The experts are joined by Ryan Levesque, author of the national bestseller Ask. Ryan will outline how you can get ahead of the curve using the Ask Method, which eliminates the guess-work. This strategy is designed to figure out what your customers want to buy before they know what they want to buy themselves.
No matter what market you’re in, there’s a universal truth that everyone wants to be spoken to as an individual. There’s no one size fits all. In this episode, we’ll focus on finding the specific pain points, so you can talk to your market as individuals.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN:
- The four groups of people using the Ask Method (« You might be one of them!).
- The formula Ryan uses to predict, with reasonable accuracy, the cost to generate a cold email opt-in (« Before you’ve built the Lead Magnet or the Core Offer).
- Ryan’s single strategy to exponentially grow your email list.
LINKS AND RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
Episode 33: The Ad Grid: How to Build Campaigns that Convert and Scale
Episode 49: Boosted Posts: Microtargeting and Other Advanced Uses of Facebook’s “Easy Button”
Episode 52: Results of 687 Facebook Ad Surveys (…And a Pep Talk from the PT Team!)
A free training in the Ask Method and see how you might apply this strategy in your business.
Episode 53 Transcript (swipe the PDF version here):
| Keith Krance: | Hello, and welcome back to Perpetual Traffic, Episode Number 53. Super excited. We’ve got an amazing guest coming on, today. We’ve got the whole team on, as well, so we’ve got Ralph, Molly, myself. How you guys doing?
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| Molly Pittman: | Hello, hello.
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| Ralph Burns: | How we doing?
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| Keith Krance: | All right. Good, good, good. Pretty stoked about this episode. We’ve got Ryan Levesque on, and he’s the author of the number 1 national best-selling book Ask. You might have heard a lot of people talking about this. There’s been a lot of buzz on this book this last year. I think Pat Flynn said it was his number 1 game-changer for 2016. It’s been featured by Inc. magazine as the number 1 marketing book of 2015, Entrepreneur magazine as the number 2 must-read book for budding entrepreneurs.
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| Ryan’s used this method, this quiz survey ask method, to build multi-million dollar businesses, in over 23 different industries, generating over $100 million in sales. I’ve been following Ryan, and we’ve been friends for quite a while, way back when I first started in this industry, and I remember doing a webinar 2.5 years ago with you and implementing some of this stuff. We talked about it on last week’s episode, and I talked about the summary of the results that we got from our deep dive survey, and it’s amazing the amount of data, and what people tell us. You, listener, people in my audience are telling us what to write in our ad copy and what to offer people.
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| Anyway, Ryan, sorry for the long introduction, but super excited to have you on, dude. You’ve got clients doing 5 or 10,000 leads a day? Even one client, I think, generating 100,000 leads in a day on some days, just from Facebook ads alone, is that right?
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| Ryan Levesque: | Yes, Keith. First of all, thanks for the warm introduction. Really, really grateful to be here, and Molly, and Ralph, really appreciate the opportunity to just be with you guys. Those numbers, Keith? You’re absolutely right. We regularly see 5-10,000 leads per day with our students, and our most successful students generate upwards of 100,000 leads per day. That’s daily. That’s on cold traffic, that’s on Facebook traffic alone, of one student who averages 96,000 email opt-ins per day. This isn’t just in a launch. This is on-going, over time.
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| It’s in a mass-market consumer niche, so those numbers are the extreme, but I love to give the extreme because it shows what’s possible using the methodology that we’re going to be talking about. Even the students who do 100 email opt-ins a day, 200, 1,000 email opt-ins a day, this strategy, this methodology that we’re going to be talking about, has been a game-changer for so, so many people. Just really excited to share what that is, how it works, and talk about it here on this call.
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| Keith Krance: | Cool, cool, cool. Yeah, absolutely. How did you get started into this industry? I know you had some pretty unique businesses to start out. How did this happen?
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| Ryan Levesque: | Yeah. In 2007, 2008, I was actually working a job in the insurance industry. I had a cubicle. I was basically selling insurance. I worked for a company, AIG, that was affected by the world financial crisis. There was one day I walked into my office, walked into my cubicle, at AIG, and there was a Wall Street Journal that was sitting at my desk. The headline read, “AIG to file for bankruptcy.”
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| Leading up into that day, my wife and I had been talking about maybe starting our own business. We didn’t know what that was going to be. We had a couple ideas, but that newspaper was the kick in the butt that I needed to finally say, “You know what? If I’m going to be an entrepreneur, if I’m going to start my own business, there’s no better time than right now, today.” I drafted up a resignation letter, walked into my boss’s office, turned it over to him, gave my 2 weeks’ notice, and 2 weeks later, I was jobless and out the door.
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| My first business, my goal was really simple, Keith. I just wanted to replace my income. I just wanted to quit my job and replace my income. The first little business that we had success in was an information product business, selling information, in the orchid care market. The orchid care market is the most random of markets, but we went into that space because my wife bought a bunch of orchids about a year earlier, and we tried taking care of the orchids, and like 2 weeks after we bought them, they all died. As I was making my list of possible businesses, possible markets to go into, it was a random one that popped into my head. We decided to go into it because there’s enough keyword volume, there was enough interest online. We said, “You know what? There’s no better way than to just start with something, so let’s start with the orchid care market.”
