Video Transcript:
Jason Drohn:
What is up? Welcome to today's episode of Sales System Experts, and today we are going to talk about creating offers during this crisis . Right? I think that's what we're going to talk about today.
Aaron Parkinson:
Wow, that's an aggressive term.
Jason Drohn:
Creating offers, yeah. Well, nobody watches this anyway, so it doesn't matter.
Aaron Parkinson:
Creating offers. By the time somebody watches it, the crisis will be-
Jason Drohn:
We'll be out of a crisis, yeah.
Aaron Parkinson:
And nothing we say will work, but if you take action in the next month, it would be amazing.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah. All right, and this is episode four. My name is Jason Drohn, and I'm the creator of done for you. Aaron can talk a little bit about what he does real briefly. Just a little tiny, tiny introduction.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. My name is Aaron Parkinson. I'm the CEO of 7 Mile Media, a direct response agency specializing in Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube ads.
Jason Drohn:
Whoa. That is a nice professional elevator pitch. That is awesome.
Aaron Parkinson:
I just came up with that on the spot. Do you like it?
Jason Drohn:
Wow, that was good.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, well, I like it.
Jason Drohn:
All right. So today we're talking about creating offers and stuff. So you want to kind of kick it off? What is an offer? What is an offer, Aaron?
Aaron Parkinson:
What is an offer? Well, you have a product. It's either a physical product or a digital product or a service, and you would like to sell it and-
Jason Drohn:
Make a lot of money.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, and make some money. And the traditional way is, obviously for most people, is open up an office or open up a store and put up your open sign and hope people walk in, and we don't operate in that world. We call it creating offers. Some people call them funnels, some people call them digital marketing. Just depends on who you're speaking to. Where we take the product, and we put it in front of the people that we think would be most likely to buy it, and we create mechanisms to deliver the information on why they should buy it online. And we make it predictable for the amount of money you should spend and how many product sales you should make so that you can scale your business.
Aaron Parkinson:
Just pushing buttons rather than standing in a store waiting for people to show up daily, during the COVID crisis, we have seen a remarkable spike in volume over the last 30, 60 days. And honestly, I was prepared to have to reduce the size of my team, like everybody was when this came down, but I was patient. I wanted to see how it played out. And I'm very glad that I was because we had our business, whatever. And you know, I just saw a statistic that drives this home. I'm part of a mastermind group with a bunch of other e-commerce entrepreneurs. And as of this week, the digital versus retail buying percentage went up to 33%. So e-commerce hit 33% this week. And that statistic was expected to be hit in the future, but not for eight years based on the trend line.
Aaron Parkinson:
Now, that's a bit manipulated because people are buying less-
Jason Drohn:
And they can only buy online.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, they can only buy online. So I think the overall gross sales are down, but the trajectory is going crazy digitally because nothing's open. So 33% of things that are now sold worldwide are sold digitally, up from 17%, which was four months ago. So now it's 33%. So then the million-dollar question becomes, what do you sell?
Jason Drohn:
Right. I read an interesting statistic that the only type of advertising that has increased... Nice mug, by the way. That mug is an icon on this show. Four episodes in, if you want to talk about icons. So I read an interesting statistic that was the only type of advertising that was increasing right now is direct response, which good thing we are both direct response guys, and direct response is up 40%. And basically, we're just eating up all of the inventory that those brand guys are leaving behind right now. You know, so-
Aaron Parkinson:
And maybe we should stop and you should give the people watching your definition of the difference between brand marketing and direct response marketing. Maybe people don't know what you're talking about.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah. So brand marketing is basically where you're building a brand. You're building the awareness of your brand so that you can cash in later. By and large, I mean, that's a very general description, and the brand guys are going to... There are diehard brand guys that are like, "No, that is not branding. Branding is all of these things," but at the end of the day, you're building recognition in your logo and in the thing that you do so that you can then launch products in the future underneath that umbrella.
