Stop Discounting and Instead Use Value-Add-Incentives with Marco Torres: An EOFire Classic from 2021

0:02Who's right to rock today, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. The only daily show interviewing the world's top entrepreneurs seven days a week. Today, we'll be breaking down how to stop discounting and instead use value-add incentives. To drop these value bombs, I brought Marco Torres into EO Fire Studios. Marco is the co-founder of marketingboost.com and has helped thousands of business owners worldwide boost sales and scale their business by as much as five-fold through the use of incentive-based marketing. In today's foundation, we'll talk about gratitude being number one, you have to be grateful for everything.

0:36Number two, how discounting can eat up your profits. And number three, how incentives can make your existing lead magnet work and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Marco and our sponsors. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Again, request life-changing tickets today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Fire Nation, you have a book inside you and it's time to share your message with the world.

1:18That's why I created Author 100, a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. If you want daily guidance and mentorship from me, JLD, then head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details. Marco, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Hello, Fire Nation. John, I'm really thrilled and honored to be invited on your show again, so thanks for having me. And yeah, so what I think is different, maybe people don't disagree with it, But I think gratitude is number one.

2:08You know, a lot of us think it's all about what I can accomplish and what I can do. And, you know, how hard of what your work ethic is. But I think you've got to start every morning out giving mega gratitude to the universe, to God, to whoever you believe in. But you've got to give gratitude about, you know, being alive, being excited and feeling blessed. Then you'll have the energy to get up and do whatever you got to do for that day. Fire Nation, why don't you take a second right now and just think of one unique thing that you are grateful for? I assure you it will improve your current state of mind.

2:47And as I mentioned in the introduction, we're going to talk about how you can stop discounting and instead use value-added incentives. And let's just break into this, Marco, because everything, and I mean everything, seems so crowded these days. How the heck can we stand out? That's a great question. Now, this is probably the biggest question business owners never really ask themselves. You know, what is their unique selling proposition? What makes them different? So most of us as entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, we're all competing with each other. Most of us, we're all, like we just said, in a very crowded ocean of offers.

3:27So what many business owners often end up doing is studying their competitors and get even more and more frustrated as they find out they're often outspending them in marketing budgets, often undercutting their prices. So they find themselves lowering their prices instead of increasing prices as they should be with the inflation that we're seeing right now. So standing out, before I discuss ideas to stand out from the crowd, what I'd really like to do, if you let me, is discuss just for a minute how devastating discounting your prices can be in your bottom line. Does that be all right? Break it down, brother.

4:00So let's say you are a SaaS software as a service or a marketing agency or a butcher or baker or candlestick maker or whatever it might be you do. You get the idea. You sell a product or service. And let's say your profit margin after expenses, let's say it's 20%. So on$1 ,000 in sales, you make a net profit of$200, for example. Now you get a bright idea from your marketing guru. Let's do some discounting and you discount your price and drop your offers by 10%. So the same sales, you now collect$900 versus$1 ,000. Now you're only making$100 in net profit because your costs are still the same and yet you discounted the price.

4:45So you end up with the same cash profits. In order to end up to get the same cash profits you had previously, you're going to nearly need to double your sales to$1 ,800 in sales to take home the same previous profits of$200. So in that example, discounting as little as 10 % can require you to nearly double your sales to end up in the same take-home profits, which is what we're in business for. We forget often, you know, we're here to take to make, at the end of the day, take home a profit, which discounting can really eat it all up. Now, one thing that I really do want to dive into, because this is to me where you're bringing something really unique to the table, is something called customer draw card incentive.

5:31What is this incentive and how can we use this strategy in our businesses? Thanks for that question. The customer draw card incentive is really what Marketing Boost brings to the table. Because instead of discounting your, you know, your, as we talked about, what we want to teach you is how to add value and add bonuses like travel incentives to your, to your offers. So you can stand out from the crowd by offering, you know, for example, what we provide our clients is three incentives. There's complimentary hotel stays at over 125 destinations around the world and hotel savings cards in increments of$100,$200,$300, and$500 and restaurant savings vouchers.

6:15So you can use these. when you add these value add bombs, as you like to say, value bombs, you add these value add incentives to your offers, you are, you can do, you can end up getting what you wanted to collect originally instead of discounting or even more by adding these value adds to your product offering. Now I want to get down to the meat and potatoes. Why do value added incentives beat discounting prices, not just sometimes, but every time. And give us some real specific examples. Well, we talked about it a moment ago, how devastating it is to offer discounts and what that does to your bottom line.

