Marketing podcast, PreneurCast, is for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs. Each week, author and marketer Pete Williams and digital media producer Dom Goucher discuss entrepreneurship, business, internet marketing and productivity.
Inspired by a presentation given by Eugene Ware of Noble Samurai, Pete and Dom discuss Marketing Assets, the things in your business that bring you more traffic, improve your opt-ins and conversions, and affect other aspects of your profitability.
Pete and Dom discuss the assets in your business that affects your profitability
Transcript:
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Episode 043:
Marketing Assets
Pete Williams: Welcome, everybody, to this week’s edition of PreneurCast. I’m Pete Williams and beside me, as always, is the Adam to my Eve, the Barbie to my Ken, Dom Goucher.
Dom Goucher: With those two, I’m glad I’m just metaphorically beside you. I was already with snoochie boochies for being Jay to your Silent Bob.
Pete: Yes, good point, great movies. How’s the week been? Been busy?
Dom: Been crazy busy, crazy busy. Just had a few days that last weekend back in the UK and it’s just all, people were all waiting for me to get back, which is great. It’s great to have kind of a pipeline of work.
Pete: Fair enough, sir.
Dom: How about you?
Pete: Plenty going on. Obviously, wedding festivities is only a week and a half away, which is exciting.
Dom: Indeed.
Pete: And honeymoon festivities, which is even more exciting; so just trying to get everything organized before those shenanigans take place.
Dom: Watch out. Well, most of the southern hemisphere, really.
Pete: We’re going to pray for sunshine. We’re getting married on a rooftop, so there’s no protection. We’re going to pray for sunshine.
Dom: OK. We’ll have a little chant for you.
Pete: Fantastic. So this week, marketing assets.
Dom: Yeah. I’ve been waiting a week for this actually. It sounds a little bit odd. But really, as we said at the end of last week’s show, the presentation that Eugene Ware gave in London a couple years ago now that we both watched was quite a significant presentation for both of us. We both took something away from it, even though at the time we weren’t working together.
So it was great to chat about this and then realize that we both got so much from it. It’s great that we’re going to do a show on it. Yeah, so we should position what we’re talking about because there’s two crazy guys just rambling away about this other guy, and it doesn’t really mean anything to quite a lot of people, I would say. Let’s stop dropping names and start talking facts. Can you give us a bit of a background to this whole thing?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. Eugene is the CEO and founder of Noble Samurai, which makes, among other things, the Market Samurai software which is one of the biggest pieces of software that they use in the internet marketing industry. A lot of people are probably aware of that particular software package, and I’ve actually known Eugene for close on 12 years now.
He used to work for a marketer here in Melbourne called Steve McKnight who runs a website in consulting information production business called PropertyInvesting.com; and Eugene was in his team for a while. That’s how I first met Eugene. The interesting thing is that, at the start of the conversation that Eugene shared about marketing assets, he actually applied it to an offline property space, which gave it a lot of context, which is really cool.
It’s probably worth starting there to give this whole thing a good bit of context we can then delve deep into. The way he started his presentation was with a question that is all about offline wealth building; because realistically, entrepreneurs and business owners, one of the core reasons most of us start businesses is obviously to create wealth – to create an income, to create some money, to be able to live a certain lifestyle and all that other sort of good stuff.
So fundamentally, it’s all about ROI and income. The question Eugene asked is, what’s going to be easier if you want to try and generate $10,000 of net profit: to start with $10,000 and have to get a 100% return on your money to generate that $10,000 in profit, or start with $1,000,000 and try and generate $10,000? In that scenario, it’s only a 1% return on your investment, which is going to be easier to achieve.
Obviously, the answer is to start with $1,000,000; it’s going to be easier to generate $10,000 on profit. It’s a 1% return, you can get that by putting money in a bank or term deposits, or all that government bonds-type stuff. It’s very, very easy to get a 1% return. The reason for that and the reason why that’s easier is because you’ve got a bigger asset base to start with. You’ve got more wealth sitting there as an asset to then get an ROI off. You only need to get a small return to generate the revenue or the profit or the income you’re after. Does that make sense?
Dom: Yeah. And I think, as you say, he started off with that. That’s really what hooked me. And it hooked a lot of people that, as you say, starting off with your $10,000 seed and trying to get a return on that is an uphill climb. But if you start with – which is where we’re going, with an existing asset that’s of a good size, then getting a return on that asset, even a sizable or decent return on that asset is actually relatively easy. So yeah, it’s a good example and a good starting point for where we’re going forward with this.
