001-seth-greene

MARKETING, PITCH TANK, AND
COMPELLING CALLS

A discussion with Seth Greene

Connect with Seth Greene

Website
www.marketdominationllc.com 

Facebook – LinkedIn

John DeBevoise:Greetings, everyone. Welcome to another serving of Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If it’s in business, it’s Bizness Soup. I’m your host, John DeBevoise. Today we have Seth Greene from Market Domination, a best-selling author and a leader in social media marketing. Listen in as we go toe to toe. 

John DeBevoise:Many of the areas that I deal with these businesses have to deal with the social media marketing. We are inundated with marketing such as LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google. Is there a order in which I should be addressing these as to my interests with my business? Do I follow those leads for those individual social media marketing platforms? 

Seth Greene:It depends on who your ideal client is. I mean, it depends on who they are because they may not be on the networks that you’re on, and you might need to fix that. Again, if you are a dentist, and you are looking for a young family to be a pediatric dentist for, then you know what? The young family’s probably not reading the local newspaper. That might be the worst place for you to advertise. 

Seth Greene:Whereas if mom and dad might be on Facebook, the kids might depending on how old the kids are, they might be on Snapchat or Instagram. It depends on who the decision maker for that family is, and where you might reach her. She might be googling pediatric dentists near me. Your ad might want to show up on relevant podcasts in your area where moms go to listen to what family-fun activities are available in that city, that weekend. Again, it all starts with who is your ideal customer, and where do they hang out? That’s where you want to show up. 

John DeBevoise:Seth Greene from Market Domination is our guest here on Bizness Soup Talk Radio. If there were three things that I must do on a monthly basis in my business, just in a generic sense, what three things must I be doing in order to continue to solicit new business? 

Seth Greene:Again, it’s going to depend on the business and the customers. Generically, you should be putting out bait, content that’s irresistible to your target market that would educate them on who you are, what you do, why you do it, who you do it for, and get them interested in having you do it for them. Number one, you’ve got to have bait that attracts your ideal client. 

Seth Greene:You’ve got to advertise that bait in the right places where your ideal clients are going to show up. Then, most importantly, once they’ve consumed your bait, you’ve got to follow up with them with multiple steps designed to remind them who you are, what they just learned about, and to get them to ultimately pull the trigger and hand over a credit card. 

John DeBevoise:What would be a call to action that I might want to use with my potential customers? 

Seth Greene:Again, it’s going to depend on the business and the customers what call to action. It depends if we’re advertising the bait, the call to action might be go to the website and enter their contact information in exchange for a free report, a white paper, an educational video, a coupon. It’s all going to depend on again, what the business is, and what you’re trying to get them to do. There isn’t one offer that every single business should run. Because the offer a local pizza place is going to make is going to be vastly different from that of a cosmetic surgeon. 

John DeBevoise:Well, certainly. As to the different types of businesses, we’re talking here on Bizness Soup of anything and everything that could be served up in business is what comes across in Bizness Soup. In the Pitch Tank that you were involved out at Freedom Fest, you had 22 companies that were pitching all different flavors of different types of business models. They were all seeking investment from the Pitch Tank. What were some of the best ways in which they were able to get your attention coming from so many different or 22 different arenas? 

Seth Greene:Absolutely, and for those of you who don’t know, Pitch tank is a physical, live version of Shark , which I’m sure all of your folks have seen or watched. The judges other than myself are Kevin Harrington from Shark Tank, Steve Forbes, John Mackey, Greg Writer, and Bernt Ullmann. Some of the ways they were able to get my attention. Asking a question to start a presentation is very helpful because automatically your subconscious mind tries to answer it. 

Seth Greene:Telling a compelling, emotional story about the product or service. For example, the winner of Pitch Tank was Throat Scope, a light-up tongue depressor to see inside your mouth in a clear way. Her story of how her child was held down by the pediatrician with a wooden tongue depressor and a flashlight. How they were wrestling with him to try and see if he had strep throat hit home with me because I am also a parent of young children. 

