Making a sale is difficult. You’ve got to generate trust with your audience, and creating that trust takes time (well at least it normally does). In the following paragraphs, I’m going to share with you a multichannel marketing formula that speeds up that whole “getting to know you process” down to less than a day.
And I know this works because the tactics I’m about to share with you are a reverse engineered funnel that Alex Becker used to grow Market Hero by turning complete strangers into qualified leads. And if your first reaction is “who the hell is Alex Becker?” Well, that’s fine.
There are around 9 billion people in the world and he’s just one guy.
Still, he is a clever guy. He created Market Hero – think of it as an expensive Mailchimp with bells and whistles – from nothing to a $100+ million company in just three years. He generated most of that revenue by scaling a marketing funnel that uses webinars to sell high-value courses with three months access to Market Hero ‘for free.’
Just to be clear, he did have an advantage of having a huge email list and the engaged audience he could leverage during the initial growth phase. Of course, that’s a huge advantage that most of us can’t replicate.
The reason I find his approach so interesting though is because the primary demographic he was targeting were strangers. He got people he didn’t know to give him money without claiming to be a Nigerian Prince. So strap in and pay attention, because this is going to be an education in multichannel marketing.
The funnel example
To help you visualize what I’m going to cover in this article, I’ll share with you the rough funnel that Alex used, and is still using, to grow his SaaS business (this is a simplified version).
The funnel starts by targeting complete strangers through Youtube ads. Two and a bit hours later a few of the people who saw the ad will have got out their credit card and spent $997 on a growth hacking course for Shopify that includes three months ‘free’ access to the platform.
In this article, I’ll take you through each stage of the funnel. We will…
- Break down the Youtube ads they are running
- Look at the copy used on the webinar signup page
- Check out the slides and sales formula used on the webinar
- Review the sales pages
It’s a lot of information. Hopefully, by the end of this article, you’ll have picked up a few tips you can apply to your business.
Generating qualified leads with Youtube ads
If you can get the conversions right, PPC can be rocket fuel for your business. Between Facebook and Youtube, you can connect with the majority of your potential online audience.
To get the conversion from ad to a landing page you have to get your proposition right and that start with target audience analysis. I’m not going to go in depth on this, because targeting the right audience is a whole article in itself.
Market Hero uses Youtube ads for their funnel. The last ad I watched was pretty funny (a lot more interesting than the standard WIX adverts you get bashed over the head with).
I know that Market Hero uses a lot of different ads and have chopped and changed them over the years. This is to be expected as you can’t show a person the same ad multiple times and expect them to magically be interested.
With marketing, you need to play around with your value proposition. If one pain point fails then hit another. Market Hero does this well – and surprisingly I have yet to see another company copy their style on Youtube.
Not only do they run multiple ads, they even sometimes run them like a mini TV series. The host, Alex, teases you for wasting time watching Youtube, tells you to go back to watching your celebrity TV channel and other things while discussing different issues that his product solves and that you might be experiencing.
Most of these ads last between 90 to 120 seconds and follow the same rough formula. Here’s a quick breakdown of the general structure of the ads.
Of course, those first five seconds are crucial. This is the obligatory watch time you have to go through before you can press skip.
After that initial hook, they explain their offer. Then they try and get the viewer to take an action, and repeat. Pretty standard sales approach that’s used across every medium as you’ll quickly see in this article.
This method obviously works well. Unusually, I haven’t been able to find any Facebook ads they’re running, even though I expect they are running these types of ads. If you click on one of these links you are taken to the next stage of the multichannel marketing funnel.
Webinar squeeze page design
If you ever got round to clicking on one of those paid ads you’d end up here; the webinar registration page. It’s a simple layout that really copies the fundamentals of email marketing.
Just in case you need it, here’s a breakdown of the flow of the squeeze page:
- Headline targeted towards the result
- Call to action
- Countdown timer
- Bullet points that cover what you get from attending
- Call to action
- Final headline
- Call to action
The page has a simple color scheme; text is black and boring, green for “go” sign up button, red for emphasis. Freud might say there’s something subliminal going on there, but it’s mostly just common sense high contrast design in action.
Try to exit the option page and an exit intent lightbox pops up offering you a free download PDF with a list of the all-time best products to sell and quickly monetize on an e-commerce store. That’s it!
