January 2014 - Donnie Bryant | Direct Response Copywriter

My First Google Hangout

January 15, 2014 by Donnie Bryant

Last Tuesday I was a guest on Lunch Money (part of The Million Dollar Trek) with Camari Ellis. It was my first experience with Google Hangouts.

For 89 minutes, we discussed marketing, copywriting, lead generation ideas and why you need to fall in love with your customers. We basically went through the 5 “smooth stone strategies” I talk about in my Beat Goliath report (which you get for free when you sign up for my weekly newsletter. Just enter your name and email address in the boxes to the right.)

We also briefly talked about the Walmart donkey meat fiasco.

For those of you who missed it, here’s the recording of the show.

Funny Side Note:

With this being my first time using Hangouts, I made a pretty embarrassing mistake when I started promoting this show. I created an event on Google+ and shared it with a few hundred people and made it publicly visible. Then, naturally, I included the link to that event in my email newsletter and shared it on Twitter and LinkedIn as well.

The problem is, the Hangout was hosted at the event Camari had created.

For some reason, I thought my Google would figure out what I was trying to do. I figured that once Camari and I were connected, our Hangout events would merge. (Don’t ask me why I thought that.) So I never corrected the problem or redirected people to the correct link.

So there were several people sitting at the Hangout I created and invited them to — without me.

Many apologies were made.

Is Your Marketing Fragile? Here’s How You Can Tell

October 15, 2015January 11, 2014 by Donnie Bryant

It’s possible to know everything about marketing techniques, strategies and tools and still be a marketing imbecile.

If you don’t understand what makes people tick, you don’t have much going for you. Marketing is about people, not methods. When business people miss this fact, the marketing they produce is usually pretty fragile. Always in danger of falling apart. Susceptible to defeat in the face of opposition or competition.

Fragile marketing is all around us. Here are 4 major symptoms — do your communications suffer from any of them?

1) Price-based messages are fragile
Unless you have no mailbox, TV or internet, you’ve probably seen dozens of advertisements for Black Friday “doorbuster” sales. Doorbusters take urgency to the extreme, offering uber-low prices to drive traffic to stores (or to a lesser extent, websites).

Don’t get me wrong; everyone loves a good deal. But consider the position you put yourself in when you put all your eggs in the low price basket. You have to be cheaper than Walmart. You have to compete with the preponderance of their commercials, too. Is that really the contest you want to participate in?

While this is true all year ’round, consumers (at least here in America) are practically programmed to shop at big box retailers for Black Friday and other commercialized holidays. The retailers spend millions of dollars broadcasting their bottom-basement prices to your customers. The deck is stacked against you.

Remedy
No matter what you sell, if you don’t a) offer something unique, b) make a more persuasive appeal, or c) develop a special relationship with your customers, you lose…

Discover 3 eading “Fragile Marketing: Recognize the Symptoms” on the Chicago Brander blog:

Much thanks to Dan Gershenson for letting my guest blog!

Leaders Eat Last

January 19, 2015January 1, 2014 by Donnie Bryant

Last week’s newsletter on leadership got a great response. (If you missed it, sucks for you. But you can make sure it doesn’t happen to you in the future by signing up in the box on the right side of the page.)

Positioning yourself as your customers’ leader (and speaking with the voice of authority that comes with it) creates one of the biggest opportunities for business growth I can think of.

According to John Maxwell, “A leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way.” If that quote describes you, this message is for you.

If you have clients and customers that you take good care of, you’re already leader. Now you have to work on positioning yourself as their leader. That doesn’t always come naturally.

Here are a few quick thoughts on business growth through customer leadership.

Ask Not What Your Customers Can Do for You…

Last January, Simon Sinek published a book called Leaders Eat Last. I haven’t read the book yet (shame on me), but I remember how the title instantly caught my attention when I first saw it. Those 3 words flesh out the idea that leadership is all about serving others, not about getting other people to follow your commands. (The term servant leadership is somewhat redundant for that reason.)

This is part of the burden of leadership — putting others before yourself is the right thing to do. This means:

offering products and services that your customers want and need, not necessarily what you think is cool right now
a strong commitment to quality and
gutsy guarantees and service after the sale

These will make you a better leader and they will ultimately make your business more profitable.

Leaders Are Architects

To a certain extent, leaders define reality for their followers.

They create a vision of what’s possible, painting a mental picture of all that life can be, all that it should be (at least in a given area).
They empower their followers to take action.
The give them the education and/or tools to make it happen.

Leaders Lead

Education and inspiration are important, but a leader has to go beyond that stage. He should lead by example. He does everything in his power to get his followers to do what he knows is best for them. He holds them accountable to what they’ve committed to do.

It’s one thing to teach your followers about eating healthy food. Educating them is definitely a good thing. But what do they gain if they keep eating junk? It’s a leader’s job to do everything he can to help them make the difficult decision to change.

Leaders can’t cower back. They have to keep pressing forward. Even when it’s dark. Even when they’re unsure of their own qualifications. Their followers depend on them!

Action Steps

1) Decide to adopt a leadership mindset in your industry, your office, your city. Make a commitment to pursue excellence and use whatever influence you have to help your pack move toward a better result in some area.

2) Remember — it’s not about you! Putting the best interest of your followers ahead of your own interests is the right thing to do.

Leaders may chose to eat last, but good leaders will still have plenty on their plates.

3) I’d like to point you to one of the documents that helped crystallize a lot of my thoughts on this topic. It’s an old newsletter article from Jay Abraham on what he calls the strategy of preeminence. If you’re familiar with Jay, you’re familiar with this concept. In this PDF, he covers some specific thoughts that I promise you’ll find enlightening. He’s giving it away for free at his website, no opt-in required. You can download it here.

It’s 4 pages long. Well worth taking the time to read, think about deeply and apply to your business (and life).