32 Key Marketing Insights from Jay Abraham
Jay Abraham is most well known for his seminal $1,000 book, Stealth Marketing. Although it was published in the early 90’s, like so many other direct response classics it’s timeless, and worth every penny. All 32 key insights below come directly from Stealth Marketing.
1. NUMBER ONE ASSET Your number one asset is your relationships with your customers. Delivering value without selling consistently is the key to maintaining customer lifetime value. Marketing is all about relationship building.
2. BEST DEALS TO CUSTOMERS Give Customers the Best Deals (before everyone else). When launching a new product give existing customers a better deal first and foremost. The point isn’t to maximize the revenue from existing customers but to maintain lifetime value.
3. HONESTY Try to get as close to 100% transparent as you can. Be edgy and authentic, REAL. Even if you offend or push away certain customers that’s okay. The goal is to laser focus and dial in your ideal customer.
4. CARING Let customers know you care. Email them upfront on opt-in that you will email them from time to time.
5. AVATAR Know your customer avatar down to the nationality, other products that they are customers of, sophistication level, fears & frustrations. Only then can you reach them at their level, not yours. You need to draw a direct line from what you have and what they desire.
6. PRESS RELEASES Have a hard news angle. Make it editorial. Illustrate the authority, social proof and USP in every press release. Be objective and use your press releases to reposition the competition.
7. QUALITY You must strive to have the highest quality in your market. You need to be authentic in how you portray your quality as all vendors say they have the highest quality. Quality alone won’t sell a product, and it’s pretty far down on the ladder of importance unfortunately but nevertheless you need to reposition the competition by having the best quality.
8. CALL TO ACTION (CTA) Avoid risk, worries, losses, mistakes and embarrassment on part of the prospect. Ask them to take specific actions to avoid these things. Be as specific as to tell them exactly what to do next, as most sites are not logical for the vast majority of prospects. They need clear instructions, step-by-step on what to do, how to do it and when to do it. “What I want you to do next is to click on the button that says “Buy Now”, enter your credit card details on the next page and then click ‘Place Order’.”
9. SPEAK TO ONE HUMAN Too often businesses speak to a group of people making all communication feel impersonal. You need to understand your customer avatar so well that you know their fears and frustrations better than they do. It’s at this point that you speak directly to your customer avatar, and in the process you your targeting becomes laster focused. Your prospect feels as though you’re speaking directly to them. You will filter out some prospects in the process, but that’s exactly the point.
10. SPEAK-WRITE Write as you speak. Speak to one person directly, use the word “you” often and frequently.
11. USE LOTS OF SUBHEADS “Chunk” content to increase readability and engagement.
12. NEVER DEAL IN GENERALITIES You want to talk and communicate in specifics, never generalities. When you speak in generalities the prospect doesn’t connect. If you speak in specifics they make a “connect”.
13. SPEND MORE THAN ANYONE TO ACQUIRE A CUSTOMER Also known as “He who spends the most to acquire a customer wins.” (no, Ryan Deiss didn’t say this first, Abraham did) Think in terms of Lifetime Value of the Customer. It’s at this point that your backend comes to life and you start making real money. All of the headaches occur on the front-end. The back-end is where all the real money and profit is. Spend more than anyone on the front-end simply to get the customer, even if you don’t make a profit. Move the prospect through your product funnel as fast as you can, and with the lowest perceived risk to the prospect.
14. BACK END PRODUCTS Back-end products is where the BIG money is. Upsell, downsell, cross-sell and re-sell hard. At every interaction the prospect and customer should be offered related and like-products. You’re helping them solve a problem, so the more solutions you offer the better.
15. TEST HEADLINES The ad for the ad. One of the biggest forms of leverage rarely utilized by business owners and marketers is the power of the headline. You can increase the efficiency of how strong your headline pulls. One change to your headline can have a net impact of 2100% or more.
16. REJECT DESK-BOUND THINKING Be desk-free. Move around, let your thoughts flow. Be in motion as opposed to being static. Location-independent.
17. BUSINESS IS A CONTACT SPORT Use EVERY persuasion strategy and tactic. If you’re products or services has a genuine benefit and solution to your target avatar then it’s in your prospects best interest to consume what is that you have to offer. If this rings true you owe it to your prospect to sell them what you’re offering. Use every tactic in the book short of torture.
18. READ UNRELATED CONTENT By following the trends of other industries you can borrow ideas, copy, ads, design and other attributes that laterally transfer to your industry.
19. DELEGATE By outsourcing managerial, customer facing and physical aspects of work increase your bandwidth to focus on the highest forms of leverage in your business, namely marketing and innovation. Read GTD to understand this if you’re not familiar with the concept.
20. SELL TO A SEGMENT FIRST Claude Hopkins said measure response, dial in language and product characteristics according to what your prospect and customer desires. Don’t think about why to do this, just do it.
21. POST-PURCHASE MARKETING Selling to customers is the most lucrative part of any business. On average customers are 24x more likely to buy than a prospect.
22. DISCOVER MARGINAL NET WORTH Each customer has a lifetime value. You need to measure this over time so that you can determine the profit potential of your list
23. STORY include a story with all products. This sells you and everything else you do. It provides a connection point for the prospects and customers. It sets you apart because the competition has none, or if they do it’s not compelling and it doesn’t speak to the customer avatar.
24. DETERMINE ADS THAT WORK Look to other industries, look to your competitors and emulate them, build and improve upon them. It’s essential that you draw a straight line from your product to your prospects desires. Ignore everything else. Be crystal clear, no poetry. Don’t make an ad look like an ad, make it editorial.
25. FIND YOUR USP Determine what your Unique Selling Point is and expand your USP in conjunction with a rock-solid guarantee to eliminate and hopefully reverse the risk. Place all the risk on you, not the prospect. Get them to agree that the risk is on you, and not them.
26. DON’T TALK ABOUT PRICE IN ADS Focus on USP and benefits in ads. Not price. There are exceptions to this, but generally you want to speak directly to the prospects fears and frustrations, which is usually something different than price.
27. DESIGN EDITORIALLY Don’t make your ads look like ads. Educate your prospects, don’t hard-sell without providing useful information.
28. JAY RECOMMENDED’S THESE BOOKS 1. Scientific Advertising 2. Think & Grow Rich 3. Breakthrough Advertising 4. David Ogivly 5. Tested Advertising Methods
29. STAIR-STEPPING 1. Prospect raises hand 2. Low-risk product 3. Core-offer 4. Slack Adjuster
30. DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE UNKNOWN Take risks, test everything and reject that which doesn’t work. Don’t get emotionally connected to an idea if it doesn’t perform, that’s not part of the equation for success. Be objective, remove it from the chopping block and put the next thing on.
31. ANALYZE ALL RESULTS Analyzing data is the most critical aspect that many entrepreneurs fail to collect and to act upon. David Ogilvy was the most successful marketer of his day not because he had the best ads, but because he spent the most on research to understand the customer avatar.
32. EXTRAORDINARILY CONCENTRATED FOCUS You must laser focus on the most important tasks in your business, which is rarely managerial, or physical in nature. Delegation is key to establishing concentrated focus.