Stephen talks about how you can employ the security guard effect in your business.

Transcript

[00:00:14] Stephen:  Hey guys, Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move and I’m with you here on an early Friday morning, actually probably not so early, I did sleep in a little bit, but that’s all good.  Either way, I’m pumped to actually tell you about this new strategy I’m trying to employ across a couple of businesses and I want you guys to hear about it and then let me know what you think.

[00:00:36] So what I’ve come up with, and this is what I thought of yesterday, I was actually walking down a street where I parked my car from the office.  So I parked my car, I had to go move it because it was a two-hour spot, I went to go move it.  As I was walking to my car, I saw that there was this film crew.  They were filming something in this house.  They must have been doing renovations or some sort of renovation show, the ones where they fix up the house and they film the process and then they put on TV and people watch that kind of stuff.  But pretty much, that process of them filming it, I stopped and I had a look on and see what was happening.  Then when I stopped, another person walking past stopped, had a look, saw what was happening and that was pretty much it.

[00:01:22] So basically, yeah, I just pretty much stopped then I kept going to my car, moved my car, went back to the office and that was that.  But one thing that struck me was the reason why I stopped was because I was curious to see what this film crew was doing.  I thought the actual crew there, being there, the whole TV, everything like that was pretty exciting so I thought I’d stop and check and see what it was all about, so I did.

Now, the other thing was once I stopped, someone else stopped and it got me thinking, I was like, well, how fun is that?  That social proof of one person stopping to see what was going on encouraged another person to stop all because a couple of cameras were around.  And I started thinking, I’m like, it reminded me actually of a YouTube prank I saw a little while ago and this is kind of semi-unrelated, but I’ll explain it anyway.  So what happened was this guy was trying to get this girl’s number and he was trying to prove that unless you’re famous — if you’re not famous, you can’t get girls’ numbers, if you’re famous, it’s easy, which is a silly point to prove, but anyway.

[00:02:25] So what he did was he just went up, asked for a number, she said, no, I’ve got a boyfriend and then 45 minutes later he ended up hiring three security guards, a big truck, hired a bunch of actors to come and grab his autograph, take photos.  With all the buzz, she ended up going there and asking for his number and taking a photo and then he ended up saying, do you want to come back to the hotel, and she said yes and pretty much the prank is like he just turns it down and he says, wait, weren’t you the same girl that wouldn’t give me your number two minutes ago and told me you had a boyfriend.  So that’s the premise of the prank.  Now, what I really like about — not the prank, but what I really like about the strategy is I’ve called it the security guard effect.  So pretty much, the fact that he had security guards around him instantly brought him up in the world of gurus and famous people and celebrities and attracted attention to him.  So people started wanting to reach out to him and grab photos.  It heightens your social status.

[00:03:23] So what I thought was this is kind of the same thing that happened when I was walking past this house that was getting refurbished and redone.  It actually heightened the status of the house and I stopped past and I looked at it, otherwise it would have just been a normal house and a normal apartment that I wouldn’t have, you know better than I live for.  So what I was thinking is how can we employ the same security guard effect in our business?  How can we make sure that we’re the famous person?  We’re the person with the security guards that draws interests of people rather than going out there and hunting down people and trying to get them to promote us and trying to get them to reach to us and things like that.  Because it’s so much easier, once you’ve got that security guard effect, once people see you that you’re someone important, you’re a famous person, you’re a celebrity, you’re putting a good value, you’re hard to reach and other people have shown an interest, so it’s that initial social proof.  Once other people have shown that interest, it just becomes easy, it becomes simple.  Then everyone starts stopping by.  You get one or two then another two then another two and then instantly you’ve got a crowd, and then you’ve got that security guard effect.  You’ve nailed it down with everyone wants to come see you because everyone else wants to come see you.  No one even knows why these days.

