VIPER Growth Hacks that will put your campaign in Beast Mode

Marketing is as old as commerce. Think about it. We developed commerce from a trading system that was already in place. The only way to survive was to convince others that what you spent all day hunting, making, or cooking is better than the person’s next to you. Thus, we find that in the coming years of the digital age; marketing methods, efforts, and resources have never been as plentiful as they are now to assist in increasing marketing by skipping the thick layers of legwork. Is marketing not grand? No really, there are so many tools at a marketer’s disposal, that it is sickening to imagine how a few oversights and a couple of points in the wrong direction will send your business or organization crashing down to the bottom floor of lost sales, poor web presence, and bad overall customer experience.

The worst part about it is that for many of us who are at the top and have sourced this work out to others more suitable for these tasks. We rely heavily on our decision to choose the consultant or digital marketing team that will have your company’s best overall interest at heart and not just a way to hop into your checkbook.

When it boils down to it: We want to see GROWTH!!!

Moreover, I’m not talking about some numbers pushed across the screen that show there are more visitors. I am talking about getting those visitors not only there, but getting them to “pick up what you’re putting down.”

The bottom line, “We want to see dollar signs and not graph lines.”

With all of this being said, “How can we put our marketing efforts into overdrive and join the ranks of having a campaign in BEAST mode?”

Let’s start off by informing you that you’ll never get there until you go through the numbers. Those graph lines you hate to see means someone else is taking on this headache and numbers matter. Especially when talking about MONEY.

Getting higher conversions on your page also means you will need to attract higher amounts of traffic, but how? MARKETING!!!

There is an industry secret that stays pretty well guarded behind a wall of elaborate explanations and metaphors that dance around the idea. It is a technique that drives real results and not just traffic (although the extra traffic is a great bonus).

We call it the VIPER effect and several top marketers use it but have no clue they are.

You have made it this far now here is the deal:

VIPER’s 5 Fang Approach to Cranking Up Conversions

• Provide Value for prospects to visit, buy, or share.
• Provide Interests to your industries community, and they will want more.
• Provide Precision When Making Statements: 50 is not the same as 53. I believe 53 more, but why?
• Provide Economical Sense by Answering Objections to Combat Naysayers and Pessimists
• Provide Remembrance by giving them something to come back to.

 

Value: Come on in, we have growth on every aisle

This is a critical step that several campaigns experience epic fails in. It happens, sometimes it is easy to think you are doing what is best, but reality will set in, and you will need to run some real test to know for sure. Providing value to customers is what business is all about right? Well, that and maybe making a couple of bucks in the process.

How do we provide value to our customers? No this is not a trick question, but seriously how? Is it enough that we set up a shop, booth, or web page that is selling what the person is looking for? No, nor will it ever be enough. Welcome to the digital age, and it is going to take a little more than carrying a product because Joe down the road has the same product for $3 cheaper and what makes your worth more? Starting to see the point here. The market is flooded, and unique products are not always available to market and often times, clients are walking down a beaten path in hopes of achieving the same results as the person before them.

In a cookie cutter world, we need to give our visitors and customers something more than a pretty design, a killer SEO campaign (how else would they have found you), and a few great words about what it is you are doing to try and squeeze money from another. The key is VALUE.

Yes, it is like being bitten by a snake, especially once you realize how simple bringing value can be. Everyone likes getting free stuff, but not everyone likes giving away his or her precious email to fall victim to a poorly executed drip. I admit, you would have to be pretty clever to squeeze my email from my hands, especially if you are trying to sell me something, but it happens. Everyone has a trigger. So let’s think of something different that won’t make it seem like we are just trying to get to their inbox.

If you are here, then you are probably pretty familiar with marketing and remember those “refer to win” campaigns, usually reading somewhere along the lines of, “For a chance to win (High Ticket Item), just click like and share with (X) friends to be entered in to win.”

Believe it or not, this works. Well, there is actually psychology behind it and has provided several successful results for large companies like Coca-Cola and McDonalds. I am sure if you have ever heard anyone talking about those iPad giveaways and how it is pointless even to enter because everyone, his or her stepchildren, and their stepchildren’s imaginary friends are entering to win a luxurious iPad.

If you plan to give iPads away, you can expect some conversions, but you will barely experience enough to buy admissions into a kiddie pool theme park. Maybe that last line was a little exaggerated, but the point is there. The purpose of this is to make your marketing campaign switch gears. Fourth gear is for someone who wants to play the waiting game. It is time to kick it into 6th and hit BEAST Mode.

Scrap the illustrious idea of an iPad giveaway; they have been outdated and overused to the point of losing its appeal. Instead, go with something that gives your consumer base a feeling of attainability. Looking to promote a brand, idea, service, or marketing something else entirely? Try a group focused promotion. Sure, the free pdf in exchange for an email seems to be a deal, but it really isn’t something to spark the growth of sharing.

