A dramatic demonstration isn’t just a challenge or a webinar - it’s all of the noise making activities you create to point people to that event. For example, we just prepared a brand new dramatic demonstration with Dan Kennedy’s business to create a story around our newest Magnetic Marketing campaign. And there’s one key piece that Tim Shields shared at Funnel Hacking LIVE that makes all of this work. This is the process to consolidate time and control your growth by redefining dramatic demonstrations.

His basement's insane. It's like where all the masterminds back in the day used to actually happen. So some of the greatest marketing minds in the world were in that basement with him plotting and scheming and planning on different campaigns and offers and events, and it's a special place, especially for businesses like us. It's pretty cool.

What's up everybody? Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. We are recording another one in our new makeshift studio, which has been a lot of fun. Hopefully you enjoyed the last episode here. I had actually a lot of fun with that. I talked about, with Ben, who's here with me, how just typically with the podcast, most of episodes like 10 minutes, but because of just the format of I'm doing a video, and Ben's in the room, and I'm excited, there's energy here. It went for 20 minutes. I feel like that episode went really well. So hopefully this one turns out well. Good as well. Who knows? May or may not.

So I want to talk about dramatic demonstrations today. And obviously traditionally we think about dramatic demonstrations. I know in the Funnel Hacker world, and we talked, I people think, oh, dramatic demonstrations a challenge or a webinar, which yes, it is, but it's way bigger than that. In fact, Steven Larson and I actually finally just set a date. We're doing a dramatic demonstration three-day event here in Boise at his offices to teach dramatic demonstrations. We're going through what the curriculum's going to be, and Steve's got some really cool things on offer hooks and how to create those and craft them that is really fascinating.

In fact... Well, yeah, it's really cool. We talked about the Funnel Hacking Live. We've done two events on dramatic demonstrations. And again, the pros and the cons, I think, that everyone's kind of categorized in their head, like dramatic demonstration is a challenge or webinar, which it is. But as we're building through the curriculum, I was like, "Steve, I want people to understand that in my mind, dramatic demonstrations are more than that. There's different types of dramatic demonstrations. Everything we're doing is a type of dramatic demonstration."

Even literally podcast episode, this is a type of dramatic demonstration. I mean dramatic and demonstrate stuff and get you excited about something. Dramatic demonstration creates excitement and engagement for the hook that you're putting out there into the world. So for me, it's always reverse engineering. You look at what's the thing that we are trying to sell.

So the example I'm going to share with you guys today is the Dan Kennedy business. I bought Dan Kennedy's business a couple of years ago. It's been one of the coolest, it's been a fun partnership. It's been a fun business. I love everything about it. There's so many fun things that we have in the plan. But the core of that business is the newsletter. It's like the Core ClickFunnels is the software, the recurring revenue. The core of magnetic marketing is the continuity. Which again, if you've been following my world, Continuity, if you don't have continuity, you don't have a business. Continuity is king. It is the most important part. So the newsletter is the continuity for Kennedy's world.

And so when we first bought the company, I think it had dwindled down... So let me step back. So I think at the peak, and this is all rumors, I don't have any proof of this, but the peak when Bill Glazer ran it, the rumors where it had about 10,000 members in it, which that's pretty cool, and then they sold the company, and then the people who bought it basically for 8 to 10 years just beat the crap out of it. And then we got this limping along, baby, barely still alive. Like, "Hey, Russell, you want to buy the company?" And like, "Oh, you guys beat the crap out of this." Literally they were...

Anyway, I won't go too much in the story other than when private equity companies buy your company. Anyways, it is interesting. They put in their own CEOs and their own people and their own staff, and you look at the books, these guys were literally just using it as their own piggy bank. It was just crazy. Stripping cash out, doing promotions, and then paying themselves 100. It was bad. They beat the company up really, really bad. So we got it. It was on life support. It was trying to keep it alive, and it was fascinating. If you read the Traffic Seekers book, I reference this article by Kevin, I think it's Kevin Kelly, about a thousand true fans. For a business to survive, you need to have a thousand true fans. For an artist to create art, you need to create a thousand true fans. And if you have a thousand true fans, it'll pay for it forever.

And so when we took over the magnetic marketing business, this thriving company that started out 10 years earlier, 10,000 active members had dwindled down to a little under 1,000. But these were the 1,000 true fans. This is the people that no matter what happened, were never leaving because they love Dan Kennedy. And so that was kind of fascinating. But we got this thing, I'm like, "Hey, this is the lifeblood and we like we're on life support. The only thing matters now is growing continuity."