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| I started this business by running what’s called a deep-dive survey, which we’ll talk about. I ran a deep-dive survey by running, at the time, some Google AdWords traffic. Today, I would be doing it using Facebook ads, but when I started the business, Facebook ads didn’t exist yet. I ran Google AdWords traffic with a tiny little site that I created, that basically just asked people, “If you’re growing orchids, and you’ve struggled, will you take a moment to tell me what your biggest challenge is when it comes to growing orchids? As a way of saying thanks, when I put together this guide that I’m creating, I’ll give you a copy of the guide for free.” Pretty simple.
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| I ran my deep-dive survey, and I gathered about 1,000 responses, and put it all in a spreadsheet. Went through this analysis process, which I know, Keith, you’ve gone through. I figured out which responses to pay attention to, which ones to ignore. I put all the ones to pay attention to in one place, and I identified that there were 4 different sub-groups, or segments, or what I call buckets of people in the orchid care market. Each bucket of people needed something very different from the other 3 buckets.
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| We addressed each of the 4 buckets, put together a simple little set of products, started selling them. Long story short, we made $371 in our first month of business, and 18 months later, we were making over $25,000 a month consistently. My wife quit her job, she joined me in the business, and the rest is history.
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| Keith Krance: | You’ve got clients that are completely dominating such massively competitive industries, like the golf industry, and the tennis industry, and the dog niche. It’s pretty crazy what some of your guys are doing here. Now, I know some people that have gone through your training, like Pat Flynn, Andrew Warner, I think Celina Sue have gone through this program. Tell me about how you’ve been able to do that. What is this method? How does it work?
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| Ryan Levesque: | In a nutshell, it’s really, it’s a very unique, specific combination of surveys and quizzes that’s designed to figure out exactly what your customers want to buy before they even know what they want to buy themselves. That, my friends, that is like the secret to doing business online. You look at companies like Apple, and it’s like, “How do they hit home run after home run after home run? They come up with something totally new. How do they nail it?” Because they’ve got this down better than almost any company in the world. They know exactly know what people want to buy before people have even envisioned that thing themselves.
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| That’s one of the biggest objections that I hear, when people hear about this thing called the ask method. They say, “Wait, it can’t be as simple as just asking what people want and giving it to them. Right?” Inevitably, someone will cite the quote that’s attributed to Henry Ford, and we all know this quote. Henry Ford is famous for saying, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘Faster horses.'” Steve Jobs said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The reason why these quotes ring true is because they are true.
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| People do not know what they want. They just don’t. We just don’t know what we want. When you ask someone what they want, you’re asking them to access a part of their brain that projects into the future. There is one thing that people know with absolute certainty, and that is what they don’t want.
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| In our businesses, we get better and better at hiring. Why? Because the first time you hire for a position, you don’t know what you want. You think you know what you want, but after you hire someone for a position and then you fire that person, the next time you hire that spot, what do you know? “Well, I don’t want her to be like him. I don’t want the next person to be like him because he was terrible in this way and that way.” You know what you don’t want.
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| Keith Krance: | Just like kids. You’re trying to get them to eat something or do something, right? You tell them to go do something, and it’s just no way. Then you say, “Hey, this or this?” They know they don’t want one. You give them a bad option, and you make the thing you want them to do the good option, right?
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| Ryan Levesque: | Totally.
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| Keith Krance: | Then they do it.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Speaking of Eden, it’s the same thing if you’ve ever been with friends, or your spouse, or a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, and you’re having that conversation, “Hey, want to go out to dinner tonight?” It’s that painful back and forth of, “Yeah, let’s do it.” “What do you feel like?” “I don’t know, what do you feel like?” It’s like that painful thing. We just don’t know what it is that we want.
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| When we start going to accessing the part of our brain around what is it that you don’t want, if I were to say, “All right, Keith, if you think about, in the last year, and you think about your business and everything that you hate about your business, let’s make a list. What are the things that annoy you the most about running your business?” We can make that list. You and I, together, we can make that list. Then, using that information, as an entrepreneur, as a marketer, you can find the solution that addresses that pain.
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| The deep-dive survey, which you alluded to earlier, is the first piece of the ask method. It’s the foundational survey that you use to figure out what people’s pain, what their challenge, what their struggle, what their frustration is in whatever area of their life you serve. If you help them grow their orchids, you find out what that pain is, in a very deep, profound way. When you ask the right questions, and you word those questions in the right way, and you follow the right process, not only do you figure out what someone’s pain is, but you actually learn the exact natural language they use, the specific language patterns, that you can use in your marketing to echo back that pain, directly in their own words.
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| When you do this right, when you follow this process, what happens is, people start reaching out to you. They say, “Keith, I don’t know how you do it, but it’s like you’ve been eavesdropping on my dinner conversations at home, because what you just brought up right there is exactly what I was thinking about yesterday, exactly what was keeping me up at night last night.” That’s the first piece of the ask method, is running a deep-dive survey to your audience, to figure out what their biggest challenge, what their biggest pain, their biggest frustration is, related to the solution, the product that you’re either intending on selling or that you’re selling, that addresses that challenge.
