts of time planning and managing extra campaigns, make the communications you are doing better quality by investing more time in them.
• Affiliate marketing – Pay only when someone sends you a customer. Share the risk of your marketing challenge with the publisher. The affiliate marketing industry is one of the most underutilised resource in a marketers toolbox. Call up an expert and ask for a consultation about this marketing channel and get involved.

The ultimate question is would the price of media be the same price if you didn’t put your logo on it? I wouldn’t be paying for branding in this market, I would just be paying to acquire a select focused set of customers.

How to win the war?

If you are cashed up you can try to win the war by buying your competitors out if they are struggling. The other alternative is to snatch market share from competitors with aggressive marketing in their niches. Buying them out is faster, marketing in their niches is cheaper.

+ For the 404 error in my last post. (The guys at the office wanted me to take it down because it was a bit too aggressive. I have put it on a secret page and will email to you if you want it.)

+ For not telling you the ultimate principal in copywriting that lifts your conversion rate of your copy every time, this principle is so important that:

If you Don’t learn this copywriting principle, At 4:35pm on Friday your electricity is going to stop, your gas will be switched off and a large groaning mob is going to be standing at your door with axes and pitch forks looking for you

Before I let you in on the secret you need to get a full grasp of the current trends in the market and how they are effecting your online marketing.

The top 3 fallacies You Could be experiencing with copy on your website, as it stands today

1. People don’t read - Every man and his dog is telling you that people don’t read copy on websites anymore. Let me give you some insight as to why people are telling you this:

+ The people who are telling you this are exceptionally unproductive and cannot focus for 15 minutes to read and learn new information. Unfortunately they go on to make the fatal mistake to assume everyone in the market is just the same as them and start spruiking that “No one reads copy on websites”.

X - Fallacy - The actual people that you want to deal with are the people who are reading all the words on your page. In fact the people who are interested in what you are offering will read ALL of the words you have to say on your website. They will literally vacuum up every bit of content. Old direct marketers sometimes used to print extra text in their ads in the margin of the page. Why? Because they knew the people who were interested would read it and they applied the principle I am going to teach you.

+ Lazy web analytics people see high bounce rates and low site visit times and assume its because no one reads anything on websites anymore. These people just look at the big numbers and make poor assumptions.

X - Fallacy - The actual reason why most people immediately leave a website is because the content they were seeking wasn’t there. Instead I recommend you realise there is a lot of traffic that doesnt just leave your website immediately and figure out why. Remember the law of small numbers that you may only be dealing with a small group of people to make your website work. Focus on your content for small niche audiences and apply the principle I am about to teach you.

2. Attention spans have gone to hell - I must admit I am almost ADD in my web behaviour, but I know the difference between productive work and non productive work. Unproductive work is when you jump all around the place and don’t focus on something and finish it. Most people call that short attention span. I play more Computer games than the average bear, at least 5 hours a week, but I focus on the one game for a significant period of time.

X - Fallacy - Just because people are jumping around between things and don’t focus on websites for long doesnt mean that when they are interested in buying something they don’t focus and make a considered decision. There is the exception like the “Ringtone” market where kids just signup on a whim and don’t think about the consequences. That is a minority compared with the majority of people who plod their way around and take a small bit of thought before making a decision. Normally when web visitors are going to buy something the majority will spend the time and learn a bit about it before immediately pressing “Buy Now”. Even though attention spans are shorter, people will still focus when interested, this is why you need to write compelling copy and use the principle.

3. Copy on webpages is boring - This is probably the most unimaginative thing you could hear from someone. If someone says this to you, ask them “If they put only pictures in a newspaper would more people read it because it was more fun?”.

X - Fallacy - The cosmetics of copy is something which you must address, especially if you are writing longer copy.

Use: Dot points, bolds, highlights, titles, headlines, mid way headlines, subheads, italics, boxes, ticks, stars, pictures, graphs, videos and audio to bring your copy to life.

The main reason that people have boring copy is because they havent applied any Cosmetic “Copy” Surgery to give it some life and to break the page up.

What “Beaten into short dot point copy” Online Marketers can use to Defend Arm Chair Copywriting Experts

Firstly you need to explain to them the 2 types of customers which you can attract with your marketing:

Bad customers

The customers who you don’t want to talk to do the following:

1. Research nothing
2. Don’t make considered decisions
3. Make impulse purchases

These customers are a nightmare because they:

1. Ask for refunds
2. Are cheap
3. Won’t buy from you again (Their lifetime value is low)
4. Waste all the time and money you spent in attracting them
5. Are a pain and a hassle and clog up your customer support
6. Lose you Boat Loads of Money

Good Customers

Instead the customers you want to attract have the following qualities:

1. Research and make considered decisions
2. Are committed to their purchase and will not refund
3. Will come back and buy more
4. Are a delight to work with
5. Make you lots of money

Think about these qualities and these types of people, imagine what kinds of questions they would be asking you. Imagine how they act and what they do, these are the customers you want.

