Subject Matter: Local Business Marketing

His Example: His Gym that he owns with his partner.  A high-end gym specifically designed for Women.

His most prominent offline marketing tactic for starup companies was using infousa.com to locate targeted people within the area that would be interested in the services the gym had to offer. He then mailed them with his offer that he had printed at a local printers.

The philosophy behind his offer was to help his potential customers get close to their goal for free (in this case giving 1-month free classes), then to actually gain their goals they would need to become a customer and signup. This way he found that most of the time you didn’t need the hard sell, most people after the month wanted to join anyway because they saw the results already working within the 4 week free trial.

The main product on offer within the seminar was the Instant Customer Software package, along with everything else the owner had produced. Instant Customer basically takes care of a wide range of marketing tasks for you, it is essentially an integrated multi-channel lead capture, follow-up and sales/marketing system!

Some of the main features include:

• Capture
• SMS  Text Messaging
• Email
• Embedded Web Forms
• Lead Page Generator
• Business Card Scanner
• Respond
• SMS Virtual Messaging
• Email Auto-Responders
• Direct-to-voicemail
• Know
• Data Mining
• Social Profile Gathering
• DISC Profile Assessments
• Follow Up
• SMS /Text Broadcasting
• Direct-to-Voicemail Broadcasting
• Email Broadcasts
• Simulated Live Webinars
• Postcards and Letters

So all-in-all Instant Customer is a very powerful marketing and sales generation suite.

Frank Kern used the instant customer marketing suite in this scenario to generate leads for his gym in his hometown. Frank’s flyers and posters offered a 30-day free trial at the gym, including all classes worth $200 +, to redeem you had to text your name and email addresses to a phone number. This is where instant customer comes in, this would then store the name and email in his list and text them back immediately with any kind of detail he wished, or it could use direct-to-voicemail to leave the person a voicemail with the same message.

The benefit of this method to gathering leads is that the customer is being responded to instantly with further information, and we all know if you get an instant response you are more likely to turn that person into a lead.

So the moral of the general webinar was for offline businesses to use offline marketing combined with easy response mechanisms to successfully generate genuine leads.

It was a very informative webinar, I enjoyed both the story and the pitch of the product, however once Frank Kern left the webinar it began to drag on whilst he was getting people to buy the physical product.

The webinar took place on 06 June 2012 at 2PM PST.