Boss Your Business - The Podcast

[00:00:00] Yvonne Heimann: Hey, Hey, everybody. We are back to another episode of Boss Your Business. And today I want to introduce you to Marco Torres, who is the founder of marketingboost. com. He has helped thousands of business owners worldwide, boost their sales and scale their businesses by as much as five fold through the use of incentive based marketing.

[00:00:24] Marco, you teach entrepreneurs how to soar at sales and marketing, through the use of value add incentives, instead of discounts, we're talking the same language there. Your Facebook group is home to more than 27, 000 active business owners who are raking in sales with your advice and amazingly affordable subscription program.

[00:00:50] Now that's, that's a thing right there at 27, 000 members in your group and active ones, because I'm like, let's be [00:01:00] honest. We all can collect emails, but getting,

[00:01:06] that's a whole nother story. And I will come to back to that because I want to pick your brain a little bit more on that. But my first question to my guests always is. How did you get here? Did five year old you think you're going to have a 27, 000 Facebook group?

[00:01:25] Marco Torres: It's up to 30, 000 now, actually, but no, I didn't have any.

[00:01:33] Yvonne Heimann: So how did you get here?

[00:01:35] Marco Torres: So, I started as an entrepreneur at nine, actually. My dad wasn't one that, and thankfully he wasn't one to hand me weekly, weekly cash. What's the word for it for children? You know, I forget the word. Allowance. Allowance. Thank you. Yeah. And so no, when I wanted a Schwinn bike way back when he told me, listen, if you want a Schwinn bike, you can either wait for Christmas or Santa [00:02:00] Claus or your birthday, or, You can go and earn some money and, and buy one.

[00:02:04] So I didn't know how to do that. Basically he set, set me up with, or guided me to get a paper route going. And by age 12, I had the biggest paper route the local newspaper had ever seen. I was featured on the front page of the paper. But on the, from there to. By the time I was 23, I owned five restaurants and a nightclub, which my older brother and I operated.

[00:02:25] We sold the restaurants to Taco Bell when they came to Puerto Rico, where I was, where we had these restaurants when they wanted in on the island. We owned all the fast food court locations. And I went and then I got in the corporate world and, moved to Florida. I got heavily involved in internet marketing in the very early days.

[00:02:44] 1996. I was an email marketer and, well, I should, they would call me a spammer before they came up with the word spam. So back, back in the day, everybody had it. Everybody had an A on it. [00:03:00] Yeah, everybody had AOL accountancy. You've got mail and they loved email back then.

[00:03:07] Yvonne Heimann: You've got mail and nowadays I look at people with an AOL email address, I'm like, do I actually want to do business with you?

[00:03:18] Marco Torres: Yeah, that's like a really aging, email account. That's amazing how people still have those email accounts. And so, yeah, that ages them right away. Doesn't it?

[00:03:29] Yvonne Heimann: Just, just a little bit. So how did you get into marketingboost. com? How did that come about?

[00:03:37] Marco Torres: Yeah, that's a great question. We, I've been in the travel space since 1990, uh, And my partners and I had launched our own travel business in 2010 after the crash of the economy in 2008 2009.

[00:03:53] We were all, you know, we all got the towel pulled out from under us or rug pulled out from under us. And we, we grouped together and [00:04:00] partnered and with each of us didn't have much capital at all, but we had our talents in our head. So we. There was four of us that got together, built a travel business that was really booming and growing, but we wanted video testimonials, and we couldn't get anybody, you know, we knew we were selling beautiful hotels and resorts and travel, and we kept thinking, if we only had customers who, if they would film selfie testimonials, and we'd be able to, you know, use those videos all over our website and Facebook ads, YouTube ads, You etc.

[00:04:29] And but we couldn't get anybody to do it. So we came up with an idea to offer a incentive, a bonus trip, if they would film a selfie testimonial from the resort beaches of the world, and the hotels, and the pool, or the bar, the restaurant, whatever they like best, and brag. About the hotel, brag about our brand.

