Who Is Dan Kennedy And The Psychology Of Emotional Marketing

Dan Kennedy is considered to be one of the greatest direct response marketers of all time. He has been called the "Millionaire Maker", helping people turn their ideas into fortunes.

Dan is a leading consultant in the areas of copywriting, advertising, and direct marketing strategies. His long list of clients includes Guthy-Renker Corporation, famous for its celebrity infomercials with Victoria Principal and Vanna White, and its Tony Robbins infomercial. Guthy-Renker is a 200 million dollar+ a year business now, and Dan Kennedy has been a key member of their brain trust since their very first infomercial.

He was formerly one of the most popular, in-demand speakers on direct marketing-related topics. He would address over 200,000 people a year, sharing the platform with other famous speakers such as Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Mark Victor Hansen, Joe Sugarman, Ron LeGrand, Corey Rudl, Collin Powell, and former Presidents of United States.

If you want to be more successful in your business or sales career, or if you're looking to start a business, Dan Kennedy's material will get you results FAST.

Unlike traditional advertising, direct response marketing gets people who've paid attention to your ad to respond in some way:

- buy directly from your advertising
- show up in your store
- call in asking for your information
- send in order forms
- come to a seminar
- and so and on...

It requires action from your prospect.

It has nothing to do with name recognition or cute commercials. That's for big companies who have lots of money to waste. When you're on a marketing budget every dollar that you spend on marketing and advertising can be tracked to the penny so you know exactly how much profit you made from each and every ad, and whether to expand the advertising or kill it instantly if it sucks.

It also can be tested for tiny amounts of money to see if you have a winner, or a dog. If you lose money, you lose small money. And when you make money you have already tested the ad so you KNOW you can expand the advertising safely!

The bottom line is that direct response marketing allows a small business to market effectively and after testing to know exactly how much money it costs them to acquire a customer. This tells them exactly how much they can spend on marketing campaigns without losing money.

Another important aspect of direct marketing is target marketing or niche marketing.

That means don't try to sell to the world. Pick a highly targeted niche and market to them.

What is a niche. A niche, is a group of people that share common interests. Such as golfers, hunters, bodybuilders, fitness trainers, martial artists, coin collectors, internet marketers, etc...

The key to success with this type of marketing is narrowing your niche to know exactly what your customer wants.

Lets take the martial arts niche. This is a pretty broad niche, but we could break it down to lets say, tae kwon do practitioners. That's a much smaller niche and if you have a product that's specifically for tae kwon do practitioners, then they'll be more interested as it's customized to their art. You could narrow it down even more, like women in tae kwon do. Or tae kwon do for kids. You get the point.

There's 2 main reasons why it's important to narrow your niche.

1. The more customized the program to the niche, the more likely they'll be interested in it, and even pay a premium because it's specifically for them, and not just anybody.

2. Typically there's less competition when you go after a smaller niche.

Going back to our example with martial arts. Lets say a woman practitioner in tae-kwon-do looking for a dvd of stretching and kicking exercises. And she comes across 2 products.

One, is a martial arts dvd on stretching and kicking. And the other, is a dvd on tae-kwon-do stretching and kicking exercises for women.

Which one will she most likely buy? And even if the second one was $5 or $10 or even $15 more, she would most likely buy the more expensive one, because it's specifically for her.

You see the difference.

So in your marketing campaign you should pick your niche carefully.

After picking the right target market, what's going to determine the success of your campaign is the sales copy (which is the ad itself.)

The art of writing a good advertisement is called copywriting. It's also called salesmanship in print. You're selling with the words on paper. And your copy needs to be emotionally driven and be able to convince someone to take action, and take it right now.

Dan Kennedy is one of the most sought after copywriters. Often charging his clients $25,000 plus royalties just to write a sales letter. Of course no one would pay this kind of money unless the ad brought in results.

Now you don't need to spend $25K on your ad, but you do need to have a good copy. And depending on the product, you can probably get a good ad written for $500 to $1000. This may seem like a lot, but think about it. You spend $1,000 once on an ad, and it works for years bringing in sales, without you having to spend any money on the ad itself.

The other option is to write copy yourself. Which isn't as difficult as it may seem.

Here are some tips from Dan Kennedy about writing a good copy.

- State the problem
- Agitate the problem.
- Explain why you have the solution and it is superior to that of your competition.

Here are the important parts of having a good copy.

1. A catchy headline. This is the most important part of the ad. Without a good headline, you might as well not even have an ad, because your prospect will get to it.

The whole purpose of the headline is to get the person curious to want to continue reading.

2. The body of the ad must be emotionally driven and compelling. Focus on the benefits your client will get, not the feature of the product or services. Nobody cares how the car works, but they do like to hear about the comfort, or speed, or the fuel economy, safety and so forth.

Another reason why it's so critical to focus on a specific niche, is because a group of people that share common interests, also share common problems and frustrations. So make sure you address them in your copy. Tell a story. People love hearing stories. There's a saying that facts tell and stories sell.

Stories are also hypnotic by nature. And part of being a good copywriter is having the ability to hypnotize your prospect into reading your copy. This is not manipulating them or anything like that. It's just putting them in a buying trance in that moment that they're reading your ad.

It's just like if you're watching a good movie, in that moment, you're detached from your issues and you're hypnotized by what's going on, and 100% of your attention is on what's going on in the movie. That's exactly what you want your copy to do when someone reads it.