So we created the first MIFGE offer, we put it together, we launched it to my list, Dan Kennedy's list, we had affiliates promote it, and within a very short period of time, we got 5,000 people to join Continuity, which was amazing. And now we were back in business. And then from the 5,000, obviously when you do a launch like that, you get 5,000 people and then a lot of them are just coming in for the free thing so we dropped down.

So I think we settled right around 3,500 or so members were in this thing and it was like, "Hey, now we're back in business." We have this continuity of sustaining growth. It sustains employees and the team and all that kind of stuff. And then we started reinvesting money back into traffic and started growing it from there. So that's been the lesson happening the last two or three years is growing that continuity.

And then we do different dramatic demonstrations with a goal to get people into continuity. So one of the things we did is after I bought the company, I did a magnetic marketing sprint. We did a Renegade Millionaire challenge. We did these different challenges to get people in, which have all been great, so all these dramatic demonstrations. But what I think most people are forgetting, me included, is a dramatic demonstration's not just a challenge or webinar, it's all the other things around it. In fact, the very first Funnel Hacking Live, when we taught dramatic demonstrations, I showed what were all the dramatic demonstrations I did to sell the Expert Secrets book.

And so in there I talked about for the affiliates, here's all the things I did to affiliates. We sent them a copy of the book blank. Then we sent the first four chapters. Then we like with the Dot-com Secrets book, we were sending him key chains to Ferraris and talking about the giveaways. And I was creating this whole, all these little mini dramatic demonstrations to affiliates to get them excited. So there's this whole channel of types of dramatic demonstrations to get one type of customer, which are my affiliates. Affiliates are a customer type. If I can get one affiliate to buy into my thing and they promote to their audience, I can get 100 or 1,000 people to buy my book. So I have a whole series of dramatic demonstrations just to get affiliates.

Then we have the marketplace. How do we get the marketplace excited? If I just come out one day, "Hey I wrote a book." The market's like what? Who cares? There's no purpose. We create dramatic demonstrations in advance of that to create the excitement, and the buzz, and the hype, and get people excited. So for example, you notice when I'm writing a book, I don't just write it in isolation, I talk about it. When I wrote the Expert Secrets book and I was 250 pages into it, and I decided to delete it, I went live on Snapchat at the time because that was what we were all doing back then. I was Snapchatting me deleting the entire book and people were freaking out. They're part of this journey. They're seeing these dramatic demonstrations and stuff is happening, and some buy so when the book comes out, they're more likely to buy, right?

With the ad campaign, with the Expert Secrets book, we literally got my book, we dumped gasoline on it, we lit it on fire, like, "Oh, this book is literally on fire. You got to buy a copy." So the ads people were seeing in their feed is me burning my book. And they're like, "Oh." And that's the dramatic demonstration, which is an ad. So dramatic demonstrations aren't just the challenge of the webinar, it's all the things that lead to that.

So there's dramatic demonstrations for affiliates, dramatic demonstrations... Man, it's hard to say fast. DDs, we'll say Dds. DDs for ads, DDs for social, DDs for your email list, you're following, all those kind of things we're creating, right? In fact, right now, we just listened to the last podcast episode. We just launched a little mini dramatic demonstration series over on social about how I'm writing a bestselling book and hopefully selling a million copies.

And in that dramatic demonstration, I'm going through and showing all this stuff. I'm going day by day, day number one, here's what I'm doing. Day number two, day number three. People are going to be following me on this dramatic demonstration series over the next year-and-a-half, year, year-and-a-half, two years until the book comes out. By the time the book comes out, think about the anticipation and the buildup and the excitement for people to buy this book. We're going to do a whole bunch of stuff. We'll do dramatic demonstrations where I'm like, "Hey, I just wrote chapter four and it is so controversial. I don't know if my publishers can let me read this. Hey, how many of you guys want to hear me read this chapter four?" And then do a whole little mini event where we're reading chapter four.

So this is how your brain's got to be thinking. How do you create these hooks? How do you create these dramatic demonstrations that amplify the hook of the bigger dramatic demonstration, which then gets people to buy into the thing you're trying to sell, which is continuity?

So if you reverse engineer that, if you look at this campaign right now. So we have magnetic marketing, and I was like, right now we're adding, I don't know, we're adding 10, 20 people a day through paid ads. Paid ads are expensive, so it's just kind of grind. And I was like, "I want to add 3000 people this week, this month." And everyone's like, "That'd be nice if we could." I'm like, "No, I think we can. Let's do something dramatic. What do we do?" And so, "Okay, well what's the hook we put out?" Like, "Let's shut down membership." If we shut it down, more people are being set up.