[00:04:48] We'd bonus them with a free gift, a free trip. But that suddenly took off when we did that. Now we started getting dozens of these reviews coming in and then hundreds of these video testimonials, and it [00:05:00] was perfect. We were able to leverage them all over our website and add campaigns and generating hundreds of thousands of new sales, but we had to turn off the campaign because it was expensive to give away those three nights that we were promising people.

[00:05:11] So we went. So then we thought, well, how could we keep doing this if you know, where it doesn't cost us so much money. So we went back to our hotel partners. Again, we were high travel, high volume travel company. We went back to our hotel partners and said, listen, we know you've got a problem and we have an idea to fix it.

[00:05:28] Let's be honest. Your hotel is not full year round. You've got hotels. There's certainly you're full on, you know, Easter week, Christmas week, 4th of July, special holidays and events and what have you, but most of the year, 70 percent of the year, you've got empty rooms, yet you still have the same fixed costs, mortgage, the staffing, the front desk staff, maintenance, and they agreed, and so we got a few hotel partners in Orlando and Vegas, to give us access to their unsold rooms so that we could fulfill all these free trips we were giving away.

[00:05:59] [00:06:00] And, and then we thought, wow, can you imagine if we could talk more hotels into this around the world, we'd have another standalone business. And that's eventually what became marketingboost. com today, where we provide. We serve business owners by providing the wild surprise and delight factor, what I call it.

[00:06:19] We give them the ability to give away complimentary hotel stays in 130 destinations around the world. Hotel savings cards at over a million hotels worldwide, and restaurant savings vouchers. And then we teach our, our members how to, how to add those incentives to whatever their call to action is.

[00:06:37] Instead of discounting, for example,

[00:06:41] Yvonne Heimann: because I'm like discounting, they, we often have those same problems because there's so much of us out there of 10 percent off here and black Friday and cyber Monday and all the things going on. And it devalues your brand in a [00:07:00] general. It's like, let's just go Shein. Shein is never going to be able to sell something high dollar amount because we know Shein as cheap clothing, cheap jewelry, dime on a dollar.

[00:07:14] Right? So I love the idea of rather than, Hey, I give you 10 percent of a 50 percent of, or whatever, and, and write that. Low off, diminishing yourself deal to a, Hey, here's something additional. Here's something extra, especially with coaches and consultants. Guys, you can pull this in and you might've seen this with, with other coaches and consultants do where you might have a workbook sitting around.

[00:07:48] You might have a little course sitting around or something where you can use the stuff you already have as an additional incentive. I'm like, when, when you were [00:08:00] talking about, Hey, we have troubles getting reviews and we gave them three free nights. Sure. I'm like for three free nights, girl, I'm going to put you together a video testimonial that is out of this world.

[00:08:12] But my brain already went to, huh. I could easily turn a 30 minute follow up call into an incentive. To leave a testimonial. It could be something simple as that.

[00:08:27] Marco Torres: Exactly. And again, you need to, to, you should be working on ideas to to continue that flow of fresh reviews written or video because we all need that social proof.

[00:08:39] And the more you have. I mean, like we have over 30, 000 video testimonials now from that campaign and more than any other travel site in the world and nobody's going to watch 30, 000 videos, but the fact that they see that I have a bunch of them, they're like, Whoa, this is credibility, you know, and so forth.

[00:08:55] And the same for you. If you had video reviews. People might watch one, maybe two, but they're going to [00:09:00] see you've got a bunch of them. That's all the credibility proof you, so to speak, need. And then how you ask, do that as you say, you know, what can you add, whether you use marketing booster or not irrelevant, you need to have create your own reward programs.

[00:09:14] If you have product ad, you know, the value, a lot of studies have shown that people react better to added value strong, more than they will a discount, even. Even buy one get one free offers, for example, instead of 50 percent off, you're better off Doubling the price and calling it a BOGO deal. That's what the grocery stores in my area do.

