The Best of No B.S.

The Ultimate No Holds Barred Anthology

Dan S. Kennedy

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781642011456
• eBook ISBN: 9781613084588
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

The ultimate Dan Kennedy collection.

Millionaire-maker Dan S. Kennedy has told it like it is for over 30 years: If you're not focusing on converting social media traffic into sales, you might as well set your money on fire. Now, this ultimate collection of Kennedy's best sales and marketing wisdom from 12 of his best selling titles, showcases the top content from the legendary millionaire maker himself.

Kennedy teaches business owners the customer-getting, sales-boosting, classic marketing strategies you need so you can stop accepting non-monetizable "likes" and "shares" and start making the marketing moves that really count. Inside, you will learn:

• The most powerful marketing tactics no matter what business you're in
• How to get riches with niches and become a magnet to your customers
• The monetizing magic of crafting effective communication
• The #1 way to prevent wasted marketing dollars
• 5 ways to grow your list for FREE (before spending a dime on advertising)
• How to turn passive content into an active conversion tool
• Create raving fans who introduce you to their networks

Discover the principles behind successful marketing campaigns and start making dollars and cents out of your social media strategy. 

PART I

DIRECT MARKETING

with selections from

No B.S. Direct Marketing

No B.S. Guide to Direct Response Social Media Marketing

DIRECT MARKETING

DIRECT Marketing is derived from “mail order,” with set-in-cement success principles dating to the turn of the century. You see it alive and thriving on TV now with the My Pillow guy, but also with Fisher Investments, aimed at a different demographic. Still, why would you ever think of applying that to your local brick-and-mortar retail business, or service business professional practice?

This gets a little less radical, outlier, and odd with each passing year, as more business owners get disgusted enough with traditional advertising and its often mysteriously hard-to-assess return on investment and look around for a different, more accountable, more intelligently manageable approach. Many find their way to Direct Marketing. Yet it is still a best-kept secret in many categories of business, particularly at the local, brick-and-mortar level. It offers you real competitive advantage because of that.

Crazy Like a Fox

Let me give you an example. The day I wrote this I had monthly teleconsulting sessions, including one with a dentist and his wife running a high-end restorative and cosmetic dental practice in the Midwest. With patients going through exams, diagnoses, and case presentations, but not proceeding with treatment, they had, over recent months, expanded their follow-up from one cursory letter and one phone call to, by my recommendations, a series of 17 letters, including several with specific offers, altered fee or terms options, and deadlines following the “rules” of Direct Marketing and Direct Response Marketing in the chapters of this book included here. Several of these letters ran a number of pages long, including patient testimonials and stories plus P.S.’s driving people online to see specific videos. I know: 17 sounds like a lot. Crazy. Enough to irritate. Something no dentist does. However, it has brought in new patients who would have, before, been chalked up to un-gettable. Its results are factually known. The net Return on Investment is, over a year, an extra six figures. Enough to pay for an offspring’s college education or nicely fund a retirement account.

“Normal” retail businesses and professional practices do little or no follow-up to unconverted leads, and if they do, it’s by email only, most never opened let alone read. DIRECT Marketing businesses have a very different “normal.” It’s called: follow up until they buy or die. And a lot of it is done offline, by real mail arriving at homes or offices. This aggressive strategy produces very useful testimonials; patients who say “NO ONE has ever cared so much about me to be as persistent and patient as you’ve been, and I’m grateful you were.”

Here is the essence: in these excerpts from the book NO B.S. DIRECT MARKETING FOR NON-DIRECT MARKETING BUSINESSES you will be presented with an entirely different business model for attracting prospective customers, for converting them, for following up on those who don’t immediately convert, and, overall, for extracting a great deal more return on your invested dollars. Nothing about this is new. Not at all. It is “transplanted” from a century of consistent success to your business. It is comprehensive—it is about whom you advertise for and market to, what you advertise, how you organize your marketing, and a “system” for managing the newly interested, prospective customer. This does literally change everything.

There are also selections here from the book NO B.S. GUIDE TO DIRECT RESPONSE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING. This is radical all over again, because it transplants and applies an “old” methodology to a “new” media. Most experts involved with social media reject the ideas of direct response and of direct accountability, telling you to measure its usefulness in new metrics like Likes or views or going viral. At the bank, though, the only thing you are allowed to deposit is dollars. So make a note: there has never been, is not now, and never will be a new media that should be allowed to eat your money or time while evading direct accountability in dollars.

From all this, you will see a thoroughly systematic, success principles-driven, accountable, and definitively unordinary approach to attracting, converting, monetizing, satisfying, and multiplying customers, clients, or patients.

CHAPTER 1

The Big Switch
Why Direct Marketing for NON-Direct Marketing Businesses?

Originally appearing as Chapter 1 from
No B.S. Direct Marketing

It is an odd sort of title, isn’t it?

If you picked it up hoping for huge breakthroughs in your business, you bought the right book. But first, I have to get these definitions out of the way.

By non-direct marketing business, I mean anything but a mail order, catalog, or online marketer who directly solicits orders for merchandise. It could be a local dental practice, carpet cleaning business, brick-and-mortar retailer, B2B–IT consultant, CPA firm, or industrial equipment manufacturer. The owners of such businesses do not think of themselves as direct marketers engaged in direct-response advertising, until I get ahold of them!

Examples of pure direct-marketing businesses just about everybody knows are the TV home shopping channels, QVC and HSN; catalogers like J. Peterman or Hammacher Schlemmer; contemporary catalog and online catalog/ecommerce companies like Amazon and Zappos; businesses like the Fruit of the Month Club; and mass users of direct mail to sell things, like Publishers Clearing House.

