#2: The One Thing Every Marketing Strategy Should Have

Anthony Puttee: So thank you, Brendan, for joining me on the show. It’s great to have you here.

Brendan Kelly: Anthony, what’s going on, man? Love it. Love to be here. Thanks for having me.

Anthony Puttee: No, you’re welcome. Look, I’ve been an avid listener of your show probably for the last three or four months now, and I really liked the way you feel like the listener. Well, at least for myself, it feels like a real sort of fly on the wall, with everything that you’re doing. I know that you are actually helping people build out their funnels, with their marketing and their custom avatars and you share a little of that, on the actual podcast, its great information. So, you’ve got a fan in me and it was from listening to this, I thought, “I got to get this guy on the show,” and I’m really appreciative that you’ve joined me here. Thank you.

Brendan Kelly: It’s so funny, especially when you launch a podcast and you’re still fairly new. You never know who’s exactly listening. So, a lot of my audience, I’ve never even heard from him or met him or anything and they’re like, “Dude, the podcast, I love it. I listen to every single episode. It’s amazing. I learned so much.” I’m like, “Wow.” So, it’s amazing to be on both sides of the equation here. So I’m excited to get started.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah, and how it really helps close the gap and feeling like you do know someone.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah, absolutely.

Anthony Puttee: You know, getting personal. I feel like I know you already. It’s like, well, just in your earbuds. Yeah. But for those who actually, who are listening, who don’t know you or haven’t yet discovered you, just tell us a little bit about what you’re doing now and how you’re helping people today?

Brendan Kelly: Yeah, so I work, I really fell in love with sales funnel strategy. So I work a lot in that space. I do coaching consulting for people who run businesses and they need to get their funnel off the ground. I also do “done for you work”, as almost like a one man band agency. Where I take on clients, they say, “Hey, I need a funnel for this. I want to fill my program. I want to run a webinar or whatever it may be.” And we go through and we do it for him and we get some great results.

Brendan Kelly: Also, the other piece of my story is that I fell in love with the dream customer in the avatar. So I feel like a lot of people, you hear it all the time and people preach, “You got to know your dream customer. Who’s your target market? What’s your avatar? Blah, blah, blah.” But nobody has a way to figure it out. And even worse, nobody has a way to utilize it once you do figure it out. So that’s kind of the gap that I’m trying to fill in.

Anthony Puttee: I think you’re spot on. I mean, it was just yesterday I had a strategy session with someone. We’re working all the way through the customer journey, which is really from where, from someone first discovered you and all the way through to them becoming like a customer, loyal advocates. People want to jump into the funnels and they want to jump into the videos and the conversion upsells and downsells, but they’re not realized, that when they get to that, there are some questions like the copy, What is the message? What are you trying to say? What’s the call to action here? You get a few blank stares and you realize, without the custom avatar. There’s a lot of answers here down the line that you can’t answer. Like it starts with that and I think you’re dead on with that. I really do.

Brendan Kelly: What I like is that basically my, what’s unique about the way I do it is that, I build the avatar first and I have a whole system built around it with all the questions you need to know. And then basically you can extract all of the pieces of the funnel, your sales message and even your offer. You can build your offer straight out of it. it makes everything a whole lot easier, once you actually have that down. So you’re not backtracking and say, “Oh wait, I don’t know.” You know, or going in and launching something that’s not going to work. So it’s amazing when you actually put in the work first and the avatar is not a very sexy part of the game.

Anthony Puttee: Exactly.

Brendan Kelly: It’s difficult to market that way. So really what I have to do is say, “Hey, here’s the result that you’re going to get from this.”

Anthony Puttee: Right, exactly. And just how much everything else is, how much simpler and easier it is, once you know that part of it. Yeah. Do you find when people come to you, like at what stage are they sort of typically, like are they coming and they’re actually brand new, and they’re just like overwhelmed and frazzled and like at what point are they coming to you and where do you see like the biggest issue? What the biggest gap that they have?

Brendan Kelly: I work with a lot of people and anywhere from people who are just trying to figure it out and don’t really know even, what their big thing is yet, what their one thing is, who their customer is or what they’re selling yet, all the way up to, people that are doing several million dollars a year and they even still, are trying to figure out that piece of the equation.

