[Inaudible 00:00] is marketing. And the key point for me in marketing is building a sustainable as an amazing offer.
Make an amazing offer
Being an amazing marketer, as a business owner before you, like the communicator or the copywriter or whatever, is to create an amazing offer, to what I’ve witnessed over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, is that even though the creativity is important, and even though the design is important and even though everything is important, the offer is more important.
If I can create a very good, very powerful, very attractive offer, I’ve made a 24 hour special offer, a special deal in the holidays a few weeks ago, few months ago, with the most the ugliest landing page I’ve ever seen in my entire life, the most the ugliest piece, with like no copy at all. But it was a very good offer. It made six figures in 24 hours. And we didn’t spend any marketing, but it was simply sent to our mailing list.
It’s because the offer was really good. It was built and designed in a good way. Some other times, nothing will happen even though the landing pages are beautiful. And the copywriting is better. Of course, copywriting is important, of course, design is important, though things could improve stuff, of course, but the offer is the most important thing.
It must be sustainable offer
And the second part of it, besides it being an amazing offer, is that for small business, it has to be sustainable. Because what many business owners are doing – small business owners – is trying to create an amazing offer that they can’t sustain. And then they have to reinvent themselves every single time. So they are always getting themselves into constant stress. You have to create a sustainable, amazing offer that you can do and deliver over and over and over and over and over and over again, to create your business on. In my personal opinion, every single, small, tiny starting business is one amazing sustainable offer away from becoming a great business.
All business needs to become a great business, in my opinion, is to have one, only one. amazing but sustainable offer. If I have one of these, your business can create amazing amounts of money with great profitability and amazing foundation for your business expansion, if you want to do it. If not, it can be a nice source of income for a pretty long period of time, and then eventually it will die. Because the offer will not be attractive forever. But it’s also a great way to build a single source of income if you don’t want to create your business. A long time, not necessarily like 20 years, but sustainable. It’s not like something that oh my god, it’s for amazing sale for 99% off and something like this and you can do it forever. Something that’s like, it’s good, even if you’re not calling it sale. It’s attractive.
So a stressless marketing message will make the customer feel stupid for not buying from you if he desires. And if he has a desire, he lies to your business. So the offer has to have an amazing meaning. Like, if I wanted this, and I have to be stupid not to buy it. Okay, not like “I’m stupid if I’m not buying it because I’ve understand it. I’m stupid if I want it and i’m not buying it.”
Everything has the perceived value
So let’s go over a few tips. So the first thing, the most important one, in my opinion, is to accept the fact that most people spend a fortune on momentary emotional benefits. I’m not saying that you should sell them on momentary emotional benefits. I’m not saying that. But accepting this fact will help you a ton. So many people are like,
“I’m not sure if I should sell my product for this amount of money because I’m not sure. Is it good enough? Is it not good enough?”
But their customers are spending the same amount of money for shoes they’ll wear once, for a dress they’ll never wear, for a gadget that’s exactly the same as their all gadget with no differences. Because they want three inch more on their TV screen which will make them feel amazing for five minutes. When I understand this, I can feel way more comfortable charging higher amounts of money for my stuff. And also, it helps me understand that we should make people feel happy for buying my products at the moment as well as providing long term value.
So I want to write it down on the screen. So the tip is like this. Almost everything has a perceived value. And many business owners struggle because they’re trying to sell on the value of their product.
For example, if I’m trying to sell this smartphone, then I’m buying it from the manufacturer for a certain price. And you come to me, and you want this smartphone at its lowest price possible. This is why in this country, in this area, most places, most cell phone stores are actually losing money for selling cell phones. I don’t know if you know that. But most stores, especially those who are totally ranked on the price comparison websites.
If you go on the price comparison website and you get to the store, that is the cheapest or the few cheapest stores on the list, for any type of cell phone and you get into the store and you will only buy the phone, they will lose between $5 to $20 for selling this phone. Because they’ll try to sell you on insurance or cases or cover and stuff like that and to make money on that. Because the perceived value of a smartphone is simply the price value of a smartphone. So it’s very competitive. And I wouldn’t necessarily recommend going into this field.
