“Never underestimate the task at hand when it comes to moving prospects to buy. It takes extreme, extraordinary measures to compel people to act.” ~Todd Brown
Wow! MFA’s first-ever large-scale live event was a total success last week! MFA Live 2015 had attendees fly in from around the world. They came from South Africa and Ireland, and even from Australia, to spend 2 days together with the elite of the elite, when it comes to funnel marketing. I took copious notes during the presentations, and would love to share some of the highlights with you. Here are the key ideas from Todd Brown’s initial presentation, The NEW Big Idea.
Marketing vs. selling
There is a big difference between marketing and selling. Selling is all about your product, your offer, and your company. It’s all about YOU and your company and your product.
Marketing, on the other hand, is all about the PROSPECT. You speak to their wants, desires, fears, circumstances, problems, and situations. In marketing, you focus on the ideal outcome that the prospect wants. You ask – and talk about – the best solution for their situation.
In fact, as Todd said, “the purpose of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”
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What you need to know before you market your product
Before you begin to market your product, there are three things that you must consider: the prospect, your competition, and the product itself.
The prospect
How does your prospect think and feel? Crawl inside their head and see the world from their perspective. What do they think about the topic? What do they feel about it?
The lower the level of awareness that they have, the more indirect your approach needs to be. If they have a higher level of awareness, you can be more direct in your marketing efforts.
Ask yourself, What are the things that are intellectually interesting to your prospect? This is a very important component of your marketing. Yes, you need to speak to their emotions, but you also need to speak to them intellectually.
The competition
Understanding your competitors’ marketing is critical for knowing how to position your marketing. The more messages prospects are exposed to, the more they begin to tune it all out, and the less they respond.
When assessing marketplace sophistication, identify the types of messages your competitors are using, and any messages you may have already used. Here is an example:
Marketplace sophistication
At the event, we did not have time to go into each stage in depth, but Todd discussed how stage 2 is where the overwhelming majority of marketers stay. It’s all about a claim, without anything to prove it or back it up.
On the other hand, stage 3 is where you can make the same believable, credible, true promise that someone else has made, but you tie it to your “unique mechanism”. This is your proprietary mechanism (technique, software, idea, etc.) – that no one else has named or can claim – and it shows the prospect how they can get their desired result. They get that result specifically because of your unique mechanism.
The unique mechanism is what gives your prospect HOPE that things are now going to be different. In fact, your prospect starts to think, “The reason this hasn’t worked for me before is because I didn’t have this special thing!”
If you don’t know what your competitors have said, you have no way of knowing whether your message is on par or not. In other words, what promises, claims, mechanisms, deliverables and offers will resonate with your prospects?
The product
Prospects want to know, “What is the promise?” Then they want to know what your claim is, and how you say you can help them solve their problems and meet their needs.
The idea business
The quality of your promotion is based on the quality of the idea that you present. We are in the idea business. Big Ideas are new ideas. They present a new secret, a new angle, an overlooked discovery, or new information.
What idea are you trying to bring to the table? It has to be a QUALITY idea!
You could have a very ugly-looking page or sales letter, but if you have the right idea, you’ll make money. Successful marketing is idea-driven, not copy-driven. Copy shares the big idea.
Prospects are already bombarded by claims. Those claims roll right off of them.
Which means that it not only has to be a quality idea, but a DIFFERENT idea. Always be thinking about differentiation. Prospects are bored; remember that money follows attention.
Todd cautioned against the “proliferation of the formulaic” – plug-and-play templates – because they are too simple and are rarely unique and valuable.
When your prospect comes to your page, if they feel like they have seen it and heard it before, they mentally opt-out. You simply can’t bring more of the same to the market and expect to get a lot of sales.
This is the key: Your Big Idea is like a pattern interrupt, if you really get it right. It catches your prospect’s attention and draws them in. THEN you can market so well, that selling becomes unnecessary.
It’s your turn! What is your Big Idea? We would love to hear about it in the comments below.
An attendee: “Todd Brown has probably forgotten more than most people have ever known about marketing and building funnels.“
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