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. The key distinction there is that if you think about real-world wealth building, when you’re trying to build properties or build stock portfolio to give you a return by dividends, whatever it might be, the core focus people have when they start that wealth-building technique generally is to build up their asset base. They’re not trying to live off the money from Day One; they’ve got to take that initial investment, put it into the asset, and try to grow the asset over time so eventually the asset spits out a nice residual income for you.
You try to just reinvest all your cash to build up your stock portfolio, or you continually improve the house or reinvest to buy a second house, whatever it might be. And the focus initially is on building the asset base, not about building and living off the income straight away. So many people, when they look at business and starting their entrepreneurial journey, it’s all about the income and not have anything to do with building an asset base that will generate an income for you.
And the people wonder and get frustrated why the income doesn’t come straightaway. Well, it won’t come straightaway in the property or in stocks, so why should it in entrepreneurial business ventures? It’s the same sort of logic that needs to get applied here when we think of assets and marketing assets.
Dom: Absolutely. Again, that’s another major, major point and a bit of a pattern interrupt to just drag up some NLP for a second – I’ll wash my hands later. But yeah, because you’re right. So many people and certainly, if you look into the people who market on the internet specifically as the sole source of their business and traffic, a lot of people get into this and are expecting immediate returns.
But if you are, if you come from an investing background, or a property development, or one of these other kind of larger or more long-term businesses, the idea of building an asset is primary, and the idea of a return is not really your sole focus immediately, as you say. It is a really important thing to stand back and think about with any business – just a little bit of a nod to The E-Myth, if you are in the business rather than, well, working.
Pete: Yeah. And a great way of looking at it as well is through like a balance sheet, a profit and loss sheet-type thing. And don’t worry, it’s not going to get boring accounting stuff here on PreneurCast. But if you think about…
Dom: I had my hand on the door… I had my hand on the door handle there, and I was on my way out.
Pete: But if you look at your profit and loss for a traditional investor in the context of what we’re talking about here, you’ve got your income; let’s say it’s for ease of numbers $5000 a month in income. You’ve got your expenses; hypothetically, let’s say $2000 of expenses, which leaves you with a net profit of $3000. That’s how much you get to take home at the end of every month hypothetically.
Now, in a traditional investing sense, what drives that income? What is it that actually generates that income? It’s the assets on your balance sheet. It’s the assets you have that generate income for you. Because remember, if you’ve read Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad Poor Dad, his definition of an asset is something that at the end of all your costs, generates you some revenue or some profit.
A house is only an asset if it actually pays your rent above and beyond its costs. Your home is not an asset because it doesn’t generate you any revenue. So from a profit-and-loss perspective, the income figure is driven by the balance sheet. You might have a real estate portfolio; let’s say worth $500,000, and that generates you a $1000 net every month. You might have some cash in the bank; let’s say $120,000, and that generates you $500 a month in interest.
You might have a $200,000 stock portfolio that generates $3,500 in dividends a month. I’m sure those assets don’t generate that sort of ROI, but it’s those three assets generating the revenue that is pumping into your income. And that’s the big thing is when you apply this to business; obviously, we’ve spoken at length that fundamentally the profit-and-loss statement of a business is driven by the 7 Levers that we’ve spoken about. It’s all about the traffic, the opt-ins, the conversions, and all that sort of stuff that generates, at the end of the day, the profit in a business.
We’ve spoken about it quite a bit; and if you haven’t listened to that episode, I encourage you to listen to that past episode, or listen to it again. It’s the key episode, I think, that we shared here on PreneurCast. So the profit-and-loss statement from a business owner’s perspective is basically the 7 Levers. They’re the key drivers of the profit you actually get. So if you take a step backwards and apply this same concept to the 7 Levers and to an entrepreneur’s profit, what drives those numbers?
What drives the funnel and the metrics and the figures that come out on that 7 Levers report? It’s the marketing assets you have. Traffic; what assets do you have out there to drive traffic to your business? What assets do you have out there that generate conversions in your business? What assets do you have out there that generate repeat upsells and back-end sales for your business?
And these are the marketing assets that you should be focused on growing, because the bigger the asset you have, the bigger the marketing assets, the more marketing assets you have out there, the more ROI, the more revenue, the more profit they’re going to spit out automatically. The dividends that those marketing assets are going to give you will drive the 7 Levers which drive the end-day profit. Is that sort of clear?