Brendan Kelly: So you know, it spans all over and just because you’re making $1 million, it doesn’t mean that you really know that stuff. So-

Anthony Puttee: Right.

Brendan Kelly: Sometimes I say, “Hey, it sounds like you kind of know your avatar, but you need an avatar overhaul,” is what I call it.

Anthony Puttee: Okay. Like to make an overall message in a sense.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. We go back through and they say, “Okay, well you know your people, maybe they are feeling this type of pain, but why are they feeling this type of pain?” Right. And they’ll be like, “I don’t know, I never really thought about that.” And then we can go more into it. It’s just a series of questions. You can really uncover who that person is and it makes it a whole lot easier to market to them, and more effective.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah. You know what to say and how to say it. Right.

Brendan Kelly: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Anthony Puttee: So like I know, I’m talking to people they can get by the launch, like with a lot of this stuff, like even if they’re like a seasoned and they’re usually got so many things on their plate, that they want to get help with, where they’re getting their systems to do it or just someone starting out from scratch. And what I find interesting about your story is like many of us, is that you haven’t always, you haven’t always been this like seasoned marketer. Like you had to start somewhere, right? There was a period of your life where you weren’t doing any of this, right? This my understanding, like even just from trying to get jobs and stuff. Tell us a little bit how you got into this game.

Brendan Kelly: So I, I feel like I’ve always had a sort of entrepreneurial mindset. Even when I was young now, I would always say, “Oh, well, let’s make a quick buck here. Maybe we could do this. I don’t know. Do you need…”

Brendan Kelly: I wasn’t like the big lemonade stand kid, but I felt like I was always in that state of mind and I didn’t know what I wanted to do in high school. I went to college, I studied public relations and graduated there with my bachelor’s in PR. Basically I lived outside of New York City, about two hours. And I said, “All right, so the logical step is, let’s go into New York. Let’s get a PR job, work for an agency. I don’t know. So get a job that’s relevant to my degree, right?” No, that sounds very logical. Oh yeah, duh. But the fact of it is, I actually applied to over a hundred jobs in New York City and literally didn’t get one single response from any of them. So yeah, it was just mind blowing.

Anthony Puttee: It was almost the universe telling you that that was not your calling. You need to be going in a different direction.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. And I’m glad it did honestly, because who knows where I would be if I actually got one job. I interviewed for a couple spots, just from referrals. One of them was with a Fox Searchlight, the film. So 21st Century Fox, 20th Century, whatever it is. It’s there like, the underdog, the indie film company. So I interviewed there, I ended up working a job selling timeshare for six months in Pennsylvania. But you know, besides the fact, basically what happened was, I needed to figure out a way that I can make money. And what I did was, I was on Amazon and I bought an ebook for 101 ways to make side money, right? And that’s when I first discovered, okay… Not first discovered.

Brendan Kelly: You know, there’s infomercials and all that. But I said, “Okay, eBay is the one that really stuck out to me.” So that’s where I got hooked on, right away. And I went through my parents’ basement. I dug out all their old crap and I sold it all on eBay. You know, old video games and signs and weird stuff like that. But I made a couple thousand dollars in a couple of months. That was my first taste of really online income.

Brendan Kelly: So then I scaled it up a little. I said, “All right, I’m going to go to Amazon. And I sold on Amazon FBA. It had a small beauty brand on there, sold around 50,000 in around six months.”

Anthony Puttee: Oh wow. I didn’t know that. That’s interesting. Okay.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. So I came from e-com and that’s really where I got started. I was learning along the way, but that wasn’t really a lot of marketing. Even in the Amazon world, when you’re pushing. It was a small brand, but it was big revenue for me. I was 21 years old, I was making a few hundred bucks a day and most I ever made in my life, I was excited.

Anthony Puttee: That’s huge. And it’s not only what you’re making, how much you’re making, but it’s how you’re making it.

Brendan Kelly: Right. Yeah, exactly.