So Stu McLaren is the king of this. All his clients, they only open the membership twice a year. So they do the big shutdown campaigns. And I remember the first time he told me this, I was actually about to cancel Funnel University, which was a continuity program we ran for four or five years. I was going to shut it down. And I told Stu like, "Hey, I'm just tired of doing this." And he's like, "Don't shut it down." He's like, "Do a shutdown campaign."

And I think at the time we had, I don't know, 1500, maybe 2000 members in that one. So it was making money, but it was also, it was in the line where it's just like, I don't know if this is actually worth it for us. And so Stu's like, "Do this campaign." So we did a campaign where we shut it down. We're basically like, "Hey, we're shutting down. If you're a member, cool, you're in there. If you're not, we're closing it down. This is your last shot to get in and if we come back, maybe we'll raise the prices. I don't know."

So we did this campaign and we ended up signing up, I don't know, two or 3000 more people join the membership. We went from having 1500 members, like four or 5,000. All of a sudden now it's making revenue. Now this is totally worth my time. I have to do this. And we did the shutdown campaign and then we ended up keeping it open for two or three more years after that because so many more members came in.

And so for Kennedy, it's like, "What if we do a shut down campaign?" Which Dan, by the way, is not a big fan of this, but he agreed to do it. And so we're like, that's the dramatic demonstration. But though that was the campaign. So it could've sent emails, "We're shutting down the thing." That would've been a dramatic demonstration if you emailed our list. But I was like, how to make this more dramatic? So I called up Dan, like, "Hey Dan, can I buy a day of your time?" He's like, sure, if you know Dan Kennedy, yeah, he always says yes to that.

So I wired him the money, we bought a day of his time. I said, "Okay, this is the plan. We're going to fly out to your house to tell everyone we're shutting down the membership site and then I'm going to talk about it, that way we can create a story behind this." He's like, "Okay, cool." And so that became the dramatic demonstration. It's, "I'm flying to Dan Kennedy's house because shutting down the membership site and I got to talk to him about why we're doing this. We're going to go to his basement."

Nobody's ever been in his basement before or the internet. He does private consults in his basement, but the internet literally has never been in his basement. So we started turning this into something instead of just emails, "Hey, we're shutting down the membership." Turn this into an experience and a story and a dramatic demonstration. Give me something where people can be excited by. In fact, I literally bought a fax machine off of eBay. It show up the office and we filmed this whole thing and like him getting a fax from Dan Kennedy, "We're shutting down the membership site. And I'm booking a time, I'm flying to his house. We're going to talk about this. And if you've got a membership site of continuity program come along because you're going to learn how to grow continuity, and then you're going to find out why we're shutting this thing down." So that was the whole dramatic demonstration.

And so we started emailing our list about that, "Dramatic demonstration. We're shutting the membership site down. I'm flying down Kennedy's house, come on the journey. We're going to stream to you from his basement. There's never been... And they're bringing Starlink into, put it into the basement." So you create this whole amazing story that gets people excited and then people registered for that event and this happens.

"Thank you, Paige. It's like, Hey, as you know, we're shutting it down. If you're not a member yet, sign up for your trial because this is going to go away." And right now the take rate on that is insane. We're getting so many people join Continuity right now who have not signed up for some reason. They've heard us email literally every day now for two-and-a-half, three years about Continuity, they haven't joined now. But because we're taking it away, they're freaking out and they're signing up. So this whole dramatic demonstration.

But it doesn't stop there. So now this event of us going down to his house is a bigger dramatic demonstration. So now we have the big dramatic demonstration, now we got to craft little mini ones along the way. So now we made a whole bunch of ads and meet with the fax machine like, "I got a fax from Dan tell them the story." These little mini two to three minute ads and me telling the story behind it, These all became little mini dramatic demonstrations. They become ads on social and video that all drive people back to the big dramatic demonstration.

We have emails going out to the email list, creating these dramatic demonstrations, bringing people back in. Tomorrow I'm flying to this house. So today I'm going to go live on Facebook like, "I'm flying today to Kennedy's house. I'm going to go see the Wizard of Oz. I'm going to be talking about joining the continuity program. But on top of that, we're actually shutting down his continuity program. I'm going to find out why. And we're going to go on this journey. Who wants to come with me?"

