Bob Serling – Marketing Ladder Blueprint

The Marketing Ladder Blueprint

How to put an end to marketing chaos… generate a small but highly responsive list of paying customers only…  and consistently grow your profits and your business by actually doing much less marketing.

6 Steps for creating your Marketing Ladder System

to build a small but highly responsive list of actual buyers

— and make continuing, repeat sales to them

Fortunately, eliminating your ineffective, damaging Marketing Funnel and replacing it with a high-performing Marketing Ladder is reasonably easy.

Once you do this, instead of 98% of your list being made up of freebie grabbing prospects and just 2% being customers, we’ll reverse those numbers almost completely. By implementing The Marketing Ladder, your list will be much smaller, but it will consist of 90% paying customers and just 10% prospects who have accepted something for free in exchange for opting into your list. And all it takes to do this are two things:

1. Understanding how to create a Marketing Ladder System and fully capitalize on it
2. Committing to implementing it

I can clearly show and guide you through the reasonably simple steps of building your Marketing Ladder System. What you’ll need to bring to the table is the commitment to carry out the implementation. With this in mind, let’s take a tour of the 6 steps for creating your Marketing Ladder System.

MLB Step 1: Create an extremely compelling “bait piece”

The core principle that drives the Marketing Ladder is just the opposite of the traditional marketing funnel. Instead of building a massive list of tire kickers (at a tremendous cost of time and money), you build a much smaller list that’s primarily paying customers.

However, similar to the old marketing funnel method, in order to attract prospects’ attention, you must entice them to opt-in to your list by creating an extremely compelling “bait piece” to be given away for free. What? Didn’t I just build a case for not giving things away for free — and charging for them instead?

Absolutely.

But while the goal is to deal only with customers who have bought something from you, because of the current state of the market, you still have to give something away for free in order to reach this goal.

Ideally, I’d like to be able to start with each prospect buying something instead of getting something for free. But I’m not foolish enough to make this such a steep uphill climb that it ends up failing. So because people are so conditioned to join your list by getting something for free, that will still be your starting point.

However, the sources you use to drive traffic and add people to your list are extremely different, which is exactly what you do in the next step.

MLB Step 2: Find only those prospects who are highly likely to make

a small purchase immediately and offer your bait piece to them

In this Step, things begin to get radically different — and radically better. You’re still going to use your bait piece as the primary way of attracting prospects to opt-in to your list. And you’re still going to offer it for free.

But the critical difference is that you apply much more careful and effective targeting to do the best job possible of identifying only those prospects who are highly likely to make a small purchase immediately. These are the only people who you’ll offer your free bait piece to.

This is achieved by eliminating all of the wasteful media and marketing tactics you’re currently using and replacing them with just three prospecting sources:

• Rented email lists consisting only of buyers (magazine subscribers, association members and buyers of products or services similar to yours)
• Stand-alone emails to other businesses’ lists — preferably their buyers only
• List swaps (having another list owner promote your bait piece to their list in exchange for you promoting theirs)

The key similarity between these sources is that the majority of the time, you can use them to reach people who have already demonstrated a willingness to buy.

With other sources, such as social media, pay-per-click, article marketing, video marketing, banner ads and so on, you don’t have any idea whether the prospect has ever bought anything similar to what you offer. So those prospects are far less likely to buy the low-cost item you offer than prospects with a proven buying history.

Just by shifting to this method of prospecting alone, you’ll eliminate nearly all the chaos normally associated with marketing. So you’ll be able to dramatically reduce the time and money you invest in marketing, freeing up your time to focus on other important aspects of running your business.

What this means is that right from the start, your list will be much smaller. But the quality of your list will run circles around lists that are built by offering more and more free stuff to all takers.

MLB Step 3: Immediately offer your prospects

another extremely compelling, low-cost product or service

This is another significant difference from the old way of doing things and as you can probably already tell, this is a change of the highest magnitude.

Now, instead of following up with endless free give aways, the moment someone has opted into your list, you’ll immediately move to convert them to a paying customer. And you’ll do this in two different ways immediately, both of which are dignified and non-pressured. Not to mention that they work extremely well when you’ve targeted the right prospects!

The first place to make an offer of a high quality, low cost product or service is right on the “thank you” page your prospects see when they opt-in. This is done with just a couple sentences of copy that thank your prospects for joining your list, then let them know that you have another resource they’ll find very valuable and that they can get it today at a very low price.

I recommend pricing the first item you sell between $15 and $20. Remember, your goal here is to identify as many prospects as possible who will convert immediately to buyers. And the willingness to buy is the most important factor in determining who will become repeat buyers in the future of your higher cost products and services — not the amount they pay for their first purchase.

