Cracking the Customer Growth Code: Secrets From the Master Mythologist
The only way you're going to reliably build a business is to get good at marketing and sales.
Most businesses, when asked what their biggest hurdle it, will say they need more customers.
Can't I just hire someone for that?
If you're small, you can't afford to do that.
If you have the money, you still need to know enough about marketing to understand whether the person or company you've hired is doing anything useful.
And then there's this new change away from brand and company to interaction and community driven by the Native Digitals - the new majority on the internet.
Here's what a 2023 study by Sprout Social determined after surveying over 1,800 consumers.
The study found that 70% of consumers are more likely to trust a company after watching a video from the CEO or head honcho - that's you!
Keep that in mind while I talk about where customer acquisition is at today.
Enter today's marketing funnels...
Nearly all marketing fits into two funnels - either high-touch or low/no-touch.
Funnels Start with Traffic…
There are basically three types of traffic - owned, earned, and acquired.
Owned traffic is from ads. Earned is from social sites. Acquired is from affiliates and other people's lists.
Any form of traffic, dumps into the top of the funnel.
High-Touch Funnels
A high-touch funnel offers a lot of human interaction as the customer makes their way to a buying decision.
In high-touch, leads are handled by salespeople who reach out to schedule a product demo.
The demo usually is the closer. The salesperson facilitates the sale.
The new customer get passed to a customer success representative to help on-board and setup their account.
In a 2023 article shared by Sales Hacker, the cost per lead for a high touch funnel can range from $300 to $1,000 or more per lead.
The average pricing markup is 3-5 times the cost of acquiring the customer.
That puts product pricing at a minimum of $1000.
That's why high-touch works for high ticket sales from coaches, consultants, and agencies.
However, high-touch is not affordable for most entrepreneurs.
Low-Touch Funnels
The mainstream entrepreneurs choose low-touch/no-touch for its affordability and automation.
That's there only other choice.
But there are drawbacks...(I'll share that in a moment)
This type of funnel sends the lead to an opt-in page to collect name and email address in return for something of value like a book, white paper, or course.
The lead is sent to a sales letter, a series of video pages, or a webinar.
When finished, there's an offer page with a 'buy now' button.
If they buy, they're a customer and are sent to a thank you page.
Many times a funnel like this will have a one-time offer (OTO) along with upsells and downsells.
The interaction and communication glue that holds this all together are emails.
Emails get the lead to return to the next event in the funnel.
And that's where the drawbacks start (for funnels and emails)...
Email has an average 20% open rate.
A 2022 study by Dataprot, shows over 56% emails are removed by spam filters.
The average email click-through rate is 2% to 3%.
A 2023 study by Campaign Monitor also shared this about emails.
47% of people said they receive too many emails from a business.
38% said emails weren't tailored to them.
According to the SaaS Playbook (Rob Walling), funnels current conversion is about 1% to 2%.
This is why funnel have one-time offers and upsells.
The conversion rate requires more offers to cover the cost of adverting.
It also means the remaining 98% who didn't convert get more emails to attempt conversion.
The on-going email barrage ends up annoying prospective customers more than it engages and connects with them.
While low-touch/no-touch funnels are automated and affordable, it's about marketing to strangers with a focus on their wallets, not relationships.
And this is the the conundrum for us business owners.
Customers want to build relationships with businesses. Businesses that use funnels and emails fall short in doing that.
The Bell-Shaped Curve
Picture a bell-shaped curve.
At one end are high-touch funnels. At the other end are low-touch funnels.
The on-going email barrage ends up annoying prospective customers more than it engages and connects with them.
What's in the middle?
A new customer interaction app that affordably builds relationships and revenue at scale.
All done through interactive video and re-engagement.
Entrepreneurs can build interactive relationships, either with the stand-alone app or integrated within existing funnel software.
And the app that builds interactive video relationships is called Relatable.
With Relatable, emails are no longer emails and funnels are no longer funnels.
Emails and funnels transform into interactive video experiences to connect, engage and re-engage.
And that builds relationships.
And relationships build trust which increases conversions.
Here's a couple of studies done by reputable companies that support the power of interactive video relationships.
A 2023 study done by Sprout Social surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. consumers about their attitudes towards company relationships.
The study found that 70% of consumers are more likely to trust a company after watching a video from the CEO.
55% of consumers are more likely to recommend a company to others after watching a video from the CEO.
Here's another jaw-dropping study done by Brightcove.
They analyzed over 1 billion video views and found that interactive videos increase engagement and conversions by up to 200%.
Interactive videos with in-action icons (we call them Touchables) have a 3-4x higher conversion rate than videos with calls-to-action outside of the video.
So how can you do this for your own business?
Follow this 4-part method to change your mindset and build your bank account.
Part 1: Rediscover Your Relatability.
That means connecting with your authentic voice.
Step 1: What makes you uniquely 'you'?
It's time to sit down and write out the following:
What do I stand for and what do I stand against?
What am I irrationally passionate about?
What do I see as status quo in my industry and how can I challenge that?
Step 2: It's time to write out your story.
For that, I'd like to introduce Joseph Campbell, that master mythologist (and guy in the picture at the start of this article).
He coined The Hero's Journey.
We all go through many heroes journeys in our lifetime.
And these journeys make up our stories.
"Heroes come from all walks of life, but they have one thing in common: they all matter to others. We, each of us, matter to someone. We may not always know who that someone is. That doesn't matter. What matters is that we be good heroes to others, and that we choose our own heroes wisely." Terry Sumerlin
And it only takes one person's story to change many lives.
