Listen to this episode for a free class on incentive marketing

Jeffro (00:00.972)
Welcome back to digital dominance. Today, I’m thrilled to welcome John Dwyer, better known as JD, a true master of direct response and incentive based marketing. JD’s innovative approach has made waves in industries around the globe. And he’s the guy who convinced Jerry Seinfeld to come out of retirement for one of the most successful marketing campaigns in banking history. With an impressive client roster that includes Disney, KFC and other household names, JD has indeed cracked the code on combining creative out of the box thinking with proven direct response tactics.

So today we’re diving deep into how service businesses can harness the power of incentive marketing to attract new clients, keep current ones longer and turn websites into 24 seven sales machines. So whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing pro looking to up your game, this episode is going to be packed with proven tactics that you don’t want to miss. Welcome to the show, JD.

John Dwyer (00:48.896)
Jeffery, thank you very much for that wonderful intro. And I love that part where you said he has cracked the code. That’s good. I wish that was the case. I wish that was the case.

Jeffro (00:56.886)
Nobody’s heard that phrase before either, it’s totally new.

John Dwyer (01:00.35)
Absolutely, it’s like the question mark. I invented that years ago, no one’s ever used it.

Jeffro (01:04.717)
Well, it’s a shame that you didn’t have much in your background. had to make up that whole intro, so hopefully people will buy it.

John Dwyer (01:09.11)
Yeah, well, it’s funny, you when I’m doing a few of these, you know, podcasts and stuff like that, people say, look, you squeeze a little bit in and I said, well, that’s because my hundred and twenty four years of age, right? I’ve had a long, long, long,

Jeffro (01:21.046)
Yeah.

Jeffro (01:24.907)
Well, you know, I have a ton of questions for you based on that intro I made up. So we’re going to dive right in. But let’s talk about direct response. Now, most people have heard of that. You know, the term gets thrown around a lot. Sometimes people use it too broadly. But for those who are unfamiliar, can you give a 30 second definition?

John Dwyer (01:42.388)
No, can’t. I’m sorry, Jeff. I wanted to do that. Yeah, I wanted to do that. I’m Yeah, look, it’s basically, it’s the opposite from what people think marketing generally is. A lot of people think marketing is getting them to, know, getting, like building a brand and then get them to taste your product. We flip that indirect response marketing. The whole idea is to get them to taste your product so that you can get them to fall in love with your brand. And so therefore, for argument’s sake, the easiest way to explain this, if it was a seafood shop,

Jeffro (01:44.481)
Thirty three seconds.

John Dwyer (02:11.474)
and they were advertising on the side of a bar, so they were sponsoring the local football teams, it would take a long time for them to have any measurable response to that. Whereas if they had someone at lunchtime and dinner time outside their seafood shop handing out calamari samples, getting them to taste the product, there’s a good chance they’ll come in and spend more money on seafood. So it’s all about taking eyes off the price and onto the value add. And the value add normally is via an incentive.

Jeffro (02:37.687)
that is there a certain type of business that benefits the most from this approach? You know, cause it’s like a retail store, a restaurant versus a service business.

John Dwyer (02:47.462)
Not pretty much across the board. mean, you know, we’ve got clients A to Z and in no matter what their industry is, if they provide somebody with a Happy Meal toy, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll stand out from their opposition. And the reason we call it a Happy Meal toy is that’s easier for anyone who’s in business to sort of just get a picture in their mind. Okay, well, what is this incentive stuff? It’s really offering them a reward for buying your product versus someone else’s.

And you can bet your life that your competitors won’t be doing it because 97 % of businesses worldwide have never tried an incentive. McDonald’s have, Kellogg’s have. I grew up in an area whereby I was teased, annoying mum, to get the corn flakes packet from Kellogg’s because of the Flintstones toys. These days, of course, it’d be a different toy. But the thing is, is that that is incentive-based marketing on steroids.

Amazon do it. Amazon say that if you join their prime membership club, you will get free shipping and free movies and free music and all sorts of things. But largely speaking, no business does it. And I know that you tend to sort of focus on service industries. You know, they might give good service, but if they really do want to distinguish themselves from the other person down the road, think about an incentive.

