Brian J. Pombo Live

Brian gives us a mail review from a mailer by Renewals by Andersen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD1tX6GJgZI

Transcription

Catching your customers eyes.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to talk about a piece of mail I got today. So we've been talking about like deep things lately on our little conversations, our nightly conversations.

But today I want to show you, this is a piece of relatively thick cardstock, let's say it's cardstock. It's a relatively thick piece of paper and I don't know enough about the paper to tell you how thick this is but they kind of get an idea just by the sound by looking at it.

This showed up in my mailbox. It was sitting there with some other stuff and it was sitting there kind of wide open. Then I looked at him like this is this a piece of mail or did someone slip this in my box.

So the first thought that went into my mind because it looks like just a piece of paper. And it's just a very thick piece of paper. So it's got the address, it's got it's pretty sorted standard US postage paid, Twin Cities Minnesota. looks like it came from Springfield, Oregon, or at least that's why it's made to look like Springfield's not far from here. It's a little north, a few hours north of here.

This is by a company called, Renewals by Andersen. But I want, I want to just point this out if you're looking to get attention from your customers, regardless of what style of marketing, this is direct mail, but regardless of what style of marketing, the whole idea is to catch their eye.

The whole idea is to get their attention for just one more second, and there are so many very subtle things about this piece that makes it different.

Number one, you don't get many pieces of mail that are just like this, even a postcard, or an oversized postcard. A postcard this size, it tends to have a little bit more weight and a lot more gloss.

This is not glossy, it's a very flat matte look to it. Okay, that's the first thing that caught my eyes.

Second thing is, I'm not sure if you can tell from the lighting in here and everything else. But it's a very interesting color. It's not white. It's not exactly pink. But it's a very light, something in between white and pink.

That's off putting it catches your eye, it's not a typical thing that you'd see. In fact, it kind of looks as I'm looking at it.

Now it kind of appears to be like a, if you've ever seen those carbon copies that used to have these around a lot more often before copy machines became so plentiful, and then printers and scanners. But the carbon copies where you can write something, and then you get a receipt and someone else gets a receipt and the top one will be like white and the second one will be like pink, and the next one will be like yellow.

And that's what this reminds me of.

I'm not sure if it's made to look like that or not but it appears that way. So it definitely caught my eye as far as that this is not accidental.

I guarantee you this is not accidental. If it is it's a brilliant accident.

Having a very off putting color is going to grab people's eyes, especially when it comes to direct mail. Just something that's unusual. So it's an unusual shape and size for direct mail.

It just It looks like a piece of paper, it looks like something that was torn off of somebody's carbon copy. And there's more to it. Okay.

In this, they've got this,

Good enough is good enough.

The value of not waiting for things to be perfect before getting started with something you want to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1r8KylU90c

Transcription

The final step in marketing research?

I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Some people ask me why I use punctuation when I introduce the show?

To be completely honest, it's usually for my producer, who takes the show, and then takes the title and adds it to everything. And so it's just become a running joke that I'll use punctuation.

I'm gonna come up with something really absurd and long one of these days and say all the different pieces of punctuation we're using in the title.

Hi, welcome back, let's talk about market research, shall we?

In business, especially at the beginning of a business, or at the beginning of a new product or service that you're offering, you may be switching to a new market, you may be appealing to a market that you're not used to, or a sub-market of the one you're already playing to.

In that process, there are all these different steps you really should go through and most people don't take any of those steps. But I highly encourage you to do as much market research as you can meaning find out as much about them and whether they would actually be interested in what it is that you're selling, whether they'd actually buy it for the amount that you're looking to sell it for.

Now, in the end, I'll tell you that in a second, but if you can find similar products that are selling at, you know, to the same people, if you can find anybody that's playing toward that same market, it may take doing surveys, it may take doing a whole lot of things, but there's one thing that you can't get past.

In the end, you're only going to have a certain amount of money available to you and resources. And you're going to have a certain amount of time to get that thing out the door.