Aaron Parkinson:
And a brand is a super, super powerful thing. I'm a huge believer in the power of major brands. Because I said something like this the other day. I said, Jason, how many ketchups do you know of? I only know of one. It's Heinz.
Jason Drohn:
Right, Heinz. Yeah, totally.
Aaron Parkinson:
If there's another one, I'm unaware of it. We could take something even broader.
Jason Drohn:
Kleenex, Xerox.
Aaron Parkinson:
Tissues. Nobody goes to buy tissue. They go to buy Kleenex.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah.
Aaron Parkinson:
And colas, okay, there's two. There's Coke and there's Pepsi. And I know there are other ones because I've been in the beverage distribution world, but nobody walked into a restaurant and says, I'll have an RC Cola or... You'd be like, "What?" That's the power of a brand. They don't even need to market anymore, and they're going to make money forever because they've established it. And that is the power of the brand. Unfortunately, right now with everything being tight, direct response is not about putting out the culture of the business, putting out how it interacts with people, how it interacts with charity, what type of social impact it's having. All the things that tend to fall under the brand category have been pushed aside for the time being, and now people are focused on direct response. So tell them what the difference is between branding and direct response.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah. So direct response is the brand matters a whole lot less than what it did. It's less about the brand and more about the offer. It's more about the transformation you're going to make in somebody's life or the access that you're selling to the thing. So it is dollars in, dollars out. The simplest form of direct response is dollars in, dollars out. So it involves sometimes very aggressive sales copy, it involves sales funnels. It involves systems that bond and educate and sell all at the same time. But at its simplest, it is an ad that links to a product, and that product sells, and 4% of people buy that product. And you know that because you've sent hundreds of thousands of clicks. And that's it.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, it comes down to predictability. You know, we've tested 50 different ads, 50 different images, 50 different copywriting angles in 50 different places, and we found that magic combination that a certain percentage of people buy every single time. Now it's just about, how big can we scale the offer? And I know that the purpose of today's call is to talk about the types of creating offers that are converting well in this space. And I think to give it some texture, the first thing I want to talk about is, what do you think are the things that are not converting well right now?
Jason Drohn:
So, immediate high ticket stuff. Stuff that is sold the immediately high ticket, as in no relationship cold. A high ticket is the first thing that somebody buys.
Aaron Parkinson:
So when you say high ticket, you're referring to something probably a thousand dollars or more?
Jason Drohn:
Yeah, a thousand dollars or more, typically. Yeah.
Aaron Parkinson:
So trying to sell something for a thousand dollars or more where there's no relationship, no context, no buildup, no credibility established, I would agree with that. I'm going to take a step back and go even more mainstream. I'm going to e-commerce. Right now, things that are tanking in e-commerce are things like suitcases.
Jason Drohn:
Right.
Aaron Parkinson:
How many people are buying a suitcase right now? Not too many, right? We had one client that unfortunately had to pause with us when this happened, and they were selling travel visas. No countries are offering travel visas right now.
Jason Drohn:
Clothing is hurting bad. I mean, J.Crew just went bankrupt.
Aaron Parkinson:
Clothing is hurting, yeah. Luxury brands, like luxury watches, things like that are taking a pretty big hit. You know, it's the stuff that might be travel-oriented, or it's more along the lines of something that I just love, but I don't need, is taking a hit.
Aaron Parkinson:
So then conversely you look at, what are the things that are converting well? And if I stay inside of the e-commerce section for a second, we have multiple e-commerce clients that are smashing it right now. And some things save money. I don't want to be overly obvious here, but if you can help somebody save money... And an example of that might be one of our clients sells a reusable, bamboo towel. So instead of using paper towels to clean up your kitchen or whatever, they have a reusable bamboo towel that you can use, wash, rinse a million times. I see my friend, Ryan McKenzie right now at Tru Earth is crushing it with reusable eco-friendly washing machines strips. They're cheaper, they're more eco-friendly, they're keeping plastic bottles out of the landfills. So people get to feel good about themselves, and they get to save money.