Jeffro (03:57.868)
So it does, it sounds like an incentive is something everyone gets when they make the purchase. But I was curious about like the Willy Wonka approach where you could get something extra special. Is that still part of it or is that just kind of a modified version?

John Dwyer (04:13.342)
It is, but we’ve done all the testing and you buy, you get easily beats you buy, might win. Okay. So if McDonald’s said, look, every 10th Happy Meal has a toy in it. I don’t think they’d be still running the Happy Meal promotion 40 years down the track. If Kellogg’s said one in six cereal boxes has a toy in it. And look, you’re talking to someone who’s run more contests than most. did all of the big scratch bingo games for the Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers here in Australia, provided the likes of McDonald’s and KFC with the monopoly style promotion. So therefore I’ve done every promotion, every contest you could possibly think of, but unless it’s a million dollar draw and you can do that, you can get insured price promotion. So therefore I can get a million dollars for any business for 20 grand. Okay. Lloyd’s of London basically provide what they call price insurance. So all those shows on TV that you see who wants to be a millionaire, that’s not the TV network giving that away. That’s Lloyd’s of London.

And so unless you’ve got a big, big, big price like 100,000 or 250 or 500 or million dollars, don’t bother giving away a of groceries because that’s not going to do anything for your business. What you want to do is say, look, you’ve used my service or you buy my service this week and I’ll give you a free vacation. The only exception to that is, you know, we’ve got a company here in Australia that just in the last four weeks broke records and it’s a car dealership. And he wanted to, we’ve got a…  promotion whereby we provide vacation vouchers to businesses for $50 and that gives them three to seven nights vacation in Las Vegas or New York or Orlando or San Diego or Down Under right across the world. These hotels are involved in this, they’re happy to give up their rooms for nothing on the basis that you know they’re going to be empty tonight so therefore give up some of these rooms and whoever stays there they hope will spend money on food and beverage so we’ve got a relationship with them where we allow the businesses to actually get vacation vouchers off us worth $1,000 for 50 bucks. They then give that away when somebody buys their product or service. So that is a real big happy meltdown that one. Because vacations of course, appeal to anyone, male or female. Anyway, what happened is car dealership said, look, we’ll get 50 or 100 of these off you and we’ll give them away when someone buys a car. And I said, look, you should put yourself into a mental institution. There’s nobody’s gonna buy a 50 or $60,000 car because you give them three or four nights vacation, right?

John Dwyer (06:30.07)
And he said, well, how do we use them? said, on a test drive. So in your instance, where it’s a gigantic ticket, like 50 or 60 or $70,000, you know that out of every 10, sorry, my alarm goes off. I was supposed to be getting up at this time. Yeah, so therefore, you know that if someone’s paid, if you get 10 test drives, there’s every chance that two out of 10 would probably buy a car. he said, yep. I said, good, okay, we’ll just give it a vacation to everyone who takes a test drive. He got smashed.

absolutely smashed and of course if his ratio is two out of ten and he does a hundred test drives he’s going to make more money than if he did fifty.

Jeffro (07:05.14)
Got it. So is there a sweet spot with the value of the incentive versus the value of the purchase that you should aim for?

John Dwyer (07:13.15)
Spot on. The reason McDonald’s won, I’ve done a lot of stuff with McDonald’s down under. And the reason that incentive works is because I know the people who produce that out of China. They produce those toys from McDonald’s for about 20 cents. But as a parent or grandparent, and I know a lot about buying them because I’ve got the father of six children and they’ve grown up and left home now. But at one stage we had six under 12 and McDonald’s got $7 billion out of us every year because of those damn things.

And so they produce the toys for 20 cents, but those toys, if you went into Kmart or Toys R Us would be a four or five dollar toy. So that’s the winning formula. The winning formula is low cost, high perceived value. And that’s why these accommodation vouchers that we give out to businesses work so well, not only because vacations are universally appealing to any age and, you know, both sexes, but also too, because they’re valued at a thousand dollars, but the actual business is only buying them off us for 50 bucks.

Jeffro (08:11.699)
makes a lot of sense because you can use this to attract new customers. And I imagine you could also do this to increase loyalty among existing clients, whether you’re upselling them or renewing a contract or even when you’re going to raise prices on them. If you throw in something like this, they’re going to stick around and be happy that you’re still in their life.