6:56And so with Marketing Boost, what we've done is revolutionize the incentive-based industry to make a very affordable subscription model where you can, for next to nothing, we're giving you unlimited access to complimentary hotel stays and restaurant vouchers and hotel savings cards that can be added to your offerings that will allow you to keep your price in place and also stand out from the crowd. So now you're not discounting your price. You're making your full profits that you need to make. And you're offering a value bomb to your client. You're adding a huge perceived value of a complimentary hotel stay.

7:38For example, We offer three-night hotel stays in over 30 destinations in the U.S., five-night hotel stays in places like Hawaii, Cancun, Puerto Vallarta, Punta Cana. We offer seven-night complimentary hotel stays in places like Phuket, Thailand, Koh Samui, Thailand, et cetera. And these incentives are literally amazing. And right now, after COVID for the last two years, there is a pent-up demand for travel that we're seeing is just unbelievable. The amount of the percentage of people that are taking advantage of these certificates, activating them, and using them is just mind-boggling. We're four times what it was in 2019.

8:22So they're booming, they're exploding, and these incentives can really make a difference to your bottom line. Fire Nation, we're going to dive into specifics on this. when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Are you looking to learn the proven processes and success systems that have been used to create thousands of millionaire success stories? See thousands of success stories and testimonials from real people just like you, who Clay Clark has mentored and coached into prosperity at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire. Clay's proven business coaching program is month to month and it costs less than hiring a minimum wage employee.

8:59Yes, it's month to month and it costs less money than hiring a minimum wage employee. Schedule your free 13-point assessment with Clay Clark himself today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. Because Clay only takes on 160 clients and only allows 300 attendees to each business conference, you will interact with Clay directly, see thousands of real success stories, and learn about attending the Thrive Time Show two-day in-person workshop featuring the legendary Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump today at thrivetimeshow.com slash eofire. become the next success story, schedule a free consultation and request tickets to join Eric Trump and Robert Kiyosaki at Clay Clark's next business conference today at thrivetimeshow.com slash EO fire.

9:42Fire Nation, you have a book inside you right now, but it's not always about our desire to write a book. Sometimes it's about knowing which steps to take and when to take them to make it happen. If you know you have a book inside of you but aren't sure where to start, then I have an exciting opportunity for you. It's called Author 100. Author 100 is a program I personally crafted to help you one-on-one every step of the way, from drafting to writing to publishing and even marketing your book. When you join the Author 100 program, you'll have access to me, JLD, for 100 days. We'll have weekly one-on-one calls, plus you'll get daily guidance from me whenever you have questions or hit a roadblock.

10:24Over the past 12 years, I've self-published five books, including one of the top five publishing campaigns of all time on Kickstarter, the Freedom Journal. I've also traditionally published with HarperCollins, so I know a lot about the book publishing world and where most authors go wrong. I created Author 100 to share my experience and the lessons I've learned along the way, and I can't wait to share it with you. If you're interested in learning more, head over to author100.com and sign up for a free call with me. That's author100.com. Mark, we're back and you talked about a pretty mind-blowing giveaway, complimentary hotel stays.

11:06How specifically do we give these complimentary hotel stays to our clients as calls to action without going broke? That's a great question. Thanks. Well, with Marketing Boost, what we've done is we've literally changed the industry. I mean, the incentive business is not new, but the way we launched it about six years ago now has really revolutionized it. For less than a dollar a day as a subscriber to Marketing Boost, you're given access to unlimited of the three major incentives that I just discussed. So you can give away the complimentary hotel stays, the restaurant vouchers, or the hotel savings cards.

11:45And the way they work for the end user, it doesn't include airfare, of course. It doesn't include food and beverage. It doesn't include transportation or government taxes. So the client, when you give them a complimentary trip, they're going to be responsible for paying the activation fee, which really covers the government taxes and fees for that hotel stay. The client gets a complimentary room for three nights to up to seven nights, and all they did is pay the taxes. After they activate that, they'll have 18 months to select travel dates. There's no hoops to jump through, no phone calls to make, no timeshare presentations or any kind of sales previews of these hotels or resorts.