Anthony Puttee: That must’ve been a huge mindset shift. Like a big like aha moment.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. It’s funny because everybody else, my friends, they all went to school and everything. I graduated a semester early, but they’re all in school and they’re looking at jobs and stuff and a couple of them have jobs and I’m like, “You guys should all quit and just do this.” And they’re like, “Dude, what do you mean?” And it’s like, no that sounds ridiculous, before you actually got in and did this stuff before. But once you’re in, you’re hooked.

Anthony Puttee: I think a lot of us can relate to that. It’s part of why a lot of us started, online businesses in the first place. It was to get in, we were really good at something we enjoyed it. And we can actually do it and help others at the same time. You know? And I think that’s largely what a lot of it inspired me from my different ventures for sure.

Anthony Puttee: In doing that though, I know a lot of us sort of, we get into the weeds and a lot of people are in the weeds with the implementations and then the marketing. So they come out and they stop educating themselves, on what they need to do, like with funnels and things like that. And I think you hit the nail on the head, as far as, the customer advocate. It not be a sexy part of it. But I also find that people sort of attend to have this aha moment, like where they see its place, in the overall marketing campaign and strategies. So you helping like with the e-com, or you’re working with more service based businesses at this time?

Brendan Kelly: So I am a service based business at the moment. I do coaching consulting right now. I got out of e-com. Well, what happened was long story short, my Amazon business kind of fell apart overnight, when a competitor bought 25 one star reviews on my core product.

Anthony Puttee: What?

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. So my big Amazon, I was making a few hundred bucks a day and then I went to losing money overnight. So that’s kind of when I said, all right, I need to find something more sustainable. And that led me to sales funnels.

Anthony Puttee: Got it. So this is not really about relying on like one big grill or one big channel. So what you’re suggesting is if I was allow you to be able to capture and utilize more than one sort of marketing channel and be able to capture those people. So you own your audiences, like you’re owning your data.

Brendan Kelly: Yes. That’s a huge benefit. Now that was a learning thing for me because you know, Amazon, they do a lot of great things for you. They get you the customers. You don’t need to go and do advertising and build your list or do any of that, right?

Brendan Kelly: As long as you have a good product and has good ratings, you could sell, they also fulfill the product for you. So that piece is like done for you. So they take the two hardest things and do them for you, which is amazing. But the cons of it, you can’t re market to your audience. You can’t even send people an email after they buy. So it’s like you don’t have a real asset. And it’s like once that falls apart. And once somebody did that to me, I had nothing left and there was nothing I could do.

Anthony Puttee: Right? Yep. It makes sense. And I think for service based businesses, a lot of people struggle with also jogging from, doing the implementation to the actual marketing and not… And then once they’re doing one, the other sort of stops. Especially in the early stages, really build out a team. Even though they could be doing, really solid sort of six figures. So if they going to make the shift, and actually start getting some of their marketing and their funnels in place. To help do some of the marketing for them, while they are building and growing and they help themselves take that and sort of next step for getting marketing, working for them, building the database that they actually own. So they can get out of that cycle.

Anthony Puttee: A big part of that as a customer avatar, knowing who they’re marketing to. So where would you suggest someone sort of start? If they’re in that position and how the customer avatar, really, why it’s so important and all the different other areas of marketing, that it fits without knowing? That the rest of it becomes much more difficult.

Brendan Kelly: So what I’m going to say is, this might be disappointing to some people, but I feel like there’s no perfect answer, at least I haven’t found one to this point on how to discover your avatar. I think you almost have to go around and do a little bit of tasting. Throw your product out to certain people, see what hits and what doesn’t maybe. Then go back and say, “Okay, why did that hit? Why did you like the product? What was it that sold you in here?”

Brendan Kelly: Because people come to me and they say, “Hey, I need help figuring out my avatar” and I say, “okay, I can ask you a bunch of questions that will lead us to choose somebody. But in the end, all we’re doing is choosing somebody.” You know, so we can go and figure out who might want our product, answer all the questions that we need to, but we need to go get those things validated anyway.