However, there are many fields where the perceived value can be much higher than the material costs or the or the cost of what you’re doing. If you go like 10 years ago, and in some areas, maybe up until a few years ago, and maybe until now in some places, a course is something that has a perceived value of a few 1000s of dollars. So when e-courses we’re just firstly launched, then e-courses, we’re just the same as courses because they have so many advantages over courses. So they had this almost the same perceived value. Over the years what happened to the perceived value of an e-course? What happened? It dropped. If I’m telling you now, sign up to this free e-course. So many people won’t even bother to sign up. They’re like, “I have to sign up. Why don’t you just give it to me?” Because an e-course by just saying an ecourse today is worth close to nothing.
So many websites like Coursera, Udemy are selling courses for $10, $5, $20. So many famous teachers are selling their courses for $5 a month, $10, $100, so on and so forth. So the perceived value of an e-course is significantly lower. But other things still have value. Some courses are still selling very high. Why? Because they’re not selling on… It’s an e-course they’re selling on, you will have the course. In the end of the program, they’re rebranding it as a program. And they’re adding some stuff that are not just videos. So they can call it a program, not an E-course. So the perceived value will be higher.
So some things have a perceived value that is much higher and some things have a perceived value that is lower. For example, there’s one thing, for example, that I did myself and use myself, and it’s all about creative marketing.
For example, I realized that the perceived value of a vacation is high, relatively high. And because of all the reforms in this area, and so on, and so forth, like with the open skies and stuff like that, then flights became much cheaper, hotels are becoming cheaper, but the perceived value is still very high. So if I would tell you, you can come to my seminar, it’s in a hotel, and you should pay for the hotel, then it would feel like, “Oh, I have to put out so much money at the seminar in the hotel,” because the hotel seems expensive. Even though it won’t necessarily be expensive. But if I’m telling you, you will pay me everything, the hotel is on me, I’m adding this part to the price. Suddenly, it feels very cheap, because the vacation part is free. And the perceived value of it is very high.
For example, if you can find stuff in your area of expertise in your business, that they have high perceived value, add to your product, or make sure that you can make sure that it sells under your price point. And it can be very attractive.
So another example, when I started this school, that teaches NLP, then there were many other schools in the country that were teaching NLP. And most of them were around the same price point. When I went out and offered this course for 50% of their price, everybody, or most people who were interested in NLP knew what the prices were. And they saw that this is 50% off. So it was very, very attractive. Then a friend of mine said, “Okay, let’s do the exact same move, and open school for sales and marketing.: And I straight ahead told him, “It will never work.” Because a course in sales and marketing nowadays doesn’t have an exact perceived value. Because there are courses who are Salesforce specific, and there are also free courses online.
In that time, there weren’t so many free courses and courses online. There weren’t so many full courses or stuff like that, they were cheap, like in sales and marketing that they always were. So he didn’t listen to me and he tried to open his business anyway. And it worked almost fine. And then he closed it like two courses later. Because what makes an offer attractive is the difference between the perceived value and the price.
The bigger the delta is, the more it feels attractive and the way I’m testing it myself before going into a marketing campaign is just like I told you before, is building the offer and building the idea creating the concept for the program and stuff like that. And then I show it to people and try to sell it on them. And if they’re telling me “Wow, that’s really nice. That sounds good. Yeah, sounds good.” Then I know it’s not good enough. Because I don’t want to work too hard at marketing. I don’t want to work too hard at sales.
So I’m working very hard at crafting the offer. I’m only releasing a very good offer, a very like, a new product, a new idea. When people are telling me “Can I buy it now? When I share it with people? Can I buy it now as well?” If they’re asking me this question, I know it’s good enough, and then I’m releasing it. And so I’m saving a lot of my time and energy on retrying and trying to convince people. When I’m telling my sales team. Now, we have like 10 people> So when we go with a new program, a new course, a new idea, then I have to explain it to them so they can sell. I try to deliver the message to the people. If I’m explaining to them, how can they sell it, they say amazing, “We’re going to sell it. I know it’s not going to work,.I want them to ask, can we ask you him, buy it as well? And if they’re not asking for discounts, if they’re not asking for it or simply just want to buy it as it is, I know it’s an amazing offer. So that’s a really big marketing tip for me.