Seth Greene:One of the companies there is in the chromosomal-testing marketplace. In talking about how their product was able to tell you why you had a miscarriage, so that you could avoid having another miscarriage. How it’s able to detect cancers really early which saves lives. Obviously, your product doesn’t have to save lives necessarily. But a compelling story addressing the target market, the pain points, and how your product or service solves that problem, is a great way to get someone’s attention. 

John DeBevoise:On your most recent podcast that I watched you on or it was a Facebook live, you talked about doing personal marketing, comparing the corporate presentation that [inaudible] slick letter versus something that’s more personal. Now, considering that today is National Radio Day, which strikes a chord with me, but it’s also National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day. Okay. How would I incorporate either one of those as a national day? There’s a website out there that has a litany of… It’s national-something day. 

Seth Greene:Yes, I am familiar with that. We use it all the time. I just didn’t look today. On National Chocolate Pecan Pie Day, you could offer a… Let’s say you were not a chocolate pecan pie maker. That’d be too easy. Let’s say you’re a radio broadcaster. You could say, “If you invest in radio advertising with us today, every purchase comes with a coupon for a free national chocolate pecan pie available at 1-800-FLOWERS.” I don’t know if they sell pies, but 1800flowers.com. You could tie it in that way. 

Seth Greene:It’s National Radio Day, so we’re having a sale. It’s National Radio Day, so we’re having a special. It’s National Radio Day, so we’re giving a bonus with every purchase. Or if you didn’t want to incentivize buying behavior, it could just be a warm and fuzzy email or social media post about, “Hey, it’s National Chocolate Pecan Day. We’re sweet and crunchy here at BizSoup Talk Radio. Here’s a picture of me eating a pie. We hope that you go get a pie, too, and are thinking sweet thoughts about us.” 

John DeBevoise:Well, let’s expand on that aspect. What would be the best way to get somebody in a subject line? What is going to get somebody to open up your email in the bite that is the subject line? 

Seth Greene:The subject line is one of the most important factors in getting your email opened and read other than the from address. Assuming they know who it’s from, subject line then is the most important thing to get it opened. Again, I mean, we have libraries of hundreds and hundreds of subject lines that we’ve tested that have worked. It just depends on the business and the customer. 

Seth Greene:Asking a question is a great idea. Swiping a headline that works from another promotion and modifying it for the email can work. There are tons of tips, tricks, and hacks to creating compelling subject lines way more than we can go into in unfortunately one radio episode. 

Seth Greene:I’ll give you a couple of the most powerful ones we’ve ever done. “Your order is not complete.” Then people open the email and go, “Oh, what did I order?” We’ve done, “There’s a problem with your order.” We’ve done, “Missed appointment.” 

Seth Greene:One that requires a little bit of technology and a little bit more chutzpah, as we say in Yiddish, to pull off is we did one where we said, “Left you a message at number 555-1212.” Whatever their number was, but we made our software so that the last digit of the phone number was wrong. It had their phone number in the subject line, but the last digit was wrong. We had an insanely high response rate of people going, “Oh, you got my phone number wrong by one digit. What was the message?” Which again is a little sneaky. 

John DeBevoise:Yeah, that is kind of sneaky. Now you have them on the phone, and then you get into whatever your pitch might be. 

Seth Greene:Correct, and you got to do a little bit of tap dancing because you don’t want people to be mad. There’s a famous example of a full-page print advertisement that ran in newspapers several decades ago. It said, “Sex,” in giant letters, had a picture of a very attractive model in a bikini. Then next to her said, “Now that I’ve got your attention, I want to talk to you about life insurance.” 

John DeBevoise:Yes. 

Seth Greene:A lot of people read it, but a lot of people were very mad because they were reading about sex and looking at the picture of the bikini girl. They were not expecting an ad about life insurance, so it does have to match up. 

John DeBevoise:I have a vague recollection of that. That is one great way to get attention. With the home base of my program out of Las Vegas, we see a lot of that on the billboards out there in Las Vegas, Nevada. 

Seth Greene:I bet. 

John DeBevoise:Yes, that and personal injury. You’d think that everybody out in Vegas was the slip and fall… Well, it seems to be the slip and fall, but they seem to be very accident prone out there. 

