Every year I give a live, state of the Internet, message right around New Year’s Day. I talked about the previous year and how I envision the new year. I talked about what I believe all of us in Marketing University should focus on in order to achieve our goals.
I started the live call with a little review. 2019 was special because it was the end of a decade. Recently I was talking to a friend about this and realized that it’s been 20 years since many people were afraid the world was going to end as we rolled into the year 2000. Time just flies by—here we are 20 years later and the world and the Internet are still here.
Back in 2000 the Internet and especially Internet commerce was sparse. There were not a lot of people marketing on the Internet. There were very few tools and much less technology. In fact, just two years prior, Google was started in Susan Wojcicki’s garage. No one really knew how to market on the Internet. We all were guessing and experimenting with what to do and how to do it.
Fast forward 20 years and technology has made giant leaps forward and there is now knowledge and experience we can draw on. We have 20+ years of history and testing that we can draw on and learn without making the mistakes ourselves. We are at a special time where we can spend less time trying to figure things out and more time focusing on our business.
Let’s take a closer look at what went down in 2019. Probably the biggest Internet related thing that happened, at least for us marketers, was a major shift by Google regarding their focus on indexing websites. They established what’s called a “mobile first” type of indexing.
What that means is they look at your site from a “mobile” user point of view because they want to ensure it’s easily viewable by people using these devices. Once they determine your site is compatible for mobile, they will then continue indexing the site. This is something I believe has been slowly coming for a long time…now it’s here.
Is this a big deal? How does it affect us? As Internet business owners, we need to make sure our sites are programmed to look good on mobile devices. If they don’t, we will have trouble getting them indexed by, not only Google, but other search engines as well.
One of the benefits of programming your sites, especially “lead generation pages” for mobile devices is your cost for lead generation will go down to almost nothing. In fact, mobile advertising is so cheap that you can literally advertise for pennies. This is a huge reason to make sure you are optimized correctly.
I’ve been concentrating on this for the past 12 months. In 2019, all of our seminars were promoted primarily on pages that are conducive to viewing on mobile devices. When we look at the stats, most of the leads were generated by people on mobile devices. The people who didn’t understand it paid a lot more money on advertising and probably have less results.
Another fact in 2019 was the continuation and growth of webinars. I observed two different factions or groups with differing thoughts regarding webinars.
The first group continued the trend of marketing high end $2,000+ webinars. They did extremely well, but there was another sector marketing at a much lower, $497 price point. They found this to be what I call a “pseudo” sweet spot. I can’t say for sure if it really is a sweet spot. But, at least for now, it’s working for them. There are a couple of good reasons why this price point works.
- It’s low enough where people don’t overthink it.
- It’s high enough to make good money on just a few sales.
For example, two sales a week equals $50,000 a year. Just add a couple more sales a week, and we’re talking about $100,000 a year ($497 x 4 x 52 = $103,376). At this price range you don’t need a lot of sales to make a decent income.
Most of my clients have relatively low price points on their products. And you’ve probably heard me say many times to start increasing prices substantially—my guess is that they could double what they are now. Depending on your market, doubling prices may not be doable, but I believe $497 is price point most people can work up to in a relatively short period of time as long as they understand the concept of product creation.
Another thing I learned in 2019 was the value of an upsell. I’m not talking about selling them a product for $XX and then immediately try to sell them into something else at a higher price, although that system also works. What I’m talking about is selling them a package for, let’s say, $497. I then deliver the package and at that time upsell them into a larger package.
For example, I did multiple seminars in the UK in 2018 and 2019. Some of these were my own events and some I was speaking at other people’s events. During my 90-minute presentation at the event, I would teach and sell a $1,997 package.
This package would come with a “fulfillment event.” In this fulfillment event, I would come back to the UK to fulfill the package I sold them. The $1,997 package was a two-day event. At this event I taught them everything they paid for plus, I introduced them to a bigger package. So now they’ve received everything they paid for plus they are offered continued training.
I offered them Marketing University. You might have even joined Marketing University as a result of this strategy. There were two packages offered—a $5,000 Gold package or a $10,000 Platinum package. Upsells are a faster way to get to the higher price points.