Do insurance
We are running out of time, so maybe we will do the other ones next time, I want to give you just one tip regarding investing in very small businesses in the very early stages of starting a business, and it’s a very basic concept. But it’s a powerful concept. I heard it the first time from, I think, was Warren Buffett. I’m not sure. And I’ve heard it several other times with other teachers I had in different variations. But the basic idea is that whenever you’re making an investment in a small business, you have to understand that there is a huge chance that it’s not going to work..
So if you have a plan, and this plan requires a substantial amount of financial investment, you must have insurance. You must have some sort of insurance. What does insurance mean? Insurance means that if it fails, then you get money in another way. So insurance companies won’t give you insurance for business projects, not the way I know it. If they can, maybe it’s a good idea as well. But the idea is, if you have a plan on spending your money and time on something, and it has to work to have a positive ROI, then it’s a bad idea.
For example, after teaching NLP for a year or so, I wanted to expand the amount of courses we’re giving in this school. So I thought what would be the closest thing to NLP, the most straightforward thing that if people would like to buy, and people would want to buy this also from us. And for me, it was obvious that it was coaching – learning how to become a coach makes amazing sense. And so I was looking for the best coach in the area as someone who is a very professional, also a lot of experience, amazing writer.
So we can develop the course in a very good manner. And we tested like 20 people. And one came out to be by far the best. And he wanted a very nice sum of money just to build the course. And then to teach the course. So let’s say it was around 20,000 to 20 something thousand in US dollars. So for me at the time, it was a substantial investment. And I thought to myself, “Okay, I’m pretty sure it’s going to work. But what if it doesn’t? Am I willing to lose all this money? And it was okay, if I would. I wouldn’t die from it.” But I remembered this principle of when we’re investing in small business, we always put insurance. So I had on the contract.
A little side note or something or a little like a paragraph was saying that the course is going to be filmed and all of the rights to the video, and of course the written content, is mine. It belongs to the school and doesn’t belong to this person. He wants to also have rights, so he can continue developing his stuff and we’ll let him have it. But what was filmed is 100% completely ours. So that I knew that even if I would lose money on the first course, I could still make some use of the e-course for selling it for like $500, $300, $200. and sell 100 of these over one or two years, not in a huge marketing campaign. Once in a while, send an email to my email list and put the return on my investment.
So in the end of the day, the course was not profitable, it didn’t lose money, then it did cover the cost and the cost of creating the course and so on. But it wasn’t very profitable. But over the years, I was doing this special sale of the ecourse several times, and it got me a few 10s of 1000s of dollars. And every single time I’m making a big investment, like a relatively big investment, I make sure it has some sort of insurance. Some sort of way that if I’m wrong, if this project will not work, still I’m getting something. It will be able to at least return my investment if not give me some profits.
So if this coaching school would have worked amazingly, then it would have made me a lot more money, of course. I think Warren Buffett calls it, I’m not sure it was him, maybe I’m just giving him credit for no reason. But I believe it was him. He was talking about asymmetrical risk rewards. Most people believe that you should have symmetrical risk rules. You can have little risk with a little game, that is having huge gains and huge possibility. Like, if this coaching course could have been very successful, then it would have been hundreds of 1000s of dollars in income. And hundreds of 1000s of dollars in profits over the years. It wasn’t so successful, but I’m not willing to lose hundreds of 1000s of dollars.
The risk is only getting profits of 10s of 1000s over the years. I paid for it once. So it was a risk. I paid something and I got it back slowly. And I learned about it just a little bit. If it was an investment like this, I wouldn’t necessarily buy it. I wouldn’t buy it. But it’s a form of insurance. That makes sense. So it’s the same as today, I’m spending like money on making videos for the school. I’m spending a lot of my time because I’m not like filming it myself. And the idea is that it’s going to be worth a lot of money for our marketing. But it also has a sort of insurance policy. Because for me, I know that this is an asset. It is going to be worth money for the long run.
So even if, theoretically speaking, the country will come out with a law that says NLP is illegal in this country, and you have to stop teaching courses. Then still we have a lot of audience that likes the videos, and we can maybe sell something else to them. Right so always think when you’re investing money in terms of insurance policies.
Hey, it’s Gal Tzhayek. Thank you for watching this video. If you liked it, please press the thumbs up button. And you can also subscribe to the channel. Make sure you get notified each and every time a new video is uploaded. I’d like to hear your questions and review in the comment section below. And I’ll see you in one of those new videos.
