April 23, 2008

What Mainstream Marketers Miss

There’s a growing marketing underworld that you are probably only peripherally aware of. Born from the direct marketing gurus like Dan Kennedy and Gary Halbert, the new breed has taken the game to a whole new level, and it’s very likely that you’re missing it.

That’s too bad, cause these kids are on the very cutting edge of what’s possible in social engineering, and they’re learning - and sharing - more every day.

I just spent the weekend with a bunch of internet marketing weirdos.  It was in San Diego at the Hard Rock Hotel.  Our host was Frank Kern.

The event was attended by about 500 buyers of Frank’s latest information product called Mass Control.

Mass Control was launched, sold-out, and closed on February 1 of this year. The product was a series of videos, emails, pdfs, and the weekend in SD.  It sold for two thousand dollars. He sold three million dollars worth in four hours, before shutting the doors.

At the event he was selling seats in his mastermind group for $2700/mo.  This also sold out to 20 folks, leaving another 20 on a waiting list. That’s another cool $50k/mo, ongoing.

Lest you believe that this is some weird exception to the rule, check this: Mass Control was small peas.

Frank’s buddies were all in attendance, many of which have done launches far bigger that his three million dollar day. For example, Jeff Walker recently launched his product (which happens to be about launching products) and apparently sold nearly ten million dollars worth.  In a day.

Andy Jenkins and Brad Fallon were there. In 2006, these guys pulled off the biggest launch in Internet marketing history - 23 million in 18 hours, I think it was. They rolled that into a membership site, off which they are apparently pulling in over a million per month.

These are real businesses with serious earnings that are being created virtually overnight.

As a guy who straddles both worlds (I work with ‘mainstream’ businesses but also buy these products and show up at these events) I know what most folks think of these guys.  Their marketing looks sleazy. They’re young punks with their shirts untucked. It looks like a scam, or a high-school popularity game.

But I think there’s much more to what’s happening here, and I think that if you’re not watching and learning from these guys - and others like them - you’re missing out on the best marketing education available at any price.

What these guys are doing is literally architecting a social phenomenon. They create products designed to make their market frenzy. They create social proof across the web, and they communicate their message in ways that literally create a panic to buy. They attract attention like magnets and have re-sellers and affiliates lining up begging for part of the action.

It’s very tempting to believe that our businesses are different. “These guys operate in a niche where this kind of thing can happen. I sell shoes. What does this have to do with me?”

I have the same questions myself. But it’s our challenge as marketers to transfer what we’re seeing here.  It doesn’t do us any good to dismiss it.

I believe that the explosive growth in information marketing (selling how-to stuff) is just beginning. I think one day they’ll legitimize themselves and begin to eat at the higher education market. Literally, folks (like me) will learn from in-the-trenches experts instead of going and getting an MBA. It’ll be cheaper, and they’ll get a better education.

More, I think we entrepreneurs should reconsider our business models. The question is ‘how can we incorporate information marketing into our sales/marketing process?’

If we’re selling high-end data storage systems (that’s you, Jame), we should be looking at the knowledge assets we have in-house, making it into products, and selling it as a front-end sale. 

I’m not talking about a $39 e-book/sales pitch.  I’m talking about a high-end ($500-1000+) package of your best people’s best stuff that really and truly educates the buyer and gets them a real result, regardless of whether or not they’re buying your product later on.

The benefits:

• Positioning as the keeper of the highest-value stuff in the marketplace.
• A product that’s easy to sell, easy to promote, and self-liquidates (that is, pays for it’s own lead generation costs, so you end up with free leads for your main biz).
• A product that you can do a launch around. Drive press around. Get partners mailing their lists for you.
• And more that I’ll talk about in another post.

I’ll be writing more about how we should be thinking about this stuff in future posts.

In the meantime, tell me what your experience of the info-marketing crowd is? Have you used their strategies? Do you plan to?

Posted in Entrepreneurship   Marketing Ideas   Sales Stuff