Aaron Parkinson:
Like if you can combine "save money" with "and feel good about me", you're crushing right now. And if you look at 2008, when the last economic recession happened, look at some of the biggest companies that came out of that. Do you remember? Can you list a couple off the top of your head?
Jason Drohn:
I can't, no.
Aaron Parkinson:
Okay, so I'll give you two prime examples. Uber, right? All of a sudden, I don't want to pay $50 for a cab that traditionally is all beat up and smells funny. I just don't want to. Uber comes out of nowhere and says, "Oh, we're going to do it for like 17 bucks. And we're going to get there in 10 minutes instead of 30 minutes. And on top of that, we're going to create an income stream for all the people that want to become Uber drivers."
Aaron Parkinson:
So it was like twofold. I'm going to save this group money, and I'm going to give this other group who needs money a way to make money and leverage your car, one of these expensive assets that you have. Uber just took off. Another one that took off was WhatsApp.
Jason Drohn:
Oh, right,
Aaron Parkinson:
WhatsApp went nuts because back then people were still ringing up a ton of long-distance on their phone, and WhatsApp came out and said, "Why would we do that? Why wouldn't we just leverage the power of WiFi for your phone calls?" All of a sudden, now they're free. And it just went boom. So two examples drive home that point, is when the economy is in a recession, people don't stop spending money. They just shift their spending patterns to other things.
Aaron Parkinson:
And when we talk about the info-marketing side, what we're seeing in the agency is a career transition. So one of our clients is a big university, and their cost per acquisition has gone down dramatically because they offer their curriculum from home. So it's not just, "Hey, it's career transition." It's digitally based. You can get this accredited certification from home. People are sitting around going, "I might as well learn something." And the other one is, I don't mean to just sort of oversimplifying it, but it's making money. So if you can teach me a skill on how to make money, like if you can teach me how to do forex, or if you can teach me how to become an Amazon seller, or if you can teach me how to do e-commerce... My jujitsu instructor, I hit him up last night and said, "Hey, man, how are you doing? Just checking in on you." And he goes, "Oh man, I've bought and consumed five marketing courses in the last three weeks, because I got nothing to do, and I've always wanted to launch this app.
Aaron Parkinson:
And he's sending me questions, like "How do I put my app on Facebook so people can instantly download it?" And I'm sending him stuff like the developer SDK and stuff like, "Hey, just go look at this." And he's like, "Oh, this is magic." It's all these things that we take for granted that we know because we do this for 15 years. But where our clients right now are pretty equally split between info-marketers and e-commerce. And on the e-commerce side, it's anything that's kind of cool, maybe has some social impact, but most importantly saves me money. Or health-related, although that's a little dodgy, because everybody's out there right now, like, "Boost your immune system," and all this stuff.
Aaron Parkinson:
That can be a little dodgy because if you make claims that aren't true or validated, major advertising networks will pull you off and shut you down. But the whole health supplement industry is killing it. And probably the single biggest one that I never thought of over the last month that caught me off guard until it happened... Can you guess it? I wonder if you could guess it. Like the number one thing that is completely sold out and you can't get it anywhere. I'm not talking about masks or toilet paper or whatever, just something that people can no longer do that they now have to do at home, and now you can't find it anywhere.
Jason Drohn:
So two things that I've seen are Nintendo Switches and webcams, but-
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. I mean, those are huge. Video games, board games for kids, anything like... I just got this microphone, and I got some new screens and stuff like that because I'm around. I'm here all the time. But the one thing that caught me way off guard was gym equipment.
Jason Drohn:
Oh yeah, right. Yep.