Dom: Absolutely. This was the cornerstone of Eugene’s presentation, and this is really the meat of it, is that we started, the introduction we’ve just given was all about traditional assets and we talked a lot about real estate, we talked a lot about property. And a lot of people can handle the idea of a house or other property being an asset. People can appreciate that a vehicle might be an asset to a business. These are all traditional things. But when we’re looking certainly in an online world, then our assets are different things.
In an offline world, they can be different to these physical things as well; but in an online world definitely, we have got to look in a different way. We’ve got to look at other things as being assets, and as you label it as from Eugene’s presentation. They’re marketing assets, they’re things we’re actually going to be enhancing and building on using the 7 Levers framework. So rather than just looking at 7 Levers – this is a great idea to go back and look at the 7 Levers or listen to the 7 Levers show again, is to look at it with what we’re about to kind of go through now.
It’s this idea that you actually have things in your business that are marketing assets that you can focus each effort and each lever, technique or whatever, each improvement on to improve things like traffic or conversions. Again, this is why I was so interested in talking about this, because these things fit together perfectly, right?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. I think a nice way of defining it is in the same way that Robert Kiyosaki defines an asset, that it is something that actually sits there and generates you a positive cashflow. Well, a marketing asset is basically anything that increases your ability to improve your 7 Levers as close to autopilot as possible. Obviously, with a house or a property that’s being rented out, you have to do some sort of maintenance on that property.
You have to obviously have some investment of time and effort to keep that asset growing and stable. But generally, on a day-to-day basis, that property sits there with a tenant that pays you rent without you having to do a whole lot. So the whole focus needs to be, as an entrepreneur, is to actually be putting in place a whole bunch of marketing assets that are as close to autopilot as possible will drive and fuel your 7 Levers in the business.
That way, it’s going to increase your revenue and also obviously increase your profit, as we spoke about in that 7 Levers episode. So that’s what the focus should be here, is building assets that will automatically add value to each one of those levers which drives the profit.
Dom: Cool. Right, so let us get off the theory and get on to the reality. Can we give some examples of things that would be marketing assets that people can be developing?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. If we look at the first lever – because remember, each of the different levers in the 7 Levers have different assets that drive that type of revenue or that type of number. So if you’re looking at traffic for example, that’s used in an online business context and offline business as well. So in an online scenario, what sort of assets could you have out there that are driving your visitors or your traffic level, while obviously having keywords with Google AdWords?
If you had 500 different keywords in your AdWords campaign, this is using Google AdWords Tool, but you choose what keyword people can search on. When they do search that keyword, your ad appears in the Google search results. Now, those are 500 little assets that every time someone searches for those keywords, your ad is going to appear as a chance to get traffic to your website.
They’re marketing assets. So the more keywords you have in your AdWords campaign that are relevant, the more marketing assets you have out there. Also, pieces of content on the web; if you’re looking at an SEO-type or natural traffic-generation platform, then doing things like guest blogging and that sort of stuff give you more pieces of content out across the web that can generate traffic for your website. That’s another form and another series of marketing assets.
In an offline world, having A-frames outside your building, having listing in online directories like Google Maps or TrueLocal and things like that are great ways to generate foot traffic to your business. To a certain extent and if you listen to the Preneur Hierarchy episode, you’ll get a bit more understanding of this. But billboards, the most billboards you have out there are marketing assets to a certain extent because it’s more opportunities for people to see and react to and come into your store.
All this sort of stuff; radio ads are another form technically of marketing assets. The more ads you play on the radio, the more response you’re going to get of people calling and responding to your business. That’s the sort of assets that I’m talking about, and looking at all these different marketing tactics and techniques as little assets, particularly if you can have them on autopilot.
Dom: Yeah. I want to go back over those because we ran through that list. But each one of those, there’s aspects to it and it’s really important to just drill down into at least these first examples. The first one you came up with, the paid traffic from pay-per-click, for example, through Google AdWords, that’s one of the most unlikely things people would see as an asset. If you said what are your business assets, I don’t think anybody would say, “Oh yeah, I’ve got 250 keyworded ads running on Google at the moment.”
A lot of people would see that as potentially a business cost rather than an asset; and I think it’s important to take on board how you’ve positioned it. That first of all, it’s an asset because it’s bringing you traffic. It’s something that’s feeding that traffic into the top of the funnel, the first lever of the 7 Levers, on autopilot. As long as you keep paying the bill to Google when somebody sees your ad or when somebody types in a search, they see your ad, they have the potential to click on it.
