No B. S. Direct Marketing

The Ultimate No Holds Barred Kick Butt Take No Prisoners Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses

Dan S. Kennedy

• Publisher: Entrepreneur Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781613083857
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

• Updated with six new chapters and new case history examples and samples from new guest contributors
• Revised to incorporate the newest media and marketing methods
• From Dan Kennedy, author of the popular No B.S. books including No B.S. series, which shipped more than 250,000 copies
• The first edition (January 2006) shipped 40,000+ copies and the second edition (2013) shipped 20,000+ copies
• Tactics typically seen only in mail-order, television infomercials, home shopping TV and direct-mail are transferred to small businesses with amazing results
• Extensive marketing program utilizing Glazer-Kennedy Inner Circle and Kennedy Inner Circle platforms, including providing a customizable sales toolkit and inclusion in their Spring and Fall conferences will be implemented

SECTION I

FOUNDATION

CHAPTER 1

The Big Switch

Why Direct Marketing for NON-Direct Marketing Businesses?

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 Clearinghouse.

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 Health Source. 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 long-time client of mine, Guthy-Renker Corporation, the billion-dollar business behind TV infomercials for Pro-Activ® 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!

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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.

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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.

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 in search of different—not just incrementally better—different ways of marketing.

Yes, Salvation Is within Reach

Now, here’s the good news: most business owners, clueless as they may be about profitable advertising or effective marketing, do know a lot about how to sell their products or services. That’s very good news because DIRECT marketing for non-direct marketing businesses is really not about traditional advertising or marketing at all. It is simply “salesmanship multiplied in media.” So you actually already do have a firm grip on one-third of the KENNEDY RESULTS TRIANGLE that you’ll master with this book. You know the Message. It’ll get tweaked, as I’ll explain. But you do have this component part.

The Ten No B.S. Rules of Direct Marketing for Non-Direct Marketing Businesses

(My Ten Commandments)

I’ll lay our foundation first. (A radical idea itself!) Please copy these and post them somewhere you’ll see them often until you get them memorized. Doing so will keep you on track, save you a lot of money, and dramatically improve your marketing.

From now on, every ad you run, every flier you distribute, every postcard or letter you mail, every website you put up, every/anything you do to advertise or market your business MUST adhere to these rules. To be fair, they are simplistic and dogmatic, and there are reasons to violate them in certain situations. But for now, sticking to them as a rigid diet will work. You can experiment later, after you’ve first cleansed your business of toxins.

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Rule #1.	There Will Always Be an Offer or Offer(s)
Rule #2.	There Will Be a Reason to Respond Right Now
Rule #3.	You Will Give Clear Instructions
Rule #4.	There Will Be Tracking, Measurement, and Accountability
Rule #5.	Only No-Cost Brand-Building
Rule #6.	There Will Be Follow-Up
Rule #7.	There Will Be Strong Copy
Rule #8.	It Will Look Like Mail-Order Advertising
Rule #9.	Results Rule. Period.
Rule #10.	You Will Be a Tough-Minded Disciplinarian and Put Your Business on a Strict Direct Marketing Diet

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We’ll tackle each Rule in-depth, in the next eight chapters.

I once wrote an entire book about breaking rules, and generally speaking, I think rules are for other, ordinary mortals—certainly not for me, and not for you either if you are a true entrepreneur. So you’ll chafe at rules here just as I would. However, when you are attempting to undo bad habits and replace them with new ones, some hard and fast rules are necessary, temporarily. Once you fully understand these and have lived with them for a reasonable length of time, then feel free to experiment if you wish. But get good at coloring inside the lines before ignoring them altogether.

Finally, a word about these aged rules and the newest of the new media and its promoters of new metrics. Try putting views or likes on a bank deposit slip. You will be told that no old rules—the time-tested, time-proven ones—apply to new media like Facebook ...