Aaron Parkinson:
You can not find plates. You can not find dumbbells to save your life right now. They are all gone because people were like, "I need to get my workout on," or, "For the first time, I want to work out, because I got this time." And everybody went, "Well, I guess we have to order them online." There was like two-week waitlists and stuff going for like 150% normal price.
Jason Drohn:
Jeez.
Aaron Parkinson:
It's crazy. So if you break some of those things down, it's... You added a good one in there. What are things that can serve people from home? Board games, webcams, gym equipment. Just stuff to entertain people in general or up-level their skills in their home office. From an info marketing side, make money, skill transition. I've seen huge boosts in companies that are teaching you how to learn another language. Again, it's those things that are like, "Well, I got time. How do I up-level my skills?" Our online university-
Jason Drohn:
Certifications are a big one. My wife just started a fitness certification, so she's going through and she's killing it. She's doing like a chapter a day.
Aaron Parkinson:
That makes sense to me. We have two weight-loss experts as clients, they're both crushing it. Because again, people are like, "Well, if I had problems before..." I'm up 10 pounds, I don't know about you. I am up 10 pounds. That's a fact, and I'm a pretty in shape guy.
Jason Drohn:
I weighed myself and I was up one, and I was like, "Babe, this isn't bad, because I've been eating like shit."
Aaron Parkinson:
Right? Dude, I got to follow whatever you're doing, because I'm up 10. So those people that had issues before, or just want to become something different while they have spare time. Both of our weight loss experts are killing it right now. And I think it's also worth noting that a lot of people, have ideas in their mind about selling their knowledge, or creating a product, or marketing their current business online. And they're fearful of it right now because they're reading the news, they're watching the news, and the constant negativity puts them in a state of paralysis where they think, "Oh, nobody has money, employment's sky-high, nobody's going to buy anything." And it's dead wrong right now.
Jason Drohn:
Oh, it's so wrong. The money-
Aaron Parkinson:
Go ahead.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah, the money just switched, it transferred. People are spending it differently. You just have to put yourself in the path of wherever it was. So when everything went down and the stock market kind of hit that burst, it tanked that first time. So it went and then it's rebounded a bit, and most people are expecting a W. When it went down the first time, I was talking to one of my mentors and he was like, "It's still there." He's like, "Literally, people took their money out of the stock market. It is there, it is sitting. It is liquid, more liquid than it ever has been, like ever. Like there is money there. It didn't disappear, it's still there. You just got to find it."
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah. And if you even want to take it a step further, if you don't want to talk about the average person that maybe doesn't follow finance and investment and stock markets, the really smart financial people that I know, they had their money out a year before the stock market crash. They didn't expect this, but they were expecting something to go wrong. So like you said, they're just sitting on it. And if I try to put myself into this discussion, like what's happening in my world, I've spent a lot of money online this month. Probably more than I ever have. We have a rental condo that I'm like, "Hey, let's just go do those renovations now and get it done while everything's quiet." So we bought all new furniture, and we bought paint, and we bought a whole bunch of stuff to get that project done.
Aaron Parkinson:
I bought a new iMac that I'm on today. I bought a new microphone. I got a new light coming. I've got a new camera coming. Because I was like, "Ah, I'm going to be around here more often. It's time to up my game." I'm looking at electric scooters. I've been wanting one of those electric... Do you know the ones that you stand on?
Jason Drohn:
Well, you live on an island.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, I live on an island.
Jason Drohn:
I can see you just running around.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, I'm bored. We can't go do anything because everything's on lockdown, but we can go outside and exercise. So I'm like, "Why don't we get some scooters and rip around the neighborhood?" You know those are like 1200 bucks each, or something like that?
Jason Drohn:
Right, yeah.
Aaron Parkinson:
And I'm looking at all these things to entertain myself while we wait this out. So I said to somebody the other day, when they asked me, "Is this a good time to be marketing?"