Brendan Kelly: So it’s like, once we figured out who we think is our dream customer, we need to go find that person, interview them and re ask all those questions. You’d be surprised because sometimes all of your answers get validated. And sometimes your dream customer, quote on quote, will literally contradict everything that you thought about them. So really the key is you got to just choose somebody that might fit your target market, your dream customer avatar, whatever, and then go find that person and ask them exactly what they think of all of your stuff. Do that with 20-30 people. You’re going to start to see trends. You’ll see some really, really solid evidence of why your product is selling, why it appeals to people who wants it, who doesn’t, how it fits into their life and you know…

Anthony Puttee: Right. So it’s kind of like, really starting out with your best guests, based on the people that you’ve probably already worked with. Already talk to, those people that are already sort of resonating or feel like that connecting with what it is that you’re doing, going with your best guess, and then taking what you’re offering out to the market and getting that feedback to find tune, basically that customer avatar.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. I’ll give you an example here.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah.

Brendan Kelly: To try to solidify things a little bit. So I work with some people in real estate. Some people, I’m working with a counselor right now, I’m working, infopreneurs with service based businesses, basically everybody. But the big thing that sells people on my service is two things basically, that I’m going to give them a solid plan that we’re going to work on together. So that gives them closure and confidence with me.

Anthony Puttee: Right, you know.

Brendan Kelly: So that’s the first thing we do is I say, “Look, I’m not going to even give you a proposal. I’m not going to pitch you on anything. So you and I sit down for a couple of hours and we figured out a plan together because I’m not going to try to pitch you something that’s not in your best interest. Something that’s not aligned with your goals and something that you don’t necessarily need.”

Brendan Kelly: So that’s my first step and people really loved that about me. So that’s a big trend within my people. But at the same time, since I’m trying to go for more high ticket clients, people who already have an established business, people who are moving and shaking. One of the big selling points for me, and this is how I cater my sales message, is look, once we have that plan, you can go and execute it with your team or you know, hire somebody else to do it. Or I can sit down, I can do the entire thing for you. That’s up to you. But either way, they don’t have to do it themselves. And that’s usually what people like about me is, it’s totally a done for you service. You can be as involved or uninvolved as you really want to.

Anthony Puttee: Right, right. So do you find that is, would you also suggest when people are going through this process that they work on a niche? One of the big takeaways, I was recently at the digital agency marketing expert in New York and one of the huge key themes was niching. In order to be able to rise to the top and scale over the next couple of years in online business, being able to niche and be really specific with who surveys going to help with that. So do you find that helps with coming up with your customer avatar, rather than trying to be all things to all people?

Brendan Kelly: Oh absolutely. Yeah. You don’t have to niche down, but you really should. I mean, if you look at the ClickFunnels announcement that just came out, they said, “Hey look, we’re going to stop trying to be another autoresponder and another messenger and another affiliate program. We’re going to partner with the people who do that best and invite them to come in and work with us. But we’re going to stop trying to do that, not as good as everybody else.”

Brendan Kelly: So, it’s one thing to say, “Okay, I build a custom funnel for people.” It’s another thing to say, “I build custom funnels for realtors.” It’s another thing to say, “I build custom funnels for listing agents,” right? So it’s like, every single time you go down a little bit further, not only are people going to seek you out more, but you’re more valuable at that point, right?

Brendan Kelly: So if somebody says, if you’re talking to a regular digital marketer and they say, “Hey, I can help you find your avatar.” All right, that’s cool. But if I’m out here saying, that’s exactly what I do, I’m the best at it. And this is why. And look at all these people that are saying, now I’m the best at it. I can, people bag for me, I have more credibility. But also, I’m worth a lot more at that point.

Anthony Puttee: Right, right. Makes sense.

Brendan Kelly: You can literally double or triple your services once you figured out what your niche and what your thing is.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah, yeah. And so you found like the service businesses, not e-com, is more… Is part of you, also doing your own self work and more nicking down.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah. What is sort of one of the things that people get wrong with coming up with a customer avatar, as far as, like wrong guesses or using the wrong information, something that they should not do? And what would be a couple of things that they could sort of stop thinking about, as far as, taking that approach to building out that avatar?

Brendan Kelly: So the biggest thing they do wrong is that, they don’t really do it much at all. I mean that’s the thing is, people will go and like I said in the beginning, people have and they say, “Hey, you’ve got to know your avatar, you’ve got to know your target market. You’re doing customer, but nobody has a system around it,” right?

