Ryan Deiss reveals to Philipp Schoeffmann how to identify your highest value leads in your lead generation strategy without reducing overall opt-in rates, and more at Affiliate World Europe 2018 in Barcelona.

Interview with Ryan Deiss | Founder & CEO, Digital Marketer

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:
So you’ve just come off stage. Could you tell us the three main takeaways? What do people really have to consider when they run their own company or run marketing?
Ryan:
Yeah, so I mean, what I actually talked about onstage was hypertactical. I talked about how just adding this binary question to your lead capture forms. Well, you know, in all of our lead capture forms in Digital Marketer, we just added a question, “Are you an agency or marketing consultant serving businesses?” Just, “Are you an agency?” Because agencies are our highest-value group. In every business there exists these high-value segments. Have you heard of the 80/20 rule?
Phil:
Of course.

Three Simple Tactics To Immediately Increase Your Lead Generation Value

Ryan:
It exists in most people’s businesses but they don’t know how to find it. Once you identify what your high-value segment is, I just simply said, “Ask people if they are in that segment on all of your lead capture forms so that you can segment them off“. So really simple tactic but it increased our lead value, our immediate lead value by about $10. So a very simple tactic that really speaks to this broader message of one, know who your highest-value segments are and create special offerings for them. Two, figure out ways to segment them, utilising the traffic and leads that you’re already getting. And three, be willing to talk to your customers. So many people, especially in a digital marketing perspective, they don’t ever want to talk to their customers. They want to stay in their basement and never get out. You’ve got to talk to people if you want to learn who those high-value segments are. What do they want if you want to sell to them.
Phil:
If you reflect on the last, I don’t even know, decade or two. Some things that you’re specifically proud of, like where do you think you share the most value? Or was it a personal success? Or whatever it must be. Can you share some of those?
Ryan:
I think all too often, people build businesses around one thing that is non-transferable. So with Digital Marketer, that one thing that was non-transferable was this ugly mug right here. My face was not going to transfer to somebody else. Now, from an ecommerce perspective, we had a lot of really good offers that converted and they made good money. But what was non-transferable was all the values in the offer themselves. We hadn’t built actual brands around those products and services. So somebody had to believe that if they were ever going to acquire their business, that if they were ever going to acquire one of our companies, that they could be as good at marketing and offer creation as we are. They probably wouldn’t be as, right?
Phil:
Probably not.
Ryan:
So that’s a non-transferable asset. And so what we did is we said, “Let’s really put a lot of emphasis in the brand that’s being created“. So that people just want to come in and buy that. We’ve been able to create brands in a number of different markets that we have been able to exit from. The thing is people say, “Yeah but I never want to sell my business“, that’s fine. You should still seek to build the type of business that someone would want to buy.
Phil:
Fantastic. So share some more of the challenges that you had to face and how you have overcome them, speaking about learnings.

The Biggest Challenges

Ryan:
Yeah the challenges are so many. Traffic costs are higher and they continue to get higher. The competition is more fierce. They’re better than ever. I can tell you, if I were to go back at every challenge that I’ve faced, it’s always come down, funny enough, to cash flow. It’s been less of a marketing problem and almost more of an accounting problem. So I don’t want to bore people. We probably have a lot of marketers watching but I was of the belief earlier on in my career that if there was enough topline, if there was enough revenue. There’d be some net revenue. There’d be some profit, some margin lying around there somewhere. And twice I’ve nearly grown companies into bankruptcy because I was not focusing on —
Phil:
Grown companies into bankruptcy?
Ryan:
Yeah and especially when you’re shifting into physical products. When you go from affiliate to physical products and you have inventory management constraints. So I had to learn budgeting. Which I never, I was like, “Budgets, ah! Budgets are for broke people! Budgets are for people who don’t know how to make sales!” That’s horse crap, that’s just not true.
Phil:
You have an affiliate attitude right there.
Ryan:
And I was wrong! And it nearly cost me everything. Again, twice I’ve been right there on the brink. One time, I showed up at the office one day expecting to have to lay off about 18 people because we weren’t going to be able to make payroll. We had an unexpected merchant reserve for release. We released some of our funds and that bought us the time to make payroll. And over the next 30 days we were able to dig out of the hole. But that’s how close I got because I was not watching cash flow. Monitor your cash flow like a hawk.

Don’t Focus On The Product, Focus On The Customer

Phil:
So, where do you see the biggest opportunity actually for the people here? Let’s say they have had some first successes. They run affiliate campaigns, maybe ecommerce. They’re not in the space yet where they can take companies from two million to twenty million but they do have experience in what they’re doing and they’re good at what their doing. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for those guys?
Ryan:
Shifting the mind. It’s a mindset shift from being offer-centric to being customer-centric. So often, affiliates, ecommerce, it’s the same type of mindset. They fall in love with a product. They have a product-centric business model. “I want to sell this product“.
Phil:
Or at least, vertical-centric, right? I mean, affiliates sometimes are —

Attention Affiliates: Make The Shift

Ryan:
Yeah, of course. So maybe it’s a basket of products. But its in the same kind of area or there’s a type of offer structure. If you want to make the shift from two to twenty, you have to pave it to being customer-centric. And to building a business that is about serving a market. And maybe that means you’ve got to throw out a product one day and go back. I see affiliates in particular, having an offer that hits and riding that thing until it’s dead and then moving on to the next offer. When they don’t realise, they’ve built up a massive database of a particular type of customer. And you can market almost anything to that. Make that shift, that’s the biggest opportunity. You know how to generate a customer, don’t focus on the product, focus on the customer.
Phil:
Well thank you so much. That was amazing.
Ryan:
Thank you.