So just today, I was working with Sean E. Douglas who is one the main producers here. And I was working with him on a new product. And we're talking about, you know, well, it could be this and it could be that and we talked around a lot about the market research.

But in the end for the amount of money that we have, and the amount of time that we really want to spend, it's going to be easier to go with this last step.

By this point in the game, we know enough about what we're doing and who we're playing towards, that this last step is what matters.

The last step is you just got to take a leap and get the thing to market, put it out there and see what the results are. It comes back to that whole concept of direct response marketing, which is testing, testing, testing, you have to get it out there, it has to be active. You got to put it in front of people, if you put it in front of people and they don't buy, then you need to ask why you need to find out some more, you got to get in some conversations and see what's going on.

See what the appeal is see if your marketing even works or not see the product may be good. But if the marketing stinks while you're not going to sell anything, or you'll sell very little.

And so you got to dig in there but it takes taking a risk. In the end, there's always going to be a little bit of risk left, even in the best-case scenario, there's always going to be a little bit of risk. There's going to be the chance that something isn't going to go right.

Thoughts on what may be holding you back from achieving success.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-abh-v_23QU

Transcription

Are you blocking magic in your life?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I came up with this one because every day I am in the show by saying, you got to get out there and let the magic happen. And I think that most people, it's not that you need to make the magic or that you even need to, I don't know, conjure up the magic or anything that sort, the real magic in life I find will happen if you let it happen.

It's everywhere. It's a constant flow, constantly flowing. It's just that we do certain things to block it. And I use it on a business show like this, talking to business owners and executives and so forth because it's true no matter what.

But it's really true, you can really see it in the field of business, that what people do is they set out to achieve a certain thing. There are a million different ways that a person can block the magic in their life. Just completely keep it from occurring.

Most of it, I think a whole lot of it, the foundations of everything come back to what we talked about yesterday, in discussing attitude, your frame of mind, and your attitude is the first thing if you don't have that, right, you won't get anything right.

You have to have that right attitude and if you don't, that has to be fixed. That is a guaranteed blocker. Absolutely that.

I could break it down into a lot of the same ways I break down business ideas. So I like to break down the things we talk about here into principles, strategies, and tactics.

Principles are those foundational types of ideas like an attitude. Everything else that goes along with that. You got strategies, which are really the plans that you put into place and a lot of times people will, either, I mean, people just tend to under plan or over plan.

They get too worked up with the plan and have something do work specifically, exactly the way that they want it to work or they don't plan anything.

They have zero expectations of getting anything that goes back to attitude. And because of that, everything falls apart. You won't get magic if you don't expect magic.

That's one thing I found. I mean, you'll get somewhat life itself is magical, you know, just being alive. Existing in a healthy state even more magical. But it doesn't feel like magic. It just feels like okay, well, this is the same way it was yesterday type of thing. But it's magic. I mean, it's amazing how these things are able to occur.

The next one though, is the tactics snd the tactics are what people won't get caught up in. It's the day to day minutia.

I found most of the problems happen on the principle and it comes down to the principles, it comes down to your attitude on what you're expecting from things on how you're going about that process and playing it out and kind of not foreseeing the future.

But planning on having a better future and working positively in that direction as best you can. You can't predict everything. You got to be able to roll with the punches. And then there's the day to day tactics.

The What, the How you're going to do it. And everyone gets caught up with that as if that's that's where the magic that magic just happens. It honestly just happens.

It's there. It's available. We have freedom available in this world if you can reach an area with political freedom, and an economic freedom and religious freedom.

Brian talks about Bible verse Matthew 7:7-8 and the power of belief.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXa7mCGtrgA

Transcription

Attitude is the foundation.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

We talk a lot here about business I'm business investor. And we talk about the principles behind business the strategies and the tactics.

Today I want to go hardcore principles on, yeah, we're going to talk about the these passages happen to be from the Bible. But I'm not going to get super religious on your anything but these interesting ideas, okay, regardless of whether you even believe in anything, right?

This is regardless of that. I hear a lot of people. Well, there was a book I read years ago called, Attitude is Everything. And that's a very common phrase that people use attitude is everything.