The second way to convert even more prospects to paying customers is to make the same offer you made on your thank-you page within your free bait piece. This should be placed at the end of your bait piece with a message that lets people know that if they enjoyed and benefitted from your free information, you have another low-cost item that will help them even more.

Both of these tactics are easy to implement. And both work extremely well to quickly build a list made up of buyers only.

MLB Step 4: Segregate your list into two distinct lists — buyers and prospects

By re-focusing the majority of your efforts on building a smaller list consisting only of buyers, then selling multiple items to those buyers many times, you’ll eliminate all the chaos normally associated with marketing, make more short-term sales (which results in consistent, dependable cash flow), and lock in the long-term growth of your business.

So it only makes sense that you’ll want to move your buyers onto a distinct list of their own in order to service them properly. This means that you’ll have a special set of marketing pieces that are used exclusively for the purpose of making more sales (and being of more service) to your paying customers.

At the same time, you’ll move your prospects onto a separate list so you can use a different set of marketing pieces to graduate as many of them as possible up the ladder to become paying customers.

All mailing list software has this capability built into it. The way you segregate lists differs slightly depending on which software you use, but the “help” included with your software will step you through doing this quickly and easily.

MLB Step 5: Move your buyers up the Marketing Ladder

to purchasing higher ticket products and services

The real money in any business is always in repeat sales to satisfied customers. Those sales are easier to make, cost next to nothing because these folks are already on your list, and produce the majority of the profit and growth for your business. In fact, 90% of all your sales will come from people who have already bought something from you.

So it’s critical to devote the majority of your marketing efforts to them. This shift alone will dramatically reduce the amount of time you spend marketing and eliminate a lot of the chaos normally associated with marketing. At the same time, if you restructure your marketing to focus on this critical principle, you’ll also make a lot more money with a lot less effort.

Once you’ve made the initial sale to a customer, an entirely different dynamic sets in. As long as you’ve delivered a quality product or service, you have now established a bond of trust with your customer. And you can leverage this trust to be of even more service to that customer by selling them additional products and services that are of value to them.

Now, the entire process is completely professional and dignified. You’re never going to hammer your customers with a hard sell. But if you have something that is of real value to them, it’s very easy to make additional sales.

This brings us to a very important point — and it’s another key principal of The Marketing Ladder approach. Whenever possible, you want to specifically design your products and services so they can be delivered in a serial manner. By doing this, you lock in multiple sales with each sale you make.

Here are a couple examples of serial products and services. A series of teleseminars all based around one core topic — such as managing employees more effectively — can be offered as an enrollment for the entire series with monthly billings or as “pick 3”, “pick 6” or “pick all teleseminars in this series” with different prices. Either way, you’re serializing the offer and locking in enrollment to multiple teleseminars instead of one at a time.

Another classic way of serializing sales is to offer a paid monthly newsletter, paid monthly audio or membership sight. And this same model can be used to offer paid monthly coaching or consulting as well.

MLB Step 6: Continue to “drip” your prospects with offers

for your low-cost product or service

Because the real money in any business comes from focusing on selling more to your existing customers, this next step should get much less attention and emphasis than the previous steps. But at the same time, its worth devoting a portion of your marketing efforts — approximately 10% to 15% — to converting more prospects to paying customers.

In my experience, anywhere from 10% to 20% of the prospects who did not respond to your initial offer to buy something will eventually convert to paying customers. And the best way to convert them is a bit counter-intuitive. Instead of offering prospects different products in an effort to find something appealing to convert them, it’s actually best to harness the power of repetition by offering the same low-cost product over and over using testimonial-driven emails.

Here’s why. By repeating your offer for the same low-priced product to your prospects, varying your message slightly and mixing in different testimonials, your prospects become more familiar with that single product.

Over time, they move from disinterested, to mildly interested, to saying, “What the heck, it’s only fifteen bucks and people seem to be raving about it. I guess I’ll give it a try.” This type of serial marketing of the same introductory level product is what separates highly successful companies from their less successful competitors.

The “Big Aha” — Put these six steps into a simple,

highly automated system that repeats the process over and over

The final piece of the puzzle is what makes the entire process work with as little intervention as possible. But it’s also the piece that an overwhelming majority of business owners, entrepreneurs and marketing executives will never do.

Why? Because even though it doesn’t take much time, it’s mundane, boring work.

So what is this final piece? It’s creating written documentation for exactly how and when to execute each of the six steps of The Marketing Ladder Blueprint for your business.