They click on it, it feeds that traffic into the top of the funnel, and that is an asset. It’s bringing you traffic. The other aspect to look at is it’s something that can be improved. I don’t want to go into the details of AdWords, although we could because maybe some people know this, maybe they don’t; but you are a bit of an AdWords god.
Pete: I’m going to put a stamp on that. Not in the last little bit. We used to – well, we still do; a significant number of dollars are spent on AdWords every year, but I’m not so much hands on anymore. They made a lot of changes in the last 12 months and I haven’t had my finger on the pulse as much as I used to. So I’ll be open a bit, bit of a caveat.
Dom: Yep. No, but the important thing is you started out by being very much involved. And then you applied some important principles that we talk about on this show, which is that it wasn’t part of your job to do that, so you actually found somebody and you outsourced it. There’s no need to say that you’re not the expert and it’s a negative, it’s actually a positive. You now employ somebody who does it. But the point is that each one of those adverts in and of itself can be looked at, studied.
You can measure it, monitor it, measure it, and then therefore, you can mine it which we’ve talked about. You can also be looking for new keywords, new opportunities, new ad copy. Each one of these ads, or the entire campaign or whatever, in and of itself can be addressed as part of the first lever just on its own as a way to improve that one lever and then get you 10% improvement.
But then you talked about other things, possibly more passive traffic like SEO traffic, search engine traffic, content, content on your website. I think people do see content as an asset because they put effort into building it. But there are lots of different kinds of content and different places you can put content. You talked about guest blogging. There’s more opportunities for getting your content out there and promoted, syndicated which we talked about briefly in a couple of shows.
So again, content, it’s not just about to improve that with a traffic lever. It’s not just about more content, it might be different places to put content, and another great asset. This, I think, some of the more technical people who are involved in marketing on the internet probably pick up on this a little more readily. But any links back to your content, or back to your website are real assets, aren’t they?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely, because they definitely affect the way the search engines rank your site and the natural listing. So the more links you have, the more chance you’re going to actually rank higher in the search engine. That’s definitely an online version of a marketing asset. The thing is that when you discuss investing in assets in the real world, people talk about how big their portfolio is. They don’t talk about how much revenue that their stocks generate for them or how much they charge and get at the end of the day in profit from rent.
They talk about, “How big is your real estate portfolio? I have seven houses worth 1.3 million dollars,” or “I have a stock portfolio worth $75,000.” It’s all about the size of the asset that they talk about, not about the revenue. But if you talk to business owners, all the conversation is generally about revenue, “What’s your turnover,” and all that sort of stuff. It’s not about how many marketing assets you have out there; because like normal investing, once you get a big enough portfolios of assets, the revenue and the income is just an automatic by-product if you build the right assets.
The focus should always be building the right assets. Having that little mindset shift makes the task of building assets more enjoyable because you actually feel like you’re building something of value. Whereas, most people when they are doing backlinking or they’re writing a direct mail piece to send out to the clients or the past clients of their briefing business or whatever it might be, or trying to put together an advert for their dental practice in the Yellow Pages, I find that drudgery and not enjoyable because then I’m considering it as, “Hey, I’m putting out a little asset here.
I’m doing an asset that’s going to automatically generate business and leads on autopilot for me.” So I think that little mindset change actually makes the task of doing these assets and building this portfolio of marketing assets a lot more enjoyable as well.
Dom: Yeah, I like that point actually. I do think that some people do see some of these tasks as drudgery, and we can talk about other ways of managing that; but the first step is to realize what it is, to realize it is an asset, and to be able to look at even a Google AdWords ad and realize that if it sat out there potentially ready to pop up when somebody types in that keyword, it’s ready to give you automatic traffic without you going and manually doing anything.
The more of those you can come up with and the more you can optimize them, the better off, the more of an asset it truly is. Back to the point you made, and I think this is really important; that it’s not good saying, “I’ve got 1000 keywords out there,” without really knowing what they’re doing for you, which is something we talked about coming at from various angles previously.
But as you say, it’s not an asset until it’s actually bringing you something in and of itself, on autopilot was what you said. And it is really important that you look into that, because that’s the other side of this. If you’ve got a thousand out there, but they’re for some reason not functioning properly, not bringing you the right kinds of traffic or not working at all, then it’s not a good asset and maybe you want to get rid of it.
Pete: Well, as Michael Douglas says in the movie Wall Street, “It’s a dog with fleas.” It’s like in your investing portfolio; if you have a stock that’s just sitting there, not going up or down in value and not generating any dividends for you, it’s a wasted asset. That Zero-Based Thinking approach we spoke about, it’s not giving you a good ROI. You want to make sure that your assets are giving you an ROI; otherwise, you move your attention somewhere else.