Brendan Kelly: So that’s what I’m developing and I’m tied up in a lot of client work right now, but in the next few months, I’m going to have an entire program all around it, that basically says here, build your dream customer, extract every single piece of funnel out of it, and then go and build a funnel. That’s going to be like my signature program. But something that they don’t do is go, and like I said, “Get those answers validated,” so we can say, “Hey, okay, Jim is 33 and he has two kids,” and that’s fine, but really, so what are Jim’s goals?

Brendan Kelly: Does he know? Is he trying to hit six figures or, okay, why is he trying to hit six figures? Right? Is it because he wants to support his family or is it because he wants to show off to his friends or is it, what is the big thing? And then, what are the inner beliefs? So it’s like, I don’t know, it’s such a…

Anthony Puttee: It can be nuance. It’s really understanding their goals and motivations. Like what are the challenges are they facing? Based on the people that perhaps, our listeners, if you’re already working with customers, what do you find are the common themes, would you say, that are coming up in conversations? There’s obviously challenges. What’s the reason that people are drawn to you in the first place? So they might come to you, Brendan, because they’re basically stuck.

Anthony Puttee: Or have no time or just simply don’t know where to start. They know they’ve got to the point where it’s becoming a real issue of them being able to grow and they need someone just to, that objective. Someone to bounce off and to help them get out of the weights and actually get it done.

Brendan Kelly: Yeah.

Anthony Puttee: Right?

Brendan Kelly: So the biggest thing that I could say is, if you’re trying to figure it out or if you’re, you just don’t know who it is, go talk to people, literally get on interviews and ask them every single question. Like, I always talked to somebody a couple of weeks ago and we were going through their avatar and I’m like, “All right, well, you know, what channels are they on? Are they actually, all right, you had this YouTube channel. Are they on YouTube? These people are an older demographic. Do you think they’re really on YouTube every day? Maybe not. Okay, so maybe we need to write up a blog and we need to get on some other channels.”

Brendan Kelly: So it’s like, let’s say you’re advertising on Facebook, right? Everybody’s kind of on Facebook. But if you can dial in that target market and your audience and you could say, “Hey, well my people really kind of listen to podcasts. What if we go throw 500 bucks at an ad on a podcast, that’s pretty well known, instead of putting the next five grand into Facebook. And let’s see the return on that.” So it’s like, we can assume, but we’ve got to go ask those people. And that’s really the big thing.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah, I love this. What you’re touching on is, you’re not only, it’s like a customer avatar, just important for getting clear on who you’re marketing to and how your services can help them deliver a transformation from where they are to where they want to be.

Anthony Puttee: But you’re saying now, that it also helps people even like, because a lot of people get so overwhelmed, like there’s so many bright shiny objects. There’s a new platform, this new social platform, this new tool to use for marketing. Like it’s just, it just becomes overwhelming. Like there’s hundreds, hundreds or thousands of these things. And so what you’re saying is, is understanding your customer avatar really helps you filter out all of that and help you just focus on, or double down on just those few marketing channels, that would be the best place for you to be where your target customer is.

Brendan Kelly: Absolutely. What’s even cooler is that, you can, once you figure that out, let’s say I want to target a higher level entrepreneur. I want to market to them instead of somebody who’s lower level, I would put in my messaging, and you can dictate your customer with your messaging, right?

Brendan Kelly: You don’t have to deal with what’s handed to you. You can dictate it and say, “Hey look, only apply on this page if you have at least 5,000 people on your email list,” right? “Only apply if you’re at this revenue, like at minimum.” Right? So you can do that and then what’s going to happen is that, you’re not going to get those bad leads coming through applications anymore, whatever it may be. Or you’re not wasting ad revenue on the wrong type of person. You’re not going to get those pesky clients. So it’s like all you have to do is just say, “Okay, I want to deal with this person. What does that person look like? And then let’s cater my messaging to actually attract that person and nobody else.”

Anthony Puttee: Right. That makes sense. Is there like a period of time where it’s too early to do this customer avatar? Like at what stage should people be looking at really making some time? Putting like half an hour aside, with the coffee, and starting to get this down.