You then use the principle I am going to share with you now to attract the good customers and leave the bad customers alone.

This principle which I am going to share with you has been shared with me from generations of great copywriters (Gary Halbert, Dan Kennedy, John Caples, Michael Kiely) its not my innovation, its just a prooven principle.

The next time you are critiqued about the length of your copy on a web page simply explain this principle: “The More You Tell, The More You Sell”.

You will inevitably create longer copy and explain as many benefits, allay as many doubts and objections as the page will allow you.

Let me share you a secret: The long 30 page scrolling pages with the Yellow backgrounds convert. They leave absolutely nothing on the table untold.

Sure most people are already sold before they even reach the sales letter and scroll to the bottom and just buy, but a lot of them arent and read every word of those web pages. I have heard of one guy falling asleep reading the sales letter only to wake up and find out that the special offer was now closed!

Reject the peer pressure and tell your story in the copy, leave no stone unturned persuading your customers.

P.S. The search engines will love you for it too!

To: Harold Mitchell
CC: Sales and Marketing Directors

The Fallacy of Media Agencies in Australia

From the Desk of Fred Schebesta

Dear Harold,

I just wanted to say how much I respect the service you have done for media industry in Australia and was wondering if you could help myself and other marketing directors out with some of the current practices with media agencies with online media.

Unfortunately

I have been advised by the guys at the office to take this one down. if you want to read the rest of the post please email me.

Just as driving a car may seem like a straight forward concept you still need to understand all the bits that actually go into driving.

Email marketing is a bit like driving a car – it may sound like an easy concept:

• Throw together some messages or offers (hands on steering wheel)
• Blast it out to the audience (keep your foot down)

But it’s actually more like:

• Strategically craft the message, call to action etc (hands at 10 and 2, keep an eye on what’s happening around you).

• Carefully select the audience (right foot accelerator and brake).

• Understand the limitations of your audience’s inbox (left foot clutch, left hand gear stick: start in first, accelerate into second, third, fourth etc).

• Make sure your email message and design adheres to relevant email standards, regulations and best practices (know the road rules and road etiquette – stop at the stop sign, merge like a zip, give someone a wave if they let you cut in).

• Test, test and test it on different email clients, with different preview pane settings etc (practise driving on some back roads before getting on the highway).

• Be aware of the fact that most of your subscribers will never see your email the way you do (assume most other drivers are out to kill you – thanks for that advice Mum).

• Monitor and track responses, fine tune your campaign (keep an eye on the dash so you don’t run out of fuel or oil or water or get a speeding fine).

The upshot?

Everyone starts out with L Plates, there’s no shame in that – but you really need an experienced driver guiding you through the first stage of getting your licence.

Email marketing is similar – you’ll have a much better success rate if you have access to someone who knows (and I mean really knows, not just thinks they know) the full capabilities and limitations of email marketing and how that fits into your overall marketing strategy.

Therefore, it was with some excitement to see in my Inbox:

From: Howards Storage World

Subject: Spring Clean

Ignoring all of my other important emails, I clicked on this to bring the
message up in my preview pane (I use Outlook 2007 with my preview pane at the
bottom).

This is what I saw…

Frowning slightly at the fact that there was nothing of interest in the preview
pane and the it looked out of whack, I persevered and scrolled down to see what
I could see…

Not much more.

Now, getting a tad bit frustrated I decided to open it anyway just to check it
out…

Yes, that’s right about 1/3 of the email was about nothing – just images and
poorly aligned “stuff”.

You may ask, why is this a problem?

1. It’s generally accepted that around 40% of subscribers will have imagesturned off or their email clients don’t render images particularly well (one source says this is more like 65%). This means the email could have looked much worse to about 40% of Howards Storage World subscribers. They would have seen nasty red crosses for 1/3 of the email.
2. Moreover, if some of their audience has a preview pane to the right, it would have looked BLANK.
3. If someone without a wide screen had opened it, again it would have looked BLANK.
4. In addition, I had to scroll down TWICE to actually get to the offer – the only reason I persevered and didn’t delete it, is because I couldn’t believe they’d done this.
5. Heaven help them if a sizable portion of their audience gets their email on a handheld device…

The upshot:

1. Don’t assume that just because your email looks good in your Inbox when you test it then it will look the same for your subscribers.
2. Be aware of email design standards to allow for various email client settings (check out the email standards project: http://www.email-standards.org/).
3. Test your email across different email clients and with different settings before sending.
4. Don’t rely too heavily on images to tell your story.
5. Make sure your subscribers don’t have to go hunting for the offer – get it in front of them early on, not everyone reads to the bottom of an email.