A person could take that a bunch of different ways that I heard one person say, it's really not the truth attitude, is the only thing he said.

I get that, too. I totally get the purpose of that. But really, I think attitude is the foundation of everything that you do. That you need action, you need everything that goes along with that you need the actual doing of the thing.

Attitude, cannot be it, you can't do it without attitude, it's the first thing, the first thing you've got to achieve is attitude. What I have written here on this, it's a three by five card and it's not laminated, it's in this little soul case.

Years ago, I heard Earl Nightingale The Strangest Secret, and he had a couple tips on there are things that you should do every day.

One of the things is he said, You ought to read this out loud to yourself on a regular basis. Though I don't necessarily read it out loud to myself, it is something that I always go back to, this is from Matthew 7:7-8, I believe it is.

There are different versions of this, but we've all heard it somewhere before that, I want you to think about it, not necessarily in terms of religion because there's a whole you go off on a whole different area.

Now, I want you to think of this in terms of attitude, for everything in life, okay?

"Ask and it will be given to you seek and you will find, knock, and it will be open to you, for everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be open."

Now oftentimes, you know, when it comes to religion, people talk about this in terms of salvation, and you know, heavily, salvation and all that. And I'm sure that's, in general, what it's meant to mean.

But I found that the same thing is true throughout all of life and especially in terms of business. If you do not have the attitude that you need to ask and seek and knock that you have to. And these are all action words.

They're not things that were just sitting still, I mean, these are, these are very specific things. But it's not necessarily a specific thing that you need to do. It's not saying you got to go knock on doors, but you have to expect in a sense that good things are possible and it doesn't matter.

If you're in a war-torn country, or whether you're in a horribly depressed economy, or whether you're starving to death or anything else, that the concept is the same.

Asking and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be open to you.

You have to believe it's possible.

You have to believe that whatever you're after in life,...

Brian talks about the attention a local barbershop (G St. Barber Co.) received from offering free haircuts to those looking for work.

link to article - https://www.kdrv.com/community/free-haircuts-for-those-in-need/article_2a1c3528-a654-11ec-a5f9-e30b527f5a1d.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwO_tBe-ADo

Transcription

Business hacks for chaotic times.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Check out this article I found. I also found a video regarding something happening right here in town, you may have something like this happening where you live also, where we have a barbershop that's offering free haircuts to anyone that is looking to get go out and get a job interview and is looking to move themselves up in the world, but they can't afford it.

This is just a helpful leg up to be able to help out but what it also is, is an amazing marketing tool is you're using a situation that everyone's aware of the crunch of money and everything else and tough times and using it to your advantage by offering something.

I mean, think about a barbershop think about all the time in a barbershop, where you have an empty chair. There are tons of periods of time where there's just nobody coming in and we've nobody's coming in, no money is being made in most cases, as smarter barbers may have a subscription program or something like that setup but if you don't, then chances are you need it.

You need all the help you can get even if it's a free person, because it's one of those businesses. That's very special in the fact that people don't like switching up.

Especially men don't like switching up where they go to get their hair done. Once they commit there, they're there for life.

So you get you get somebody to come once or twice to the same barber. If they're happy with the results, they'll keep coming.

If they're even partially happy with the results. They will keep coming, which is a which is a really cool deal.

Congratulations to this fella for setting up this program here locally. It's something you can do even if you don't have a barber shop. That's not even if you don't even have a local retail shop.

Find ways to offer to make an offer that's tied to the news that's tied to the conversation already going on in people's heads and you'll go far. It's a nice quick tip for tonight.

Go check out, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business my book that's all about how to overcome competition works in into any industry whatsoever. If you purchase this read it and you say it can't work in your industry. I would love to interview you and I will give you double your money back. So reach out today.

Go go pick up your own free copy. If you don't want to pay for it, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Free copy at AmazonProofBook.com.

AmazonProofBook.com, all one word.