And if we take another example of another sort of marketing asset is a good, cleansed, accurate, up-to-date database of previous clients. Having previous clients in and amongst themselves is not a good thing, there’s no value in that. Having a database of up-to-date information about these people with their contact information, their addresses, their email, that sort of stuff is a good asset. So if you compare this again to offline assets and think about a rental property, a house, a bungalow for example; well, you can have a house that’s falling apart.
There are leaks in the roof, the air conditioner’s not working, and there’s mildew in the bathroom. That’s a ‘dog with fleas’-type asset. That’s a database that’s not actually accurate. That house is not going to get you the best rental return you can actually get. It’s not going to get you premium rental rates. Whereas, a property that’s been cared for, that’s been painted quite regularly, that’s been updated and kept in good condition, it’s going to generate better rental rates; and it’s the same with your database.
If you’ve got a retail clothing store, having a database of all your past clients which is accurate and up-to-date and in some sort of software application that allows you to do email plus @ on will, or on autopilot. Maybe you’re using OfficeAutopilot or Infusionsoft or AWeb or something like that that allows you to put your data in there. That’s a property, a four-bedroom house. That has good carpeting and fantastic heating system, and a very clean garden. It’s a different sort of asset.
Just having a house that’s dilapidated, that’s not a good asset. There are different levels of assets as well, so you’ve got to think, is my database as an asset in my business a good asset? Is it an up-to-date asset? Is it an asset that’s going to give me an ROI? Because you may have a database of past clients, and counting your 3,476 previous clients is completely irrelevant.
It’s like saying a three-bedroom house can be a real crappy three-bedroom house, as I explained, or a really good three-bedroom house. Having a past client base of 3,476 people could be a good history if you’ve actually got them in a database, or a bad history if you just let them walk through the door and walk out without any actual collection of information. That’s a big distinction as well.
Dom: Yeah. For me, and being slightly more specific to the online space for a second, one of the simplest things to do, but one of the most powerful things to do – we’re talking here about collecting a list of past clients, but I’m making sure the data is complete. One of the most important pieces of data is in an online world, because people are forever collecting email addresses, and sometimes they just collect the email address.
If you go to the website, you may have a sign-up form to collect the contact details if somebody visits your site. And because somebody somewhere or on a podcast said you need to be collecting this information, you’ve been collecting it. But there’s a big difference in that list between the people that just signed up and the people that actually bought something. To me, segmenting the list is a relatively straightforward task, but it provides you with a very valuable piece of information.
And that information becomes far more of an asset than it’s just a list, as you say, if you have this ratty old property that really you can’t rent out because it’s not in any fit state. You might be able to rent it out, but you won’t get very much for it. Whereas, if you have a property in a good location and you have a lot of marketing materials for it, it’d be very easy to rent it out.
Similarly, if you have a huge list of people that at some point interacted with you in some way, whether it’s Twitter followers, Facebook fans, whatever; that’s all well and good, and it has some value. But people that you have registered definitely have bought something from you, to me, is adding incredible value in one step to that list, in the same way as not having recorded anything about people that have bought from you in an offline sense versus a record of people that have bought from you that are actually customers, yeah?
Pete: Yep. Spot on.
Dom: So I guess that’ll probably come out as our tech tip for this week. If you’re using some kind of contact details-capturing thing on your website or otherwise in an offline world, make sure it’s complete. But in an online world, start trying to track which people in that list have bought from you because you can talk to them differently, which we’ve talked about in other shows.
But this all is around customers and customer data as an asset, and that asset can apply to different levers. We’re talking really down at the bottom of the Preneur Hierarchy, another show that’s worth another listen; that existing customers or past customers that have bought from you is the easiest group of people to market to. So that is a conversion asset, isn’t it?
Pete: Yeah, absolutely. And this touched on the whole database that you were talking about then; if we again relate it back to something people know, like property, you have a database of past clients and past purchasers and things like that – that’s your house. If you don’t have an autoresponder sequence in place that is designed to upsell and cross-sell people who want to purchase from you, not having that is like not renting out your property. You know, the property itself is not going to generate you any sort of revenue in the way as an asset is defined by Robert Kiyosaki, unless you have a tenant in there paying rent.
So having a huge database of people just sitting there is like just having a house that’s empty, it’s completely pointless. The revenue that you’re going to generate from this asset is by actually working the asset. And in real estate, you work the asset by having people in there paying rent. You work your database by having an autoresponder upsell marketing systems on autopilot in your business generating that rental revenue.