[00:09:34] I walk into the grocery stores and they've got a whole, these whole basket areas full of BOGO offers. And you can kind of tell all they really did was double the price. But now you see people getting two jars of mayonnaise, two, two boxes of cereal they didn't even want. But now they're reacting with an impulse buy and they're buying two instead of one.

[00:09:53] So they've doubled their revenue and they sold stuff that might have been even getting old on the shelves.

[00:09:58] Yvonne Heimann: Oh, [00:10:00] I am. I am the same. When I see a Bogo deal, it's like, it doesn't even matter where I go. And I'm like, Oh, my standard product. And now suddenly I have a buy one, get one deal. Believe me, I'm going to grab two.

[00:10:13] Marco Torres: Yeah, exactly. You're at least, you're at least, you know, we're trained or we are, our, our, our greed button gets kicked off and we're ready to go at least look at it, consider it and ready to be ready to put that impulse by and put it in your cart and so on. And so again, added value versus 50 percent off.

[00:10:30] You probably would not have taken action, but the the, the, the idea of. Filling your basket with two items for the price of one is attractive.

[00:10:39] Yvonne Heimann: And the, the nice thing is thinking about the mindset behind that is we all know you pay a little bit of, of an, of a dollar amount and suddenly the client that paid.

[00:10:53] The 50 percent off is often, I say often, not always more [00:11:00] strugglesome and a Peter client than the one that paid the full price. So it's, it's interesting how you are also. You sell the same thing. You potentially sell easier with a buy one get one deal, but you also attract somehow a different level of mindset, even though it's the same thing.

[00:11:21] Marco Torres: Yeah, you're right. And again, you got more revenue from it right up front as well. So it's, it's important. But, you know, when you're thinking about what does that mean? Or how would you do a buy one get one? You know, it doesn't get it. Don't have to be by one. Get one. But let's say you have a subscription model and you would like people to add.

[00:11:39] They're paying you monthly. Well, you'd like them to pay for a year in advance. Well, why not offer the 13th and 14th month free? Maybe. So now you're offering them extended value. After they, if they pay for 12 months in advance, they're getting the 13th, 14th month free. That doesn't cost you as much as giving a 30 percent discount up front would because [00:12:00] that's less revenue and so forth.

[00:12:01] And yet now you've got a loyal client, you've got them on for instead of monthly. Now they're on your annual. And by the way, you could consider throwing in a marketing boost incentive to make that even easier.

[00:12:12] Yvonne Heimann: And the interesting thing is this timing of this podcast is perfect because We, or I literally just decided to do a two for one, we have the start up your ClickUp membership, which is low budget monthly membership to, to have the support to really run your ClickUp.

[00:12:33] And no, you get support, you get knowledgeable support and all the things, rather than going out in the ether and watching a YouTube video. Right. And it was always one member, which means usually the CEO joined or the COO joined, but they don't always have the time to jump in and jump into the office hours and all the things.

[00:12:54] And we literally, a week ago decided, you know, what. They're not showing up every [00:13:00] single week. We are not losing anything if we allow them to bring in a second person, meaning their VA potentially, or their implement or whatever it is. So now we have the decision maker in the membership and we have the implementer in the membership.

[00:13:15] It's the same price deal because they get to bring in a second person. And chances are, they're going to have better results. They actually going to have a person that can show up and here we go.

[00:13:29] Marco Torres: And you've got, and that's value for the CEO because he knows he's not, he knows upfront, I'm not going to make every one of these appointments.

[00:13:36] I try. Well, I'm this I'm that and and knowing okay, I'm going to be able to delegate this to my staff member or my, you know, partner or my spouse or whatever it is. And let's get them engaged as well. We're not I'm going to get the value back. So great idea on adding value.