Aaron Parkinson:
I said, "Well, number one, all of the big brick and mortar companies and the mom and pop operations have pulled their marketing out of-"
Jason Drohn:
Even Google is 50% less. Everybody slashed their budgets by 50%, which means all that inventory is wide open.
Aaron Parkinson:
Right. So there's all this inventory, and if you look at things that are auction-based, like Google, like Facebook, like Instagram, I haven't seen advertising prices this cheap since probably 2014.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah, absolutely. On Facebook and Google... I mean, I looked at my Google Stats yesterday. Holy shit is it cheap over there. I mean, it's ridiculous. 20 cent, 30 cent clicks. Like, I haven't seen that since 2006, when I started.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, I can't remember the last time I saw a 20 or 30 cent click on Google, and it's auction-based. If there are people not in their bidding, then that's the price. And even talking to some of the branding guys over the last couple of weeks, some of the smarter ones, they're like, "We're taking advantage of it. We're putting our message out there right now because there's never been a cheaper time for us to get eyeballs on ourselves for when this goes back to some sense of normalcy." And so you've got this combination of super, super cheap traffic. You have 400 million people in the United States for the first time sitting at home on a phone or in front of a screen. So you have a captive audience. I mean, that's got to be 10 times more than the average. And if you're beyond that, Canada, United States, Australia, UK, Spain... I mean, what are people doing in Spain other than hanging out on their phone?
Jason Drohn:
Right, yep.
Aaron Parkinson:
So you've got a captive audience, you've got cheap advertising costs, and you have a whole bunch of really in-demand product options, whether they're physical products or they're info products that people are consuming at record levels to try and-
Jason Drohn:
And it's all going to be shipped to their house, or digitally delivered.
Aaron Parkinson:
And it's all shipped to their house. I looked at this report in China yesterday. Everything's back to normal from a manufacturing standpoint. There were some inventory problems for a while, and the last problem that they ran into is shipping. There were some shipping issues because there were safety issues of planes flying over there and so on. But that's almost been 100% rectified at this point for it. So it's almost like if you're going to do it, do it now.
Jason Drohn:
Now's the time, yeah.
Aaron Parkinson:
Because if China's back to normal and we're just replaying the same movie... Like Elon Musk said last night on Joe Rogan. He feels like he's watching the same movie the second time. If this movie's going to end as China did, four months after it started, this is the time to jump in and plant your flag and create your foundation for your product to create separation between you and competitors while you can, while it's cheap, while you have attended. And I know that you're seeing that even with the DFY funnel.
Jason Drohn:
Oh, yeah. Right now, leads are cheap, sales are cheap. People are moving through at a frightening pace from a conversion standpoint. They're moving right through, and it's all Greenlight. Do you know what I mean? Same with a lot of our other funnels. A lot of our other kind of low ticket into mid ticket sales funnels, anything... It's the relationship. I mean, like literally, if you have a relationship with your audience, then you can get some great conversions out of it. But right now, there's never been a better time to create a relationship with an audience, because they are all online. I mean, it's funny. I did my 40th life this morning.
Aaron Parkinson:
I was going to bring that up.
Jason Drohn:
So my 40th one today, just before this... My business has dramatically changed in the last two business months, in the last 40 episodes. I mean, not only is there better awareness, I had 13 calls yesterday. 13 between clients, between sales calls, like 30-minute chunks, and then I had a webinar with a couple of business owners at the end of the day. And literally, I'm not asking for anything. It's just information. I'm just trying to help and train people up, give some education. And then I'm transcribing it, throw it on the blog. And I'm doubling my organic traffic every month, which is awesome, but that was never the point.
Jason Drohn:
Like now, it's like, "Okay." My little city of 120,000 people is starting to wake up digital marketing one by one by one, thanks to these little tiny live streams. It's like this one person shares with this one person, who shares it with this one person. And now all of a sudden, my little city is having some pretty big talks about digital marketing. And how do we go get people outside of our city to then buy stuff from us? And it's fascinating how quickly you can capture attention.