John Dwyer (08:19.016)
Thank you.

John Dwyer (08:29.002)
You got it. And look, the thing is, that it’s as simple as this, Jeff Drowline, at the end of the day, if there were two butchers in town, and they were directly opposite each other, the butcher who has the sausage sizzle outside his shop every day, and he’s got the white chef hat on, and he’s got the whole theatrics Disney style going with it, he’s going to the guy across the road. And that’s the very basic version of, you know, I guess, you know, direct response marketing, he’s doing things differently.

and getting a direct response because I can tell you if mum’s walking with two or three kids down the street and she needs to buy meat for tonight’s meal, the kids are not going to let her go across the road to the butcher who’s got the door closed and to keep the eagerness in. It’s going to be mummy mummy, we want a sausage sandwich. And so therefore the guy who’s going to be entrepreneurial with a point of difference, he’s going to win every time.

Jeffro (09:17.395)
So is there, does there need to be a direct connection between the type of incentive and the business? Obviously with the butcher, you know, meat and that’s what he sells. It’s the same thing. You know, hotel and a vacation that’s directly connected. But how far, a car on a vacation is a little separate, but still related. You know, is there some direct line that has to be in place?

John Dwyer (09:37.416)
No, in fact, we advise businesses to try and make sure that the incentive that let’s call it the happy meal toy is nothing to do with their business. Okay, so we have a retail chain down under and I was talking to them recently, they’re called sushi train. And so what they and you guys would have in the States and whoever’s listening to this anywhere in the world would understand the sushi train restaurant model. And when you spend money there, you get points and you can trade those points for more sushi. And I said to him, look, if you turn that into a movie voucher,

not one because that would be like winning a shoe, but if you gave someone two movie vouchers, right, that would double your results. It would double it. So because the thing is, is that, you know, they’re there eating sushi, it’s nice to get more sushi, but you can only eat so much sushi. But if you actually gave them a movie pass or a gas voucher, then you’ll find that’ll double or triple things. And to give you an idea, you know, like how the whole

holiday, we call it holidays down under, but the vacation thing came about where we’ve got these vouchers to hand out as a company contacted me, which was a travel company after I had done the Seinfeld stuff. And they said, listen, you seem to have half a clue with marketing, we’ve got access to all these hotel rooms around the world, would you like to join forces? So I said, yes. And that case study with Seinfeld, I know I’m name dropping, but the thing is, is that that is what taught me, I guess, big time the benefits of incentives because that bank

was up against the Wells Fargos of Australia. They were called the Greater Building Society. And they got me in as a consultant and said, look, we want to sell more home loans. And when I looked at what they were doing, they were just basically dropping their prices to 6.2 % or 6.1%. And guess what? The Wells Fargo would drop their interest rates within two seconds. You’re never going to beat the 40 ton gorilla. It’s like the little corner store thinking that they’re going to beat Costco on prices. It’s not going to happen. And so therefore I said to them, listen, I’ve been doing some TV commercials for a travel discount company. Why don’t…

we introduce you and you guys give away a vacation with your home loan. And that’s what they did. They stopped the honeymoon rate, which every bank does, you for the first year you get a percent off. So they just stopped that and gave it to the travel company, which means the promotion was cost neutral. They came on TV and we just said, get a home loan, get a vacation. It was nine words. And for three or four years, it went absolutely nuts. We’re talking $15 billion worth of extra home loans in the first couple of years. And this idiot who you’re talking to didn’t do a deal. Okay. I take it in solvency, please.

Jeffro (11:59.686)
John Dwyer (12:01.726)
And then after four years, we got Seinfeld to do the ads. So I went back and forth to New York and we got Jerry to be spokesman. So when Jerry Seinfeld came on and said, get a home, I’ll get a free vacation, you can imagine what happened.

Jeffro (12:13.201)
Yeah, well, that’s impressive. just how that small difference, know, because it’s psychological, right? It’s what drives us. We feel like we’re getting something for free. We’re way more likely to go with that option. It’s just the way we’re wired.