Dom: You could just say “Actually just having a list of people who you could at least make an offer to would be handy.”
Pete: Absolutely, absolutely.
Dom: We don’t have to get all technical with upsells and things like that, just to make an offer to them. As you say, a house isn’t an asset unless it’s working. It can’t work on its own, you have to have a tenant in there. I do think that that’s a great analogy because there are so many people who do have these lists that have gone out there because somebody on a podcast somewhere said get a list, collect the data, use AWeber or MailChimp or any one of those. They’ve got a list but they’re not doing anything. They’re not even communicating with the list, let alone making offers to them or in any way trying to generate revenue.
Pete: Yeah, exactly right. And then you’ve got things like, to really drag this analogy out a little bit; if you look at content like guest blog posts for example. Now, a guest blog post can do two things for you: it can generate you traffic that actually purchases and engages with your products and services. So you write a guest post with a call-to-action at the bottom, a direct response-type article, or the article can also – if it has backlinks in there as you spoke about earlier, generate you SEO benefit which is a long-term by-product.
Now if we compare that to real estate, or let’s say we’ll compare this to stock. We’ll get away from real estate; we’ll compare it to shares in stocks. Now, if you have a piece of content out there, the only benefit it’s going to give you because you don’t have a direct response call-to-action in the article, the only benefit’s going to be a backlink that may one day help add to the Google algorithm to increase your site’s ranking.
To me that’s like holding a stock that’s not generating you any dividends; you’re purely owning that stock for it to hopefully go up in value in the future and actually sell a product for a profit. You’re purely doing a capital gains play with that stock. That’s the type of online content that goes out there with purely a backlinking plan. Yes, it might work for you; but you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Whereas, if you can write content that has a direct call-to-action that people will respond to by reading the article, actually engaging that article and click through on the link and actually buy your product or join your opt-in list or whatever it may be, that’s like having a stock out there or a share that’s not only potentially going to increase in value from a capital gains perspective, but it’s also going to give you a return right now in dividends.
What’s a better stock to own, something that’s going to go up in value and give you dividends, or something that just might go up in value? So when you actually get your assets out there by doing online content creation or you’re doing a Yellow Pages ad for example to again get a bit more analog, it’s like having a Yellow Pages ad that may just get a phone call because it’s in the Yellow Pages.
But if you have and apply some direct response principles with strong headlines and a clear call-to-action in your advert, that’s going to be an asset that will actually generate you leads just by default. Because in that medium, but it’s actually going to generate you a direct response-type level of inquiries due to the actually calls-to-action you have in that ad, in that asset. So there are two plays to every asset: there’s long-term gains – capital gains, and there’s dividend gains – returns right now. Does that analogy make any sense whatsoever?
Dom: Yes. Yes, it does. It’s a good one. If you’re into that game at all, it makes more sense. But just to separate it out from the analogy, it’s important to look at what job your content is doing. If your content is doing the job of an asset, if it can generate traffic, if it has got a call-to-action, then you can see the value in it. It’s that mind shift thing again, yeah? If you’re just writing an article for the sake of getting a backlink, which is something that people in the online world will know about, it can be a little bit disheartening.
Whereas, if you are writing a piece with the intention, with the goal of getting somebody to take an action, you can really visualize that quite easily as being an asset, and you can apply that straight across into those. I brought up customers being a conversion asset; and you talked about the autoresponders, the automatic email systems that communicate with them. If we take the principles like content principle and work in developing content with a purpose and bring to play your direct response techniques, then you can sit down and you can look at what you’re sending out in these automated emails, and work on that to talk and communicate with your customers to improve conversion.
You can literally be directly addressing content to people to get a response, it’s not just leaving content lying around anymore, which is more of a traffic thing – posting things on you blog or guest posts or whatever. Putting it into an autoresponse sequence and having it email to your list to people you know, especially if they’re people you know have bought from you, then communicating another offer to them that’s up their alley or whatever, then it improves your conversion. So again, these techniques, we’re just bringing it all back.
It’s all going back to the 7 Levers and picking something and working on it. But this marketing assets is just a different way of looking at it, and the kind of rapport here for me is that is stand back and look at these things. Look at your marketing assets. Certainly, it’s what happened to me when I saw this presentation. I stood back and I started to look at things that I’d really not paid that much attention to, or I had been a bit less than enthusiastic towards.
