How To Create Your Strategic Foundation For Ultimate Marketing Success. By Jay L. Abraham. Part 2.

Here is the second part of Jay Abraham’s excellent methodology to help you create the most competitive marketing strategy for your business…
Case Study #5: Investment Rarities
Another strategic distinction is that people can’t tell if they like something unless or until they try it the first time.
I worked with a little company called Investment Rarities. Their strategy was to sell people investment grade gold and silver coins just once. And do little else to follow-up.
It was so reactive. We looked at all the different people that they had in their potential target audience and decided that in order to get them started, that you can’t get into the habit of doing something unless you do it once.
We would send their target audience a “loss leader” offer (an offer where we actually lost money on the first sale) that would allow them to buy something at a loss with the knowledge that we could come back and re-solicit those same people if they were happy.
We also had a powerful risk reversal, such that if they weren’t totally and completely happy, we would actually buy the coins back from them for more than what they originally spent. So we got people in the habit of collecting coins. We brought a lot of new people into the fold. We then moved those same people through more and higher and higher purchases.
We took the company that was making $300,000 a year, and within eighteen months they were doing over $500,000,000!
They generated in excess of $25,000,000 in commissions. That’s a powerful example of the impact of being super strategic and integrating it with sub-command/field strategies, such as:
• Selling at a loss on the front-end
• Having a “better than risk free” proposition (Powerful Risk Reversal)
• Having a deep and well thought out back-end
In order to do that you had to know the prospects. And know that they would tend buy other products if they were offered.
Case Study #6: Entrepreneur Magazine
Entrepreneur Magazine sold subscriptions to an expensive newsletter. They weren’t making any money to speak of. They basically just paid their bills. What I did was I used the strategy of “re-purposing” all the information that was generated for their endeavor.
We took the actual reports, articles, stories and interviews and added certain common boiler plate content. Like how use/hire an Account, CPA or attorney. Or how to incorporate. This made the information very valuable and very encompassing, yet very industry specific.
People would pay $69 to buy research on a specific industry. We made tons of money off of that concept. We also did specialty courses, manuals and seminars tapes sets where we took all their unused information assets and made it into a product that was far more valuable, than even the company itself.
That’s another marketing strategy too— to look at the unused assets.
Similarly, I bought the rights to a lot of books that weren’t selling. And books were valued at $20 for a hard bound copy. I got the rights to all these books. I then had another team of people pull out the important messages in the book and then sell them as reports for $79.00. We were able to make lots of money from things that were essentially being thrown away. We just took them and created special reports out of them, which added a lot more value.
Sometimes less is better. That was the concept. People are willing to pay more money for a report that gave them the exact information they were looking for than they were for something that included a lot of information that didn’t cover a lot of additional things other than what they were looking for.
Case Study #7: Author, Bob Morrison
Another associate of mine, Bob Morrison, wrote best selling books. And his marketing strategy was to mail offers to people for different books. For those offers with book titles that didn’t sell, he didn’t write the books and instead refunded the money.
The ones that did sell, he actually wrote the books and made a tremendous amount of money that way. One of the books that he wrote was called something like “Why SOBs Make More Money than Good Guys”. I think SOBs were defined as “Strategic Operating Businesses.”
That title was a winning title. And he made a lot of money off that one book. So much so, he was able to retire. And that’s just an example of another marketing strategy. He sold books he hadn’t written yet based upon creating offers which tested the titles and was very successful. In testing the titles, he determined what the market wanted.
Case Study #8: Reader’s Digest
Reader’s Digest did something similar by having people ask for free reports. And then based upon the title of the report, they used that concept to tell them which articles they going to run and what they were going to be named.
You may think that that specifically didn’t increase their sales. Yes it did. Because people looked at Reader’s Digest magazine at the bookstand or in the bookstore. They always looked to see what was there. It became an impulse purchase item in the store. And then if they read it and they really like what was there, they subscribed to the magazine.
They became one of the most successful companies in that field based upon that marketing strategy. Because they were so successful they were able to sell their advertising for thousands of dollars instead of hundreds of dollars, like so many other similar magazines.
It’s Easier Said Than Done
One of my associates recently asked me why I didn’t just tell people what the strategy is that they should be using. Or just define the strategy for them. I can’t define it, because it’s different in every single case. But— there is a common methodology here. It’s to determine your target audience, and look and see what they are looking for, create a hypothesis, test the hypothesis and when you find a winning hypothesis…
Move forward with it rapidly.
So you see, there is a method to my “strategic madness”. But it may not be one you can define easily, or you might think anybody could have figured out. You wouldn’t have figured out the same thing Tom Monahan figured for Domino’s Pizza, or you wouldn’t have figured out the winning strategy for Entrepreneur Magazine or Investment Rarities. You wouldn’t have figured out what FedEx did either.
So it’s different strategies in different cases.
The Best Way To Learn Strategy is from Case Studies
The thing you need to do is to look at other people who have successful marketing strategies and extrapolate the best from them.