Seth Greene:Yes, very much so. Maybe it’s all they’re upset because they lost in gambling, or they had too many free drinks at the casino? 

John DeBevoise:We’re talking with Seth Greene from Market Domination at markletdominationllc.com. We’re talking about the call to action. Again, this is all very generic. If you’d like more information about how your business can take it to the next level, well visit bizsoup.com. We’ll send you in the right direction on how you can empower your business and take you to the next level here through Bizness Soup. 

John DeBevoise:The national campaigns that you are personalizing, why is it that the personalization and perhaps making a marketing piece look more amateurish by utilizing it might be yourself, your family? Or in my case, my horse and rodeo industry that I’m involved with. How does that make it easier to garner attention than the slick, corporate thing? 

Seth Greene:Because it’s personal. People relate to people not nameless, faceless corporations. If they feel they get to know you as a person, they’re more likely to buy from you. They’re more likely to buy more often. They’re more likely to spend more money. Most importantly, they’re likely to stay around longer because they feel like they have a relationship with you. 

John DeBevoise:Well, I have known that my moniker of, “I’m just a simple cowboy,” has worked very well. I can live, walk, and talk the lifestyle of the cowboy, but I can also bring it around to the business as I do with Bizness Soup Talk Radio. It’s my own personal branding that has worked quite well for decades is just being the simple cowboy. 

Seth Greene:Absolutely. 

John DeBevoise:Tell us about Seth Greene. When you got out of high school, were you planning on becoming a market dominator? How did you get to where you are today with your marketing company? 

Seth Greene:When I graduated from high school, I was planning on becoming a Broadway star. My original, undergraduate degree was in theater, and you see how that worked out. This is my stage now. I decided to go with my back-up plan of marketing and finance. That led to a career in financial services. 

Seth Greene:My original branch manager, my first day after passing my Series 7, handed me a phone book. Told me that all my clients were in the phone book, and I had to go get them. After making 300 cold calls a day, interrupting strangers, asking for money for years, I finally found a better. 

Seth Greene:That better way of direct response marketing not only took me from the bottom of 6,700 advisers to the top 30 in the country. It then spun off the Market Domination marketing firm 11 years ago. I have spent 95% of my time focused on that because in all honestly, it’s a lot more fun. 

John DeBevoise:Broadway star, huh? 

Seth Greene:Yes, that was my goal. 

John DeBevoise:That’s where you were headed? 

Seth Greene:That’s where I was headed to New York City to be a starving actor. 

John DeBevoise:Did you ever wait tables and all these typical starving actor type of activities? 

Seth Greene:I did not. I saw my friends who were a year or two older than me in college, moving to New York, sleeping on couches, putting their stuff in storage, waiting tables, and working temp jobs. I decided that’s not what I wanted to do. 

John DeBevoise:You got into the internet marketing rather early on? 

Seth Greene:I did. I had the good fortune to learn from the number one direct response marketing expert on the planet, a 21-time, best-selling author named Dan Kennedy. Luckily, I was able to take what he taught me and what I paid to learn, and take it to a whole other level. 

John DeBevoise:Like everyone here at Bizness Soup, you surround yourself with experts in their aspects of business, and you pass that information on through Market Domination? 

Seth Greene:Well, we can either teach you how to do it, or most of our clients just want us to do it for them. 

John DeBevoise:Most businesses that I encounter are too busy managing their own business to try and get into learning another aspect of their business. I, myself, have to hire out the editing and the production of my program because my time is better spent making the contacts. You managed to climb the ladder with that background of Broadway and basically entertainment. I can see why your kids do so well at it is that they’ve got a dad who can show them how to work the stage. 

Seth Greene:Absolutely. I greatly appreciate it, and I greatly appreciate you having me on here at BizSoup. I hope your listeners got a lot out of today’s interview, and I look forward to talking to some of them. 

John DeBevoise:Well, I look forward to having you back on the show. Thanks to Seth Greene from marketdominationllc.com. Seth, thanks for joining us on this serving of Bizness Soup. 

Seth Greene:Thank you.