John Dwyer (12:28.886)
Yeah, and by the way, too, the Greater Berlin Society ran that for 11 years. wasn’t until I left and moved on, I was a consultant, so therefore I would visit them once every week or 10 days. And as it turned out, I decided to move on and concentrate more on small to medium sized businesses. And when I moved on, they brought a new consultancy in and guess what that new consultancy did? Because they never liked to inherit anybody else’s ideas. They stopped the vacation. I had Jerry’s manager, a guy called George Shapiro ring me.

And not that Jerry needs the money, he’s got more money than God. But he rang me, George Shapiro, said, JD, what’s going on? And I said, mate, look, I’ve left, I’ve moved on, and they’ve got a new consultancy, advertising agency, and you know what it’s like. And he said, yeah, it wasn’t their idea. I said, yep. So they crucified themselves by going back to interest rates. And do you think that they will ever beat the Wells Fargo-style bank? Not a chance.

Jeffro (13:22.854)
What a shame. You have something good and because that guy, that new consultant had an ego, right? Wanted to prove himself a good choice. He just messed it up for him.

John Dwyer (13:29.558)
And the thing is that I don’t have an ego. you’re watching this on video, this gag will mean nothing if you’re listening to this on just audio, but I’m patting myself on the back now. I am so good.

Jeffro (13:40.39)
You

Such a humble guy. I love it.

John Dwyer (13:44.662)
look, of my greatest assets is my humility.

Jeffro (13:51.034)
That is something, I know your tongue is firmly placed in your cheek, but this is actually true. And the more you can be authentically humble about things and recognize, I still have a lot to learn, or even if I did XYZ thing, it doesn’t make me better than the next guy intrinsically somehow. And so just having that perspective of always wanting to learn and grow, you can be grateful for what you’ve accomplished and proud of it, but it’s not the same as getting puffed up by it.

John Dwyer (14:19.764)
absolutely. And I’ve got to say to you, being a baby burmur, the AI thing is even more stunning to us than it would be even to your age group because, you know, I used to go to school on the horse and cart with my friends, the Walton family, the Walton’s family. I’m joking. I’ll go back to Bonanza, the TV show. Yeah. But this AI stuff is crazy, crazy at the moment. so we’ve got heavily.

Jeffro (14:34.511)
You

John Dwyer (14:44.886)
gone heavily down the rabbit hole with that. we’ve got robots answering phones for surface based industries. are being tradies. We’ve concentrated on tradies, tradesmen, and because they are out on the road or putting a solar panel on the roof of houses, they can’t answer the phone as easily. And they’re losing big business because they can’t get to the phone. And, know, these days if a lady has a bad air conditioner and it’s not working on a hot day and she rings and you’re an air conditioning guy, you can’t answer it, then she just didn’t ring somebody else.

So the abandonment rate, and we don’t have all these stats because we’ve been doing it for the last six months in particular, but you know, some electrical services and plumbers, they are having a 30 or 40 % abandonment rate because people are just not gonna wait on the whole button. And we fixed that in a heartbeat now. Basically the robot answers every single call. So they have no loss of income through abandonment. And the robot is converting better than a human. When the lady rings and says, I want three ceiling fans and I, you know, I want an Echinester in my third bedroom, then of course the robot has the conversation and then the books in a call. Not only books in a call so that the tradesman can go there, you know, and provide a proper quote, but we’ve got a company that has 10 vans on the road of electrical services. The robot actually schedules the person who’s rung up to be with a electrician who happens to be in her area tomorrow at that time. So they’ve lost all of the travel time now, or sorry, they’ve gained all the travel time.

It’s just crazy. It’s just nuts.

Jeffro (16:13.794)
Yeah, well, that’s a great example of how AI is helping the world. I know a lot of people are worried about what AI is going to take away, but stuff like this is huge for small businesses. So that’s a great example. And since you mentioned AI, I did want to ask you also, because I saw on one of your landing pages, know, tools like ChatGBT becoming more common in marketing, you’ve said there’s one vital ingredient that you need to do to get the most out of them. Can you talk about that?