A signup button is a two-step option. The form has a date picker with one option; conveniently the webinar is about to launch in the next 10 minutes. Of course, this is an evergreen webinar, but we’ll cover that a bit later.
Once you’ve signed up to the webinar, you’re redirected to the “Thank You” page which doesn’t have much to it. There’s the video, name of the webinar, and the countdown timer.
One thing to note, below the link to the webinar there’s a warning message. It informs the viewer that they should watch the webinar on a laptop or desktop. It’s obvious why; people don’t normally spend an hour watching a webinar on a phone and buy anything.
Alongside the Thank You page, you also get the obligatory email that you can find below (that’s three channels now – go multichannel marketing!).
Actually, you get two emails. I have a feeling that this is because the email is being added to two servers. A lot of marketers with big lists do this as it gives an average additional 10% open rate.
Chances are if you’ve opted into the webinar you’ll click one of those links.
Running your webinar
Let’s deal with the very obvious elephant in the room; this is an evergreen webinar. Despite the fact that this is an evergreen webinar, everything has been done to give the impression that it’s live.
For example, when you first sign in Alex is busy doing something in the background while talking to the imaginary audience.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the number of attendees increases and then naturally varies throughout the webinar. Alex also deals with objections to this being an evergreen webinar by greeting attendees and explaining why you won’t see any comments in the chat-box.
Keep in mind as you read the next subheading that at the end of this webinar some of the attendees purchase a $997 course from a stranger. So what’s so special about the 100+ slides?
Well…
Webinar slides – the sales process
I’ll give you a very rough breakdown, as I see it, of what’s going on in the slides. Think of it as a sales story. Like all good stories it starts with the line; once upon a time in a land far away a guy sat down next to his Ferrari…
- Why you should attend and what the attendee will learn on the webinar (backed up by some sexy case studies of people who attended in the past)
- Very brief mention of the product being sold (I’m sharing free information with you on this webinar from this premium course)
- What you get by sticking all the way to the end of the webinar (this is normally a free course or similar as a thank you – but really a way to ensure the attendee listens to the sales pitch)
- Who the presenter is; this is pretty much a story that has that “aha” moment where everything changed (it needs to be relatable – from regular Jo to a millionaire or similar)
- What would you feel if you could get the results on offer? How would this knowledge change your life?
- Results that other people have got from listening to the presenter.
Now, just to give you a sense; at this point, we are almost 30+ minutes into the webinar and the attendee has learned nothing that they were promised… the focus from the presenters’ side is not providing information but generating trust in the presenter.
This is the reverse of regular sales where pretty much everyone with a blog will tell you: “provide value – then sell.”
The reason it’s the reverse is these people don’t know the presenter. You can’t provide information, and expect people who don’t know you to listen if you don’t first establish credibility.
You see this all the time at conferences: “superstar name was featured in Forbes, is a New York Times best-selling author, grew a multi-squillion dollar business with his groundbreaking pancake flipper and more…”
In this context, it’s all about the presenter, their journey to success, and how they have helped people – just like you. Only after you cover this, you can share knowledge in a room full of strangers, which brings us back to the slides.
The webinar continues:
- The value of the course (how easy it is to attain these miraculous results – any regular Jo could do it with the right training or tool)
- Questioning the audience; now that I’ve shown you how easy it is, who wants to get these results?
- Sharing information and knowledge – this takes 30+ minutes or so
- Results from previous students who invested in the course – students just like the attendee
- Final review of the course and exclusive bonuses
- Creating a sense of urgency – what you get if you act now
- Removing obstacles for the audience – this is for you because…
- The final set of testimonials and sale
This sales flow answers all of the important questions that a potential buyer has: who, what, where, why and how. There is a clear focus on results – this will work for you because it worked for Ed who is just like you!
The sales pitch is made over 90-minutes. Reading those slides, it would be really easy for Alex to come across as a complete d%$k or some kind of Elon Musk style superhuman that nobody can relate to.
He avoids doing this. You can find a few sample webinar screenshots below that should give you a sense of his presentation style.
There are some pretty silly images in the selection of slides I showed you; there’s Alex with some Star Wars gear – just a goofy guy who happens to be rich – next to a private plane – a statement of success.
You have stupid looking photos, like the one of the fat guy next to the running machine and relatable images – a guy wearing a military uniform, with the underlying assumption that he has to be on a basic wage.