Especially the ones OUTSIDE your field of endeavor.
There’s no book that I have ever seen on the subject that has these kinds of details. (And I have done a year’s worth of preparation.) You need to do a lot of research, referencing, and looking at companies that are successful. Because as I have said before, a strategy or tactic that’s very humdrum and common in one industry, if used in another industry, can have the effect of a nuclear bomb which can explode your profits.
That’s the reason its best to learn from examples.
A Word of Caution
You can do the same thing. You can analyze and emulate successful companies. You can see what they did. But a word of caution— you have to be real careful that you analyze specifically what they did. I’ll give you another clarifying example here.
Sometimes it’s not obvious. For instance, there has been an ad on negotiating seminars in airline magazines for as long as I can remember. You’d probably think if somebody is running an ad that long, it must be really successful.
Well, the course that they offer is not necessarily successful. Where they really make their money is on the back-end. They have a back-end of expensive products and programs like customized seminars they sell you.
So you have got to understand the full story.
For instance, in the case of Domino’s Pizza you may not have realized that they had done a lot of research before they executed. If you don’t do the same kind of research, you may or may not have a winning marketing strategy.
I don’t know where there is an effective “off the shelf” marketing strategy format. If you have found one, let me know because we can all make billions with it. What I want to do is give you the principles and the process, whether or not you do anything with me or not.
What Matters is ACTION
You really need to follow the simple steps that I have identified, and then once you have the marketing strategy, you need to implement it quickly.
It doesn’t do any good if you learn all this information and you don’t follow through with effective marketing action.
Just so I am clear, let’s walk through the strategy process one final time:
1) The most important part of the process is finding and knowing your target
audience— your “list.”
2) What does you target audience want? What do they need? What are their
dreams, hopes and desires?
3) Establish a working hypothesis (i.e. offer) and test it. The question is—
“How can you position what you are doing in a way that gives your target audience the benefits that they are looking for?”
You must create a valid offer. And you need to figure out that all they ever
wanted was the pizza delivered hot and tasty within 30 minutes to their home.
Not to have a fancy big building to go to. Not to drive to that big building to
pick up the pizza.
You need to know what they are looking for and create an offer which is clear,
distinct and actionable by your target audience.
4) The last part is the copy. Most people think that if you have a great sales
letter— that’s all it takes. It’s not. In the marketing world, people say the list
is 40% of the equation. And the offer is 40% of the equation. And the copy
is 20% of the equation.
I don’t think that’s accurate. Here’s why:
I submit if you get the list wrong, you don’t have any equation at all. You
don’t have anything. Nothing really matters without knowing the target
audience or understanding their wants, needs and desires.
If you have the right target audience and you know what they want, but you
give them the wrong hypothesis/offer, then it doesn’t work either. So only if
you have the first two things right, then can you optimize the third thing
which is the marketing copy/message.
People think writing copy is the area I specialize in. I don’t really specialize in that, although I’m very effective at it. I specialize in the first two, but if you get the first two right, it’s real easy to get the third one right with effective copy, scripts or ads.
But again, I want to caution you— Unless you get your marketing strategy down by knowing your target audience/your list and knowing the offer that you want to give them, it doesn’t matter how good the letters, ads or scripts are. Whether they’re from me or from another expert copywriter you pay a million dollars to.
It just won’t matter.
In Summary
Recently, two of my colleagues came to me and asked me to thoroughly explain
marketing strategy to them. And I thought how to do that over a long period of time. And I’ve explained it to them and to other people numerous times in the overall definition.
I told them that the strategy is the overarching concept or plan, and tactics
are the tools you use or the way you implement the strategy. But defining it doesn’t make it come to life, because knowing what strategy is, and knowing how to develop a successful one, are two different things.
So what I’m giving you, by explaining the process to you in detail, is how you can develop your very own Master Marketing Strategy. Because if you don’t have an effective Master Marketing Strategy I don’t believe you are not going to be successful in business. At worst, you are going to go out of business or barely survive— versus being a force to be reckoned with in your industry…
And having success, money and everything else that
comes with being super successful…
Most entrepreneurs provide a valuable product or service that the market needs but most of them are very ineffective businessmen— because the only way they know how to market is like their competition does. So they can’t really stand out in a crowd.
They are just competing just like everyone else does.
If you want to have the success that you desire… If you want to be the next Dell
Computer… If you want to be the next Microsoft… If you want to be the next FedEx…
If you want to be the next Domino’s Pizza… If you want to be the next Investment Rarities… You need to be able to move forward confidently and effectively.
Here’s your opportunity. You now know something which very few people in your industry are aware of— exactly How to create the Ultimate Master Marketing Strategy for your company. Remember—
“In the land of the blind… The one eyed man is king.”
I have given you the key and now it’s up to you to run with it. I hope this treatise on strategy has helped clarify strategy for you and helped move you to action.
I wish you the best of success with all your strategic endeavors!