John Dwyer (16:38.228)
Yeah, look, chat to be fantastic, but it’s completely useless if you don’t have the big idea. Okay. And I know that because we’re an ideas company, it’s very convenient for me to say that. we had a company before the company now is the Institute of whale.com. But my company before this was dynamic ideas company and the acronym for that DIC was not the best. So we decided to, I’m joking. I sold that company. So someone else has got the dick company now, but anyway.

But yeah, so this company is called the Institute of WoW.com. yeah, I keep on saying to people, look, know, chat GPT is absolutely marvelous. But if your props are not based on a big idea, then you’re just going to be wasting a lot of time. You might as get a jigsaw puzzle and sit there with a thousand pieces on the dining room table. You’ve got to have that big idea. And I guess that’s where the likes of us come into play. We’re not just a, I guess a functional advertising agency that most of the stuff we do these days is similar to yours, it’s going to be digital, but we provide big ideas. There was one recently, it was a hairdressing salon. I didn’t make any money out of this, it was a friend of ours and she was in a little country town and she was the only hairdresser in town for the last 25 years. All of a sudden she’s got another hairdresser come to town sitting opposite her and she was just beside herself and she said, what do I do? We’ve lost all of our men. I said, why have you lost all your men?

She said, well, the lady across the road’s opened up the hairdressing salon, she’s got men’s haircuts for $10. We normally charge men’s haircuts for 50 or $60. Women, of course, will pay hundreds of dollars, but men will pay 50 or 60. We’ve lost them all because they don’t care where they get their haircut, they’ll go to the butcher. And I said, well, leave it with me. And a couple of days later, we got all the men back. I just put a sandwich board outside her hairdressing salon, which said, we fixed $10 haircuts.

Jeffro (18:26.275)
I love it.

John Dwyer (18:30.42)
So it’s not about functionality always, although GBT brings a massive, massive advantage, and of course all the other AIs. It starts with the idea. You gotta have the idea.

Jeffro (18:41.41)
Yeah, well, and with a big idea, that might mean something different to a marketer versus somebody else. Because when I hear you say that, I think of Todd Brown and his definition of big idea, and it has certain qualities that are things that has to meet the criteria before it qualifies as a big idea. So is that kind of what you’re talking about?

John Dwyer (19:00.594)
yeah, look, there’s lots of morons out there with big ideas. mean, I have people coming to me because we are an ideas company. I’ve got people, know, insane people coming to me with, you know, ideas. and most of them are ridiculous. They have not put the idea through a pre-qualification process. So, you know, direct response to marketing and the idea have five components. The first one is you’ve got to highlight their problem whatever that might be, you then got to aggravate the problem. So if it was weight loss, was the problem would be, look, are you overweight, not feeling good about yourself? You aggravate it by saying, someone’s around the corner, don’t you want to look good? The third thing is provide the solution, come with my weight loss program. The fourth thing is provide proof, which is generally speaking, testimonials. I was overweight, I was unhappy, but now I look like a supermodel. And then number five is the strong CDA. And that’s where a lot of people fall down, the call to action.

It’s a weak call of action. You’ve got to have a strong call of action and that’s where the incentive comes in. You know, invest in my weight loss program by Friday at five o’clock. So you have a deadline, I think, and you will get a free vacation or whatever it might be.

Jeffro (20:03.747)
So that makes sense. And it takes a while to get there, right? And it takes practice. I imagine you get better at it over time the more you do it. But you have to spend time on it. You can’t just do the first thing that pops into your head necessarily. You gotta make sure it passes mustard.

John Dwyer (20:19.446)
You do, but you know what? There’s one at the moment that we have as a package, but anybody watching or listening to this can swipe it and do it themselves. It is so simple. It’s a Facebook contest for now. when, Jeff, you say that a lot of your audience are in the services industry, you are talking, I mean, services obviously include accountants and dentists and doctors, of course, but are you talking about plumbers and electricians mainly? Yeah, okay.

Jeffro (20:38.242)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean all of the above.

John Dwyer (20:44.606)
Well, he’s one that could double their business overnight as he teases with the drum roll. And it’s a really simple thing that we stumbled across about six months ago. You think that we’ve been in this for a hundred years. I would have come up with this earlier, but I didn’t. And we just call it the Facebook contest formula. And it’s as simple as this. just, mean, when I tell this to people, they go, well, that’s so simple. I know I shouldn’t deserve to any money out of this because it is so simple.