The other thing you might notice about the slides is that your Mum could have probably made them. I’m certain that this is deliberate. When you put all this together you come away with the feeling that Alex:
- Is just a regular guy. Pretty funny and easy to get along with.
- If you can create a slideshow that looks as good, or even better than his, then you must be able to do what he’s doing…
This is important. If you’re selling something to your audience using multichannel marketing they need to be able to relate to you. If your audience thinks you’re a d%$k you will lose the sale.
Presentation style
I’ve spent the last seven or eight paragraphs talking about the webinar without once talking about the presentation. You probably gathered from the PPC adverts and those slides I showed you that Alex Becker plays up the fact that he’s a down to earth, approachable guy.
There are three other things that I want to highlight about the presentation style. In no particular order these are:
- Using made up goofy words
- Getting the audience to engage
- Mixing up the presenters
We’ll start with the silly made-up words; he uses words he just made up throughout the presentation. This is deliberate pattern interrupt.
In a two hour presentation, people stop paying attention to what you’re talking about and what you’re showing them. Silly images and made up words grab your attention. It’s like a slap in the face with a wet fish or having a bucket of ice cold water thrown over your head.
You sit up and notice.
Then there’s the interaction with the audience.
Webinars can be incredibly boring. The audience is expected to sit and listen to a person talk, for a LOOONNNGGG LOOONNNNGGG time. There’s no way to get around this fact. The webinar host needs the audience to be there for that long so they can sell to them.
If you can’t avoid this, you still need to do something about it. Experienced webinar hosts use audience interaction to get around this. For example, Alex asks people to type “1” in the comments if they agree with a comment he said.
For example; “type 1 if you could do this.”
This is partly to get your audience to agree with what you are saying, but mostly to stop people falling asleep. Remember, there are so many more interesting things a person could be doing than listening to you speak about yourself…
Finally, Alex is not the only presenter of the webinar. Alex is the star who keeps it all together, but he has two guest presenters that do a 10-minute slot.
Mixing up the presenters is another form of pattern interrupt. Having someone else speak to you makes the webinar more engaging. It’s a common sense formula that is standard on TV but rarely used in webinars.
So that’s the webinar. Well almost…
The final sales pages
The webinar closes with a sense of urgency. There are freebies on offers for the first 15 buyers, and an emphasis on what you’ll miss out on if you don’t make a purchase. The “this is a shortcut that will help you avoid my mistakes so you can straight away get my results” kind of stuff.
It’s a powerful way to close your sales video, and even though I had no intention of making a purchase, I did feel the desire. And if I had pressed on the link as the buyer, I would have come to this page.
The final sales page is a testimonial assault on the senses. To start with there’s a quick review of what you get, followed by a LOT of testimonials (and those screenshots below don’t do it justice).
The proof is tacked on top of proof. This is deliberate.
The number of testimonials you use should be proportional to the price of your product. If it’s expensive, like $997 expensive, then you need to stack that proof up to the point where your audience is drowning invalidation.
Last chance saloon
Assuming at the end of this whole multichannel marketing campaign you didn’t buy the product you’ll get retargeting messages. This is primarily done through a drip feed email campaign that brings you to more webinars or sales pages.
There are two main follow up emails. One arrives in your inbox an hour after the webinar ended and the final one comes 24 hours later. They’re reminders for you to take action and tease you with what you’re missing out on.
The emails lead to new webinars and sales pages and so the circle continues.
I could continue down the rabbit hole to see where this funnel ends, but it’s just repeating many of the points I’ve covered above. So, “That’s All Folks.”
Wrapping it all together
I ripped up the last two drafts of this article because I realized that after writing almost 3,000 words of content I’d shared nothing of any real value. This version is different. Instead of sharing general BS with you on how to turn a stranger into a qualified lead, I get straight to what works.
This article on multichannel marketing contains a lot of practical tips that I’m sure you can apply to parts of your business (and I do recommend you bookmark the page and take action). Even if you don’t though, I hope there are things in this article that got you thinking, because studying what works is the best way to avoid making expensive mistakes that other people have already tried.
Nico is an online marketer with a passion for travel. Every week he finds the best lifetime software deals, from sites like AppSumo and StackSocial along with independent developers, and posts them on Launch Space. In his spare time, he likes to talk about himself in the first person.