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| Yeah, Keith, a question that I often get is, “Who is this for? What type of person? At what stage should someone be at in their business where the ask method makes sense?” There are really 4 groups of people, or what I describe in my world, 4 buckets. 4 groups of people, 4 buckets of people, that the ask method is for. The first group of people is someone who is absolutely starting from scratch, who hasn’t even decided what market they want to go into.
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| I gave the example of the orchid business. When I was first figuring out what market I wanted to go into, there was a process that I followed to evaluate whether the market itself had enough potential. For example, I mentioned that I looked at the number of key word searches, around certain key words in the orchid space. I did things like identify what pain, and agony, and struggle, and challenges existed in the market, and I was able to extract and figure out if there was enough demand for the solution that I was going to eventually create, which was an information product, a book on how to care for your orchids.
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| What’s interesting is that when I was evaluating the orchid care market, I actually looked at a half a dozen other markets. I did it in the flea removal space, the hummingbird space, I did scrap-booking bargains, that was another one. The way I was able to figure out that in the orchid care market there was enough demand is when I ran a survey in that market, and I had no list. Remember, I had no list in any of these markets. I was starting completely from scratch, literally no experience, no list. I ran Google AdWords Ads to a landing page.
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| In the orchid care market, I was able to get my cost per survey down to $2.45, just under $2.50. $2.45 for a cost per survey.
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| Keith Krance: | That was back using AdWords.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Exactly. That was using Google AdWords. I see it now in Facebook, in some markets, it’s under a dollar. In most markets, it’s between $1 and $5 for a cost per survey. There’s some B to B markets where you’re going to pay more than that, but generally speaking, most consumer markets, that’s kind of what you’re paying for cost per survey.
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| Now, contrast that with scrap-booking bargains. I was thinking about building a business where we were going to find bargains on scrap-booking, which is crafting for, mostly women like to do this. Bargains that people can find on supplies and things like that, we were going to build a business around that. In that business, we were paying about $53 a survey, in that market. When you look at those 2 numbers, $2.50 and $50, what that tells you is that the scrap-booking market is 20 times more expensive to get someone to fill out a survey.
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| You can use the willingness for someone to fill out a survey as a proxy for how much demand exists in the market. If nobody’s willing to fill out a survey, or if you have to pay a fortune to get people to fill out a survey, it’s going to be expensive to get people to opt-in to your email list. It’s also going to be expensive to get people to buy whatever it is that you’re selling. If you can get people to take a survey, people hate taking surveys, at a reasonable cost. It’s $2.50. What’s I’ve found is that you divide that number by 2.2, that’s what it’s going to cost to get an opt-in on an email opt-in page. $2.45, divide that by 2.2, and you get, whatever the math is, it’s a little over $1. It’s like, $1.10, $1.15, somewhere like that to generate a lead, an opt-in, in that market, on cold traffic, in this case on Google.
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| Once you know those numbers, before you’ve built a website, before you’ve built a product, before you’ve built a funnel, before you’ve built a Lead Magnet, before you’ve built a core offer, or anything like that, you can know, with reasonable accuracy, how much it’s going to cost you to generate a lead. Then, using that math, figure out how much you need to sell to each lead in order to break even.
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| I knew, in the scrap-booking market, there was no way. If I was going to pay $50 for a survey, and maybe do $30 or $28 for an opt-in in that market, that I was going to be able to make that market work. At least, on average traffic, not a possibility. In the orchid care market, $2.50 was totally, totally doable.
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| Keith Krance: | Yeah, $250 to get 100 surveys, that’s a lot of data you’re getting with that. That’s not just 100 leads, we’re talking massive amount of information.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Right, that’s answering multiple questions, telling us what their biggest challenge is, telling us about how long they’ve been growing in different demographic information around their age and gender, and things like that. You have so much useful data you can work with that.
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| Molly Pittman: | Another great aspect of the survey really comes down to segmentation, right? When we talk about retargeting, and sending traffic to a blog post to really figure out what someone’s interested in, in terms of a subject, right? A digital marketer, we want to know if you’re interested in social media, or funnels, or blogging. We want to know specifically what you’re interested in, not just the broad market as a whole. Another benefit here, even though you are paying a little bit more per lead, you really know what this person is interested in, and you can make them a very specific offer that they’re much more likely to take.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Totally, totally. That’s a perfect segue into the next group of people. Let’s say, for a moment, that you’ve already chosen your market. Maybe you already have a fledgling business, but what you’ve struggled with is building your list, building your list. Everyone knows, we all know that your list is one of the greatest assets that you have. We all want a bigger list. I don’t care if you’ve got a 10,000 person list, a 100,000 person list, or 1,000,000 person list, you ask 10/10 marketers, “Hey, do you want to grow your list?” We all want to grow our list.
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| To your point, Molly, about segmentation, one of the most effective ways to build your list quickly is using a quiz. A quiz is really a way to ask a series of questions about your prospect before you ask for their name or email, so that you can customize the information that you put in front of them and segment your list. For some people, the most basic form of a quiz is what I call a one-question quiz, for single step segmentation. This is literally just asking a single, multiple choice question before you ask someone to opt in to your list.
