Brian Kurtz

It’s a pleasure to be here talking about market development strategy.

Brian Kurtz

It’s a great question.

I spent some time with one of the great online marketers with market development strategy. I think most people have heard of Perry Marshall. Perry and I did an interview not that long ago, and we got deep on this subject of why it’s important to dive in and understand not just classics books but also understand the source of where things come from. It’s like your kid comes up to you one day and says “Where the babies come from?”

Knowing where the source will enable you to ask better questions and to be more involved with the state of the art today.

Perfect example that came up just recently was I was on another podcast talking about direct mail because that’s where I grew up. I grew up in the world of direct mail. That means I paid for postage, for paper, and for physical product to send out in the mail which a lot of people listening here are saying, “Wow. This guy is a dinosaur, isn’t he?”

I always say, “Paying postage made me a better marketer.” Because what I had to think about before I put a piece in the mail because of what I was spending, was way different than anybody today including me because I do a ton of online market development strategy today.

Before you hit send on an email, you think that hitting send on an email since it’s so cheap you can do anything. The fact is you can’t.

If you understood classic market development strategy and classic direct mail, you would know how much care and concern it takes for every single message that goes out.

If you did that online, you wouldn’t waste any circulation online. You wouldn’t lose messaging online.

Brian Kurtz

You would have much deeper relationship with your audience as opposed to not knowing that one time you send out an email that’s so off base that you thought couldn’t do any harm because it was cheap to send and how many unsubscribers you might get or how many people stop opening.

I’ve heard our stories about stuff that hasn’t been congruent and then all of a sudden if you don’t get a lot of unsubscribers that the open rate will weigh down.

Brian Kurtz

That’s right.

Brian Kurtz

Ben and I are not disagreeing as much as you might think about market development strategy.

Ben, while he’s teaching you not to sit on your hands, get it out there, keep interacting with your audience, develop the relationship. The one thing that Ben has learned to do and he’s way better at it than almost anybody is that he’s congruent.

You expect to get an email from him every day. You expect it to be in the language that it is in. He’s trained his audience to understand that language.

But the reverse example that I’m talking about is when you have an audience, you’re not going out to them that often and then you start, for example, taking on an affiliate that is so incongruent with what you’ve been selling yourself and that’s when your audience stops trusting you.

Ben has kept it consistent. Robert Cialdini is one of the classics who wrote Influence that everybody should read. He’s got the six basic principles of ethical influence. Every piece of copy needs to follow those six things, and one of them is consistency.

Brian Kurtz

The idea that you’re not going to be consistent with your audience and you’re going to be sending them all kinds of random stuff not applicable to what they want is not what Ben is saying. He’s saying, “Get off your butt. Do something and keep getting it out there.” I do not disagree with that because that’s what audience is.

Frank Kern was one of my friends and one of the great online marketers and experts in market development strategy. He would have a subject line “Dude, whatever,” and people expect that from him. If I did that, people wouldn’t open my email, and they’d say, “Who the hell is this person and why is he doing an affiliate deal with Frank Kern?” or something like that.

I only get too specific on individuals and places, but that’s why the idea of congruent market development strategy is so important.

The thing is once Ben gets all the people to unsubscribe or get sick of him, that’s great because the people left are those that will want to get his daily. They are the once who going to buy the most. But now, he stays congruent and consistent with that audience. I don’t differ with him, but that is the case.

Brian Kurtz

The list is the critical component of any market development strategy campaign.

There’s a rule of thumb in market development strategy. This is again why it’s useful to read the classics at least because I always say the great Picasso quote “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.” That’s why you read the classics. It’s something that you have to follow everything to the letter, but if you learn them, then you know what rule you’re breaking when you get a breakthrough.

Brian Kurtz

Now, that doesn’t mean the creative is half as important as the list. What it was saying is if Ben Settle writes the best email he ever wrote and writes it to the wrong audience, he’s going to get zero response, zero open, zero sales.

If Ben writes an inferior email, one that is not the best that he’s ever done but it’s to a list of people that love him or understand what he’s talking about, and he makes an offer that’s irresistible, he’s going to make some money even if the creative is not as good.

I spent a lot of time in list segmentation and list selection when I did direct mail. Because I couldn’t waste postage and printing, I had to make sure that every name that I rented or found in the marketplace to promote to was going to give me acceptable response rate. That’s what direct market development strategy is all about. It’s measurable response within an acceptable return on investment.

