Jon Schumacher: Marketing Mastery Media INC

In This Episode

Jon Schumacher got some sage advice from his dad: “Never lie.” Since then, he’s made it a staple of his business as a webinar specialist. In this week’s episode of MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR, Jon shares some of his go-to webinar strategies, including how to get people straight to your webinar opt-in page and the fundamentals behind driving webinar traffic.

Topic Timeline:

1:02 Stop Taking Every Course

You can spread yourself too thin when first starting out so try and focus on certain skill sets.

3:05 Connecting With Others

Making connections with other human beings turned out to have a big payoff.

6:56 The Fundamentals

Jon sticks to the core fundamentals, instead of flashy tricks, to drive webinar traffic.

9:10 Team Building

As his company grows, Jon is learning how to manage his team better.

9:58 Taking Advice From Dad

His dad always said, “Never lie,” and that theme has found itself at the foundation of the business.

10:34 Take Care of and Respect Your Clients

Don’t just take your client’s money; get them the results.

– Jon Schumacher

Show Transcript:

LR: Welcome to MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR. I’m Landon Ray. Today I have Jon Schumacher who is a webinar specialist and an online marketing consultant. His clients have earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales using webinars. He’s the co-founder of Client Mint LLC, a digital marketing agency focused on building automated marketing funnels for coaches, consultants and other agencies. Jon’s also the host of the Webinar Mastery Summit, the largest online webinar conference and has hosted over 300 webinars in the past four years. Awesome. Thanks so much for being here, Jon.

JS: Thank you for having me, Landon.

LR: When did you start your business?

JS: I started in the online space about five years ago. I’ve been full-time in the marketing space for the last three years.

LR: If you could go back and give that “five-years-ago-guy” some tips, what would they be?

JS: You know, I think for me it would be to stop focusing so much on what I call front end strategies. So I was, at that time taking every course. I was following every new hot trend that was being put out in the form of courses from other experts. And I learned a bunch of random skills, but I never really got to a point of profitability at that point. I was spreading myself too thin and I feel like a lot of people, particularly when they get started, they get pulled into a lot of the flashy items. You know, I learned how to do YouTube SEO. I learned how to do all these random things and I built a YouTube channel, but I didn’t really have any way to monetize that like I wanted. And my goal was to leave a job at that point, and I just kind of struggled to get there.

LR: We tend to get pretty enthusiastic about the stuff that people are saying, like this is the secret to whatever and it’s a hard decision to make to stop being in learning mode, right? Because before you got into the industry there was a ton you didn’t know, right? You didn’t even know what YouTube SEO might even be for or the concept of traffic generation and lead generation and the whole process. So it seems like we do have to somehow immerse ourselves and learn some stuff to get a sense of what this industry is. But then at the same time, there’s a point where we’ve got to go, okay I’m done learning. I actually have to deliver something to the marketplace. How do you figure you make that decision?

JS: You know, it’s a good question. Sometimes you’ve just got to learn and go through it. But I think, for me, I should have done a better job seeking out other people to help me. Finding a mentor, somebody who’s two, three, four years ahead of me instead of just trying to figure things out on my own. I think that was one of my early mistakes was … And I think somebody I would have trusted could have sat me down and said, no you need to focus here. If your goal is to create a business and leave your job, you need to sit here and focus on this stuff. So I think that was a key thing that I could have done better early.

LR: Now you’ve had some significant success. What do you feel like your kind of unique skill sets or talents are that’s enabled that?

JS: Part of it being able to connect with people. I’ve always been kind of a good person at connecting with others so I found a lot of partners early that helped co-promote with me. So I think that one skill I think has really helped me is developing the ability to connect with other human beings and make connections in your space. Even if you’re just getting started, I know you get a little nervous about approaching people that are a few pegs ahead of you but being willing to push through that and actually build relationships and give and help and just be a nice person to them, that’s been huge for me.

My latest obsession and what I feel like I’m good at and feel like what I feel I want to keep going, is more on the fundamentals. Like what’s the big idea of your funnel? What’s the marketing message? How do you make your offer compelling? How do you make your marketing message on a presentation compelling? So I feel like those elements are what I’m sort of obsessed with. And in the past when I’ve been obsessed with things I tend to learn them and get really good at them. So I kind of go all in when I get excited about something.

LR: Yeah. It’s interesting what you say about connecting with people and reaching out to people that are at a different level than you. When I got started in this industry, which was quite a while back, it was a way more transactional kind of time where if you wanted somebody to maybe promote your offer, their first question was, how big is your list?

And if your list was not basically the size of their list, then they were not interested because they expected you to promote them and it was like this trade thing. And what I have seen, over the last few years in particular, is that model is just tired. And this kind of like, you know, sort of fake promotion, like I’m just going to say whatever I got to say to sell this guy’s thing so he’ll sell my thing, like it’s just not even the game anymore at all.

JS: That’s correct.

LR: Yeah, right? The people that are good at this, the people that have relationships with lists that are valuable are actually looking for high quality products to sell, not somebody just to promote them or whatever. We’re looking for the best experiences to deliver and when you can show up with that, you’re going to find that the people that you talk to are receptive, right?

JS: Right.

LR: And so your point, focusing on the back end, what you’re actually delivering can really be the long and short of it at the beginning of your career, right?

