Book Summary: Magnetic Marketing by Dan Kennedy

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The Book in One Sentence

Magnetic Marketing is about how to reliably and affordably attract an abundance of your ideal prospects, customers, and clients.

The Five Big Ideas

All the frustrations and internal problems you’re experiencing with your business today are because you don’t have a good Marketing System.
Without a sufficient and steady stream of people with whom you can exchange value for money, nothing else about your business matters.
Big name brands have all sorts of reasons for the way they advertise and market that have nothing to do with getting a customer or making sales.
You must make yourself the go-to person, place, or entity for some audience that can be interested in you and your deliverables.
You have to deliver the right message to the right marketing using the right media.

Magnetic Marketing Summary

“All the frustrations and internal problems you’re experiencing with your business today are because you DON’T have a good Marketing System.”

“Without a sufficient and steady stream of people with whom you can exchange value for money, nothing else about your business matters.”

The financial reality is that in every profession, every category of business, every sales team, every population, these figures hold true:

1% create tremendous incomes and wealth
4% do very well
15% earn good livings
60% struggle endlessly
20% fail

Don’t jump into media because “everyone else is using it.” Big name brands have all sorts of reasons for the way they advertise and market that have ZERO to do with getting a customer or making sales.

The typical entrepreneur and business owner are essentially clueless when it comes to advertising and marketing. This makes them highly vulnerable to becoming what Kennedy calls “Advertising Victims”—easy prey for media salespeople and ad agencies and anyone else who doesn’t know how to actually close the deal and make a sale.

“You must make yourself the go-to person, place, or entity for some audience that can be interested in you and your deliverables. And the primary way to accomplish this is by crafting an answer to this question: ‘Why should I choose you versus any and every other provider of the same product or service that you provide?’”

There are three questions you can ask yourself to help kick-start the process of finding or creating your unique selling proposition (USP):

What specifically do you do that’s truly different compared to competitors?
How do you uniquely benefit your target market?
Can you niche your target market in a way nobody else can or will?

Take the time to create your own USP—it’s one of the greatest marketing weapons you can ever have for your product(s) or your business.

Marketing Mistakes

Mistake #1: Marketing to the Wrong People
Mistake #2: Saying the Wrong Things
Mistake #3: Asking Them to Do the Wrong Things
Mistake #4: Thinking You can Advertise Anywhere and Everywhere
Mistake #5: No Marketing System
Mistake #6: Chasing Clients
Mistake #7: Thinking You Have the Ad Budget of Coca-Cola
Mistake #8: Race to the Bottom in Low Price
Mistake #9: There’s No Follow Up

“The only way to avoid marketing to the wrong people is to nail down exactly the WHO to whom you are selling. Once you know that, it’s actually quite simple to choose which media channels to advertise in—you go where they go.”

“In most cases, most advertising is not directed at any one person. Instead, it’s directed at EVERYONE.”

“When you focus on a specific WHO, you’re able to hone in on exactly what makes that person tick. You’re able to adjust your offers and your messaging in a way that perfectly matches their desires and abilities to fulfill those desires. Knowing that WHO inside and out enables you to craft a compelling, emotional message that reaches deep into their hopes, dreams, fears, and pain.”

At a minimum, you want your Marketing System to focus on three key areas:

Lead generation—the ongoing acquisition of leads for your business
Conversion—taking those leads and converting them into paying customers
Retention/Referral—keeping that customer base intact and generating new leads based on referrals.

You can boil direct marketing down to two very basic ideas:

Spend $1.00 on marketing, get back $2.00 or $20.00, fast, that can be accurately tracked back to the initial $1.00 invested.
Do NOT spend $1.00 on any marketing or advertising that does not directly and quickly bring back $2.00 or $20.00.

“There’s a story about legendary copywriter Gary Halbert, who once asked a room of aspiring writers, ‘Imagine you’re opening a hamburger stand on the beach—what do you need most to succeed?’ Answers included, ‘secret sauce,’ and ‘great location’ and ‘quality meat.’ Halbert replied, ‘You missed the most important thing—A STARVING CROWD.’ Your job is to find that ‘starving crowd’ who can’t live without what it is you have to offer.”