Brian Kurtz

The list work was the most important piece that I did, but then, I made sure I spent a lot of time coming up with great offer, and I only hired the best copywriters.

Even though the copywriting by itself wasn’t what’s going to put it over the top, by getting world class copy with an irresistible offer to the perfectly targeted list, now, I’ve got everything cooked on all cylinders.

And so, the rule of thumb that I’ve been saying to people, in fact, I wrote a blog post that says, “When 41% is a majority,” although I changed it to “When 46.6% is a majority.” That’s the number of votes that Donald Trump got, but I wasn’t getting political when I said it. But I thought it was a good number to use. It got people thinking I was going to be political, which I would never be and I’m not going to tell you who I voted.

I then said, “46.6% is a majority, 33.4% is offer, and 20% creative.”

By doing that, I was trying to make my point.

Why do people do affiliate deals? They’re not paying for the lists, but they’re finding the best lists. People always say that when they do an affiliate launch online, out of a hundred affiliates, 5 of them are getting 90%. It’s not even 80-20. It’s 5 or 10 affiliates are getting 90% of their revenue? Why is that? That’s list. It’s a great fit for the product to the offer.

Also, it happens that if it’s a perfect fit and your affiliate partner writes killer copy to endorse your product, that’s why they become a top 5 affiliate.

Brian Kurtz

That rule of thumb has been around forever, and the little spin I put on it is that I think a lot of online marketers don’t pay enough attention to the creative because they already have some of this list stuff built in especially with a solid affiliate group.

Spend more time on great creative and messaging to even different segments of those lists. God forbid we should have different messaging to different segments of our lists.

I did an indirect mail when it was super expensive to split creative to different list segments. Online, it is so easy to do.

That’s what my buddy Ryan Levesque teaches about market development strategy. He teaches doing surveys to your audience, putting the names into buckets and you have four different buckets. Then you have four different avatars.

Your messaging to each of those four people even if the video in your launches are the same, you might want to have a 5-10 minute buffer at the beginning of each of the videos to those four segments that appeals specifically to those segments.

So now, you’re doing personalization which is so easy to do online. I had a hard time doing that in direct mail and offline. I did it to a degree. There were many times I had more than one control package, more than one winning direct mail package to different segments of my lists. I tell stories about this in my blogs often.

That rule of thumb of specific copy to specific list segments to personalize it, you could put that online. That’s a lesson I learned in direct mail that I could be way more efficient online.

Brian Kurtz

Frankly, I’m a kid in a candy store to be able to do that kind of stuff online in a much bigger and easier way.

To me, if there’s one thing one principle, that would be the one.

That’s a great question. That’s where my head went immediately.

Brian Kurtz

Most people who are listening to this who are good online marketers are focused first and foremost on building their list, so they’re not going to be reliant on affiliates for the rest of their lives.

The thing that I would highly recommend is developing your content that you can give away as free content so you can get people to opt-in and create list.

One of my buddies, a great marketer, probably known to some of your listeners, Rich Schefren, has this great thing where he says that unless you’re in a position to be able to buy media and make it pay out, you’re not in business. You’re just borrowing a business.

These are my versions of his quote. What he means by that is that you know you’ve arrived if you could buy paid Facebook advertising or display ads or Google AdWords or direct mail and get sales, make it pay out at an acceptable rate and not being reliant on things that are free. Like just posting on Facebook, hoping to get traffic through organic search only, and doing just affiliate deals.

Brian Kurtz

Now, affiliates is an excellent way to launch a business but to live on other people’s list the rest of your life is a bad thing to be thinking about. That’s the one thing, and it’s not one thing you do tomorrow, and it happens like you snap your fingers, and you have a list. But, I think everything that you do should be focused on that. The other thing is that you want to spend a lot of time making sure that you’re thinking about specialty as opposed to commodity.

Let’s say you’re in the nutritional supplement business and you’re selling a fish oil. Well, anybody can sell a fish oil. Either you better come up with a unique selling proposition to sell that fish oil or find another supplement that no one else has that you can come up with a selling proposition that differentiates you.

Brian Kurtz

So always narrow to broad.

Let’s say you’re in a niche called fitness and nutrition. Why don’t you do fitness and nutrition for fat lawyers?

Brian Kurtz

I say it partially ingest but not entirely.

The story I often tell is the story of the guy that said, “I’m going to do a product that’s going to help men in their midlife crisis.” I’m like, “What qualifies you to do that?” Then he told me his hero’s journey of how he almost committed suicide. He lost his job. He came out the other end bigger and better.