You have a great night. We'll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

A look at using collector's items in your marketing with an example piece from Zen Master of the Internet, Matt Furey.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcmLuPG0Otc

Transcription

Collector's items, as marketing.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I've got this is a pack, this is from 2007, is what it says on it. And I probably got it somewhere around that time not long after. This is Matt Furey for those of you who are unfamiliar, Matt Furey is an exercise health guru online, also very well known for teaching direct response marketing.

He was one of the earliest ones that I saw online really taking advantage of banner ads and email marketing.

Very early on in my internet journeys, I had bought a few of his books, because they were so out of place, they were on a political website of all places that he was advertised. And he just it stood out.

There's something to be said for that method also, but I wanted to talk specifically about this, this is a pack of cards, it says Matt Furey Exercise Bible.

But what this is, it's a pack of playing cards, I'm gonna pull some out here, you can see, of course, you got the same thing as that's on the cover there. Each one you got here.

So here's the three of hearts, Hindu squats.

So he's got all his different exercises. Here's the four of clubs, Tablemaker, right?

You've got all his exercises on here. So in a sense, you can use this as, as an exercise, actually learning his exercises, or at least reminding yourself of the exercises that he teaches in his books and other places.

All of these were drawn by Vince Palko, who if you haven't heard of him is over at AdToons. Really good stuff, brilliant way of marketing.

Here's his reason why I haven't thrown this out.

Number one, because I love Matt Furey and his stuff. It's quirky, it's corny, it's got the little cartoon versions of him, there's an actual picture of him on that side. But it's who throws away a pack of cards, right?

You keep a pack of cards around forever, it's like books you tend to keep up. And it's just one of those things that I can always go back to, if I never used it, I can always go back to it as a marketing lesson if nothing else.

But even if you weren't into marketing, if you didn't understand the ability of these, this is going to get around each one of the cards. Even if they got displaced, they'll have his website on it.

They'll have his website or a website of the other people that helped help out like lets Vince Palko on there.

So, really great idea collector's items can be really useful, if they're clever. If they stand out if they're different. If you can stand out be different. You have a way of getting into your customers' lives in a way that other people can't. They'll have a tough time getting rid of you have years and years and years, I still have so many of these materials. Not just because I'm a packrat and I am a packrat. But also because it's just solid marketing.

Those types of things don't die easily. They stick around, they stick around your households, and they just have a way of never going away.

That's a really interesting concept. I've got other interesting concepts in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business is all about making the competition irrelevant and how to stand out in any marketplace.

You can get. Go pick up a copy at Amazon.

Brian talks about how one picture stirred up a reaction from a recent campaign.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCl7r_Jt7FQ

Transcription

Know your audience's hot button.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I wanted to tell you about this thing here. This is an image that my friend posted on Facebook with a little description of what is happening locally, and it's very special.

It's very special, it says sales tax, for those of you who are just listening on it. That wouldn't really get many people's attention I would imagine around the world necessarily.

In this particular county though, on these county groups that he posted it in, it garnered a whole lot of attention. Because I live in Oregon, okay. I live in Josephine County.

Josephine County, at least for the longest time, I'm not sure if it still does but it had the lowest property tax of any of the other counties in Oregon.

On top of that, Oregon does not have any broad base sales tax. Now they have a few a few little taxes here and when it comes to automate a little. They could be relatively large, depending on who's paying it but they have a tax on on cannabis and they got a tax on on gas, and they got you know, they've got taxes but there's no broad based retail sales tax.

So every time anyone ever proposes one, people come out of their skins that unglued.

I'm not saying they should or shouldn't but it happens it's a guaranteed hot button issue in this county, especially in our county, in certain counties, they may have local sales taxes or cities and so forth.

This is one that they're proposing for a county wide sales tax.

And boy, you can't believe the results of the reaction just to that picture caused people to read what he had written, and caused people to comment and share and do all this other stuff.

I really think it has a whole lot to do with this image.

It's a great big red image that says sales taxes, if it's a tag, and it just it grabs you if but like I said, In all cases, that wouldn't be the case.

But if you know your audience, knowing your audiences is really the key thing here.