Brendan Kelly: Like I would say as soon as possible, no matter where you are. There’s so many questions to ask. The more data you collect, the better off you’re going to be. Because you know, let’s say I’m running a headline on a funnel that says, “Hey moms, are you sick of…” I worked with somebody who helps stay at home moms, make their own side income, so that they don’t rely on their husband, right? So we started with “Hey moms,” and we said, “Wait, most of these people are stay at home moms.” So like, “All right, let’s put in stay at home moms.” And we said, “Okay, and she runs a crafting business and she teaches other people how to do that.”

Brendan Kelly: So I’m like, “Okay, so what if we put, ‘Hey crafty moms, crafty stay at home moms?’ Right?” It’s like in that headline right there, all it is, is the first four words, but that defines that person so well, so that if that person is a crafty stay at home mom, they’re going to read everything else on the page, as opposed to just, “Hey, mom.” Right?

Anthony Puttee: Right, right. I feel like you’re really talking to them. Yeah. Anyone else that doesn’t sort of fit that, they’re just going to bounce off. But those, those key people that you do want to work with, that’s going to resonate with them. You’re going to be, they’re going to feel like you’re talking to them, and then you’ve got them. So basically it’s… Right. So it’s who they are, what they do.

Brendan Kelly: So, if we’re using that same headline, “Hey, crafty, stay at home moms.” If they’re not crafty throughout. Right, they’re not going to read the page. They’re going to be like, “I don’t need this. This is not my thing.” Right? If they’re not a stay at home mom, they’re going to be like, “This is not my thing.” If they’re not a mom, they’re going to say, “This is not my thing.” They’re all going to leave. But the people who are a crafty stay at home mom, who wants to make a side income, so they don’t have to rely on their husband. Those people are going to be all in, dive into that page.

Anthony Puttee: That’s fantastic. Some people would take going away from this, this show now, like from what you’re saying is they can just start off with that headline. It’s like start off with this work on those first four to six words about who it is they really targeting and what stage are they at, like where are they?

Anthony Puttee: And that is a great sort of first half and the right headline, that people could be using on their product page or their landing page. It’s going to help them really engage with their ideal target market, without sort of fixing on features or anything else. It’s really speaking to them and that’s going to be a great first step. You’re saying, as far as, really getting your customer avatar to really have an effect on your copy, which obviously has an effect on getting people engaged and convert.

Brendan Kelly: Absolutely. So another good way to start is, most of your audiences indoctrinated through Russell Brunson expert secrets, dot com secrets, that series? Yeah.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah. A lot of people are familiar with Russell Bronson, ClickFunnels, and he’s got some of these expert secret stuff like the books. Yeah.

Brendan Kelly: So a great place to start is with that big domino statement. Like if you have that big domino statement behind you on your wall, then it leaves. It makes it a lot easier because everything is so clear. So it’s like for those of you who don’t know it, it’s like… Gosh, I can’t remember right now.

Brendan Kelly: So it’s like if I can make people believe that blank, which is the new opportunity, if I can make people believe that my new opportunity, is the key to what they desire most and it’s only attainable through my specific vehicle, then everything else becomes irrelevant. They have to give me money, right? So what this does is it keeps your messaging very aligned. So if I say, for ClickFunnels, for example, if I can make people believe that sales funnels are the key to success in online business and it’s only attainable through ClickFunnels, then they have to give me money.

Brendan Kelly: And to think about that like really deep. It’s like so true. Because if they truly believe that they need a funnel, in order to be successful online, and that’s really what they want the most. And they see ClickFunnels and they say, “This is the only option,” there’s no way they’re not going to buy.

Brendan Kelly: So you know, that’s a great place to start. And I’ll give you another example. For me, my program’s called Ultimate Avatar. So if I say, “If I can make people believe that knowing their dream customer and avatar is the key to building a successful funnel, that’s going to make them money and it’s only attainable through the Ultimate Avatar, then they have to give me money.” So it’s like, that’s how I can cater my messaging. I can say, look here. And then I stop saying, “Hey, build a funnel. Here’s the way to build a funnel.” And I start saying, “This is why you need your avatar. The avatar is most important. This is why, this is why this.”

