I’ve picked up a little hack to get my kids to pick up the house before bedtime…
And, it has INCREDIBLE relevance to your marketing results.
Let me share.
My kids are like a lot of kids. They don’t like to pick up. Especially when it’s mom and dad asking them to do it. Even if they are clearly the ones that made the mess. Even if it’s their toys.
And I can do a lot to try to persuade them.
I can sell with benefits: I can tell them they can pick up quickly and be done with it, and maybe have story time afterward. They like they idea, but it’s not enough to get them to take action.
I can sell with fear: Everything that’s not picked up by bedtime goes in toy time-out, and is gone for a couple days of good picking up. They hate that idea, but it’s also not enough to get them to take action.
But here’s the hack that I’ve discovered.
A timer app. (I have them on both my phone and iPad.) There are a lot of them. You pick what works best for you. The main thing: they have to be VISUAL.
That is, there has to be instant recognition that time is slipping away, and they need to get done.
Set the timer for plenty of time for them to pick up the mess they’re faced with, and hit “Go.”
And it works.
They look at the timer, and see it ticking. They hear it ticking, too — the good ones have a ticking clock sound, even though they’re digital.
Tick, tick, tick. The timer face shows the time slipping away. Tick, tick, tick.
And, the kids go for it. They start picking up. Sometimes faster than others. But with that timer and clear deadline, almost always faster than without.
Usually, as long as we’ve given them enough time, they’re all over it.
With a clear deadline, they take action!
The marketing lesson should be clear. It always, Always, ALWAYS pays to limit the time for response. To set a clear deadline. To require action before a certain cut-off. And to make sure you’ve communicated this with total and unmistakable clarity.
The easiest way to make that happen?
Hold an event.
It can be offline. It can be online. It can be big. It can be small.
But it should have a date and time, and with that, an automatic deadline.
This solves one of the biggest challenges of digital marketing: how to create realistic scarcity.
Because time scarcity it unmistakable. When that deadline passes, all will know. You don’t have to make up a fake quantity available. You don’t have to fudge the truth about limited supplies.
You simply set an event date and time, and ask for action in time for that.
While I don’t necessarily think you should treat your market like children, you can take lessons from the best ways to deal with children. Especially motivating children to do something they’re not prone to do without a little extra nudge. In these things, what motivates our behavior is not that far off from what motivates kids.
(I’ve been using Deadline Funnel for communicating deadlines and really like it.)
This is one of those principles that trumps tactical implementation…
I’ve been asked by clients to create “evergreen” sales copy. And I can do it, in a pinch. In certain markets, like finance, ever-changing market conditions helps create a sense of urgency you wouldn’t have otherwise.
But in many other markets, evergreen campaigns are difficult.
You can sell with benefits. You can sell with fear. But unless they prospect believes there’s an urgent and unmistakable reason to act now, you will fail.
Because there’s a difference between making a decision and taking action.
Frankly, getting a prospect to make a decision that they’d like to buy your product is the easy part. It’s translating that into action that is difficult.
And yet, if you can’t get them to take action, no money for you.
How I’ve applied this principle…
For one client, I was writing a bunch of evergreen promotions. They did okay, but we weren’t moving the needle as much as we’d like. So we created online summits, featuring their experts. These events helped us generate tens of thousands of new leads. Then, we created a time-limited offer, linked to the event. This created hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales. They then turned that into their primary marketing strategy, across multiple brands, and are continuing to run these events based on my formula today.
For another client, we launched a product, and it was doing really well. So well, in fact, that they were concerned they were going to oversaturate the market. So I urged them to close the doors, at least to let the dust settle. Make the “closing the doors” an event to spur action. They refused. They’d never done such a thing, and feared it would be seen as a gimmick. Two days later, they reached out to me again. They were taking my advice. The product was live for two weeks total. The initial launch generated a lot of buzz. But the 3-day “taking it down” deadline generated as many sales as the 11 previous days. It still holds the record for launch sales in its product category with that client.
Right now, I’m doing it again. I’ve released five trainings through BTMSinsiders already, each with minimal fanfare — I’m not running big product launches. But I decided the next would be great to deliver as a live webinar. So on Friday at Noon US Central Time, I’m holding a webinar called Think Like an A-List Copywriter: 17 principles for maximum profit. If you want to attend live, it’s easy. You simply have to join BTMSinsiders before Friday. Inside the training’s curriculum is a registration form for attending the webinar. It’s just $37, and you can attend the webinar plus you can start watching the five other training titles today.
(BTMSinsiders All-Access Pass members can click here and login to register now.)
This is a good time to note that it’s worth watching what I do on two levels.
First, the superficial level, where you learn from what I say. Second, the deeper level, where you learn from what I do. Here, I’m pulling back the curtain for both. (Check out my implementation of Deadline Funnel for this specific campaign by clicking here.)
Either way, you should also do what I do. Consider what you can do to link an event with a time and date into your next marketing campaign. Use the deadline as an urgency driver. It’s a principle that will increase your response rates with near-100% consistency.
And that, my friend, is a breakthrough.
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
PS: I got the idea for this article from the 17 principles I’ll be covering in Friday’s webinar on how to Think Like an A-List Copywriter. But I promise to go deeper and add dimension on this. Plus there’s 16 more principles I didn’t touch on here. Click here to learn more, and to register now.
