James: James Schramko here with my buddy John Lint from 10XPRO.io. Hey, John.
John: Hey, James, how are you?
James: Good, thank you. You may recall, before I was doing my online business, I used to be a General Manager of a Mercedes-Benz dealership. And I remember when I took over the marketing department, we had newspaper ads. Every second week, we had a spot on the front page of the local newspaper, it was the bottom strip, It was called the North Shore Times. It’s a pretty exclusive area of Sydney.
And I remember writing my first ad for the newspaper. And I sent it off to the agency, they formatted it sent it back, we sent it to Mercedes-Benz for approval, and it was approved. And then we were waiting for the edition to come out. And I couldn’t wait for the edition to come out, I was like, I grabbed the paper, I looked down, there’s my ad on the front page of the local newspaper. And I said to the guys in the morning meeting, get ready for the phones are going to ring hot today, because we’re in the paper, it’s all on. And then nothing happened at all. No phones ringing.
The difference between what I thought would happen and what actually happened was earth-shattering, like I was so devastated at the time. And it was probably my first education in the difference between hope and reality, when it came to marketing. And I see a lot of people get super enthusiastic about their first product or their first opt-in or whatever. In their mind, it’s already going to be successful. And I would venture to say that really the only vote that matters is the customer’s wallet, you know. Will they make a purchase? And that’s the opinion that matters the most.
It doesn’t matter what mom or dad or your brother, or your friend down the road says. It matters if your target audience finds your offer appealing. So I want you to comment around this, if you’ve seen this happened before, where people have big expectations and it doesn’t pan out and what we can do about it more importantly?
John: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is another common mistake, you know, that online course creators make, which is hoping that the sales will magically appear, you know? Like, okay, I’ve created my online course, I’ve worked on it for two months, I’ve created all the videos, I have more than 70 videos, so surely it’s going to sell, right? So let’s create that. Let’s quickly create that sales page, right? Let’s not focus too much about it. I mean, the course is awesome, right?
James: And there are 70 videos and they took so long to make. So of course, it’s going to be successful.
John: So that’s it, I put my sales page, and we’re going to be rich. Well, unfortunately, that’s not the reality there. And that’s not going to happen. Hope marketing is not a strategy, I like to say that. Hope marketing is not a strategy. You can’t do anything about it. So, instead, we want to strategically engineer, strategically set up some campaigns.
That’s why we talk about, you might have heard, funnels, I like to use the word campaign because you know, funnel is just like pages, and then the series of pages. You need to campaign. You need to do a lot more these days, maybe messages on social media ads like you are doing, talking about emails, of course, setting up your different messages, different videos. But bottom line, you know, it’s all about thinking strategically about how you’re going to move people from point A, point B, point C, point D to where they now discovered the offer, right?
So instead of just setting up and telling people, Okay, we’re open, please buy whenever you want. That’s not a campaign. Instead, you want to kind of tease them a little bit about it, give them some content surrounding your online course. Tell them that, Hey, it’s coming up or a good strategy would be like, Hey, I’m creating some extra videos for you guys about this topic. Let me know what are your top two questions or something like that. They reply and tells you that they’re interested and you can go back. You have another reason to go back to them and tell them, Hey, I got a ton of questions about this. So I just created a new video about this. And then you deliver your content. And then again, you can always start talking about it. By the way, if you want more, I’m going to be doing something awesome.
Think about Apple, think about all these big companies that have those events, right? They don’t just send an email, say, Hey, we’re live, we’re live now. No. You know about it. You know months before. Same thing, with a movie release, you know about it months before. You have all the actors going into different shows, telling people about it, you have the trailers, that’s what the trailer is all about. It’s all about teasing your audience about something’s coming up. You want to engineer that in the information publishing space. It is providing content, providing value, building your positioning, your expert status, making sure that you show people that you have helped others. So maybe showcase studies, testimonials, before they even reach the sales page. Because then everything is easy. When you open the doors, it’s not a surprise, they know.
And some of them are actually eagerly waiting for you to open the doors. And that’s it. And now they go, they know who you are, they know that you’re the real deal. You can help them, you have proven that you can help by helping other people, you have all of that going on. And then you make sure that there’s a, you know, if we are going to start talking about copywriting strategies, of course, you want to have like a strong reason they should buy now, maybe limited bonuses, whatever it is, right? And then that’s it, you close the cart. All of that is an example of one campaign.
There are tons of other campaigns. We talk about that in the Online Course System, which is the program that you and I have together, located at OnlineCourseSystem.com. I also teach that as part of special bonuses that my 10XPRO.io members get when they sign up. It’s all about you doing those extra marketing campaigns to really maximize your chances of success, and really not relying on just hope marketing and hoping that people are going to find your sales page and hoping that they’re going to buy.
James: You know, just to back that up. Towards the end of my time at that dealership, it was the last job I had. I did a Product Launch Formula at the Mercedes dealership, and I had a coordinated campaign of the newspaper ad but also direct response mail, SMS, email, showroom, signage, and we have bonus offers, redemption, coupons, etc., test drive incentives… We collected over 1000 opt-ins over the two or three-day events. We sold millions of dollars worth of stock, we came first in the country for that week. And it was a huge success, to the point where actually Jeff Walker was interested in, you know, finding out about it as a case study. And it worked particularly well in that.
So, I went from not really understanding how the newspaper ad work to making it a part of my campaign. You know, much like making videos like this, we’re regularly posting videos. And by the way, if you’re watching this, be sure to subscribe wherever you see it because there’s more videos just like this, and you will get a great education. But it’s part of our campaign. That’s how we let people know about onlinecoursesystem.com, and also 10XPRO.io is we talk about what we’re doing here and how we solve problems, and we’re letting you know what the solution is, as well.
So, John, thank you so much for sharing again. I look forward to catching up with you as always in the next few video and we’ll speak soon.
John: Thank you!
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