Anthony Puttee: I love that. I love that. So people see… And so for the people that are listening, they can actually take that now. You take that headline, I really recommend you do that. Take 10 minutes, take the headline example, that Brendan’s just given and then substitute it with your own, your business, your own cold product as well.

Anthony Puttee: It’s a great exercise and really helps with that mindset shift. That’s-

Brendan Kelly: It gives you so much clarity just seeing that. Because then what I did, is I stopped marketing certain things and I started saying, “Look, this is why the avatar will get you successful with sales funnels.” That becomes the core to my message. That’s what brings people in. And then they see that program. They say, “You know what, if the avatar really is the key to success and building a profitable funnel, then I need to get that program.” And you know…

Anthony Puttee: Yeah, it’s awesome and it’s fantastic. Where do you see… This is like really hot right now and it really fits in with marketing everything else. But I mean even over the last, ever since like marketing and the Madmen days, right? I mean understanding the target customer was always a key part of like marketing. Do you always see that as being the case? Like where do you see sort of marketing going as we know it now? With funnels and automation and things like in the next 10 years or so?

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. What I like is that, the concept of the dream customer and the avatar, it’s absolutely evergreen, right? It’s all based on human psychology and it’s never going to change. We’re not going to change humans, they’re born the same way, since the beginning of forever. So it’s like, that is it’s such an advantage. So if we can get these principles down and if we can really dial in that dream customer, we’re never going to go wrong. Never go wrong with the marketing. It’s like if something does go wrong, if your headline is not converting, if your offer sucks, it’s not because there’s not enough stuff in the offer. It’s because it’s not speaking to your dream customer and you’re not addressing their Watson.

Anthony Puttee: That’s awesome. I couldn’t agree more, I really do. The tools are going to change, like the methods and the mechanics of how we deliver our marketing content and pieces and our message is going to change, but ultimately who we’re changing, who we’re trying to create this transformational change for. Getting that understanding is always going to be critical. It’s always going to be there, the customer avatar.

Brendan Kelly: The vehicle might change. Maybe funnels don’t work in five years, I don’t know. But-

Anthony Puttee: It could be messenger bots. It could be like signals straight into the brain, who knows? It could be implants and we’re just getting holes.

Brendan Kelly: Who knows?

Anthony Puttee: Right, some crazy stuff. It’s really awesome. So I think people can really get away from this now, really have a much better understanding of why having their target customers, sold what to know. Really just doing some of their own headline examples that state in the value, right? What was it that you called it?

Brendan Kelly: The big domino statement.

Anthony Puttee: Yeah. The big dominant statement or a statement of value.

Brendan Kelly: It’s an Expert Secrets. I don’t know what page it is, but you know it’s in there.

Anthony Puttee: We can sort of link that up in the show notes as well.

Anthony Puttee: So Brendan, thank you so much for your time with us today and just giving us some of those knowledge bombs. I think we’ve got something that we can all walk away with and really start implementing today and taking those first steps. So look, I mean we could talk for hours on this stuff, but where could people find your online, seeing you can get to know a little bit more about the whole cast of avatar and how you’re helping people with that?

Brendan Kelly: Yeah. Yeah. So the big place would be on Facebook. That’s where I do most of my marketing. That’s where I hang out. But you know, if you want to follow more of my stuff and get more information like what we talked about today, my podcast is called What The F*nnel. It’s all about sales funnel strategy and I address a ton of dream customer avatar stuff in there, as well as, other things for service based businesses. I just did an episode last week, on how you can double or triple your price, just changing your model a little bit as a service based business. So tons of stuff in What The F*nnel. I would definitely go check that out. That’s my podcast.

Anthony Puttee: Fantastic. Yeah, I’ll link that up. And as a listener and a fan, as I said at the top of the show, it’s a great show. Keep doing what you’re doing mate. Because people and business owners, they need to know this stuff and your podcast really makes it accessible for them and makes it feel like that they can actually do it too. It’s not up to all just these big gurus that can do it, but they can do it. They just take that step.

Anthony Puttee: Really inspiring. Thank you so much for your time.

Brendan Kelly: Hey man, thanks a lot for bringing me on. I really appreciate it.