So I'll be going Facebook Live and then from the air I'm goin to do Facebook Live, and then from the La Quinta hotel we're sitting at in Cleveland, Ohio, I'll be going live. And then I'll be like, "I'm driving to his house, freaking out." I'm going to go live like, well, all these little mini dramatic demonstrations all fueling and to the big dramatic demonstration. And that's the game plan.
And so then in two days from me recording, this is when we'll actually go live with this. And I don't know what's going to happen, but I think it's going to do well. So what we'll do is we'll go live for about an hour in Dan Kennedy's basement. We're going to show people the basement, hopefully. It's always kind of... I love Dan Kennedy, but I'm still scared to death of him. So I'm going through this thing where I'm like, I hope I don't offend him. But the working plan right now, as long as he's cool with it is we're going to do a tour of his basement so you can see...

His basement's insane. It's like where all the masterminds back in the day used to actually happen. So some of the greatest marketing minds in the world were in that basement with him plotting and scheming and planning on different campaigns and offers and events, and it's a special place, especially for businesses like us. It's pretty cool. So that's happening down there, which is going to be awesome.

And then we're going to go for an hour and then the hour's over, basically we're like, "Hey, this is your chance to go sign up for the newsletter." And do a big huge push and they'll have 30 minutes to sign up, and then when 30 minutes is over, then we have the second training, which is a three-hour training with Dan happening only for members. Now there's this big hook of like, "You got to get in." Like urgency and scarcity. "The campaign isn't until Monday at midnight, but right now you've got 30 minutes to get in to be on a live webinar for three hours with me and Dan Kennedy talking about memberships and Continuity and how to get people to stick and how to grow."

And so now we have this urgency so I'm hoping. Right now I think we have seven or 8,000 people who have registered for this event and we haven't emailed the clicks on this list yet. So by the time we're done, we should have 15 to 20,000 people to register for this event. We're hoping to have 10,000 reliable on this thing if we cut it off, if we can get two or 3000 people to join Continuity in that 30 minute window, that changes the metrics of the business once again. Right now I'm even more excited about Dan Kennedy's business. It's amazing. So we do that. So we do the 30-minute thing, we shut down... Sorry. We do one hour free training, and they got 30 minutes to sign up, and then three hour live training starts in the members area. And so everyone's joining, signing up to go get the members area as quick as they can so they can be part of the live training.

So that's what's happening. And again, I don't know what the numbers are going to be. I have no idea. Based on just the people joining the Continuity right now, from Thank You page, it's going to be amazing. I think potentially we could double membership from this one dramatic demonstration campaign. That's just everything. That's me buying ads for the next three years and doing it in one dramatic demonstration.

You guys getting this? That's the power of this. And it's crazy. There's so many side stories I'm going to tell you guys. Because again, Dan Kennedy, I love him to death. He has no internet in his basement. The only way to talk to him is through fax. So all the correspondence happens through fax on this. And also he's a very private person, obviously he doesn't... But we have to have people with cameras to be there. So it's like four or five people to be there for cameras and he's kind of stressed about that. So it's going through that stuff.

And then we're bringing Starlink, which I didn't know what Starlink was. I thought it was just, I don't know, I thought it was like your phone that's got a hotspot on it. But apparently Starlink, you have to have this big box that has to be outside, and then you have a cord that has to be inside. So I found yesterday, that we have to have basically, we have to set this up outside his house, then have it through a window or a door. I was like, "We can't just pull in on Dan last minute. He would be furious." I'm like, "He has to know."

So we're faxing him like, okay, how we fax him, let him know that this whole thing has to happen at his house, which he's not going to be happy with. So we fax him, "Okay, for Starlink to work, this is what we have to do and how it's going to work." And then immediately we get a fax back from Dan, all caps, "CALL ME ASAP." And it's like, "Oh man, The Wizard of Oz is going to yell at us before we get there." I'm stressing out.

And this is legit. Again, I love him to death. He's my mentor, he's my hero. He's one of the, technically he works for me, which is a weird thing because it's like, "Technically I'm your boss, but I'm so scared of you that whatever you say..." Anyway, it's this weird thing. But I'm legitimately scared. So he faxes back in, "Call me ASAP." And it's just like, okay.

And luckily he was cool with it. He just wanted all the details and how it's going to work. But it's like all these little things like... Anyway, there's so much drama behind the scenes, I wish I could tell you guys all the stories, but just stuff like that to pull something like this off.

It's actually interesting. The reason why we're doing this dramatic demonstration, if you guys are at Funnel Hacking Live, hopefully you were, and the cough. Okay. If you guys were at Funnel Hacking Live, and hopefully you were, Tim Shields presented and he, man, it was a really cool presentation. He joined the Category Kings group. So the next month later he was in Category King's, he's in this room right here and he shared how he does dramatic demonstrations. And his thing he said, it was so cool, I hope you guys didn't miss him. I'm guessing most people missed it. You go to a four-day event, there's so many gold drum, gold bombs drop. But there's always the things for me that I'm like, ah, that's the thing.