He got divorce, became an alcoholic, and came out the other side bigger and better. Now, he wants to teach what he went through.

Brian Kurtz

I said, “Okay. That’s a pretty good story for your promotion but why am I going to be interested?” I said, “What did you do before you had your nervous breakdown?” And he happened to say he was a lawyer. So I said, “Why don’t you start with lawyers in midlife crisis, and eventually, you could be the next Tony Robbins, maybe.

You gotta start somewhere and starting as tight a niche as possible that keys to their story and your story so that you can be relatable, is probably the most important thing I think any entrepreneur can do to start figuring out what business they’re going to be in.

To determine what business you’re going to be in, you should be able to tell a story that’s not just unique. It needs to be unique, but it needs to be selling a specialty and not a commodity.

Brian Kurtz

Right.

Brian Kurtz

Yeah.

Well, that’s classic text right there, classic swipes.

Brian Kurtz

You need somebody to be asking you a lot of questions and challenging you whether it’s a coach, someone in business, or someone who’s been there.

The best students of Jeff Walker and his market development strategy talk all the time about their niches.

Susan Garrett who does dog training, did Dog Agility Training first before she did broader dog training. Will Hamilton of the Fuzzy Yellow Balls, who does tennis training online, started very narrow within tennis or if he did doubles before singles or whatever. So even within a niche, he did a niche within a niche. That’s an excellent example of that

Having somebody asking you questions is crucial.

One of the little hacks or tricks I’ve used when I’ve coached people on this is the question that I ask them.

Let me give you an example.

Someone tells me they have a product that helps entrepreneurs become more efficient by outsourcing much more of their administrative work whether it’s to foreign countries or virtual assistants or whatever. They got a system that does that.

I’m thinking to myself, “Well, where are we going to go fishing now using your fishing analogy? Going to go fishing in the Atlantic Ocean or you want to go fishing in a small pond?”

Brian Kurtz

The line of questioning that I gave her was my next question was this is a good one. It usually works. I said, “You got some success with this product helping people be more efficient. Who has written you the biggest checks using your system? Who has paid you the most money so far to do that?”

Let’s assume in this particular case she wasn’t a start-up yet. She was a little further along. Let’s say she’s got 20 clients. It happens that she had two that accounted for 80% of her business.

We look at those two. We started looking at the two who paid her the most amount of money. What do they have in common? What characteristics? It just so happened that we were able to kind of put an umbrella over those two that we could find other people. They were gurus and individuals in a little bit of personal development, a little bit of market development strategy.

We were able to find a lot of people, and now, she can go prospect in a pool that looks like the two biggest check writers. If she could get the two biggest check writers to write her a testimonial of how great she is, going out to 70 more people that look like the two on a one on one level.

This was not a $39-product she was selling. She was selling consulting agreements that could be in the tens of thousands. So, in this particular case in a B2B environment, but I think all of this applies because your pool can always get smaller to be the bigger fish using your analogy.

It’s about not just being the big fish in the small pond. It’s being able to relate your story.

Brian Kurtz

Not only can they go from a big pond called “Every entrepreneur who needs to outsource help,” to gurus and thought leaders who are one man and one woman shows who need to outsource. The fact that I have case histories of people who are just like them, who have had success with my system.

The fact is you and I both know that once you get them in, the system that they’re going to use could have been used by a dentist. It could have been used by a lawyer. It could have been used by another type of thought leader. It doesn’t matter.

You can now write copy and be able to talk to that audience in a way that made it sound not in a deceptive way but it made it seem like that this system of efficiency in their business was only for their type of business.

Once you dominate that niche, then it’s time to look at another one. Because then, more people are going to write you checks because there’s going to be some word of mouth.

I never want my market development strategy to be word of mouth and referral, but you’re going to get word of mouth and referral.

If you’re focused tightly on a niche, your next niche is going to come out of the referrals.

You’re going to start figuring out that as you start going broader, you’re going to go out slowly as opposed to go out to be the small fish in the ocean, you’re going to be a bigger fish in another small pond. You go one at a time. You dominate.

Brian Kurtz

Right.

Going back to your original question about market development strategy and why it’s important not just to read the classics but to understand this methodology, it’s going to make you a lot more intelligent and the ability to ask different types of questions.