Now, the truth is that for the most part, this will be very similar for every business. But there will always be some details that are specific to your business. So I can easily guide you in doing this, but you have to commit an hour or two to the actual effort.

Here’s why this documentation is so important. Each step of the system is run at different times of the year or different times of each month. It seems fresh while you’re in the midst of doing it, but when you come back to it a couple months later, things can get murky.

By documenting exactly how to execute each of the six steps of the system and when to implement them, you always have a complete roadmap to guide you every time you need it. And this means you’ll always be executing each step the same correct way every time you use them.

Another advantage of this type of system documentation is that it makes it easy to train your staff members. This documentation becomes both your training and operations manual for your marketing — a manual that any employee can use to properly run your marketing system like clockwork.

How to build your complete Marketing Ladder System

That’s a quick tour of what’s required to shift from the unproductive, conventional way of marketing to an entirely new approach that helps you make substantially more sales while marketing much less. And it restores your sanity — and a load of free time — by eliminating all the chaos that’s a natural byproduct of the conventional marketing funnel.

Using just what I’ve shown you here, you could immediately begin to apply it to your marketing and you’d gain a powerful advantage over all your competitors. However, as you can imagine, there are many nuances to all 6 steps of the system that I can’t possibly cover here. So if you’d like to get even better results and achieve this more quickly, you can do that with my complete program The Marketing Ladder Blueprint.

In this program, I personally guide you step-by-step to quickly build your own Marketing Ladder System. This program is unique in that not only do I show you exactly what to do to build your system, but I further illustrate each step by walking you through a real Marketing Ladder System I’m building at the same time for my own business.

So not only do you get comprehensive training and all the marketing documents you need to build your system, but you also get to see the real-world application of all 6 of the system steps as my own system is built. To my knowledge, there is no other program that trains you in this innovative way. And I can assure you that the benefit you get from seeing every step implemented down to the last detail will be an invaluable source of help and inspiration in building your own system.

Here’s how the program is delivered

With this in mind, let me show you how the program is delivered. There are three major components to the program, all designed to make sure you’re successful in building your Marketing Ladder System and ramping up your sales as quickly as possible. Here’s what you get:

Component #1 — Comprehensive training materials on a password protected training site. This site has all the materials you’ll need for learning and implementing all 6 steps of the system. Plus it includes an easy-to-use directory that steps you through everything in the proper order. Members of my previous programs have absolutely raved about how beneficial this site structure is, how simple it is to navigate, and most importantly, how easy it makes it to learn everything as quickly as possible.

In addition to a wealth of modules covering every step and every nuance you need to quickly create and implement your Marketing Ladder System, each lesson is accompanied by a separate Action Steps document that lays out exactly what to do to implement the material from that lesson is the shortest time possible. This “roadmap” of each lesson ties everything together in an easy to follow recipe for maximum success.

Component #2 — The MLB Marketing Toolkit. This consists of every marketing document you’ll need for launching and running your Marketing Ladder System for years to come. One of the core principles of the system is that everything must be simple, highly effective and completely reusable. This gives you the leverage to create a marketing piece once, then use it in multiple ways and for years to come.

By doing this, you get off the hamster wheel of constantly trying to keep up with the dozens (or hundreds) of potential ways you could be marketing. Instead, you have a finely tuned system that runs like clockwork with minimal intervention and maintenance.

The majority of these marketing pieces have clearly numbered blocks with corresponding explanations of the strategy behind each block and instructions on how to modify them for use in your business. In addition, you get both the block-by-block versions and separate Word versions of these documents, so when you’re ready to use them, you can just cut, paste, make a few simple modifications and they’re ready to go.

Component #3 — The complete “ride along” tour of how I’m building a new Marketing Ladder System for my own business. As I mentioned above, I’m building a completely new system for my own business using the Marketing Ladder Blueprint. It’s designed to sell a completely new set of products and services I recently started offering.

Since the target market for these products and services is different than the market I’ve been working in, a completely new system is required. So I’m documenting in complete detail exactly how I implement all 6 steps of the system in real time.

You’ll see the entire system unfold as I build it — the strategy, the tactics, the hits, the misses and everything in between. So you’ll be able to learn from my experience, get a real-world example of how to ideally implement the process to build your system, and see the results it produces.

HINT: I already have great confidence that this will be a booming success. The first couple steps are already underway and so far the results of using The Marketing Ladder — and by this, I mean real sales — are exceeding our projections. So you get this powerful “look over my shoulder” that you can use to model your own system every step of the way.