But then we put man on the moon in 69. We only put wheels on luggage, airport luggage in 84. So therefore, you know, we’re not as humans, we’re not that smart, seriously. So it’s as simple as this, whatever your product or service is, and let’s just say it’s lawn mowing, you would actually give a month or two months worth of lawn mowing away as a prize on a Facebook contest. Anyone who enters that contest obviously is not in an apartment, okay? They’ve got a lawn.

And the moment that they enter that contest, of course they aren’t a lead, they’re a red hot lead. So you give away one of your prizes and then you’ve got 999 other people you can contact to say, look, you didn’t win our lawn mowing contest for two months, but guess what? We’ve got this incredible deal. If you actually use our services now for two months, we will give you a free vacation. So what we do is that we actually combine the free vacation, which is ridiculous, but they buy for $50 into a purchase of $500 to $1,000. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s an air conditioner or it can be anything. We had one, only two weeks ago he came on board and he just said to look, I’ve got walking frames, know, for the elderly with the walking frames with wheels on it. He insulted me by offering a contra. So anyway, I said to him that I hope he dies in his sleep. But anyway, so what we did was we ran a contest on Facebook for him and basically he was giving away a walking frame. And so we had an older gentleman in a walking frame on the graphic and it said, win a walking frame. And he had 822 leads in the first week. He wouldn’t get that in six months normally. And so he said to me, look, I’m not gonna be able to get to them. My head has exploded. And so we have a robot ringing all those people and saying, look, you didn’t win the walking frame, but obviously you’re interested in one and you are 104. So it would be good for you.

John Dwyer (22:55.638)
If you actually get in by Friday, we will give you a special deal and you’ll also get a special bonus. And the robot is building the human in conversion rates.

Jeffro (23:05.792)
Yeah, that’s fantastic. And I think the great thing about a contest is you’re getting people to raise their hand and say, yes, I am interested in that thing. Even though they wanted the prize, but they’re also at the same time identifying themselves as someone interested in the service that you mentioned. Because otherwise they wouldn’t bother because they’re like, I don’t need that, whatever. And they move on.

John Dwyer (23:20.694)
Thank you.

John Dwyer (23:25.406)
And Jeff, I look, they’re not only a lead, they’re a red hot lead with the one that we did. We only did one a few weeks ago there for a swimming pool slide company. And obviously it’s targeted at people with swimming pills. If he put out a letterbox brochure, we put out any other Facebook campaign, there’s going to be an element of wastage because whilst Facebook and Instagram and all these platforms, of course, are laser targeted, very difficult for them to tell you who’s got a pool and who hasn’t in terms of exposure. In this instance anyone who’s going to enter a contest to win a pool slide obviously does not live in an apartment and they’ve got a pool in their backyard. So he got 1600 leads in just a matter of weeks. And he’s a guy who ran about my footage, I guess he said to me, said, Jody, I don’t know what we’re going to do. said, our biggest problem is now getting to the 1600 leads. And of course it is. So therefore he gave away one swimming pool slide, which cost him $1,500. I mean, his retail is at foreground, but he gave it away.

And now again, we’ve got the AI robot phoning everyone who didn’t win and offering them a special deal on a pill slide. And if they get in by Friday, guess what? They get a free vacation. So what we do is we bring the Happy Meal toy into what is a quite a brilliant, even though it’s simple, it’s quite a brilliant leads generation.

Jeffro (24:40.735)
feel like I’m going to go do my own contest and campaign now and give away vacations because you’ve made quite a compelling argument for it. I can’t see why I shouldn’t.

John Dwyer (24:46.166)
You know what you could do, because of the skills that you’ve got in digital marketing around it, you would give away, let’s say, a package of your digital marketing services for one month or two months or whatever it might be. I’ve done it myself, where I say, look, who would like to win a month’s worth of consultancy with JD? I get a whole bunch of people that glow in the dark, and I get one away, of course. And then the other people are red hot leads for consultancy.

you can do exactly the same. Anyone can do this. The only people I’d suggest should not do it as a funeral parlour. I don’t think that would be good to a free funeral. And then when they don’t win, you’re reading them and say, look, you must have relatives who are getting on a little bit.