What you want to do in terms of targeting is to find good, prospective customers for your business that can be reached affordably, that are likely to buy, that are able to buy, and preferably who already know of you, or are likely to trust you.

“There’s the old story of the guy walking into the hardware store looking for a 3/4” drill bit. The mistake that’s easily made is thinking the customer wants a 3/4” inch drill bit. Wrong. He wants a 3/4” inch hole.”

The Magnetic Marketing Triangle has three big building blocks, each of which you can imagine as one side of a triangle:

Message: A truly compelling, preferably irresistible, marketing message.
Market: High-probability target marketing that identifies only those most likely to respond.
Media: The most appropriate, effective combination of media used to deliver your message to your market.

To determine the psychographics of your target market, ask yourself:

What keeps them awake at night, staring at the ceiling, unable to fall asleep as it relates to your product or service?
What are they frustrated about?
What is causing them pain, right now, as it relates to your product or service?
What is the single biggest problem that you can solve for them?
What do they secretly, privately desire most?

“What do you say to your marketplace, to your past, present and future prospects, clients and customers that is compelling, that is magnetic, that cannot be ignored, that must be responded to, that draws them to you like a bright porch light on a dark night draws moths?”

“A marketing message is a way of concisely and clearly saying to the right market, ‘Here’s what I’m all about and here’s why you should choose me.’”

If you own, say, a hotel, a common offer might be: “Get 10 percent off your hotel room rate.” A widget, however, ups the ante by tossing in extra elements to make it even more attractive, hard to resist, and impossible to compare against competitors. Widgets are packages of services and goods and premiums and experiences bundled together, given a clever name, and promoted as a special, one-of-a-kind buying opportunity.

“An irresistible offer (again, think ‘widget’ because that’s what you’ll be promoting) bundles together a variety of elements—price, bonuses, guarantee, speed, security, etc.—into something unique and compelling.”

“If the widget you create doesn’t cause you to pause and reflect to yourself ‘Am I giving away the farm here?’ for at least a moment, then the offer isn’t good enough.”

When creating your offer widgets, in the Magnetic Marketing System there are basically three types of offers.

Lead Generation Offers;
Consultation Offers Direct Purchase; or
Final Offers

The 10 Foundational Rules of Direct-Response Marketing

Rule #1: There Will ALWAYS be an Offer or Offers
Rule #2: There Will be a Reason to Respond Right Now
Rule #3: You Will Give Clear Instructions
Rule #4: There Will Be Tracking, Measurement, and Accountability
Rule #5: Only No-Cost Brand Building
Rule #6: There Will Be Follow Up
Rule #7: There Will Be Strong Copy
Rule #8: It Will Look Like Mail-Order Advertising
Rule #9: Results Rule. Period.
Rule #10: You Will Be A Tough-Minded Disciplinarian and Put Your Business On A Strict Direct Marketing Diet

To add urgency, tie the offer to a hard and fast deadline restrict the offer to a limited number of customers remove the bonus or gift from the deal if they don’t act right away add an element of “bidding” to the deal.

Kennedy advises readers to invest in direct-response marketing and gratefully accept brand-building as a bonus. He writes, “NEVER buy brand-building and hope for a response as a bonus, unless you simply want to spend Daddy’s fortune out of spite.”

There are hundreds of variations for follow up campaigns and strategies, blending offline with online. Here are just a few ways you can follow up:

Restate, ReSell, and Extend the Same Offer—present
Provide a Stern or Humorous “Second Notice” Tied to an Onrushing Deadline—present
“Third and Final Notice”—Tie
Change the Offer

Your Lead Generation Magnet has four main jobs:

First, to generate and enhance response to advertising.
Second, to reinforce and strengthen the prospect’s unhappiness with the current circumstances and problems he has that you can provide the solution to.
Third, to establish both your expertise and empathy.
Fourth, positioning so that the prospect is predisposed to accept your recommendations favorably.

“The way to be very successful in marketing is to do what you do so well that people can’t resist telling others about you.”—Walt Disney

Ask for referrals right after you’ve done something praiseworthy for your customer.

Everybody has a circle of influence in which you could do business if you were properly introduced, but you haven’t been.