For example, your first example, AdWords ads. Some people run their entire business or certainly have run their entire businesses on them in the past. Other people go, “I can take that or leave that, not really bother, don’t know,” and not really even willing to give it a go. But it’s a potential asset. It’s a traffic asset. And if you’re looking to work in through the 7 Levers to improve your traffic, then it’s certainly something to give a go and see what sort of result you get.
Pete: Absolutely, because that’s the thing: when you assess your business through the 7 Levers and actually look at each of those levers in your business and how they apply to generating the profit that you make in your business, if one of those levers is not giving you the outcome you want, you can’t increase it by 10%. The way you do increase it by 10% is by increasing the relative marketing assets that drive that lever. That’s all it is; it’s just about putting more assets in place where the return they spit out affects that particular lever directly.
Dom: Absolutely, and so- quick summary, just some examples of things you can add to the mix, and we covered some of these before, but not in this context, but we covered it in the 7 Levers podcast, so as Pete said go back and have another listen. But traffic assets, we’ve talked, you can add an AdWords campaign. Quite a lot of people can add an AdWords campaign because right now, they’re not doing that.
And it’s not as hard and scary as you think, and there are people out there that’ll do it for you. You can outsource it, and so give it a go. You can add that if your current traffic activities aren’t up to scratch or you think you’ve maxed it out; there’s extra content that you can create and have it go different places. You can syndicate the content, you can go looking for backlinks, opportunities to get links back to your site. And there are lots of other completely separate traffic-getting things.
Pete: Putting an A-frame outside your retail store. Yellow Pages ads still work. Putting your business, your plumbing business on Google Maps and TrueLocal, putting adverts in your local newspaper, doing mailbox drops; all these sorts of stuff are different assets that can work for your business if applied properly.
Dom: Yeah. And if you’ve got these things, if you’ve got an A-frame or you’ve got a Google Places listing, you can still plus it. You can plus a Google Places listing by getting a review on it, yeah?
Pete: Absolutely.
Dom: You can plus you’re A-frame by sticking a neon luminous ugly sticker on it to attract attention; ugly works, as we’ve talked about before. But you can plus them or you can add them. But the message here is that they are assets, they’re doing a job. They are enhancing in and of themselves your business. And again, a couple of examples for conversion before we wrap up, customers are a massive business asset.
I think we kind of just slid that one in and glossed over it a little bit; but your customer base is a massive business asset that can work for you but only if you do something with them. And Pete your example was great; having the list of people who bought from you is a good start, but having a complete database, having useful information, and then doing something with it is the most important part of that.
Pete: Absolutely. That’s exactly what it’s all about. So I think that has hopefully given people a clear understanding of what a marketing asset is, and why it’s important to be aware and think about the activities you’re doing to generate the revenue in your business through the 7 Levers; and looking at all those actions and systems you have in place as marketing assets because that’s what they really are if you look at the definition we used in today’s show.
So, as we touched on, the action point for today is to go out and actually make a list of all the marketing assets you currently have in your business that are generating a return that directly affect the 7 Levers, or one of the 7 Levers. Take some time and take stock of your marketing portfolio. Investors who have real estate and stock portfolios monitor that portfolio religiously. We should be monitoring our marketing portfolio and our marketing assets with the same sort of diligence and attention. That’s what people should be thinking about today.
Dom: Absolutely, and the little tech tip that I slipped in there, you talked about maybe using software to manage the information you have about your customers in an offline business. And in an online world, I mentioned trying to find a way to segment your list to be able to know who has bought from you and who hasn’t. If you’re just collecting a random group of emails; some people have bought, some people have just taken your free stuff, and you don’t know the difference, you can’t effectively communicate with those people.
As far as the 7 Levers are concerned, they’re all prospects of an unknown origin and an unknown nature. So segmenting through some system is, I think, an important thing to try and achieve if you’ve already got the list or you’re building a list right now.
Pete: It’s like subdividing your block of land to get two four-bedroom or three-bedroom apartments on the one block.
Dom: That analogy has done its job for this week, mate.
Pete: Damn it, fine.
Dom: And I’ll just change the subject rapidly over to our sponsors, which I will try and do in a non-corporate way this week. I’m not sure I’m going to achieve it, but I’ll give it a go. We haven’t mentioned many books this week, normally we’re a bit book-heavy. But we have two sponsors for the show at the moment. We have Read It For Me who are an awesome book review/overview/preview/interview service.