Here's some prompts to write your own heroes journey story:
1. Struggle: Your current inner dialogue that held you back
2. Event: The internal or external event that shakes up your world
3. Aha: The eureka that created such a strong desire, you moved forward
4. Mentor: Who mentored you along your journey
5. Fear: Your battle between innermost doubts and desire for your result
6. Method: Your method(s) you developed to achieve the result
7. Sharing: How you shared it with the world (content and community)
Getting clarity on step 1 and step 2 is what makes you Relatable.
It's authentic, genuine, and vulnerable - people connect with that.
So write it down.
Part 2: Discover Your Secret Sauce
That is your unique and different solution you provide to those you plan to serve - audience, customers, or fans.
If you do this right, you can become the category king of your niche.
In their book, Play Bigger , the authors share their view of how to become a category king in the marketplace.
Companies like Uber, Google, Birdseye, and Airbnb have all become category kings.
To become a category king means you see a problem and create a different, not better solution.
For example, Uber built its new category around a simple and clear problem: ‘taxi service sucks’. The question they answered was, “How can you reliably get around town without a car?”
Once the public understands the problem, people latch on to the most popular solution.
Bottom line – if you are the company that changes the way people think, people will see your company as the most popular solution and the category king.
Telling your story to define and change the way people think about a problem it your secret sauce.
To help illustrate how to find your secret sauce, I'll use our new product Relatable to share how we came up with our secret sauce and named our category.
Relatable is an interactive video software app that re-engages to develop relationships at scale.
First, we looked at passive video.
Sites like YouTube and Tiktok are great examples.
They're massive giants with billions of views.
The drawback is viewers are passive - a pair of eyeballs and an ip address to deliver ads.
It's not a great fit for most businesses as passive video is transactional, not relational.
As a business, you can't build true relationships people who watch YouTube and Tiktok videos.
Then we looked at funnels.
Funnels are the status quo of low/no-touch marketing.
They take the user through a one-way experience that ends with a call-to-action to purchase.
If a user drops out at any step, funnels try and re-engage with email.
According to Rob Walling, author of The SaaS Playbook (great book to read btw), keeps track of current conversion funnel rates. They’re between 1% to 2%.
To counteract the lower conversion rates and ever-increasing ad costs funnel creators use one-time-offers (OTOs), upsells and downsells.
Once again, most funnels are transactional, not relational.
Finally we looked into interactive video applications.
According to a 2022 study by Interactive Video Association, the average conversion rate for interactive video is 14.8%.
That's much better than funnels; however, current interactives are about boosting engagement, lead capture, enhancing training, and monetizing content.
It was in this research, we found our secret sauce and the new category of software.
From talking with those that would be our customers about their sales process, using video, and their frustrations, we learned they wanted:
1. An affordable sales process.
2. A medium, like video, that's familiar to customers.
3. To develop customer relationships that build long-term value.
4. An easy way to scale relationships without having to be there in person.
We combined the research with our customer-based desires and the epiphany revealed itself:
Interactive Video Relationships.
And Relatable was born. Relatable is:
1. Affordable.
2. Interactive video to engage viewers.
3. Re-connection, bringing viewers back to where they paused watching.
4. Re-engagement with personalized videos based on viewer's answers to build relationships.
5. Measuring effectiveness and viewer behavior and responses in analytics.
Part 3: Translating Your Secret Sauce into a Cause to Build a Community
A cause refers to a shared vision or mission that unites people towards a common goal or purpose.
A cause inspires and rallies people together, creating a sense of community and fostering a collective effort towards bringing about the desired change.
A cause serves as a driving force that motivates individuals to take action and work collaboratively towards a shared vision.
The cause is the ‘glue’ that holds together the community.
Relatable’s cause is created out of our problem statement: you can’t build relationships with current video platforms.
We created a way to think about being relatable and a software tool that can easily build interactive video relationships that is easy to build and easy to deploy.
We’re creating an us vs. them approach, helping people realize that you can’t engage, nurture and build relationships with your customers on any video channel like YouTube and TikTok – especially when they all serve interruption ads that annoy their audiences but help them keep the doors open.
That’s the epitome of not building a relationship.
True relationships are built with focus and interaction on the other.
These businesses focus on themselves first and their user base second.
We even differentiate in how we describe people that build and people that interact with Relatables.
There are builders and viewers.
There are no users.
As Edward Tufte, Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Yale University said, “There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software.”
Going forward, we’ll get criticism and backlash. If we didn’t, we’re not doing a great job creating our cause and our movement.
Part 4: Show Up Every Day
Relationships are built by showing up every day.
With Relatable, it's possible to to create daily Relatable interactive videos sharing a thought, challenge, or method and then asking a single question to get your audience's feedback.
Daily Relatables, show you are committed to your audience and want to share with them.
Your audience feels like they can count on you.
Showing up tells your audience you’re passionate about your cause and community.
A call-to-action at the end of a daily Relatable is to ask them to join your community and movement - not to sell them something (that comes later).
Over time, you'll learn so much about your community's desires, challenges, and feedback on your next moves.
Building interactive video relationships with Relatable is a memorable way to stay connected with your community and build your movement.
Play the long game, not the sprint.
Be real. Be remembered. Be relatable.
If this piqued your interest and you’d like to learn more about Relatable, tap or click the ‘Get Relatable’ button.
If you're already a subscriber to our community and movement, thank you so much for your support!
You're parts of Heretics 2.0. The largest movement where marketing meets in the middle - driven by the wise words of the master mythologist, Joseph Campbell.