Jeffro (25:25.76)
Well, I this is a business. Any business owner would rather have the problem of too many leads than where do I find leads, right? So this is just brilliant. So I love that and I love all the examples. Now, before we get to the end, though, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about websites and website incentives because my personal mission is to rid the world of terrible websites. You most business websites are static brochures, but everybody actually wants a website that sells.

Let’s talk for a minute about how to turn a website into a 24-7 sales machine. And I’m curious to hear how you bring in the incentives in terms of lead magnets and all of that too.

John Dwyer (26:06.026)
Yeah, Geoffrey, thank you for asking me about the website because as you know, know everything. So therefore, I’ll give you the… You know, if I was listening to this or watching it, I just say, look, I’m not going anywhere near that Aussie guy. His dad jokes are just woeful, you know. Okay, so look, websites should be the same as if you’re having a conversation with someone for the first time. And that is that you need to… I mean, I use wit and sarcasm to get attention.

Jeffro (26:10.174)
Yeah

John Dwyer (26:34.858)
Mostly just happens to be my personality. But if you’re not built that way by the big guy upstairs, then use whatever you’ve got as a skill to come up with an Elvis found headline. OK, so your website right at the very top either has to have a benefit headline. Not welcome to Smith’s Electrical, which they all do. Smith’s Electrical voted number one electrical business in Southern California, whatever it might be. OK, so that is you won the Academy Award. Make sure everyone knows that.

Just like every restaurant, I’ve been to Los Angeles a million times and every single restaurant has won the Restaurant of the Year award here before.

Jeffro (27:14.397)
Yeah, I know. No one ever checks the year. They don’t go back and double check. Like really? In 2018?

John Dwyer (27:20.318)
No, exactly. I had a restaurant, was a client and he says to me, look, we want more people at breakfast time. I said, okay, well, you you should have the best coffee in Queensland. I’m in the state of Queensland, Australia. And he said, well, what do mean? I said, well, let’s, he said, how do I say that? I said, I walked out to four ladies who were sitting at the coffee, at the table, having their coffee. I said, do you think this is the best coffee in Queensland? And they all said, yes, yes, yes, yes. said, there you go, it’s unanimous, right?

So no one’s ever going to ask for the sample size. You’ve just been voted number one coffee in Queensland. So we changed all of his ads to say that number one voted number one coffee in Queensland. And it was, right? He had people driving. We’re talking 40 minutes away to his coffee. And guess what? He did have good coffee. So if he had bad coffee, I wouldn’t have done the coffee was fantastic. But yeah, look, the website. So have an Elvis found headline or benefit driven headline or have a problem solution headline. And just as I said before, are you overweight and you’re not feeling good about yourself?

Summer is just dot dot dot dot dot summer is just around the corner and guess what we’ve got the solution problem solution marketing Okay, and then of course throughout the website what you need is a video what we call an explainer video And if you think you can get away with that a video on your home page now then you are insane you should go and see therapy because Yeah, we live in the world of video for goodness sake do not have a home page without some sort of explainer video And if you don’t want to be on it because you’re ugly and let’s face it, 80 % of the world are, then either get Tom Cruise or just have a voiceover, okay? But have and explain the video on your website and make sure of course it’s well produced and well put together. And the other thing that you want of course is testimonials and preferably not written testimonials. We don’t believe them. We think you just wrote them and put a name down the bottom of them. Try and have testimonials that are landscape on your homepage and are real people, okay?

And of course, the big, big, big, big thing is have an incentive. Make sure that you’ve got something on your homepage. I mean, look, when people say how important is the homepage, I said it’s the only thing that’s important. It’s like women’s magazines. I used to have a client here in Australia that produced a lot of women’s magazines. If we put George Clooney on the front cover, they sold more magazines, all right? So therefore, the front cover could dictate whether that magazine got sold or not. Your homepage will dictate whether anyone goes surfing through the website.