So what he said was interesting. He said that if you look at what Tim Shields is, he's a photographer. So he doesn't just do photography training from his home, he doesn't do webinars from his house. He goes where his dream customer would want to go but can't, right? So he'll go on the side of a glacier and then he brings Starlink in and he'll stream from there and do his webinar there.

He did this webinar from the side of the Grand Canyon, which you can't get internet to. So again, he brought Starlink out there and he did a whole dramatic demonstration. And he's like, "What's up everyone? I'm on a webinar. This is the Grand Canyon behind me." And he did a whole webinar from there. So his people, they follow him because they want to get the webinar, but they want to get it from the locations they can't get anywhere else.

So he's doing these dramatic demonstrations and the thing he said, he is like, "You want to go where customers wish they could go, but they can't." And I was like, "What is that for marketing nerds like me?" I was like, "Dan Kennedy's basement." And I think Tim actually said like, "Russell if I was you..." So I don't know if I had the idea, it was probably him, but he's like, "For you, you should do one in Dan Kennedy's basement." I was like, Oh my gosh." Because that's where that idea came from.

And so if you follow Tim Shields, you should follow him because look at what he's doing in the photography market. He's killing them. In fact, he joined the Category Kings, he's in Atlas group, sorry. That's $250,000 a year investment. He was able to write a check for 250 grand a year to be in this group and he's in the photography niche. What is he doing? There's not many photographers make enough money to be successful and have enough money laying around to write a check. And he's won a Two Comma Club X award, so he's doing well. How's he doing it? Well, he's not doing webinars from his office, that's for sure. He's making these dramatic demonstrations dramatic. It's fascinating.

So this is our first take into Tim Shields style going into the basement with Dan Kennedy. But what version of that for you? What could you do? How could you do it? So anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. Just getting the wheels your head spinning about how do these dramatic demonstrations. It's not just a challenger webinar, it's creating a story and crafting, and then the story to the affiliates, the story to the social media, story to your email. All these are little mini dramatic demonstrations, all fueling the big one. It's going to be amazing.

So anyway, that's what's happened. Hope you guys get some value out of this episode. If you didn't, then you must be living under a rock or something. I think this was full of some cool stuff. I mean, just the fact that us doing this one campaign, if we do it correctly, will be the equivalent of us buying ads for two or three years. And I think to keep this money, Zuckerberg doesn't get any of this money, this is just coming from the list we built in the past. So that's the power of all the stuff we're talking about. How to compress decades into days by creating the right dramatic demonstration.

So I hope this helps you guys and gives you kind of some cool ideas to think through. Again, Steve Larson and I are doing a dramatic demonstration event that's going to become a dramatic demonstration book here in the next couple of months so I'm sure you'll see info about that. But this is what we're talking about and trying to take this concept and really expand it to, it's not just this one piece of your marketing, but it's all the pieces of your marketing. It creates desire, excitement, it promotes the hook of the thing you're doing, brings people in, gets them excited to buy, it creates a fun buying experience, having a good time.

It gets people to actually show up for your webinar. "How do you get people to show up for my webinar? No one's showing up." Like, "Well, are you doing it from your home office?" People are going to show up to Dan Kennedy's basement because it's live and it's the only time they're going to see this, right? They're going to watch Tim Shields on the side of a glacier because it's the only time it's happening, right? The more dramatic the demonstration, the more people are going to show up. So think about that. Hopefully this helps you guys.

If you enjoyed this episode, again, please take a screenshot on your phone wherever you're listening to this and post it and tag me on social media and tell people, listen, the only way that this show grows and the bigger the show grows, the more time and energy I can spend with you guys. Again, I'm a big ROI guy. Sorry. Again, I'm a big ROI guy. So if we get 10,000 people listening, if I get 50,000, if I get a 100,000, if we get 1,000,000, the more people listen, the more we put in this. So if you join this, you want share this, share it with other people, share it with everyone on your team, your staff, your employees, maybe your spouse is like this stuff is valuable to you, send it to them so they can listen as well, and they all get on the same page with you as you're developing your dramatic demonstrations. Yeah, that mean the world to me.

And if you like this, again, go leave a comment on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. I read those as well and it'd mean the world to me as well. So with that said, thank you guys so much. Hope you enjoyed this episode. We'll see you on the next episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast. Let's go.

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