[00:13:55] Yvonne Heimann: So with talking about added value and resources and [00:14:00] all the things, how did you manage to build a 30 K strong Facebook group and when did you start building that?

[00:14:09] How long did it take you?

[00:14:11] Marco Torres: Well, we've been at it since 2017. So it has been a few years and we built our business. Mind you, great question. We built it with affiliate marketers. So when we built our particular business model, we went out creating it for affiliate marketers to promote it. We created a strong commission structure for affiliate marketers.

[00:14:33] And we went out advertising first, not to consumers, but to acquire affiliate marketers. So we today have probably close to 20, 000 affiliate marketers. I have one Facebook group with over 54, 000 affiliate marketers in that group alone. And so our focus was acquiring the affiliate marketing community to then promote Our product marketing boost, which, now we have, we, we really [00:15:00] spend very little in advertising, in ad buys compared to what we pay out into affiliate marketers who promote us.

[00:15:08] Yvonne Heimann: So affiliate marketing is kind of like building a Facebook group. It's great. Everybody signs up, but. Getting them to actually do something and drive traffic and advertise you. What have, what have you seen? What, because it does work for you. Do you have some tips for the audience? What they can do to, to really drive affiliate sales, incentives, is getting them activating their affiliates.

[00:15:43] Marco Torres: Well, even like you met, you asked earlier about building that Facebook group and how to do so. Same with this affiliate group as well. And it, for the affiliates, it meant we had to, we had to create the content. We had to create the videos. We had to create the banner ads. [00:16:00] We had to create all the marketing materials that they might use to promote us.

[00:16:06] We had to do it for them, in advance. In other words, we were in with feedback from them as well. Matter of fact, when we first launched our business, this is about the feedback, listening to our clients. When we first launched our company, we launched it under a different brand name. It was called advertising bait. com and our affiliates kept getting back to us saying, you know, we hate your, we love your product, but we hate your name. And, the idea behind it was we would be the bait, the hook, the, the incentive that would help your advertising be more effective. The advertising bait, you know, the magnetic draw, but our affiliates said, look, the name bait in your name sounds like bait and switch.

[00:16:47] And we, you know, we don't like it. So. We listened. We were nimble, and we changed the name to advertising boost at the time, and we went for advertising boost for several years, and then we kept more [00:17:00] feedback from affiliates. You know, nobody considers themselves an advertiser anymore. They're everybody's a marketer.

[00:17:06] You know, or hiring marketers, not advertisers and so on and so forth. So we changed our name again. We had to pay a pretty bundle to get the URL marketing boost, but, we switched our branding and everything over to marketingboost. com over three years ago, and don't plan on changing it because it's working just fine, but.

[00:17:24] We were nimble. We listened to our affiliates. We listened to our community and realized, hey, it's this would be a better name. So not that everybody should be considering changing your brand name, but it is about listening to your community and trying to make it so that they love evangelists for your brand, that they are out there promoting you.

[00:17:45] And again, giving them all of that logo. Giving them the content, the banner at the videos, the copy, the, the email copy, scripts. You know, try to give 'em everything they need to make it easy for them to tell others about our product. And, and [00:18:00] then create, you know, the affiliate backend where they can log in, they can see all their numbers, all be transparent.

[00:18:06] And then when it comes to our consumers, our Facebook consumer group, or our, the business owners that actually use our service. That group is over 30, 000 members and the same thing. We're provide them with all of the tools they need and ideas and marketing materials that they can use to add. Our incentives to whatever their call to action is.

[00:18:27] So we have a huge library, even stuff that's editable on Canva so they can take the creatives that we've built, but we make it easy for them to edit them on Canva and make them their own, add their own logos and promote whatever it is their product or services with one of our incentives as to help them with improve their call to action.

[00:18:49] Yvonne Heimann: So guys would, what you heard here from Marco right now is literally the thing for your business, no matter what. [00:19:00] I don't care if it's membership. I don't care if it's affiliate marketing. I don't care if it's your podcast, because Marco gets to experience something similar. We have the exact same approach with our podcast guests.