Jeffro (29:45.023)
Well, that’s a great summary and I love how a lot of the other strategies that we talked about map directly to the website. It’s just a different medium. You’re doing the same stuff, coming up with a big idea, presenting it a certain way, the problem solution, and then incentivizing people to take action on that, whether that’s to join your email list or to sign up for a service or a free quote or whatever it is, just sweeten the pot a little bit and it makes it a lot easier.

John Dwyer (29:53.0)
of the field.

John Dwyer (30:07.808)
Yep, yep, yep. as you said, as you, sorry, as you said, an opt in, forgot about the opt in of course. And, you know, in the game we all call it opt in, you know, if you’re not in marketing, what we talk about is a freebie. You give someone a free something so that they will give you the details.

Jeffro (30:08.905)
Well, thank you so much for joining me. go ahead.

Jeffro (30:23.997)
Yeah. And you’ve illustrated over and over on this conversation, just how well that can work. So if you have a good incentive, it pays for itself over and over again. So thanks again for joining me today. JD, I know we’re at the end of our time here. I would love to keep chatting though and hear all of your many stories and dad jokes and anything else you’ve got, but we are out of time. So for those of you at home, JD is living proof that thinking outside the box can have a massive upside for your business. Take this conversation as inspiration to step up your own marketing game.

Looks like you got something there you want to share.

John Dwyer (30:56.15)
I was just gonna give a book away, okay? So therefore, when I wrote a book, I had to write a big book because I’m an idiot. So therefore, if you’ll listen to this, won’t see it. But if you’re watching on video, this is the WoW Manifesto. And it’s 300 pages of, yeah, just direct response ideas that worked. I didn’t put the ones in here that didn’t work. And it is, yeah, it’s a great swipe file. So therefore, if you wanted to swipe ideas, it could make a difference in your business. I’m happy to give that away.

And you’re not gonna be surprised at the URL I’m gonna give to you to get this. It’s called getmorejd.com.

Jeffro (31:34.719)
And I bet they’re gonna get messages from you offering them more vacations and things at some point too.

John Dwyer (31:41.47)
Yeah, exactly. So the whole idea of get more JD.com is it’s an evil plan. So therefore it’s an evil plan for people to get in contact with me. And then of course, you know, surprise, surprise, I might have something that they’re interested in. Yeah, I’ve got a little finger out evil doctor evil.

Jeffro (31:54.865)
Exactly. Well, you’re practicing what you preach, so I like it.

Jeffro (32:02.693)
All right, one last question before I let you go. If you had one piece of advice you’d give to the service business owners who want to start implementing an incentive-based marketing campaign tomorrow, what would that be?

John Dwyer (32:15.094)
Yeah, seriously, and I know this again, it’s pointing fingers back to me and it’s self-serving, but the Facebook contest formula, do it straight away. If you want to help to do it, do you mind, Geoffrey, if I tell them where to go, if they want to help it. It’s FB formula, sorry, FBcontestformula.com. So if you go to FB for Facebook, FBcontestformula.com, just swipe it. You don’t need us if you don’t want it. I mean, obviously we help.

Jeffro (32:28.073)
Go for it.

John Dwyer (32:41.078)
people speed it up and one guy said to the other day, look, I went to your website, I decided to do it myself. He was a landscaper. He said, I gave away a $2,000 landscaping prize and I spent $320 in three days on Facebook and we got one lead. Any chance you could take it over? I said, yeah, okay. So we’re talking about 35 cent leads. This thing will provide perhaps leads for you for the 30, 40, 50 cents a lead, which means that you’re only spending $30 or $40 a day on Facebook.

Jeffro (32:57.149)
Yeah.

John Dwyer (33:07.806)
and you get red hot ludes. So if you’re interested in really ramping things up quickly, hold that contest on Facebook or Instagram, but most likely Facebook, where you give away your product or service as a prize, but you get a bucket load of ludes and yeah, fbcontestformula.com.

Jeffro (33:23.452)
All right, well thank you JD. And now you guys know if you don’t implement this, whether on your own or with help, you must hate money. You’re leaving all that on the table. So rethink your life choices. Thanks again for being here JD. Thanks to all of you guys for listening. If you thought this episode was valuable or entertaining, please leave a review for the show on Apple or Spotify and go do a contest. Take care and I’ll see you next time.