2019 proved to me that if I have the right offer, people will buy it.
Armand Morin
I tried a lot of different strategies in 2019. Some of them worked and others didn’t. Still others worked, but not was well as I would have liked them to. You won’t know until you try whether an idea will work or not. One of my ideas was different twists on selling big ticket items.
It’s no secret, I sold $5,000, $10,000, $20,000 and even $25,000 items in 2019. I sold these items using simple 10- to 15-minute videos. By trying different ways of doing it I came up with a system for these videos. I suggest you watch these videos over and over, study them word for word, transcribe them.
I was talking to Russell Brunson and he told me that he downloaded one of my videos for high end products and transcribed it. He wanted to study it to discover what I said in order to get people to respond and purchase. Other people have told me the same thing.
What I didn’t realize was that it isn’t common to sell $5,000, $10,000 or $20,000 packages from short videos, but I do it regularly. It’s all in the words and how I say them. It’s in the expression on my face and the movements of my hands. If I have a good product, it doesn’t matter what the price point is; I am very confident I can sell it.
One very important factor is that you have to be 100% confident in the product you are selling. I am 100% confident that my products will help and work for people as intended. I have no problem selling these products. My enthusiasm and certainty for the product shines through my presentation in the videos.
This past year I added a different twist when selling my $25,000 Titanium package. I hope you saw the video for it. I laid out the entire program for the viewer. I even told them what the price point was. Then instead of sending them to an order form, I had them fill out an application for acceptance. Only after their
application was processed could they purchase the program. We are continuing this process in 2020.
I’m not the first person to use this process. I’m sure you’ve seen others do it. The twist I added was that I’m up front with the price. The typical way to do it is to take them through the video and application and only after they complete the process do most marketers reveal the price point.
They end up talking to a lot of people who aren’t qualified for the product. By giving the price up front, I’m weeding out the people who aren’t qualified. I don’t want to “sell” people on my product. I want them “want” my product even when they know the price. Then my team simply has to contact them to close the deal.
It’s a simple five-step process.
- Good presentation
- Good pitch
- Simple application
- Contact them to close the deal
- Start working with them
Let’s talk about one of my biggest failures. It was my 2019 Complete Seminar. We had a great time, the setup looked great and there was a lot of great training, but I considered it a failure. The marketing went great. We registered more people than we ever have for any event…the problem was the number of people who actually showed up.
I set the seminar marketing up as a test to see if I could fill it in the US the same way I do in the UK and Australia. Basically, I offered a free event and then upsold them. It didn’t work the way I wanted it to. Looking at the registrations, we should have had around 1000 people there, but we only got a small fraction of that.
Do I take the blame for it. Sure, I do. But, the promotion was a test. It works in the UK and Australia so I wanted to see if it would work in the US. Do I regret trying it? No. The only way to find out if something works is to try it.
The value of development or putting out products is something else I learned in 2019. If you only have one product out there, there’s only one way people can find you. A strategy I’ve used for years is to have multiple products—30 or 40 of them. This gives me multiple ways to get people into my system.
If they’ve purchased one product from me, I have a lot better chance of selling them more. I called this system the pipeline. All the products were priced at $97. My average customer who came into the pipeline purchasing one product ended up, in the next 60 to 90 days, purchasing a total of five products.
So, by having multiple products available to them, this wasn’t just a $97 customer. They were a $500 customer and that’s without them upgrading to one of my membership programs.
I hadn’t developed this pipeline into a system until 2019. I plan to continue refining this system and using the strategy in 2020.
While there were no major shifts in our industry in 2019, I did see a trend towards using more paid advertising. I also noticed a major separation in the way people used paid advertising. There was the low-level advertising that the average person does and the higher- level, sophisticated advertising that the more successful people use.
Low-level advertisers don’t understand the basic concept of advertising; they look at it as an expense. The more sophisticated advertisers look at it as an investment. This has lead to a huge widening of the wealth gap between the two groups. It’s not secret knowledge or tricks that lead to this gap. It’s knowledge of the business and understanding marketing and advertising. Marketing is an art form. People just need to spend more time learning it.