I use all those terms from the speed reading world because Read It For Me is a great service to subscribe to, to get a very good overview of business and personal development books. Most of the things that we talk about on the show are covered in that service. If you go to ReadItFor.Me/PreneurCast, there’s a little page there that we’ve put up, Pete and I, where we go into the membership area of Read It For Me and show you exactly what Steve and the team do to give you a really fantastic summary of these books, which is a multimedia summary.
Pete: That’s it, exactly right. It’s so engaging. That’s what I love about it. It’s not your typical book summary service which is just the summary written out in black and white text on a page which is just disengaging. The stuff that these guys do is videos with moving images and cartoons and stuff like that, and really very visual PDFs and little workbook. It’s really, really cool.
I don’t know another word for it other than an engaging way to get a summary for a book that you may want to delve into a lot deeper. And that’s the best thing about it, is it’s a sampler, it’s a way to just sample a whole bunch of books around business management and personal development that will obviously help grow your knowledge to become a better investor in marketing assets.
It’s a great way to sample a whole bunch of books before you go out and actually buy the actual book and devour it that way. Because if you want to devour it that way, you can jump onboard with our other sponsor, Audible.
Dom: What a segue!
Pete: I worked on that all week.
Dom: You did, and you didn’t warn me. Audible are a fantastic service that have audiobooks. And they have a huge library that you can download to your generic MP3 player or your computer device of any platform. They also have a deal for PreneurCast subscribers. If you go to AudibleTrial.Com/PreneurCast, you can get a trial and a free download of a publication from their library, so give it a go.
Pete: Over 100,000 titles.
Dom: Sorry?
Pete: Over 100,000 audiobooks they have.
Dom: Crikey! I don’t think you’ll run out of those in a week. But it’s a great way to consume the content. Having it in audio format means that you can be doing something else responsibly while you’re consuming the content, and you can speed it up or slow it down while you’re doing it. Pete is famous for listening to audio books at 2-speed to consume them faster. Now, I actually just want to add one little thing with the Read It For Me, which is that we talk about it as a summary service.
We talk about it as a way to get an overview of a book that you might want to delve into deeper. Something that I’ve started to find with Read It For Me is that I’m actually appreciating it as a summary or reminder service for books that I’ve already read. Because of the quality of the work that Steve and the team do with their summaries and the fact that they give you memory aids for the publication that they’ve sat and worked out themselves.
They don’t just copy bits out of the book, they sit down and think about it and put together a memory aid for you to remind you of the key points and key aspects of the book and the key takeaways. And so if it’s a book that you read a while ago and basically have forgotten five of the seven key steps, or two of the seven key steps and you can remember five, then Read It For Me is a great way of just going back over it again.
So I think that it’s great that we have both Read It For Me and Audible as sponsors because they’re services we both use and we can recommend wholeheartedly. Because they just do, as Pete says, enhance your ability to consume this content. So, at that, I think, we can wrap up for the week, Pete. What are we going to talk about next week?
Pete: I want to take this creation of marketing assets a little bit further, and we’re going to talk about content versus mechanics. I’m going to talk about it in the context of outsourcing because obviously, a lot of people want to know a lot more about outsourcing – how to do it successfully. I’ve done a couple of guests webinars in the last couple of weeks for a few friends of mine and their marketing communities, and I’ve been speaking about this content versus mechanics-type thing.
I’ve gotten very articulate now to actually be able to share it with PreneurCast. We won’t say it out loud but I think we’ll use those guys as tests to actually make sure I’ve got my articulation of this concept right before I share it with PreneurCast. But I think it’s now right, and we can talk about content versus mechanics in the context of outsourcing and how it applies to building market assets. That can be the title of the show, that longwinded title.
Dom: Yeah. I might edit that a little bit by next week. Cool. Alright. Well, I’m looking forward to that because you know it’s one of my favorite topics as well. So see you next week!
Pete: Talk to you then!
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Links:
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http://ReadItFor.Me/preneurcast – ReadItForMe creates multi-media summaries of popular business and personal development books. Visit our link for a 14-day trial and a PreneurCast listener 10% discount on their membership fees.
http://audibletrial.com/preneurcast – Audible has a huge library of audio books of all types. Visit our link for a 14-day trial and PreneurCast listener coupon for a free audio book.
Books:
Rich Dad Poor Dad – Robert Kiyosaki
PreneurCast Episodes:
These previous episodes are talked about in today’s show. Go back and listen, if you missed them, over at http://preneurmedia.tv.
PreneurCast Episode 16 – The 7 Levers of Business
PreneurCast Episode 37 – The Preneur Hierarchy
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