Aaron Parkinson:
I call it manufacturing celebrity status because people view people they see on a screen as credible because we've been conditioned that way since the first television came out in the 1950s.
Jason Drohn:
Right, yeah.
Aaron Parkinson:
So all somebody has to do is see you on a screen, 7, 8, 9, 10 times, and then they go, "Well, he must know what he's doing. He's on the screen all the time." You and I both know that just means turning on the camera and talking. But psychologically, that's how we're programmed as humans, is like, "Oh, I saw him a hundred times in the last month. He must be rich. He must be intelligent. He must know what he's doing. He must know more than me because he's on the screen."
Jason Drohn:
None of those things is probably true.
Aaron Parkinson:
Doesn't matter. I mean, we have people coming to our agency all the time and they're like, "How do I build my audience?" I'm like, "We make little videos, and we pay to put it in front of people." And they're like, "We give value," and they're like, "That's it?" I'm like, "That's it." That's it. Look at the Gary Vaynerchuks, or the Frank Kerns, or the Grant Cardones, or Brendon Burchards or whatever. Half the stuff they say is complete nonsense.
Jason Drohn:
Or you've heard it a million times before. It's just the way they say it.
Aaron Parkinson:
Yeah, and I'm not hating on them. I think what they do is brilliant. I think it's genius. It's just about being consistent and repetitive and putting it out there, as you've done over the last 40 days. And then it gets shocking, doesn't it, how-
Jason Drohn:
Oh, yeah. Fast they're coming-
Aaron Parkinson:
How many people start reaching out to you.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah. It's crazy. One of my clients said that in Expert Secrets, Russell Brunson's book, in that book, he said something about 100 days. Like you need 100 days of expert material out there, delivered in a chunk, and then you will be set for the rest of your life. That's what he says in the book. And I do believe it.
Aaron Parkinson:
Probably a pretty smart guy. If he says that, it's probably not that far off. And I've challenged some of my clients to do three-
Jason Drohn:
Yeah, three.
Aaron Parkinson:
Pieces of content a week.
Jason Drohn:
Three a week is what we've been doing.
Aaron Parkinson:
For a year, right? So if you break that, that's 150 in a year. And most people, they won't commit to it. They're just like, "It's too much," but the reality is you carve out your niche, and you build your audience that you can sell stuff to. And you do it for cheap, super cheap, like 10 times cheaper than television.
Jason Drohn:
Oh, yeah. Well, it's like, just the amount of... Between organic and paid traffic that we send, we would probably... If we were spending $10,000 a day, straight $10,000 a day, it would probably rival what we're spending much a 10th of that, between organic and paid. Do you know what I mean?
Aaron Parkinson:
Oh, yeah.
Jason Drohn:
And the relationship, when it starts from search and then is backed up by paid, is different than when it's interruption-based paid and comes in and they learn about you, and then... So it's like, "Oh, I found them because Google gave them validation because I discovered them."
Aaron Parkinson:
Right, or somebody else.
Jason Drohn:
Right.
Aaron Parkinson:
Like somebody else's podcast, and I've got that a couple of times in the last month. "I saw you on such and such's podcast, and what you said about that was interesting. Can we talk about my business?" And I'm like, "Damn." And they've already been pre-sold on me, and they've reached out to me. So now I'm in control of the conversation. It's not me trying to force the conversation onto them, which is just a significantly better place to be when you're making and creating offers. Well, we're 10:35. Anything that you want to add to your genius-ness today? Because you are a genius, good sir.
Jason Drohn:
Oh, I don't know about that. So are you, I mean. No, I'm good. I think next week, we'll talk about something else cool, and kind of go from there.
Aaron Parkinson:
Awesome. Well, thank you everybody for joining us again today. We'll see you next week.
Jason Drohn:
Yeah, have fun.
Aaron Parkinson:
All right, take care.
Jason Drohn:
Bye.