Now let’s shift gears and look to what I predict for 2020—only time will tell if I’m accurate or not.
I foresee the merging of online and local marketing. Local businesses want to know how to market on the Internet, but they don’t want to do it themselves. I can absolutely guarantee they don’t know how to do it, and they don’t want to take time to learn how. They want to focus on their business. Your huge opportunity is to give them a scenario where you do it for them. I think offering these online marketing services to local businesses will be huge in 2020. It was big in 2019 and it will continue to grow in 2020 and beyond.
I think the fastest way to make the most amount of money is to create an agency to cater to this group. There are only a few things I get truly excited about and this local marketing is one of them. I see potential for this not only in the US, but everywhere.
In the past, I’ve talked about doing this with YouTube videos but it’s so much more than that. You just need to look at and think about what these local businesses need. Maybe it’s Facebook and Facebook advertising. Maybe it’s social media management. Anyone, regardless of their age can provide social media management. The list just goes on…Linkedin marketing, Facebook marketing, Yelp, Google ads or Google local listing, YouTube videos etc. All of these are services you can offer local businesses. People are already making hundreds of millions doing this, and they haven’t even scratched the surface of this huge market.
If you don’t believe me just take a look at Gary Vee. He has a media company that provides this “do it for you” service to large companies who pay him huge amounts of money to do it for them. This may or may not be for you, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you about it.
The question we need to ask ourselves in 2020 is how can we reach more people who don’t know us. It’s easy to reach people who already know us, but the big money is in reaching people who don’t. I know I need to get more people to know who I am. There may be a lot of ways to do this but I need to concentrate on what I can do to get people to hear my message, to understand who I am. I call this personality marketing.
We all have a personality. This puts marketing in the same realm as talk shows, news, television shows etc. You watch those shows because you like the people on the show. It’s the same with marketing on the Internet. We need to market ourselves, our personalities, in order to get people to understand us, like and trust us. I know I need to get out there, this year, and market me. I need to come out of my comfort zone and market me.
I know this may sound strange to you. After all, I should have no problem with this. I talk from stage, and I’ve made hundreds of videos and presentations. Yes, that is correct but I need to get my message out to more people. The question is how do I do this? I need to talk more; I need to do more videos. Video is a great way to get people to know you. Video is not going away. It’s here to stay, and it’s just getting bigger.
I’m going to use a simple strategy to get my videos out there. I’ll record short videos and put them on YouTube and drive paid traffic to them. YouTube is inexpensive, just a couple of cents per video view. I’ll set a budget of $10 or $20 per video. I’d like to do a new video every week. That way I can spend the next six days promoting the video I just put up. On the seventh day, I’ll put up a new video and promote that for six days. The purpose of these videos is to get people to follow them. I can do the same thing on Facebook although it will be a little more expensive.
A while back I was talking to a friend of mine, Mike Stewart. Mike has a business that records theme music for companies. Basically, he records advertising jingles for local businesses. He takes the jingle and puts it in a video and drives video views to it. I just couldn’t understand it.
He said it’s kinda like a TV station—people buy ads on TV which basically means they are paying to get people to view their ad. This is done on both a local and nationwide basis. He said he is doing the same thing. He creates the video and then pays to drive traffic to it. Some of his customers are getting 100,000 to 200,000 views a month for just a few hundred dollars. It’s brilliant!
After I thought it over, I realized that’s what I want. I want people to watch my videos so why not purchase views just like television advertisers pay for their ads. I want to set up a schedule to do this regularly. There is one “mindset” change that I need to make first…I need to change the mindset of making a video to sell something to making a video to entertain.
In order to help with this I’ve started watching a lot of videos. One of these is a video by a guy who does “unboxing” therapy.
You can check it out on YouTube—his channel is called “Unbox Therapy.” He simply unboxes new products. He also talks about random things that he feels are of importance. People like him and are entertained by him. He has a great following.
I firmly believe video will play a big
role in 2020. I encourage you to
start doing it right now.
While video is one way to get known, another way for people to get to know you is to put stuff out there. There are multiple ways to do this. Write down the number of different ways you think there are for people to give you their name and email address. Chances are the number you wrote down is too small.
