Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - The Rebirth Of The Squeeze And The Refocus On The Hook

Episode Date: July 31, 2018

Despite the fact that others are saying that videos are dead, I want to show you what we're doing now that's actually working better. On today's episode Russell talks about how Chrome stopped allowing auto play videos and how that has lead to the rebirth of the squeeze page. Here are some of the awesome things you will get to hear on this episode: Why it's so important to re-focus on the squeeze page to bring people in, when you can no longer rely on auto play videos. How Russell used a couple of squeeze pages to 2x his listeners of the Marketing Secrets podcast. And where you need to put hooks in order to get people progressing through your sequences. So listen here to find out why Russell believes that the rebirth of the squeeze page has begun. Transcript - https://marketingsecrets.com/blog/the-rebirth-of-the-squeeze-and-the-refocus-on-the-hook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Good morning, everybody. This is Russell Brunson. I am standing in the middle of the Mossy Mar looking at a bunch of zebras, and I want to bring you a very special episode of the Marketing Secrets Podcast. So the big question is this, how are entrepreneurs like us who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, we're spending money from our own pockets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world and yet still remain profitable? That is the question and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing Secrets.

Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. We are on the last day of our Kenya trip. We've seen, we've been, if you've been listening along, we spent the first three days with children building schools, which was insanely cool. And then we came back and now we're on a safari. We saw elephants and lions and about a billion zebras. And we saw leopards. We saw a leopard that pulled this uh an animal up in the

tree and was eating it up in the tree which is kind of crazy um so i have millions of hippos like it's crazy in fact i'm sitting on my deck right now in this little tent we have and last night while we came to come to bed there were two huge hippos walking next to our tent eating grass anyway it's kind of crazy and amazing so it's been been a lot of fun. It's been a really cool mastermind group with all the people that came. And she's been really special. So, but as you know, with most entrepreneurs, when you are off a computer for 12 days, your brain's going crazy with ideas. And I just want to share with you something that I wanted to actually do a podcast on

this before I came to Kenya, but just ran out of time. But it's on my mind this whole time because before i left i heard um i got an email from um a really cool guy who i respect a lot and he was and you know you always know people have an angle because they're selling something but he was talking about how like you know vsls because now chrome took away autoplay how like vsls are dead and it's the end of you know this era of how we used to do things and you know come to my event i'm gonna show you guys how how to change things and it sort of made me start thinking i'm like hey the vsl like you know don't auto play anymore so i'm like what like what changes like and i want you guys think strategically through this right because this is how we win this game is by thinking strategically not like running around

like chickens with our heads cut off so i've started strategically thinking like what's the power of video auto playing right it's like we if you come to a page of video, it's auto playing. The goal is to like try to hook somebody as fast as you can. Right. And so if Google takes that away from us where you can't autoplay a video, it's like, okay, what was the goal of the autoplay? The goal of the autoplay was to hook. So if, if the hook is, can't now be in the first five seconds of the video, like, how do I hook? I'm like, where's the hook happening? Right. And so now it's so funny. It's coming back to old school, right? Everything, um, comes back to the core fundamentals. It's like having the hook in the headline. So it's like having a really good headline. The other thing that's interesting is, um,

uh, and it's just, it's, it's funny, the progression of, of this business, um business and how it shifts back and forth and back and forth. Like when I first got started with the big thing that everyone used was squeeze pages, right? You have a really curiosity-based squeeze page, something opposite, and then you can follow up with them through emails to get them back to the message. So sometimes by the first time, they might buy a message three or five or ten or who knows, right? Nowadays, it's like people have almost forgotten about the core fundamentals and they've gone to like send somebody to a video and then retarget them.

That's how you follow this through retargeting, which is still amazing. Like don't discount retargeting, but I think we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater. And so what my message for you guys today is I believe that right now we're going through a rebirth of the squeeze page. If you have been listening to the Marketing Secrets podcast

or if you are a new recent listener, you probably saw a campaign we did last week to get all y'all to come subscribe to my podcast, right? And just, you know, like getting people to subscribe to a podcast from external source is hard. Like we've tried a ton of different ways. And so what we did, this working amazingly well. In fact, if you want to see the campaign,

go to marketingsecrets.com slash black book. Um, what we did is basically we took, uh, Julie Stoyan on my team. She went through 500 plus episodes of initially the marketing in your car podcast. And then it was the marketing secrets podcast and pulled out like 99 biggest like secrets and then kind of rewrote them in, in a, in a really cool like 500 word article. You can read really quick to get the gist of the big secret. And then it has links back to the different podcast episodes if you want to go deeper and hear me actually talk about it in podcasts. And so we made that e-book.