[00:19:14] So I know you've guys been around for a while, listening and watching. Marco hasn't gotten the rundown yet because that usually happens after the show. What we do is the exact same thing. We are already creating assets for this podcast. So what we do after the podcast is our guests get all of the access.

[00:19:35] They get access to the video recordings. They get access to the blog post. They get access to The short form content when we post it and they get tagged to it Marco you're going to be able to create your own short form content if you want to do that and what we have seen is the exact same thing that happens in your Facebook group.

[00:19:53] That happens in your affiliates or marketing group where the easiest you make it [00:20:00] for the people you collaborate with to not think about, to not have to spend too much time to do something. The higher the chance is you can activate them to do something.

[00:20:15] Now tell the audience about Marketing Boost and the deal you have for them.

[00:20:22] Marco Torres: So Marketing Boost, we give you what I call the wow, surprise, and delight factor, helping you stand out from the crowd to help people get off the fence and choose your business over somebody else's. Because we give you for your subscription to marketing boost, which, by the way, is only 37 a month, you get access to the ability to give away an unlimited amount of all three categories of our incentives, which first is complimentary hotel stays in 130 destinations around the world from three.

[00:20:50] to seven nights days. No timeshare presentations, no hoops to jump through, etc. Of course, they don't include airfare. They don't include food and beverage [00:21:00] or taxes and fees. Second, we have the hotel savings cards. They come in increments of one, two, three, and five hundred dollars. They're good at a million hotels worldwide, and these can be used from everything that to entice somebody to book an appointment with you for zoom call to all your reminder messages might say hey don't forget show up on time for the appointment we're going to reward you with a 200

[00:21:27] hotel savings vouchers And they come in one or 200 increments, and they are good at about 250, 000 offers in 100, 000 locations throughout the USA and Canada, and these are what I call micro incentives for micro calls to action. Everything from Hey. Follow, invite 10 people to join my Facebook group and we'll reward you with 100 hotel savings card and you can grow your Facebook group virally with, with contests like that, or, you know, for every 10 people you invite to join our Facebook group, we're going to [00:22:00] enter you for another chance to win our five night trip to Cancun.

[00:22:03] And so you can run contests, engagement, Invite people to join your webinar with these incentives and say stay till the webinar, we're giving away two trips to las vegas so for those of you that are engaged and stay tuned you might be the winner and There's just a million ways to use our these incentives for a trade show giveaways, lead gen ideas rewarding past clients, birthday gifts, you name it, if you have a little bit of creativity, these are just one of the tools that you should have in your toolbox to help engage your community.

[00:22:39] Yvonne Heimann: I love how, how easy you guys make it to really come up with incentives, because it's like, often enough, it's like, What am I going to do with this? Everybody's just doing Amazon gift cards, right? So guys, Marco has for you, as the freebie, I think it's one month free without credit card down to go check it out.

[00:22:59] Is that [00:23:00] right?

[00:23:00] Marco Torres: Actually, we have a, a freemium version. It's, it's, only includes a few of our destinations, but you can join for free with no credit card required. And it's, you know, you can use that, that limited group forever, if you like. Or you might, after you see the freemium version, you might say, look, I want, I want the hotel savings cards.

[00:23:19] I will also want the restaurant cards. I also want the other 130 destinations. And then you can upgrade later on if you like it to a paid version.

[00:23:27] Yvonne Heimann: Love it. So guys, as always, links on the description, marketingboost.com. Marco, thanks so much for joining me and giving me new ideas of how I can engage my startup your ClickUp.

[00:23:42] Thanks so much, everybody for listening and watching. I'll see you in the next episode. Make sure you click this subscribe button so you don't miss it. And Marco, thank you for joining me today.

[00:23:52] Marco Torres: Thank you. It was my pleasure.