Instead, think of a bundle or group gift (maybe a pizza party) and host a promotion, by offering a chance to win a free pizza party for spreading the love. Disclaim a limit to the number of winners, say, ten winners, so ten pizza parties. Not a huge investment, maybe a couple hundreds top, but that isn’t the focus. Growth on crack is the target and your brand’s marketing angle coupled with a sweet “Share-n-Win” promo is one of those secrets that if done right, will net an overflow in traffic. What does more traffic do for your business? You guessed it if you said more sales! The main goal is Value, so providing value to your industry will help to streamline the rest.

Interests: Spark interests and peak curiosity in your niche

This insight is something every marketer, copywriter, and anyone trying to promote an item attempts, but without understanding, fail, and do so to the extreme. Don’t believe me? Perform a google search for “failed inventions” nearly all of the SERPs that come back will be comprised of lists upon lists of products that wanted to be big but failed. Was it just a bad product or did the marketing team drop the ball on this one? Some are just bad in general, almost like, “What did they think when they came up with this?” Then there are those gems that just never seen the light of day. These projects are typically crushed dreams of really good ideas that either lose funding due to poor marketing and securing the interests of investing prospects to keep projects going, or it could be a case of just targeting the wrong demographic. Maybe your product isn’t for the niche you thought it was for.

Take the Google Glasses a few years back. Do you remember all of the hype? The painted dreams of people walking around with essentially small computers situated right in front of their eyes. Imagine, being able to check your email on the fly by just looking out of your glasses. Sounds cool right. That is about as deep as it goes too. It was a remarkable product, but the everyday person would not benefit the most from this. Testing proved that this was a fail from a giant: Google. No matter the size, experience, or depth of your company and products, there is always from for better marketing. Years later, that same pair of glasses has made a stronger comeback thanks to a few rebranding techniques. Google Glass is now focused on industry jobs, by providing on-scene metrics and analysis of technical jobs. Several industries are benefiting from this technology.

This was just one example of how Google failed to spark the interests of the right crowd, but still not this sections points. Back on topic, the idea of VIPER’s second step is to paint a picture that is visible, but blurry. It could be something amazing, but it isn’t clear. You have to make your audience want to learn more. But how do you do this, when it is hard enough just to get someone’s attention in the “Era of the Blinking Screens” with design alone. Sure, the design can quickly get their attention, but it has also been proven, that we do not pay attention for long periods of time or short for that matter (most pay about 8 secs of attention to any single product while shopping).

I need to keep people on my page longer and give them something to stay for, but I also need sales…

 

Sadly, most of us run into this struggle. We have great ideas, an awesome niche community, but we fail at keeping their attention. So how can you get them to click on your site? If you are as smart as I think you are and understand that we are in the second step: We need to create a mysterious attraction. How do we do that?

Let us say you have just written or orchestrated the generation of a piece of content on developed software that gives instructions on efficiently managing business activities, process, and projects. You could say:

Discover which managing technique will streamline your business to boost project productivity and increase sales by staying in the loop.

This statement identifies what the product or book is about and a couple of questions it can answer. It did all of this in one sentence. Amazing right. Therefore, it is a decent assumption that if someone who was researching a way to manage this company or help organize their projects and came across your ad, a click is in store. It makes the user want to know what in your book will help them out if anything. Maybe you have a consulting business, and you just wrote a book looking to spark interests. Let us say your consulting experience is in the chicken coop business, and you are offering a concierge service to promote your coops to farmers and hobbyists:

Learn how the right chicken coop can increase your flock’s health and drive egg production.

Again, we have a product, and we let the user know what it is they will gain from your service. In this case, they will more than likely gain an abundance of eggs and have beautiful, healthy looking chickens. For the average person, these sounds dumb, but people come on, your food comes from somewhere, and yes there is also a competitive market on that too.

The ultimate goal of the second step is to let the user have a sip of a delicious cup of coffee and then invite them in for the rest of the cup.

Precision: Be specific. Round numbers tell a story.

When marketing anything, the last thing you want to do is spend all of your time, efforts, resources, and yes capital in marketing only to flop due to what your numbers are telling your viewers.  Rounded numbers are the biggest storytellers in the marketing game. Honestly, when you read an ad and see something like:

“I made $100 a Day last month and you can too!”

It is more likely it is around $94, or maybe something over the claimed about like $123.39 a day. The point being is it is odd for numbers to naturally end whole in terms of 5’s and 0’s. It is like saying a McDonald’s location sells 1,000 burgers a day. Sure, no one says they are not slinging out the volume, but it is widely known these types of numbers are not real and hold very little truth. Large brands and established companies can make use of these numbers because they are well known, and we are not faulting them, but for us smaller guys, a different approach is needed.

This is where the need to establish a reliable campaign built on truthful numbers and their relevance. For someone selling a product that let’s say, regrows hair for men. Simply saying that men experienced up to 50% or even saying over 50% hair regrowth still projects an unreliable feature to the product. Is it more than 50 percent and if so what kind of growth can I as a consumer see. Try making the numbers work for you. How about:

First Statement: “Research shows that men on average experienced over 50% regrowth of their hair.”

vs.

Second Statement: “Research shows that men on average experience a 54.8% regrowth of their hair.”