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| What does this do? I’ll give you an example in the orchid market. In the orchid market, when we ran our deep-dive survey, and we figured out all the pain, and frustration, and challenges that exist in the market, we went through an analysis process that I’m not going to get into here because it involves some spreadsheets and numbers, but basically, we were able to figure out that there were 4 segments in the orchid care market, 4 buckets of people.
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| The first bucket is people who want to get their orchid to re-flower. These are specifically people who, they bought an orchid, the flowers all fell off, and they want to figure out how to get their orchid to bloom again. The second bucket is people who are struggling to re-pot their orchid. The orchids will grow to a point where they outgrow the size of the pot, they need to re-pot it. It’s a delicate process. If you do it wrong, you’re going to kill your plant. If you do it right, your plant will live for years and years to come.
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| The third bucket of people are people who want to save a sick or dying orchid. These are people who, their orchid is either having mushy roots, yellow leaves, spots on the leaves, something that makes it look like the orchid is sick, and they want to save it. The fourth group of people are people who are given an orchid as a gift, usually a mom who was given an orchid by one of her sons, or daughters, or maybe husband, and she doesn’t know what to do with it.
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| These are the 4 buckets that exist in the market. There are other people that are in the orchid market, but through the process that I teach, those are segments of the market you want to ignore because those are people who are unwilling to spend significant amounts of money to solve their problem. In the orchid care market, you’ve got these 4 buckets.
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| Molly Pittman: | If you go back to Episode 33, The Ad Grid, and you really think about your different avatars, and the hooks, and how they overlay, this could absolutely help you figure out your buckets for your survey because you could really define not only who you’re speaking to, but what pain points they have.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Totally. When you combine this segmentation, funneling people into one of several directions based on what “bucket” they fall into, and you layer on top of that the power of quizzes online, quizzes, like I said, are the single best list-building strategy that I’ve ever encountered online. You see tons of evidence everywhere you look. You look at companies like BuzzFeed. BuzzFeed, if you look at the navigation on their main website, they’ve got home, news, something, and quizzes. Quizzes are the number 1 traffic and list-building strategy that BuzzFeed uses in their business. They generate something like 260 million unique visitors to their website every single month. There’s a reason why you see those BuzzFeed quizzes everywhere.
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| When you combine the power, the viral nature of a quiz, and use it as a segmentation tool to get people onto your list, like I said, this is the single biggest list-building strategy that I know of. When Keith mentions those numbers, 1,000 leads a day, 5,000 leads a day, 10,000 leads a day, I have one student who generates between 50 and 60,000 leads every single day, and one student who generates an average of 96,000 leads a day. These are opt-ins, email opt-ins. It’s with this strategy.
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| The third group of people are, if you’re in a business right now, let’s say you have a list, and you have a decent business, maybe you’re doing 6 figures, and you want to break through to the next level. You’re on what I call the promotional or launch roller coaster. What do I mean by that? The only way that you generate revenue is if you’re hustling. You’re running some sort of promotion, a promotion to your list, you’re running a launch, you’re relying on JV partners, you’re chasing affiliates, and your income looks like an up and down roller coaster. Do a launch? Income is great. Next month, no money is coming in.
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| The antidote, the secret to that, is a cold traffic funnel that generates leads and customers consistently, on auto-pilot, every single day. That’s why I love to show the orchid AdWords account. Imagine a funnel, once again, that you set up, put a ton of time and effort into it up front, but build it once, that generates leads and customers, potentially, for months, if not years. In the case of the orchid business, 8 years.
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| I keep going back to the orchid business because I think it’s one of these small little obscure niches we can all appreciate. Like I’ve said before, the numbers that we’re doing in different markets range from a few hundred leads a day. The orchid business, we do, in the non-peak season, between 150 and 200 email opt-ins a day. On Mother’s Day and the days around Mother’s Day, we’ll get close to like 1,000 opt-ins a day. It’s like peak season. Valentine’s Day, we’ll get between 500 and 700 opt-ins a day. Generally speaking, 150 to 200 email opt-ins a day, as regular as the sun goes up and the sun comes down.
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| Last but not least, and I think so many people in at least the digital marketer world, and Keith, in your world as well, is if you are a digital marketing professional, you’re an agency, you are a consultant, maybe you’re a coach or a copyrighter, and you do work for clients. You build funnels, or you do online marketing, digital marketing. Right now, there is this interesting dynamic where there is so much demand from customers, from businesses out there that want a survey funnel, or a quiz funnel, or an ask method funnel built, they don’t want to do it themselves. They just want to hire someone to do it for them. If you’re in that situation where you do client work, there’s a tremendous opportunity to learn this methodology for yourself, not necessarily to do it for your business, but to do it and charge businesses for it.
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| The 4 buckets, one last time. Figuring out what market to go into, number 1. Number 2, building your list. Number 3, scaling your business and getting out of the launch roller coaster, and building a cold traffic funnel. Number 4 is if you’re a digital marketing professional or agency and you want to potentially add this, the ask method, as one of the services that you can offer for your clients.