[00:04:30] So that’s what I want to share with you guys today, how do we crack that security guard effect in our business.  And it got me thinking of one way so far — and I want to employ this a few different times, but pretty much one way so far that’s worked really well and that would be for me I think the easiest way to do this would be retargeting.  So when someone visits your website, what you can do is — or you know, even to a whole lot of people you outreach to, what you would do first is outreach a whole lot of people, find the people that you want to outreach to, grab their emails, send them an initial email.  Now, the open rate or the reply rate or whatever that is might be quite low.  So this would work for influences, this would work for a whole lot of different types of people, but you’ll have to get their email.  So far I’m still working on this strategy, but this is what I’ve got.  So you’ve got their email, you’ve got a bunch of people you want to reach out to, so say there’s like a thousand people that you want to reach out to, and it doesn’t have to be working like an influencer, it could be working for anyone that owns a website or a particular whatever.

[00:05:33] So you find all these emails from people and there’s tools and things that you can just go find emails and people’s websites.  You go do that, send them an email, follow-up rate might not be great, so they might open the email, they might not reply.  They don’t know who you are, you’re a bit of a nobody.  But instantly after that, you grab that email, upload it as a custom audience on Facebook and then start running ads.  Now instantly you can start delivering them, video testimonials of people that are saying like, yeah, what are the companies, whatever, like positive reinforcements is what I was trying to say.  Instantly, you can start delivering the material, and this material, especially the people that aren’t familiar with how advertising works, they will think, man, I just heard from this guy and he’s really famous and he’s popular that you can deliver them material that will make you look like an authority without them even knowing it.  That’s I think employing the security guards around you to make you look like an authority.

[00:06:26] I think the easiest way to do that is then start running ads and start showing people what are your security guards, what’s your authority material that you can start showing people to build yourself up, build that credibility.  So for me, it might be running a couple of ads to links where I was featured in The Huffington Post or Entrepreneur Magazine or something like that.  If I send traffic to pages that I was featured in, people are going to be like, man, this guy is a badass.  He’s been featured in these big publications.  He’s someone I actually want to reach out to.  And those would be my security guard pieces of authority.  So you got to decide what yours would be.  So that’s the first actionable way I would implement something like this, but you’ve got to have to look at your own.  I think there’s actually a lot of different ways that you can plug in on this and make it relative.  So have a think about it.  It’s something which I think is massively underrated because this sort of effect really draws people to you and you know what happens after that, is it keeps multiplying.

[00:07:24] So once you’ve done this the first time, the security guard effect is just going to keep multiplying.  Like in the video of the prank, you’d see initially there are only a few people that he hired as actors that would take photos of him and they were interested.  And then after that happened, there were even more.  And then more legitimate people started coming over.  And then eventually the girl came over and eventually more and more and more and this big crowd starts to build and I love it because it’s pretty much just that social proof, it’s nothing spectacular going on.  People just love crowding shit, like if they find out something is working or whatnot, it’s just that social proof keeps building and building.  And there’s actually a TEDx talk where they talk about all this which I highly recommend you grab a copy of and you read or you watch the video.

[00:08:06] But yeah, guys, have a think about that.  I just got to the office, I’m going to wrap it up, but let me know what you think about the security guard effect.  I think there’s something in it and it’s something I’m going to employ in a couple of my businesses, because I know that as soon as you bring that authority to you, people start coming to you and you’re not just sitting there hand on your hand, sitting on your hand there waiting for people to email you and if you’re cold calling.  It’s kind of like telemarketers, when they’re trying to reach out to you, you just hang up, you don’t care who they are because they got no authority behind them, whereas if it was someone famous reaching out to you, things might be a little different.  So have a think about it guys, have a wonder how you can employ the security guard effect in your business.  I think it’s super powerful.  Let me know, shoot me a message and I’d love to hear from you because it’s something which I’d love to collaborate on.  I think it’s super powerful.  So, have an awesome day guys.  Make sure you crush it, and I’ll speak to you soon.