How many lead generators do you have? Probably not enough. How many opt-in pages do you have? Probably not enough. How many ways do you have out there to get people’s name and email address? The answer is, “not enough.”
At the end of each day, look at your opt-in list and see how big it is. It should be bigger every day. Think about ways to drive traffic to it. How are you getting leads? How many presentations are you doing? You need to keep track of it.
In 2020, you need to become analytical. I am a very analytical person because the numbers tell me everything. I write down and keep track of everything.
- Leads are the first thing you need to track. I keep track of the number of leads I get on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. It’s important that you know the number of leads your generating.
- You need to track “presentations.” How many people actually saw your offer? Your offer could be a sales letter, a video, a webinar, it doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is how many people saw it. How many presentations did you actually do?
- The third thing you need to track is the number of sales.
These three things need to dictate your 2020 marketing. You will need to be analytical and track them; they’re not hard to track. All you need to do is take the time to write them down on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. If you don’t want to do it, hire someone to do it. If no one does it, your business will probably be short lived. If the numbers are going the wrong way, you need to make changes. If numbers are going the correct way, you need to keep doing more of what you already are doing.
Webinars will be key to my 2020 marketing. I can sell higher tickets items faster and in larger quantity through webinars. Webinars give me more time with people. I don’t really care how you do them or whose software you use. I just want you to start doing them! Webinars are the key to getting you to whatever income level you desire in 2020.
That brings up another point. What is your number? What is the income number you want to hit by the end of the year? $50,000?
$100,000? $200,000? $500,000? A million? Or maybe even higher? I don’t care what the number is. What’s important is that over the next few days you take that number and break down exactly how you are going to achieve it.
I don’t care it’s $10,000 or $1,000,000, you need to break down exactly what you will do to achieve that number. What product(s) are you going to sell? What’s the price point? How many do you need to sell, daily, weekly, monthly?
If you can tell me how many sales you need, I can tell you how much traffic you will need because it’s all about conversions. If you know how many sales are needed you know how many people have to see your sales letter. This number, in turn, tells you how many people need to see your opt-in page. This will tell you how much traffic you need to drive and subsequently what your advertising budget should be.
So, looking forward into 2020, I don’t think there are any major shifts that are going to happen, but there are some things you may want to consider. For us, we’re going to be focusing on smaller events, 30 to 40 people in a room. Many of our Marketing University members are also doing this, and it’s worked well for them. The smaller events cost very little money to produce and are easy to fill. They can range from only a few hours a day to two- or three-day events.
My wife, Marianna, and I are going to create a product that shows you everything you need to know in order to successfully put these smaller events on. We’ll be putting what we teach into practice as we do our own smaller events.
These small events have multiple advantages.
- You get practice as a speaker at your own events.
- They give you great marketing practice without a high cost.
- If done correctly, they can be very profitable.
Privacy is going to be a very big issue as we move forward. In the UK, they now have GDPR and similar legislation will be coming here, too. California has released some new privacy laws that will become effecting in June. Right now, it only affects companies
that do more the $25 million in sales. I believe that the remaining states will follow with their own privacy laws. But, as of now, these rules don’t affect us at the level we operate.
With all the privacy issues raised by Facebook, we are going to see more and more regulations regarding privacy. Don’t panic, you just have to learn to adapt and abide by the regulations. I will do my best to keep you abreast of the changes as I hear about them.
Another thing, we as small businesses need is something that we hoped to avoid when we started our businesses, and that is structure. We have to dedicate a certain portion of our time towards development, marketing, sales, customer service, etc. This time has to be scheduled into your day, week, month. Structure simply cannot be ignored.
One thing you need to concern yourself about is time. The time it takes to get from point A to point B is just taking too long. You need to find a way to shorten the amount of time you spend getting your products from development to marketing. You need to speed things up. You want to get as many products out to the marketplace as possible in 2020. Good structure plays a big part in this.
Silver through Titanium MU members can view this address in its entirety by logging into Marketing University and clicking in weekly training on “State of The Internet Address.” I look forward to working with you in 2020!