You have to know who you're going after, you have to know your market, like we're talking about yesterday.

You have to know what their hot button is, what is the thing that's going to stop them right in their tracks and and force them to pay attention to you.

This doesn't matter whether you're posting on social media, just something some type of, you know, written up text thing, a blog, or anything of that sort, whether it's a video, whether it is and when you're talking video. You got to have that thumbnail image that first image that's sitting there on the video and what your title is. It matters.

It doesn't matter whether it's a podcast episode, the same things true every time. If you know what that hot button is, you can press it over and over and over again.

You're going to continue to rake in attention, especially if you switch it around a little bit how you say the same thing over and over again, to get people who may have missed it the first time around.

So this isn't just for online marketing. This is across the board. It doesn't matter if you're putting out billboards or you're writing a book, if you can somehow get that hot button issue, that hot button image that brings up the issue, whatever it is.

Brian gives 3 tips for you to consider if your thinking about creating ongoing content marketing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X__OkApkgZU

Transcription

Three tips for content marketing videos.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to talk a little bit about content marketing videos and three things. Really, are there three steps that you ought to think about taking in the process of developing content marketing videos, let's talk about step number one.

Step number one is defining your market.

Who are you making your videos for?

Yeah, is content marketing?

So you're creating content for somebody to do something?

So who is who are they?

Where are they going to be?

We're talking about videos.

So where are they watching?

Where are they watching these videos at?

All that you got to think about all the different places they're going to watch them. You know, most people think well, YouTube. Okay, great. YouTube. Where else?

Are you going to place these videos on your website?

Are you going to place them in other places?

Are you going to put them up in other video?

Places that hold video, ones like rumble, and all these other ones that are out there.

Are you gonna create a podcast out of them?

Are you going to create playlists or are these purposefully just for fresh faces that find you on YouTube?

How do you expect them to find you?

Do you expect them to do searches?

On YouTube on Google on the other search engines?

How are they going to find these videos?

That's the first step market who, who who?

Who are you talking to and why are they why are they?

Why could they?

Why would they possibly want to watch you and watch what you're talking about?

The second step. Second step simple.

Once you know who then you got to know what you want people to do, it's the message step. So what is your message in the video, what are you telling people to do?

What do you want them walking away with when they're done watching your videos?

And you're probably going to have more than one what, right?

It all depends on how often you're doing them. I recommend doing them consistently. Thereby, building up momentum and everything else and really giving yourself presence online.

But I'm not in your shoes, you have to ask yourself, what is the message of our videos?

What is the end game, what do we want them to do?

What are we going to be telling them to do?

That's the message. So we got the market? The Who? The media, which is the what? What's the third step?

Third step is media.

What form of media is this going to take?

I started asking some of those questions early on, but they're best suited right here.

How are people going to find you?

Where and how are people going to view you?

You got to answer the first two questions to really get to ...

Brian talks a section in Eugene Schwartz's classic, Breakthrough Advertising in regards to building believability and trust in your copy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY9q9bvZWgE

Transcription

How to transfer trust in marketing.

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live. Where I get into the nice down and dirty psychology of marketing tonight. There are very few amazing teachers out there like the late great Eugene Schwartz.

This is his magnum opus, Breakthrough Advertising.

It's a tough one to get, I believe Titans Marketing still sells this, for a pretty penny, worth every dime, Titans Marketing, for Breakthrough Advertising.

I can pick up this book at any time, flip to any page and get something great out of it, which is what I did tonight, I got this chapter, chapter 13, on the seventh technique of breakthrough copy, which is what he calls camouflage.

In the very first few paragraphs, he's talking about that he calls it how to borrow conviction for your copy.

He's talking about copywriting copy advertising copy because that was what Eugene Schwartz did, he wrote, copy for advertising. But the principles can be tied to any type of marketing whatsoever, which is an amazing thing is that especially to content marketing.

So you've got to pay attention to this, this is great stuff that he says he says in here. He says, "We have to discuss five separate ways to build believability in your copy."