It's like, I don't know, we spent a lot of money, probably $10,000 plus on Julie going through, creating this book. And then we put up a good old-fashioned squeeze page and said, Hey, to get a free copy of the marketing secrets, black book, give me your email address. And we also have Facebook, many, uh, messenger on there as well. So many ops in their email and their messenger. And now we have a list of specifically people who are interested in the marketing secrets podcast. Um, it's been funny, you know, the marketing secrets podcast was the number one or the top 10 for been funny, you know, the Marketing Secrets Podcast was the number one, or excuse me,

top 10 for over a year, year and a half or so we're in the top 10. And then we got iTunes slapped, which is really annoying. And some of you guys know that. So we had to create a new feed. And I'd say probably two thirds of you guys are now listening to a new feed. A third of you guys are still listening to the old feed, but they don't let people resubscribe to the old feed. I'm not sure why I'm telling you all this.

But basically we were trying to like figure out like how do we you know how do we how do we build that up and so the only way in the past we have is like is people have found out a podcast through other avenues that's how it grew right and then we got lists in the top 10 like more people found about it but it was hard like organically or not organically but to to met um what's the opposite organically to like to grow it through us pushing, right? And so we had this idea of this thing. So we had the squeeze page now and we did a whole bunch of campaigns through email, through Facebook Messenger,

through ads, all sorts of stuff. And in the first week, we've had over 35,000 people opt in over at marketingsecrets.com slash blackbook to get the blackbook, right? And they go, they opt in. And from that, our downloads, um, have more than two X cause now people are, um, two things. Number one is the black book gets them, hooks them on, on a story and then it pushes them to the episodes. So more

people listening to different episodes deeper than they used to. Um, but now they opted in. Now we have a whole sequence, push them to subscribe to the podcast. And now every time a new episode comes out, you'll notice if you subscribe that 30, if you want 35,000 people to subscribe that you can email saying, Hey, here's new, the new podcast. You should go and, um, and, and, uh, and, and listen to it. So it gives us the ability to push people to go and listen. And it was all through good old fashioned squeeze page, which it's so funny.

I haven't been using squeeze pages for a long time. Most other people aren't either, but the old school works. I got 35,000 people I can push out every single time an episode comes out to instantly go and listen. On top of notifications that come from iTunes and things like that. So I actually created two squeeze pages. One of them is at marketingsecrets.com slash blackbook. The other one is at marketingsecrets.com slash binge. And we actually made a binge guide where you can go binge listen to all the episodes if you go to either of those you'll see some old school

vintage squeeze pages i dusted off from from an earlier life and uh and they're converting amazing the first one's like an 89 conversion rate it's insane and it's getting tons of people now subscribe to the podcast which now gets you guys listening to this um and so i think that there's a big um so let me step back to kind of where i started is with the VSL, with autoplay disappearing, it's like, how do we get someone in? I think the key is becoming better at the hook, but not the hook in the first 10 seconds of the video because people aren't, are not going to see that. We have to have the hook to get them to click. Right.

And so, um, that, that comes down to the headline and the design around the video. Like what, what are we doing to hook them, to get them to click on the video, to pull them in. Right. So hook starts pre video hook is, is headline landing page. Like what are all the elements to get them hooked to actually watch the video? Right. But I think on top of that is because, because, um, cause I think going a step back is having the hook on a squeeze page to get people opt in. Then you push them over the page. Now you've got more abilities to follow up them, to get them to actually click the play button and get into the hook story offer of

your, of your video. Right. And so, um, I'm a big believer. It's the rebirth of the squeeze page and it's the refocus on the hook and not just the hook in the video, but the hook on the copy of the page hook, hook on the squeeze page hook on the land, on the video page. Like, like that's, that's the refocus we all need to get doing, uh, get better doing. In fact, I was at a Bill Glazer's event. I met somebody who said that, um, they said that when the whole autoplay thing happened, they were all freaked out because they thought that their conversions are going to drop. It's what actually happened was conversions went up because they had a really good hook above the video.