A quick example is I did a podcast not that long ago, got into a deep dive discussion about how we did modeling of names in direct mails. It’s called regression modeling.

Again, I’m not a statistician. I was an English major, so I had people do the statistics but conceptually, what I was talking about, and this guy that was interviewing me started getting deep into the conversation with me.

But without getting too deep, the concept of what a regression model is when you do a mailing of some cross-section of a much bigger universe of names, you get the responses. You lose money on that mailing. But because you got people to respond to an offer, you can see what the characteristics are of those individuals who responded and then, you do a model of those names and how they look like regarding all of their data the names on the bigger list.

You have a two million name universe that you could mail to, you mail 50,000 names, and you get a thousand orders. You take those thousand orders, look up what they look like, and see what are the best names in the two million, and you rank them one to two million in groups of 5% or 10% segments. That’s as far as I’ll go on the statistical thing.

Brian Kurtz

The point I want to make, I started talking about this. This is how we selected lists in direct mail. This guy who did the podcast with me posted the podcast on Facebook, and someone responded to the podcast.

He said, “Oh man, this interview with Brian Kurtz was great. He talked about this modeling where you could look at names that look alike names. I thought Facebook invented Lookalike models.” His mind was blown.

My point here would be not that what we did back then was better. It’s not that what we did back then supersedes what we’re doing now. However, if you understand that methodology, my guess is when you get a consultant or an agency who’s doing your Facebook advertising, or you could start asking questions about their Lookalike models, how they’re doing them, you would ask questions.

If you understood Regression modeling, direct mail list selection or how the greats of market development strategy look at audiences and list segmentation, the questions you will ask are going to be so much deeper.

You may draw conclusions that are no different, and you’ll still do the same Facebook Lookalike model but maybe not. That’s only one example.

By reading the greats, you give an excellent example of looking at a John Carlton, the ad with the one-legged golfer. I have a swipe file of the biggest direct mail packages ever written that I refer to all the time. It gives me ideas for some trick lines and emails.

Brian Kurtz

Anybody in market development strategy today and online marketing today, maybe this is another answer to Kamala’s question about what advice I would give. Start actually developing a swipe file of all your favorite emails that you get. All your favorite pieces in the mail, your favorite copy you read, favorite launches that you see and videos and video sales letters, keep them. Put them in a Dropbox.

Have a swipe file that you can go to all the time to inspire you to start thinking about how you can message sincerely to an audience. That’s how you’re going to be able to differentiate yourself.

Most people online today don’t even know that there are available swipe files of ads written in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, that are classic ads, classic lines. I know online marketers who do know that using a lot of that stuff can play very well in current environment.

Brian Kurtz

Yes.

Brian Kurtz

My book is called The Advertising Solution, and it profiles six of the greatest advertising men of all time. I maintain that this six are all the six of many that I think everybody should read.

The beauty of my book is that we distilled the greatest tips from these six guys. The interesting thing about this six guys even though they grew up before the internet, for the most part, they practiced advertising before the web, and they were more known for being more general advertising, not direct response. They work on direct response marketers trapped within general advertiser’s bodies because they were committed to measurable advertising and getting a return on investment.

Brian Kurtz

The six people are:

1. David Ogilvy, one of the fathers of advertising.
2. Claude Hopkins, who wrote the classic book Scientific Advertising, written in 1923. He died in 1937. He talked about human behavior not changing. The book is 100% relevant today.
3. John Caples, who wrote Tested Advertising Methods, the Father of Testing. They’re all wrote copy too by the way.
4. Robert Collier, who wrote The Robert Collier Letter Book, which was the classic book on writing sales letters.
5. Gary Halbert, who was considered the Godfather of Copywriting.
6. Eugene Schwartz, who was one of my personal mentors, who wrote one of the classic books of all time called Breakthrough Advertising, which I’ll be bringing back to life.

So if people do get on my list, they’ll hear about it when it’s reprinted, and that book, as a matter of fact, I just wrote a new afterword for the book, and you’ll like this Luis.

The book was written in 1966. The first line is, “Human behavior hasn’t changed since 1966.” Then again, you could put any year in there, and human behavior still hasn’t changed either. We’re 100% congruent on that.

Now, if people want to get this book, it’s cheap. It’s on Amazon for $12. The beauty is that I created a bonus package for people that can give them a lot of free stuff for the 12 bucks. You can order from a special site, which I set-up. It’s called thelegendsbook.com.

Brian Kurtz

Nice.