Can you see how the first statement is misleading? In today’s world, consumers want to know what they are getting and are willing to research products to find the one they want. Be upfront and let them know what the real deal is. The second state is more believable because it is not uniform and makes more sense that percentages especially averages do not come out pretty like 50%. It is all about number psychology, and this does not just work with percentages and volumes. It is relevant in dates, and times. It is the difference between “in just one month” or “in 29 days” the precise disclosure creates a sense of truthfulness for the consumer and lets them know you are not hiding anything.

 

Economical Sense: Beat them to the punch and point out flaws

One of the biggest concerns to address right up front in your marketing is PRICE. If you expect to compete with high-end luxury, your competitors will be looking to see how you justify the price of your product when they already know the effort it took for them to establish themselves as a luxury brand. Take the luxury watch brand Rolex for instance. They are known for their high-quality watches, and the price tags on them are justified by their name and power words that descriptively capture the raw essence of the brand. No one is to say; you could not make your own luxury watch brand. If you plan to do so, then here is one of your top competitors. So how would you justify a marketing campaign for selling luxury watches at even a fraction of the price of a Rolex?

You would definitely want to start by collecting a few opinions and reach out to a few experts for their opinion. These testimonials will help add value to the price you attach. You also are looking to get the point of unmatched style and primal power over luxury across. Doing this will take design work as well as compellingly strong copy that bleeds, sweats, and pours nothing but luxury. If you are writing a blog with to go with your brand, you will need to know relevant topics. The same content tactics that work for known retailers of low-end products is not going to attract the same level of engagement as content that is focused more toward those who lead a more prestigious and eccentric lifestyle. These individuals will want to know what is going on in the world from a different perspective and as a marketer of a high-end product; this is an essence you are targeting. Let us look at a way to explain a high-end product or service.

Wondering why you have found cheaper imitations around. It’s because these are only for the elite and those who executives that wish to stay a cut above the rest.

The focus of Economical sense is to prove the value and why you are marketing it at the price you are. It goes for low priced items too. Some people may argue that an item or product that does not cost a lot of money is not worth spending the few bucks for, however, if you are one of these people then you could not be any more wrong. A way to bring exciting value to smaller price tags can be to explain the value the person is getting. You see this tactic spread around with variations to the design, but the principles are the same:

You are getting this product or service, which comes with some additive, special bundle or a guarantee that totes the value of $$$. You are getting this at such a great value because we are overstocked and are passing on the savings to you.

 

The point is to justify your worth by answering those naysayers and the skeptics, by presenting value that backs up your marketing strategy. This technique is a driving force behind building trust and value leading to increased conversions.

Remembrance: Keep them coming back for more.

The last stage of striking growth increase through the VIPER system is to create an experience or deliver something so spectacular that the person wants to come back and wants to share your content. This is one of the hardest parts to deliver on in the VIPER system, mainly because it requires consumer insights on an expert level. Many start-ups still in their infancy do not have the authoritative voice to stand out. Sure SEO and marketing can get users to your brand and can even get them to bite on your products, but the sole point of going BEAST mode is to increase your sales. This step focuses on increasing sales by creating a memorable experience for the consumer and subtly or aggressively nudging them to come back for one reason or another.

How is this achieved you may ask? Well, there are several ways to get this done and if done correctly can spark a chain reaction of recurring and new organic visits to your site. Once the visitor is on your site, in your store, or wherever you need them to be within your funnel, it is time to let them know what they will miss out on if they are away for too long. For retailers, this can be frequent non-advertised flash sales. For shoppers that visit retail stores or websites, this simply disclosure of secret sales is enough to make them want to come back to keep checking out new deals to save on.

Another example of this could be for a technical or consulting site to provide extensive & consistent beginner content that is updated on a consistent basis. A form of this could be to start a page on your site that discusses website building. On this page, you frequently update a large piece of content with new and ongoing material that builds and adds value to the overall piece. These are met with a beautifully placed CTA that demands the reader come back. Something like, “This post is constantly being updated and expanded. Come back and for the next amazing update where we discuss …”

You have to grab their attention, and in a galaxy of distractions and competition, the best way to do this is to focus on the overall user experience. It is about the consumer and a well informed and the educated consumer who obtained their knowledge from your source, is a lot more likely to convert at your store or site than at competitors.

Where the hell did VIPER come from and why haven’t I heard of it?

By now, I am sure many of you have tried to google the VIPER marketing strategy. What did you come back with? Something like this depending on your previous search history:

On the other hand, were you one of those that tried to be sneaky with your keywords and went with “VIPER growth hack marketing” and were met with a SERP that looked something like this:

Are you confused as to why you can’t find this growth hack anywhere on the internet? Didn’t I mention there are secrets to the industry in the very beginning? The reason many of you have never heard of VIPER is that it is a secret growth strategy and let’s face it: Every business can’t go into BEAST mode, or we would have to come up with something else.

I know it is pretty amazing, right? Are you inspired to do something new to your marketing campaign now? Contact our experts and find out how marketing growth hacks can take your company to the next level.