33% right yet 100% rich

The secret to the greatest marketing campaigns of all time

Every successful marketing campaign has an offer, and audience and a message. The most successful campaigns do all three at the highest level - a killer offer to a hyper responsive audience with pitch perfect messaging.

Yet it’s rare you do all well.

You can get really rich if you just do two right and one average.

You can get decently rich if you just ONE right and the other two average.

Example - if you have a killer offer, it can work on an “okay” audience with a “good enough” message. Some of my best pitches have done under the gun - meaning I only had a few hours to craft them, when ideally I’d like a whole week!

But because the offer was so compelling, even with a rushed pitch I still sold the lights out.

The flip can kill you.

Once I took a deal with a client for a dumb reason - sentiment.

He had acquired the rights to market a Zig Ziglar program. Zig had personally been such an impact on my life that I foolishly leapt into the deal thinking that the marketplace would value him as I did.

They didn’t.

I wrote an unbelievably amazing pitch. I stayed up extra late on it. But it barely converted. Because the offer didn’t have an audience for it. The program lived in no man’s land - it taught selling techniques from years past without a clear path of how to use those in today’s environment.

We had people we could reach - Zig’s facebook fan page had a few million followers I think - but quantity is usually inversely related to quality. They showed up and were appreciative of the lessons but not enough of them bought for it to be worth any of our time.

Another example - once I did marketing for Peter Diamandis. He had a program related to Abundance - which he had wrote a NY Times best seller book on. He had a mastermind around the topic too - very expensive and completely sold out to Fortune 500 companies.

He wanted to occupy the middle - create a course to sell to the rest of businesses out there who weren’t Fortune 500.

The challenge with this offer is it wasn’t problem-focused.

Abundance isn’t a problem - it’s poverty that’s the problem. Abundance is nice to have, but at mass market people aren’t looking for quality of life improvements. They are looking to get out of pain. Somehow I overlooked this. I think it’s because of the respect for Peter’s intellect - he truly is a genius. I was thinking like he or I would think - not like the customer.

We had Tony Robbins promote the product. The webinar did decent. That same week I did another webinar to my internal customer list selling a high ticket software. The webinar with Tony had 10x the people on it. Yet my internal software webinar did 5x the sales.

No famous people. No NY Times best sellers. Just a killer offer to a perfectly targeted audience with an incredible pitch.

9-7-5 Theory

When I work on promotions now, I want to start at 9-7-5. That means between the offer, audience and message, one has to be 9/10, one a 7/10 and the other a 5/10.

Example: a 9/10 message with a 7/10 offer to a 5/10 audience.

That is a great starting point because it will work well enough to establish momentum and allow me to then optimize each piece - to turn a 9 to a 10, a 7 to a 9, a 5 to a 7… and then eventually try to get it to at least 9’s across the board.

If I get to choose what is what, I want the offer to be 9, the audience to be 7 and the message to be 5. A super strong offer to a strong audience with an average pitch will get the best initial results. And the pitch is the easier thing to improve.

That’s why I like to start with the offer first. How can I sell what normally is a $10,000 thing for a $1,000? How can I have something with so much proof that without saying a word the value would be obvious?

Next is audience - can I find people who buy quickly and are happy with even the smallest win? And/or can I find an audience who is under-served: they have never seen anything like it before and it solves their major problems better than the normal things they’ve seen time and again.

Last is message. The exception here is if the story is so incredible, then we can fit the offer around the message.

The Invisible

I’m most KNOWN for the pitch because that’s what you see the most of when it comes to launching a campaign.

You don’t see the quiet planning to create and position the offer. You don’t see the research into the audiences to target. You just see the webinar.

Yet it’s the least important piece. Ask any of the clients who pay me $25,000 for a day of consulting. We spend most of the day on the offer and audience and then the message usually only takes an hour to strategize around because it practically snaps in place.

Before launching your next campaign, audit your offer, audience and message. Where is your leverage? Is one element extra-compelling? If not, get it there. Because otherwise you can do all of them well enough and still strike out. Yet nail one and get the other two “okay” and you crush.