Guest Writer Angela Schuster owns and runs Schuster Consulting Group www.schusterconsulting.com.au

1. Your agency is Slow to get your campaigns out the door for you – Have you noticed that your campaigns take forever to get out the door? Is it taking even longer and longer to get things from your agency? I will let you in on a secret, you are either a small client in a big pond or a big client in a small pond. When you are a small client in a big pond it means you are not a very profitable client as the amount of work it takes to give you service is not profitable. You might want to look for a smaller agency. If you are a big client in a small pond you will get good people working on your account but then you will eventually find that these will be replaced by others that aren’t as good. The good people who used to work on your account are now hunting for another client. My advice here is to look for a bigger agency.
2. Your ads aren’t coverting but your agency is winning creative awards – Awards are great but sales are better. If your agency isn’t really a direct marketing agency and they keep talking about the creative concept as opposed to the triggers that will get your advertising converting, you might want to switch agencies to a more direct response focused one.
3. Don’t understand direct response –Just like with your creative looking all pretty but not selling if your agency isn’t advising you on ways to increase qualified response you might want to consider switching agencies. Its easier to create sales generating campaigns when your agency talks the same language and you don’t have to keep coaching them on basic tactics to make the creative sell. Its time to stop being frustrated by your agency pushing back on you telling you that the creative would be better with a smaller call to action and a more creative headline. You know what works and its time to work with an agency that work for your targets not for creative awards.
4. When a campaign performs poorly your agency doesn’t care – This is a clear sign that your current agency is just treating you like a number and don’t care about what you are trying to achieve. The better agencies know your targets and feel the pain as much as you do when a campaign doesn’t work. Proactive suggestions on ways to get the campaign to recover as opposed to waiting for you to make a decision as to how to fix the problem is what you are looking for.
5. The costs don’t justify the value – Champagne “long lunch” agencies are fine if they deliver high quality work along with their high price tags. If you are looking for direct response hard hitting creative that converts and wins ADMA effectiveness awards I would suggest a more value orientated agency would work better. The creativity and speed of delivery of the campaign to get it to convert is what you are looking for. This way you will probably do a larger volume of campaigns or increase your media exposure of your campaign with the money you save.

If you are looking for a new online marketing agency here is a guide to choosing one.

The question:

Is this where Gary Halbert lived?

Checkout this google maps location from his letter

Thank you to Efrain for finding this superb video by David Ogilvy. I love the straight up no fuss way Ogilvy says it. I would also have to agree that if you substituted the words words “Direct Marketing” for “Online Marketing” although I would leave the “Direct Response” words in there to call David our Ambassador of Online Marketing.

Give this video to your branding colleagues for a laugh at least.

Persistence at something is how you achieve it. But every now again you feel a bit down and just get confused as to why you are persisting at what you are doing. I have found that at these times it will take something quite revolutionary to change this. Something will just snap you out of that feeling of being stuck in mud. Some people call it depression, but you might feel that is a bit of a strong word to attach to your feelings, so let’s just say you are feeling depressed, but not clinically depressed that you are taking negative actions on yourself.

Inspiration cures depression
Personally I go in swings and round abouts, my mood goes from “Allan Bond unscrewing the America’s Cup to hoist it above his head!” to “I might just go back to sleep even though I have been sleeping for 14 hours. At least I can ignore the telephone that way.” Usually when I find myself in the down patches I know and can eventually self assess that I am a little depressed. Usually I am self aware and start asking myself, “Why are you feeling down?” As a logical person I can figure that out can’t I. Sometimes I can, but sometimes, unfortunately, I just can’t seem to figure it out. The logical side of me becomes stumped and I fall back into a shallow pool of waiting and passing time by. I consider myself quite a motivated person and when I see myself like that I get confused.
What I have realised is that when I feel a bit depressed, the best thing to do is to inject yourself with a bit of external motivation. Normally people who have done something amazing call it their “inspiration”. If you are feeling down, get your hands on some material with some super powerful motivation in it. The thing about online marketing is that it can get lonely, sitting by yourself for 8 months can take the wind from your sails every now and again. Things can get really tough when you lose focus of your vision. This is where you need to make a little reboot.

5 ways to inspire yourself out of depression

• 1. Watch an inspirational movie - “The Last lecture”, Randy Pausch was dying of pancreatic cancer and gave this speech on “How to achieve your childhood dreams.” The twist at the end will get you.
  
  Other inspirational movies: The Aviator, A beautiful mind and Fightclub.
• 2. Read an inspirational book - These are the books that inspired me to create Freestyle Media. Richard Branson’s autobiography, John Singleton’s autobiography “Singo” and the book “How to win friends and influence people” helped me get there. I have heard that “Get the edge” by Tony Robbins is good too.
• 3. Hang out with your grandparents - For some reason they can give you truths that you can’t see at present and it will help give you clarity about the future.
• 4. Meet someone inspirational and talk to them - Sometimes I have spoken with people who I thought were gods, and they caused me to go home and double my efforts. Some of these people included: Michael Kiely, Wayne Kingston, Peter Steele and Jessica Schebesta.
• 5. Go back over old photos and notes - Reminiscing helps you see where you have been and gives you a point of reference on where you want to go.