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| Ralph Burns: | If you’re segmenting out this cold traffic into 4 separate buckets, let’s just say, it’s between 3 and 4, and I’ve gone through all your training. It’s awesome, no doubt. The problem, I think, maybe some people listening because they’re either just starting with Facebook ads, or maybe they’re just starting their online business, that means now I need to create 4 different products for 4 different avatars? Seems like a whole lot of work. Although, I get the concept, I understand it, segmenting out your market, it’s such a simple concept. Ask your market what it is that they actually want, and then create a product around it. What would you say to somebody like that, who might say, “That just seems a little bit too complicated for me, the newbie?”
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| Ryan Levesque: | Yeah, Ralph, I’m so glad you brought that up because that’s one of the most common objections or challenges that people have. I think we all kind of get it. We all go into building a business online, I can’t speak for you guys, but when I came online, I think a lot of us feel this way. You start seeing what everybody else is doing, and everybody sells a one size fits all answer. We try to get as many people onto our website as possible, sell as many of those people the thing that we sell.
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| In the back of our mind, if we took some truth serum, had an honest conversation with ourselves, we kind of know that there’s some people that aren’t a great fit for what we’re selling, but we try to get them to buy anyway. We kind of know that people are different, people need to be treated as individuals, but we just kind of bury that thought in the back of our mind. The problem with that is, it’s dangerous. It’s dangerous for your confidence as an entrepreneur. Because, what ends up happening is, in the back of your mind, you kind of know that what you’re doing is a little wrong. If you were to tell your parents, your grandma about it, it’s kind of like, “Eh.” We dance around that.
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| We all know that we should be selling different things to different people, but we also know that that’s a lot of work, and so we don’t do it. We get scared. It’s like, “Yeah, that’s way too much work. There’s no way that I’m going to do it.” We have this ideal that we want to do it, but we don’t. That’s where the 80/20 comes in. This is where the good news is. Because, the good news is that using segmentation isn’t an all or nothing game. What I mean by that is that there are a few key leverage points, a few key things, very small, easy things, that if you just tweak, customize these few key things, it makes a massive difference.
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| I’ll give you an example. Let’s pretend that in the orchid business, we’ve identified our 4 buckets. Pretend you’ve identified 4 buckets in your business, if you’re listening to this right now. You’re freaking out because you’re saying, “Crap, do I need to create 4 products for each of these segments,” Ralph, as you mentioned. The answer is no, not necessarily. Here’s something you can do.
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| Step 1, the first thing to do, is just add a one-question segmentation survey as a step before people opt-in. That’s it. No customization, no nothing, but a simple multiple choice question before people opt in. We have a launch coming up, and we do this in our launch. Before we ask someone to opt in, we say, “Step 1, question. Which of the following best describes you?” I just describe what our 4 buckets are. Are you just getting started and need help choosing your market? Are you looking to build your list? Are you looking to scale your business with cold traffic? Are you a marketing consultant that works with clients? I asked that 1 question before we ask people to opt in.
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| What is that going to tell you? It’s going to tell you the percentage of each bucket. Then, once you know, it’s possible that if you have 4 buckets, it’s going to be 25%, 25%, 25%, 25%. More likely, there’s going to be one bucket that’s disproportionately larger than the others. You might have one bucket that’s 40% of your market. Okay, cool. If you’re going to customize anything, where do you start? You start with that bucket because that represents the disproportionately large segment of your market.
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| What do you customize? Do you do a full-blown custom sequence for that segment? No. Step 2 is really simple. Step 2 is, after someone opts in, send people to 1 of 4 pages, and change 1 thing on the page, the headline. That’s it. Just change the headline, one line of copy, so that the headline speaks to that particular bucket. Great. That’s pretty simple, right? That’s doable.
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| Once you’ve changed the headline, maybe a week or 2 later, you’ve got your feet wet, you’re like, “Okay, I can do this.” Then, if you’ve got a written sales letter, customize the first paragraph of the sales letter. Just the first paragraph speaks to that particular bucket. If you have a video sales letter, maybe record a 1 minute intro that introduces the video sales letter and speaks to each particular bucket. Pretty simple, right?
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| Once you’ve done that, maybe what you do is, the next step, step 4, if someone opts into your email list, they answer the 1 question, opt into your email list, customize the first email. That’s it. Rewrite your first email that you send out 4 different ways, so that every person gets 1 of 4 versions of the emails based on what bucket that they’re in.
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| I’ll give you an example. In the orchid care market, this is exactly what we do. Someone opts in. They say that they want to get their orchid to re-bloom again. They get sent to a version of the sales letter where the headline talks about re-blooming, and the first paragraph is all about re-blooming. Pretty simple. Then they get an email that’s sent that day, and the first email is all about re-blooming. Instead of being a generic email, it’s all about re-blooming.
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| You think about this, and if you’re in this market, and that’s what you want, you don’t want to get orchids for dummies. You don’t want to have to flip through a 400 page book to find what you’re looking for. You want someone to do that work for you that gets right to the challenge that you’re struggling with. This is true in every single market. There is no one size fits all answer, but it’s also not a matter of personalizing what you do in 10,000 ways. In every market, you’re going to find that there are these clusters, these buckets of people that congregate together, that are similar to one another. That’s the secret. That’s the 80/20.