And he goes on with that. He says, "As long as there is faith in that publication, so if a person's reading a publication, a magazine or a newspaper, as any space buyer can tell you, it remains an excellent medium for advertising because some of his trust carries over from the editorial pages to the advertising pages."

So he discusses how trust is built up between the reader and the person that's read, and they and the person that's writing it, but the same thing is true across the board.

He even mentions it's not just print, it's all forms of entertainment, a person, you know, at this time he was talking about buying a radio or buying a television.

Sometimes people just do it to keep informed just to just to know what's going on what's happening and why it's happening, and so on and so forth. So news media, and nonfiction, if you will.

But but people also rely on any form of entertainment, any form of entertainment, and there's a trust base in that entertainment factor. So that the shows that you watch, if you if you watch television shows.

If you watch anything off of off of Netflix, that's a series or anything of that sort. You are expecting very something relatively specific that you're watching either a comedy, or you're watching a drama or a thriller.

There's certain things you expect you expect for it not to go to graphic you expect for it not to do that there's certain things and it's sometimes there are things you don't even think about because you would never see any of those things on television.

But that's part of your expectations, there's a trust built up there.

If you have trust in anything, and whether you know you have trust in it or not what you do if you're going back to something over and over again, you're going back to a TV station, you're going back to a YouTube channel, you're going back to somebody's blog, or what have you.

There's a trust that's built up.

That trust transfers automatically,

What happens when Post comes out with a Mrs. Butterworth's Fruity Pebbles flavor?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9eEOBSiStc

Transcription

Dumbest product ever?

Hi, this is Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I want to talk about this, and if you happen to be listening to this and not watching, I have up on the screen. This was a thing that I saw on one of my Facebook groups.

There is a Mrs. Butterworths syrup out there. And for those of you who don't know, aren't familiar with the brand is especially if you're outside of the United States, Mrs. Butterworth has almost like a made shaped bottle with corn syrup, maple flavored corn syrup in it.

And I know it was one of my favorites. As a kid was poured this stuff all over back then I don't think it was mainly corn syrup like it is now. But this is a very special bottle of maple flavored syrup.

It is flavored like fruity pebbles, the famous Flintstones based cereal. And so it says slightly different color, it's more of a fruity color.

If you can think of the sweetness of fruity pebbles in liquid form, it kind of it automatically sent chills up my spine just thinking about it. And so here's what I ended up doing with this, I ended up taking this post that someone else had posted reposting it on my Facebook page and making a snide comment about how all these crazy things are happening in the world.

Yet, we have this. This is truly a sign that the end of the world is coming and the more I think about it, the more brilliant I think it really is.

I had a friend who bought it for his children, and they said they don't like it. I can't have anything like that. I try to stay away from things that are high in sugar or high on the glycemic index, you could say, and so I wouldn't buy anything like that.

But it's a very interesting concept and his children didn't like it. They didn't.

They hated it.

But I loved all the different reactions I was getting from people, because it definitely caught attention. It caught fire on my Facebook feed. And so it made me think, yeah, initially you think it's stupid. Initially, you think it's dumb, and you think this is something that nobody should do.

It should not be something that we even think about. But then I thought, Look the initial person posted it in a very popular Facebook group. I took it reposted it, even though I mocking it, I'm advertising for them. And whether a person even goes out and buys that particular one or not. I'm advertising Mrs. Butterworths.

There's no other reason in the world that I would really ever do that unless they had something else that was relatively newsworthy, or what we're talking about.

Now I'm making a video and an audio podcast for you advertising Fruity Pebbles, Miss Butterworths. I'm not intentionally advertising. I'm talking about it.

The magic of marketing is getting people to talk and advertise for you when they don't intentionally even mean to do so. The this is the equivalent.

I know I'm going to get in trouble for even saying the name. This is the equivalent of a Donald Trump. Okay, Donald Trump got people to talk about him even when they were mocking him. And talking about the stupid thing that came out of his mouth or showed up on his Twitter account.

He was able to advertise himself even and most often in a negative light. And because of that, he was able to garner more and more and more attention where he was able to initially that's...