12:28So it's literally after they activate, they can immediately start logging in online to look at the dates for the hotel, the destination they selected and the dates available and choose from the participating hotels. So it's an incredible win-win-win situation. And the way it works, I mean, the next big question everybody asks is, you know, this sounds too good to be true. How can, for less than a dollar a day, do I have access to give away all these complimentary trips? And what we do is we own a number of mega travel sites, but one of them that fulfills these trips is called RedeemedVacations.com.

13:05And what they do is negotiate with hotels around the world to help them fill what would have otherwise been empty hotel rooms. So every hotel averages about a 70 percent occupancy. Nearly every night, you know, depending upon the destination, they've got about at least 30 percent of the rooms that are unoccupied, except for obviously peak season, weekends and what have you. So we help them fill what would otherwise be empty rooms. And we create a win-win-win. The client, the hotels have agreed to accept these clients that are only paying the taxes, but they know that they're going to see people spend money at the restaurants, the bars, the casino.

13:42They're going to add additional nights quite often. They're going to come back and travel in the future. They're going to post positive reviews on social media that help them generate more business in the end. So it becomes a win for the hotel because they're filling a room that would have gone with zero income to the property. And with somebody staying in the room, they're going to be spending money on property, like I said. Plus, it's a win for our clients because now they can provide this incredible value-add incentive to their clients. And it's a win for Marketing Boost because we're helping our business owners succeed and we're generating our subscription revenue.

14:17Plus, we make money on upgrades and selling them additional nights and so on and so forth. So that's how it's a win-win-win for all the parties involved. For years, we've been talking about the importance of a powerful lead magnet. Does a good lead magnet still work? That's an interesting question. So let me go over some ideas on how an incentive can make your existing lead magnet work and discuss what is a lead magnet. So lead magnets show your potential customers that you're not just trying to make a hard sell. You're offering immediate gratification that communicates that you're providing them interesting content of value, not just taking their money.

15:01So when you give these, what are examples of lead magnets? For example, you know, providing you providing a free book or e-book, offering a PDF with, you know, resources, download, cheat sheets, guides or reports, a toolkit full of resource lists and case studies. So but nowadays, one thing that's challenging with these type of lead magnets is consumers are starting to get blind spots on some of these resources and downloads for lead magnets. And adding a small incentive is what I teach that like a hotel savings card or a restaurant voucher with with from marketing boost. So when they're signing up for your lead magnet, you add on one of these smaller value incentives and you're going to increase and impact the amount of downloads you're getting to increase the value of your lead magnet, which means you can grab those leads, put them in your drip campaigns, your sales funnel, so you are nurturing them until they become a paid client.

16:05Let's get back to travel incentives. How is it even possible or affordable to use travel incentives for client acquisition? I mean, I really want to give Fire Nation specific steps and strategies so that they can make this happen in their business. Well, again, because we make Marketing Boost so affordable, it's literally a no-brainer. At$37 a month is the starting price if you're just going on a monthly plan. And I'll give you some ideas on some of my case study or clients that have done used incentives, for example, to grow. One guy grew his Facebook group from zero to over 10 ,000 members in his Facebook using incentives to virally grow.

16:51So I'll give you an idea. He would tell the people, you know, if you invite 100 friends to or 25 friends to the group, you'll be entered in to win a complimentary hotel stay in Cancun. You'll win a chance to win five nights in Cancun. And so he did all these different types of promotions like that and grew his Facebook group to over 10 ,000 members, which now he monetizes substantially. They can be used to generate referrals. I know of one company that used incentives to ask their clients to send a video review in exchange for an incentive, and they now have over 25 ,000 video testimonials about their services.

17:30Loyalty programs can be created. I've got tons of clients that have subscription plans that use incentives to reward their clients when they re-up a year later, for example. Or, for example, if you have a gym, they could, you know, after they reach their 90-day goal and lose 20 pounds and what have you, boom, you're dangling the carrot and you're handing them out a travel incentive at the end of the 90-day or the six-month program. I can't even begin to count how many have used incentives for staff or downline contests. For those that do network marketing, for example, and have direct sales teams, you could be using these complimentary hotel stays as your quick start program.