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| Ralph, to answer your question about someone that might be overwhelmed by all this, the thing that I recommend is to use a psychological hack on yourself, which is the same psychological process that your customers go through when they take one of your surveys, which is something that we call micro-commitments. Micro-commitments is nothing more than taking tiny little baby steps that are not threatening enough to scare you off from doing the thing that it is that you want to do.
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| A micro-commitment to working out or getting into shape would be, put on your running shoes. That’s it. Just put on your running shoes. Anybody can do that, right? Once you’ve put on your running shoes, ask yourself, “What’s the next impossible to fail step that you can take that’s going to move you one step closer to your goal?” Maybe that might be, fill up your water bottle. Super simple. You’re using that hack on your own psychology to hack your fear response, the response of feeling overwhelmed toward taking action.
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| Again, first step, just but that one question segmentation survey before people opt in.
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| Ralph Burns: | It creates momentum. It’s very similar to Episode 49, we talked about boosting posts. We tell people to just go out and boost a post. What this does, is it give you momentum. Like you said, it’s like a micro-commitment. Now, they start to see results, it’s a little victory. Now, you’re inspired to do the necessary work that it takes to learn the power editor, and to create more different versions of your ad copy, and those types of things. I think it’s a very similar situation as you’re talking about, here.
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| Ryan Levesque: | We can trick our own brains into building that momentum, and that’s the hack. This is something, by the way, that I learned from the researcher Dr. Robert Maurer, who wrote a book called the Kaizen Way. Highly recommend it. His hack is something that’s been extremely impactful on me. He’s a PhD researcher out of California who studies the psychology of fear. The hack is, ask yourself the question, “What is the next impossible to fail step? What’s a step that’s so small that I can take today? It’s literally impossible for me to fail.” The step should be so small you almost laugh at yourself for even thinking about it. Putting on your shoes or tying one shoe as an impossible to fail step towards getting to the gym is the type of step we’re talking about.
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| In this case here, I think, yeah, just go to your Leadpages account, if that’s what you use, and do a one question segmentation quiz that you pop in front of your opt-in step, and that’s it. Call it a day. See what it does for you, and you’ll build some momentum.
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| Keith Krance: | Yeah, exactly. I’d love to hear 1 or 2 examples of people doing this, clients of yours or something like that, where they’ve done this, so people can kind of see it.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Totally, yeah. Quickly, I’ll spend 10 seconds on each bucket. If you’re starting from scratch, looking to choose your market, we have a student, Ron. Ron was in the situation where he was evaluating about 20 different markets, used the ask method to pick a tiny, little, obscure pet niche. He grew his business starting from nothing to 6 figures in 11 months, building up an email list of 19,000 email addresses. Total newbie, starting completely from scratch.
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| I’ll give you an example from the second bucket, in this case, Peter. Peter was in a case where he was struggling to build his list. Peter built a list of just under 10,000 leads in 10 weeks in the astrology market, using the ask method. We have pages on our website that detail each of these case studies, in detail, with actual screenshots and everything like that, which is kind of cool.
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| I’ll give you an example in the third bucket, Will. Will ran a profitable, very successful, 6 figure business teaching people how to improve their tennis game. He was in that launch roller coaster. He’d do a launch, make $300,000 in one month, next month, make nothing, the next month after that, make nothing. Start running out of money, do another launch. Run another launch, make $150,000, and then same thing would happen over and over again. He came to the ask method to build a profitable cold traffic funnel. He ended up creating not one, but 6 ask method funnels that he strung together, one right after the other. There’s one about how to improve your doubles game, how to improve your serve, how to improve your forehand, how to improve your backhand.
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| Keith Krance: | The serve one, how would they do that? What’s that hook?
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| Ryan Levesque: | The serve? The product is the 100 mile an hour club. Basically, the serve is the serve killer’s angle. Take the quiz to find out what your number one serve killer is. There are 10 mistakes that tennis players make when they’re serving the tennis ball. Once you’ve identified your number 1 mistake, it can often unlock 15 to 30 miles per hour in your swing, and help you break through into that 100 mile an hour club. Take the quiz to find out your biggest mistake right now.
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| Long story short, Will, with all these funnels together, does over $100,000 a month in cold traffic on Google and Facebook. Again, he was in that launch roller coaster, now has a business that basically produces leads and sales every single day, every single week, consistently through cold traffic.
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| Last but not least, in that fourth bucket, if you’re a digital marketing agency, or marketing professional, or a coach, or a copywriter consultant, Cory is a perfect example. Cory is one of our students, and he was a student of the ask method master class. Basically, he decided he wanted to do this for clients. First client out of the gate, charged $25,000 to build one of these funnels and 10% of gross sales. We have dozens more, dozens of additional students in each of these same categories, but I wanted to give you a flavor for someone at each of these stages in their business, and how they’ve used the ask method to basically transform their life in a really exciting way.
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| Keith Krance: | Love it. I love what Todd did, too, in his launch. It’s like, he’s selling the same, main program, but just added one question, and I bought it, I bought the program, Todd Herman’s. It’s just one question. It wasn’t a ton of complex stuff, it was basically the initial email, and maybe intro to the first video. I don’t know how complicated it got, but I think, starting out, people can keep this super simple, right?