There are thousands of true direct-marketing businesses. Some are familiar to the general public; many, many more are familiar only to the niche or special interest they serve. For example, at any given moment, I have over 50 direct marketers as clients, each selling books, audio CDs, home study courses, and seminars and services by mail, internet and print media, teleseminars, and webinars, which market only to a specific industry or profession—one to carpet cleaners, another to restaurant owners, another to chiropractors, etc. If you are not a chiropractor, you don’t know the name Dr. Chris Tomshack and his company HealthSource. If you are a chiropractor, it would be hard not to know of him, thanks to his full-page ads in the industry trade journals, massive amounts of direct mail, and other direct marketing. There are also direct marketers unknown by name but known by their products or brands, like a longtime client of mine, Guthy-Renker Corporation, the billion-dollar business behind TV infomercials for Proactiv® acne creams and many other products made into brands. What all these have in common is their fundamental process of selling direct via media to consumers, with no brick-and-mortar locations or face-to-face contact required.

These are not the folks this book is for, even if they are the kinds of entrepreneurs I work personally with a lot. They already know everything in this book, and live and prosper by it.

This book is for the owner of a brick-and-mortar business—a business with a store, showroom, or office; a restaurant; a dental practice; an accounting practice; or a funeral home—that is some kind of ordinary business, one most likely local and serving a local market. These are the entrepreneurs who have populated my audiences for four decades, subscribe to my newsletters, and use my systems to transform those “ordinary” businesses into extraordinary money machines that far, far outperform their industry norms, peers, competitors, and their own wildest imaginations. How do they do it? The big switch is a simple one to state (if more complex to do): they switch from traditional advertising to direct-response advertising. They stop emulating ordinary and traditional marketing and instead emulate direct marketing.

Most “ordinary” businesses advertise and market like much bigger brand-name companies, so they spend (waste) a lot of money on image, brand, and presence. But copycatting these big brand-name companies is like a rabbit behaving like the lion. It makes no sense. The big companies have all sorts of reasons for the way they advertise and market that have nothing to do with getting a customer or making sales! Because your agenda is much simpler, you should find successful businesses with similar agendas to copycat. Those are direct marketers. You and they share the same basic ideas:

1. Spend $1.00 on marketing, get back $2.00 or $20.00, fast, that can be accurately tracked to the $1.00 spent.

2. Do NOT spend $1.00 that does not directly and quickly bring back $2.00 or $20.00.

Please stop and be sure you get this life-changing principle. Be careful who you copy. Be careful who you act like. Be careful who you study. If their purpose, objectives, agenda, reasons for doing what they do the way they do it don’t match up with your purpose, objectives, agenda, then you should NOT study or emulate or copy them!

Please stop and be sure you get this life-changing corollary principle. Find somebody who is successful, who shares your purpose, objectives, agenda, and pay great attention to what he does and how he does it.

Big Company’s Agenda for Advertising and Marketing

1. Please/appease its board of directors (most of whom know zip about advertising and marketing but have lots of opinions)

2. Please/appease its stockholders

3. Look good and appropriate to Wall Street

4. Look good and appropriate to the media

5. Build brand identity

6. Win awards for advertising

7. Sell something

Your Agenda

1. Sell something. Now.

I believe some call this sort of thing “a blinding flash of the obvious.” Well, you can call it obvious if you like—but then how do you explain the fact that 99% of all businesspeople are operating as if ignorant of this obvious logic?

I might add this principle has power in places other than marketing. You can eventually get south by going due north, but life’s easier and less stressful, and business more profitable, if you actually get headed in the direction that leads directly to your destination of choice. Emulating inappropriate examples is the equivalent of trudging south to get to the North Pole. Odds are you’ll get lost, tired, or eaten by a giant iguana long before seeing snow.

Why Is There So Much Lousy, Unproductive, Unprofitable Advertising and Marketing Out There, Anyway?

No B.S. truth. Most business owners are just about clueless when it comes to advertising and marketing. They are, therefore, often Advertising Victims, preyed on by media salespeople, ad agencies, website developers, social media wizards, and others who don’t know any more about how to actually produce a customer or make a sale than they do. Anytime you are being guided to decisions and investments that are not fact based, and instead driven by popular fads, trends, opinions, and monkey-see-monkey-do pressure, you are being victimized. Direct marketers insist on facts and live by data.

If you try to get a business owner to accurately tell you where his customers and sales come from, what it costs to get a customer from source A or source B, what results specifically come from this ad or that one, he can’t. He’s guessing. Consequently, he’s often grumpy and unhappy about things he shouldn’t be, but also wasting money he needn’t be.

The reasons for the cluelessness and vulnerability to victimization are many. Here’s a big one: Marketing Incest. When you got into whatever business you’re in, you probably looked around at what everybody else in the business was doing and copied it. Gradually, you’ve tried to do it better, but not radically different, just better. So you have everybody in an industry standing in a circle looking inward at each other, ignoring anyone or anything outside the circle. It’s incestuous, and it works just like real generational incest: Everybody slowly gets dumber and dumber and dumber.

This book dares you to turn back on the circle and deliberately go far afield from your peers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Direct Marketing
• Part II: Branding and Local Marketing
• Part III: Personalized Marketing
• Part IV: Wealth Building
• Part V: Productivity and Management
• Part VI: Pricing
• About the Author
• Index