Here's a good resource by a person who coined this phrase, hypnotic marketing, Joe Vitale. The Hypnotic Marketing Program. It's a great course with an e-book and an audio that teaches you how to create hypnotic ads, emails, and sales letters, it also provides an extensive hypnotic phrases swipe file.

3. Next, have an irresistible offer. Let's say you're selling a $100 item, make it sound like it'll be $500 or even $1,000 dollars. Add valuable bonuses to make the product worth at least 10 times what you'll charge, build up to it, and then surprise them, that it'll only cost $100.

4. Lastly, have a strong guarantee. Offer a 60 or a 90 day money back guarantee, try 1 year if appropriate for your product. The longer the guarantee, the more comfortable they'll be at purchasing. And don't worry about returns, because even though, it is an inevitable part of our business, but if you have a good product or service, people will not want to return it.

Once the customer enters your sales funnel with your first product, also called your front-end product, don't miss on the opportunities to sell them more products and services on the back end.

Once you acquire the customer, there's very little cost to continue marketing to them. Email them regularly to keep in touch, and from time to time send them offers of additional services they may be interested in.

When was the last time you went to the drugstore to buy medications only? People go to drug stores to buy birthday cards, pop, magazines, envelopes, get pictures developed. These companies figured out that if people go there anyway why not cross sell them different items that they will buy from someone anyway.

Think of how can you offer additional products or services to your customers, whether they're related to your front-end product or not.

I've spent many years in financial services, and most financial planners focus on one or two needs of the prospect. They offer them investments and some maybe insurance. I always thought, if they invest with me, they need life insurance, health insurance possibly, a mortgage at some point, auto and home insurance, etc...

How can you create an additional profit stream from existing customers?

It's amazing to me, that most businesses do not create that kind of a marketing strategy. They have no mechanism in place to follow up with their customers to offer them more.

Another missed profit opportunity is creating a joint venture. Joint ventures is any kind of a partnership where two businesses create a marketing strategy to cross sell their products.

Here's an example of one that I absolutely love. My wife and I go to this nice Italian restaurant often, and one of the reasons why we keep coming back, besides the fact the food is good, is that they offer a special where if you get 2 dinner entrees with 2 beverages, they include 2 movie tickets to a local movie theater. It actually works out that if I would purchase the tickets separately at the theater and pay for dinner without this package, I would spend $6 more on 2 tickets. Well since we love going to the movies as well, anytime we go to the movie we go this restaurant. Now is this brilliant or what?

Look at the psychology here. There's a movie theater in the same plaza with the restaurant, but that's not the one offering this deal, it's another one down the street. So that other movie theater gets more business, because of this, and the restaurant gets more business, because if we want to go out to eat, that would be our first pick because of this package.

Of all the local businesses around this is these 2 are the only ones, that I saw were creative enough to do this.

Dry cleaners could this with maybe a grocery store or gas stations. Carpet stores could do this with maybe a furniture store or a store that sells drapery. Online entrepreneurs could partner up with other website owners who are not in direct competition with them, but serving the same market and cross promote to each others list. Or maybe sign up for an affiliate program and offer their existing customers additional products they could benefit from and get paid an affiliate commission.
This should get your creative juices flowing.
If you're just starting out, and you have a good product, but no customer list, you could joint venture with someone who has a list and split the profits with them.

The opportunities are endless.

If you're strictly marketing on the internet, all of these strategies still apply.

It's even more important to create a good direct response model online, because when visitors come to your site, you only have a few seconds literally to get them to stay. So if what you're offering is not of value, they're one click away from leaving your site forever.

So having a good headline is important, an enticing copy and an opt-in form to capture their contact information in return for a valuable and relevant report, audio, or an e-book.

You can also combine direct marketing offline with your online business to grow your profits.
Dan Kennedy has an entire program devoted to that specifically. The Ultimate Internet Entrepreneur.

Case Study:

There's a website that I know, that is doing it in a brilliant way. When you go to their site, they have an order form for their product, but that's not on the main page, and they don't even lead you there.
Instead they have a nice image, that states: Get a CD, DVD, and MP3 FREE! When you click it takes you to an opt-in form for you to fill out your information, name, address, email, it then asks you for $6.95 to cover the shipping of the cd and dvd, which by that time you've filled everything out and mentally you've decided that you want this freebie, so you proceed to pay $6.95.

Then instantaneously you get an email with an mp3 audio file. Then 2 days later you get a package with a cd, dvd, and a sales letter for their full $300+ product, with a discount from the original price on the website.

This is a very clever way to market.

First, they get your email and can send you continuous emails to follow up, stay in touch, and keep offering their product.

Second, they get your physical address and actually put a nice looking, good quality cd and dvd in your hands so you can experience the product, and they get a sales letter in your hand, that you will at least read once because it's with the cd/dvd envelope (not junk mail). And they can send follow up mail as we've discussed before.

Third, by charging $6.95 they more then recoup the cost of mailing the free cd, dvd, and the sales letter, plus any cost of actually acquiring you as a lead. So if they have to spend money to advertise their site, they recoup that cost by charging $6.95.
Brilliant.

The main thing you want to do is to under promise and over deliver. Not the other way around. Make your promises strong and compelling, but WOW your customer with unadvertised extras, excellent customer service, and over deliver on your promises.

They'll not only stay with you forever, but also spread the word around what an awesome experience they've had.

And all this makes a good direct marketing strategy that any business can apply.