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| Ryan Levesque: | It’s all about knowing what leverage points to focus on. It’s all about knowing what segments of your market, not only to focus on, but what segments of your market to ignore.
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| Molly Pittman: | Would you send traffic directly to the survey, have people had success with that? I know it’s a big ask on first touch, but I also do know, you referenced BuzzFeed, for example. People are always wanting self-assessment or answers to their questions. They might be willing to take a survey, right from cold traffic. I just wanted to get your feedback, and what maybe one of those ads would look like.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Totally. There’s a couple different ways that you can do it, Molly, and I’m really glad that you brought up the idea of Facebook ads because one of the biggest questions I get is, people say, “Hey, Ryan, I get it. If I had a list of 10,000 people, I’d just send an email to my list, run a survey, easy-peasy lemon-squeezy, but I don’t have a list, so what do I do?” I know, Keith, in your business, when you first launched your business, you were in that same boat, right?
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| Keith Krance: | Yeah, exactly.
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| Ryan Levesque: | You ran a deep-dive survey to Facebook ads. Molly, I’ll answer your questions, but I’d also love, Keith, maybe if you could talk about what you actually did because you were in that exact boat, right? When you were trying to get deep-dive survey data, without having a list, and you said, “You know what? I’m just going to run some Facebook ads and get my data that way.” What was the angle that you used?
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| Keith Krance: | What I did was, and this was just to get the deep-dive information before the actual quiz funnel, which I think Molly’s referring to. For me, and if you’re in this boat, I had a few people, I had a few hundred on my list. I think it was less than 1,000. What I did is, I want to find out what people want. That data has served me ever since, even though I never actually added the survey funnel into my funnel, but I wanted that. That data has been so gold for me, the last 3 years, and we’re adding the survey funnel now.
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| Basically, I just ran Facebook ads into the survey, so they didn’t have to opt in or anything. I went right to the first question. To get that data, basically, after they finished this survey, I made a short little video, didn’t have to be a video, but I said, “Hey, I’m doing a training on the initial results, on what you’re telling me you want.” What I did is, I just had people register for a webinar after they finished the survey, so I could basically monetize that. I couldn’t afford to just run a survey and get the data, so I just added a webinar, and I was super authentic about it. I just said, “Hey, I’m going to do a training on the preliminary data,” and I did that, and I sold a program. That helped me monetize those leads, so I was getting data for my deep dive as well as selling my one size fits all program.
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| Molly Pittman: | If you’re going more to cold traffic to build your list, and this is just an honest question, are you speaking more to one of the buckets? If it’s the orchids, is the ad speaking more to the, “Hey, do you want to figure out why the petals are turning yellow?” Whatever fear they have, is your ad speaking more to one of those buckets, or is it just the overall, “Hey, take this survey about orchids.”?
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| Ryan Levesque: | This is after you’ve already generated the data, you’ve got some of your initial deep-dive data, and you’re talking about the regular kind of quiz funnel, like you just gave in the example.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, that’s great, Keith, and that’s a great way to immediately monetize. I was just taking a step back, more to people that would send cold traffic right to the survey.
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| Keith Krance: | The main funnel, yeah, exactly.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Let’s talk about both. In the process, you think about it, there’s 2 big steps. The first step is, you run traffic to a deep-dive survey. The deep-dive survey is something that you run once for each project that you create. The deep-dive survey is where you figure out what buckets exist. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is they think they know the buckets in their market because they’ve been doing what they do for a long time. That’s one of the biggest mistakes that people make, is they guess what buckets exist. One of the biggest powers of the ask method is it eliminates all the guesswork in your business. Let’s talk about that one for a moment.
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| You run a deep-dive survey. You can run it from an email to your list, if you have a list, or if you don’t have a list, you can run Facebook ads directly to a page, to get people to fill out the survey.
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| Molly Pittman: | You’re collecting data with that initial campaign. Just like we talked about in the last episode, guys, it’s worth it to spend a little bit of money to collect that data. This is a great way to do so.
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| Ryan Levesque: | You’re paying for data. You’ve got to look at, why are companies like Google and Facebook so valuable? One of the biggest reasons why is because of their access to data. Google and Facebook know more about us than, in some cases, we even know about ourselves. That’s why they’re so valuable. When you shift that mindset towards you’re paying for data, you’re acquiring data, that data is going to serve you for the rest of the time that you’re in your business.
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| The first step is, you run that deep-dive survey once. You’re paying for data. In the orchid market, I paid $2.50 for about 1,000 survey responses. I paid about $2,500 to get access to that survey data. With that survey data, I had access to people’s phone numbers, their email addresses, I was able to follow up with people on the phone, ask them questions about their situation, learn more about their pain points. I was able to analyze the texts that they provided to me. That’s something that you do once, and that’s an investment that you make in yourself and in your business.