18:11You know, reach your goal in 90 days and get X, Y, you know, X promotion. We have a huge network of members that use incentives to support local charities. And they're, you know, helping raise funds for local charities. And at the same time, they're building their personal or their company brand in the process by giving back to the community first. This one is actually one of my favorites. The charities has been something that we've helped hundreds of members around the world because we offer our service to members literally around the world. We've got tons of clients in Europe and Australia and everywhere else.

18:47But in the U.S., I had a lot of them that literally use our incentives to give back to the local high schools that are raising funds for a football team. And they walk in with the incentives that they're giving to the nonprofit based, you know, from their company brand. And they seem like the hero. They're giving their trips. People are auctioning for these complimentary trips. and then they raise money and that person's a hero and generates goodwill in the community. Another idea is referral rewards. A good way to use incentives is you can use them to entice customers to provide referrals to you and then share those links on social media, et cetera.

19:30So a lot of clients have done that very successfully. Reputation management is another big one. I've taught countless companies to use incentives to build out and control their online reputation. So, for example, I recommend doing a survey after they purchase a product from you. Do a survey from 1 to 10, how did we score? If they're not happy, you can use an incentive like a restaurant voucher or a hotel card to help smooth over what the issue is, and it gives you a chance to go fix it. And then if they're thrilled and happy with your product or service, then encourage them to post a review and ask them if they'll share that review on other social networks, et cetera.

20:13Then you can bonus them with a trip, for example, or one of the other incentives. Use it as an upsell. I've got a client recently out of Houston, Texas, that he's got he launched a business in January 2021, and he offered all of his monthly subscribers. He had built up a big subscriber list and he offered them, hey, if you go from our monthly plan to our six month plan, you'll get three nights in Las Vegas. And if you prepay for the year, join our annual plan, you'll get five nights in Cancun or Hawaii. Well, he generated over four hundred thousand dollars in three days with one promotion. So these are just examples of how using incentives to do everything from creating contests, sweepstakes, lots of members use incentives to generate leads with these types of contest pages.

21:06There's unlimited ways to use these incentives if you're creative. Another thing, when our members join us, we do have a Facebook group with over 27 ,000 members that are actively engaged in helping each other with ideas on how to use these marketing boost incentives. Fire Nation, a lot of opportunities here, a lot of different things to test and try with your market, with your clients. Marco, give us the one key takeaway or value bomb, as we like to say, that you can make sure Fire Nation walks away with from our entire conversation today. Then give us the best way that we can connect with you, any call to action you have, and then we'll say goodbye.

21:46First benefit you get if you were to join Marketing Boost is you get a complimentary trip you can use yourself. So we encourage you to test, send yourself one of the incentives. These are all immediately sent digitally via email or text message to your client. So you can get one for yourself. You have unlimited incentives to give away. You get our top 10 playbook on how to implement the incentives. You get a comprehensive video training. You get access to our Facebook group, all for only$37 a month. And I'm going to break my own rule here, John. I just talked about not discounting, but exclusively for Fire Nation listeners.

22:26When you go to marketingboost.com and use the promo code ONFIRE, you'll save an additional 10 % if you select the annual plan. So instead of$37 a month, which would come out to$444, if you use the ONFIRE promo code with the annual plan, it comes out to$312 for the year. Wow. which is only 85 cents a day. Love that. Fire Nation, take action. Get your marketing boosted because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with MT and JLD today. So keep up the heat and head over to eofire.com. Type Marco in the search bar and his show notes page will pop up with everything that we've talked about here today.

23:13And Marco, one more time, what's that call to action for Fire Nation? Thank you. Yes, go to marketingboost.com and enter promo code ONFIRE with the annual plan. Thank you. Boom. Marco, thank you for sharing your truth, knowledge, value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Marco and Fire Nation. What can 3 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about.

23:59This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com. I'll catch you there or on the flip side. Is this your year to grow a successful business? Attend the world's highest rated business growth workshop taught personally by Clay Clark and now featuring Rich Dad Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki and Eric Trump at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Again, request life changing tickets today at Thrivetimeshow.com slash EO Fire. Fire Nation, you have a book inside you, and it's time to share your message with the world.

24:43That's why I created Author 100, a 100-day program where I will personally guide you one-on-one to create, write, publish, and market your book. If you want daily guidance and mentorship from me, JLD, then head over to author100.com to sign up for a free call with me to chat about the details.

25:07Thank you.