They got people to push play. So now people don't just come to the page and start autoplaying where they did nothing. Now they come and they have to click play. And so just the action of clicking play on the button actually increased conversion overall. And so I don't think it's the end of anything. I think it's the rebirth of coming back to the old school, right? It's interesting. Whenever new platforms like Facebook or Instagram comes out, there's always hacks, right? Everyone goes to the hack for a while and the hacks get taken away typically. And then it always comes back to this, to this revisiting of the fundamentals. The same thing in wrestling. Like when I first started

wrestling, um, I remember, um, uh, there's a guy that lived two doors down from me and he had, he started like two or three weeks before me. And so when I showed the first day of practice, he was doing all these like fancy throws and all sorts of stuff. And I was like, Oh, this is going to be amazing. I want to do those things. My dad said, told me no, he's like, No, you have to do the fundamentals. And he forced me to do single legs, double legs, like, just the basic fundamentals over and over and over again. It was interesting. I remember when I went and I wrestled my own. I wrestled my buddy, probably four weeks later. And he'd been working with the more advanced team on the tricks, the tactics, the big secrets. And I was just doing these dumb fundamentals.

Went out there to wrestle and he tried to head throw me and I did a double leg and took him down and ended up beating him. And it's funny, as I watch kids in junior high wrestle doing these crazy throws and these insane things. And then high school is the same thing. You start getting to college, people start moving back to the fundamentals. You look at the Olympics, like you look at the olympics like you look at the dudes olympics i mean almost every olympic match is won by like a single leg or double leg that's it there's no there's no flashy flair it's it's the core fundamentals and the same thing's true in marketing like as you get bigger and bigger like next level it's like a revisit back to the core

fundamentals like list building which was was, you know, I've been preaching that for a decade now and I feel like our industry as a whole has gotten away from that because now they're like, oh, I'm going to build a retargeting list. I'm going to do this. And like, those things are good, but the core fundamental list building, list building, list building is key. You know, we've been doing list building off of Ottawa or webinar registration pages and two-step order forms, but now I'm coming back one more step and revisiting the squeeze page

with an insanely good hook to get somebody to opt in both through email and through messenger. Next page, amazing hook to get them to plan the video and then boom, the video hook moves immediately into hook story offer. So it's pulling people in there. So if you guys just want you to kind of think through that, if you want to go see some squeeze pages that are doing really well, look at the campaigns they're doing. Go to marketingsecrets.com slash binge to go see the binge guide or marketingsecrets.com slash black book to see an old school squeeze page. Again, it's like 89% conversion rate. We've got 35,000 plus people opted in the last two weeks since this has gone live.

Now I'm able to follow up on every single episode. It's building. It makes it easier for me to communicate with everyone who's interested in this podcast. That's number one. And then number two, you'll notice moving forward. Oh man, there's a monkey chasing a warthog right in front of my eyes. It's that noise if you can hear it.

Anyway, if you look at moving forward, start noticing how we're using hooks to get people to play on the videos. If you go to clickfunnels.com homepage, you'll see it. If you go to some of the other ones, well, some other ones are coming up. Like you'll notice like the GIF on the video is optimized to get people to click.

The headline above it, everything on the page around the video is all optimized to get somebody to click on that page. Because I'm not assuming that they're going to click, right? So I have to create a good enough hook to get them to have enough desire to actually click on the play button. I can't leave that to hope. I have to leave that to a really good hook that gets them to want to click play

to find out the next thing, right? And so I think we're at a spot where the rebirth of the squeeze page, I think it's coming back. I think I'm gonna be doing a lot more of it as you'll see here. And I think that a core focus back on amazing hooks for each step.

What's the hook to get them open email? That's your subject line. What's the hook for them to click? That's email. What's the hook to get them to opt in? That's the squeeze page. What's the hook to get them to click play on the video? That's the headline. What's the hook to get them to buy the's your subject line it was hooking them to click that's email what's the hook to get them to opt in that's the squeeze page what's the hook to get them to click plan the video that's the headline what's the hook to get them to buy the product that's inside the video like like coming back to hook story offer hook story offer i did a podcast episode a few

um a little bit ago about hook story offer like go back and listen that 10 times 20 times 100 times because that's the core fundamentals that are gonna help you win this game as we keep moving forward so um that said i'm gonna go um actually we're gonna go finish plotting and scheming we've been working on book three the traffic secrets book working on the one comic club challenge working on 10x secrets stage course working on uh one comic club two comic club board game working on some amazing things for you guys out here and i cannot wait to show you but um for now there's the tease there's the hook and hopefully I'll keep you guys interested and keep engaging with this podcast and everything we're putting out. Appreciate you all. Thanks for listening.

And we'll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye everybody. Want more marketing secrets? If so, then go get your copies of my two bestselling books. Book number one is called expert secrets and you can get a free copy at expertsecrets.com. And book number two is called.com secrets and you can get your free copy at. expertsecrets.com. And book number two is called Dotcom Secrets, and you can get your free copy at dotcomsecrets.com. Inside these two books, you'll find my top 35 secrets that we've used to become the fastest growing non-VC backed SaaS startup company in the world.