JS: Oh yeah. Like you say, and I think you put it well, the old way of scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours is sort of fizzling out a bit, which is not a bad thing. But I think it’s … I don’t know, it’s just simple for me. I like human beings and I want to make friends with them. Like when I went to a JB event in San Diego earlier this year and they asked, what are you looking to get out of this? And it was a JAB specific event. And I said, I’m looking for friends first, right? Because I don’t really want to do business with people that I don’t have the same philosophy with. And I wouldn’t expect them to do the same with me. So I think it starts with that filter and then, of course, you can look at some of the more business type metrics, lists and stuff like that. But I think, for me, I was able to get a few bigger people that were notches ahead of me earlier because I was just a good person to them and I enjoyed them.

I did a lot of interview content so I got to meet people doing interviews like this where you get to … It’s a great way to meet people. Write a podcast or add a video.

LR: I’ll be asking you actually to promote me after this.

JS: There we go. But I had one of the first video Google hangout podcasts when that came out so that’s how I got into webinars and stuff. So I was just doing a lot on interviews, meeting a lot of people, following up with them. Actually being a good person to them. It’s a huge, long game kind of play that is really great.

LR: Yeah. It never goes out of style, right? Apart from just like run a webinar, what is the thing that’s working right now to maybe drive traffic and opt-ins and attendees to webinars?

JS: Yeah. You know I have a very simple model right now. Like you said, I used to do a ton of JB webinars. I don’t do that as much anymore. I used to do a lot of interviews with webinar, teaching webinars with my list and stuff. What we’re doing right now is very simple and you might even laugh. And it kind of goes against a lot of the complexity that’s being taught today in the market. Like you need all of these PDF opt-ins and the messenger bot follow-up to get them on the webinar and all this stuff. You know, what we do is, we focus on the fundamentals. So we get a highly relevant ad. So like Facebook scores ads zero to ten, we’re looking at the eight, nine, ten to drive really good leads. And in most cases we’re testing right to a webinar, which you’re not supposed to do, right? But in a lot of industries it still works very well.

LR: A webinar opt-in?

JS: Yeah. So a webinar opt-in. So from ad to webinar opt-in. And then we’re doing, we’re just allowing people to watch the webinar. We’re not like fake living it or anything like…

LR: So it’s not … It’s a video actually.

JS: It’s basically a video. And the goal is driving applications, not necessarily selling on the webinar. So there’s a little different psychology there. If you were selling a course, the funnel would probably look a little bit different. But we found that, for a lot of industries, when you get the fundamentals right, when you get the ad, the webinar, and you have the offer ready, which are kind of the core.

And again, I’m obsessed with the 80-20 core. When you get those things right, that you can make that profitable very quickly.

LR: Yeah. And are you … just to get tactical for one second … are you getting an email before you show them the video or it’s literally just come watch my video and we’ll talk after.

JS: They do get a confirmation email where they can click through to go to the webinar or they can watch it off the thank you page.

LR: They don’t even need to give you their email address?

JS: No. They do. They do. So they opt in. So it’s a registration page. They opt in. We integrate the CRM and all that.

LR: Got it.

JS: And then the next page is a thank you page where they can either watch it on the hour or they can click a button that literally lets them watch the presentation like right now. So we’re using a form of just-in-time, where people can come. They can consume the content.

LR: Got it. So what are you learning right now. What is it that you’re struggling with? What are you trying to figure out? What is the cutting edge for you?

JS: For me, it’s team building. You know I kind of came from a previous background of a course model, the influence, or trying to sell courses and consulting kind of the solopreneur into more of now we have a team and an agency and things like that more. So I’m learning, how to hire and fire, how to motivate the team, who to get good people in there. How to manage more hands-on, high touch client work and stuff like that. So that’s been a learning curve for me definitely and I’m sure you got a big team here. You know, putting that together and making sure that there’s cohesiveness, that people work together, that our clients are taken care of and all those things is been a great learning experience.

LR: Yeah. So you’re just starting out. You’re five years in or whatever. But have you got a sense yet, of what it’s all for? Like what is the legacy that you’re building?

JS: I want to be known as someone who cared about his clients, as somebody who was a good person, who did it the right way. Who made a lot of money and helped people make a lot of money but did it in a way that. My dad always said, “Never lie.” Never lie to people, right? And I think that one of the reasons why we don’t do all the fake live webinars and things like that, is that I want that trend to go through what we do.

LR: So we call this thing MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR, trying to get what the unique opportunity is of this moment, right? Everything’s changing so quickly and, as entrepreneurs, we have these opportunities that are available to us that have never been available before. And we’re trying to uncover what those things are and maybe also what the unique responsibilities are that we have as entrepreneurs. What do you feel like those things might be?

JS: I think we have a responsibility to be professional, to take care of our clients, and to treat them like people. I think, again going back to that, I think there’s some regions of the market there’s less of that than others. And so I thin, for me, I feel a responsibility to them, to our clients, to the people we’re helping share their message. To treat them with respect. To do good work for them and to communicate with them. I’m quoting like Zappos who was famous for customer service? I think the CEO was obsessed with it. I kind of feel that same way a little bit, almost too much, but … But I think for me the responsibility is, I don’t just want their money. Like I want to get them the result. And I feel like that’s a huge responsibility that keeps me up at night but I think it’s a good one, too.

LR: Great. Thank you so much for being here. It’s really a pleasure Jon. Would you sign our wall?

JS: Yeah, sure.

LR: Thank you.

JS: What have we got here? Where’s the wall? Right behind us?

LR: Yeah. Right there.

JS: All right

Want more MODERN ONTRAPRENEUR Podcast?

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