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| After you’ve figured out what buckets exist, you’ve figured out what copy is going to pull, what natural language patterns exist in the language that your market uses, and you use that to design a quiz. That’s where you run ads to what will be, essentially, a permanent funnel in your business. When I say permanent, it’s something that you will likely optimize.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah, it’s evergreen.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Yeah, it’s an evergreen. Exactly, it’s an evergreen funnel. You shut off your deep-dive survey campaign. That’s done. You run it for a month or whatever, get your data, done. Now, you create your funnel, and then you turn on your evergreen campaign. For that one, the Facebook ads are going to vary.
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| For example, let’s take the tennis one. We talked about tennis. Tennis ad would look like something like this, for the doubles example. Doubles might be, question mark, “Play doubles tennis? Does your partner suck? Maybe you’re making one of these 5 mistakes when you’re playing with your partner. Take the quiz to find out now.” In the orchid market, it could be something like this. “Does your orchid look sick and dying? Maybe you’re making one of these 5 mistakes in caring for your orchid. Take the quiz to find out what mistake you might be making now.”
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| Molly Pittman: | Absolutely. I love that. Back to Episode 33 with The Ad Grid, for our listeners, the survey is providing the hook for you, and the survey is the answer to the hook, so that’s why people are going to want to click. Then, also, you can prescribe the best product for them, once they’ve filled out the survey. Really, really cool. I just wanted to get a mental image of what these ads actually looked like.
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| Ryan Levesque: | This is a universal big idea. Think about your market, if you’re listening to this right now. Everybody wants to be spoken to as an individual. Every single one of us, our favorite subject is not orchids, it’s not tennis, it’s not even internet marketing. It’s ourselves. Like, me, myself, and I. That is my favorite subject on the planet. It’s your favorite subject as well. Everything else that you do in your life ties back to how it relates back to you. That’s just universal.
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| It’s universal to say, “Listen, when it comes to choosing furniture, when it comes to growing your orchids, when it comes to playing tennis, there’s no one size fits all answer. If you take a moment to answer a few questions about your situation right now, I’ll be able to direct you to the best possible solution for you. Not generically, but for you, specifically.” That is irresistible. It is universal. It is something that works no matter what market you are in.
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| Molly Pittman: | The specificity here allows you to broaden your targeting a little bit, which is great on social platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Obviously, on Facebook, you can’t target people whose orchids are dying. That amount of specificity just isn’t available. That’s more appropriate on AdWords. You can target people that are interested in flowers, and you can use the ad copy to speak to that specific pain point, so that only people whose orchids are dying are going to respond.
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| Keith Krance: | This is definitely something that we talk about in just varying up your ad copy. In this case, it would probably be the one thing you would vary, more so probably than the image because you know that these buckets exist, so you would speak to each one of those individual pain points in 4 separate ad copies, maybe with one image. Depending on what your budget is, you can obviously split test it. Probably, going to each one of those orchid related interests in separate ad sets, so they could really be split test against each other, to see what really does work out the best. Then, obviously, you’re going to 80/20 the results once you actually get them in the door.
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| Ryan Levesque: | In most cases, like the tennis example, they start the quiz, it’s the momentum, little victories. Then, they opt in to either get the results, or sometimes they’ll tell you the results, or the answer, and then you might opt in to get the solution. I think there’s a lot of different ways you can do that, but I think the always question depends on whether people opt in at the beginning or not. A lot of these mass consumer markets, though, they’re not opting in until after they finish the quiz, right?
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| Molly Pittman: | Right, because they want the answers.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Exactly.
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| Keith Krance: | Exactly. Love it, love it. How can people go through this sucker and learn a little more?
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| Ryan Levesque: | Yeah, totally. If this is something that you’re kind of interested in, the best next step would be actually to see it in action, and to go through the free training that we’ve put together, that walks you through what the ask method is from a visual standpoint, so you can actually see it, and see how you might apply it in your business. I think we put together a simple little link. I think it’s askmethod.com/ppt. Askmethod.com/ppt.
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| Keith Krance: | “PPT,” as in Perpetual Traffic. Perpetual pains in the ass.
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| Molly Pittman: | Yeah. Thank you so much, Ryan. Guys, this survey funnel is a great offer to take to Facebook. Obviously, we talk a lot about Lead Magnets, and sending directly to something, a landing page where someone can download something of value, but a survey is a great offer to take to cold traffic, especially on a social platform. I guarantee you that because people love surveys and quizzes, these ads would get a lot of social sharers, too, and high relevance scores. Even if you’re not the person, your mom might be, and you might share that ad. Really interesting, and thanks for coming on, Ryan.
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| Ryan Levesque: | Molly, Ralph, Keith, it’s been an honor and a pleasure. I’m really grateful for the opportunity, and hope we were able to share a little bit of value in the meantime.
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| Keith Krance: | Yeah, great stuff. Love it. We’ll have anything we mentioned in the Show Notes at digitalmarketer.com/podcast. We’ll have the link that Ryan mentioned, askmethod.com/ppt. I love his stuff. I’m supporting his launch. Even if you’re not ready to add in the survey funnel into your funnel, just getting the deep-dive data itself, and doing it the way Ryan talks about, is worth it. That’s why I was really excited to have you on. Thank you so much for sharing so much stuff. Hopefully, you enjoyed it, you, listener, and we will talk to you on the next one.
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