The difference between a successful and failed marketing campaign can be as simple as a good marketing offer.

Let me explain.

I own a gym that sells a premium membership called Tribe.

We’ve been trying and failing miserably to generate more leads for our Tribe membership with Facebook Ads for the past two years.

We’d been running the same old ads and offers for too long. The ‘Free 7-day trial’ is tired – everyone’s doing them. So our ads were blending in instead of standing out.

Then I tried something completely different. I said we’d pay people $77 to train at our gym for a month – with a few minor T’s and C’s.

We went from getting less than one lead per week to 15. And within a month, we’d added $21,000 in recurring revenue to our business from a $1,000 marketing campaign.

I didn’t even realise what I’d done for a start, except obviously, pay people to train with us. But the lesson behind all this is that your marketing offer can make or break your campaign.

Shit offers get shit results, no matter how good the copy or creative is. And great offers get great results, even if the copy and creative sucks.

After thinking about this for a few months and realising what I’d done, I decided to reverse engineer my process and share it with you here.

The Opposite Of An Irresistible Offer – Blending In With The Crowd

Before I get into it, I want to point out the game we’re playing here is direct response marketing – utterly different to brand marketing and stuff like that. This is what you do when you want to make sales now.

The goal here is to make your offer soo good that people find it hard to refuse. How do you do that? You steal the 1990s infomercial playbook.

But first, let me suggest an easier way. Stop doing what your competitors are doing and steal from others doing it well.

Like I suggested earlier, when you look like your competitors, it’s all a wash. You drown each other out.

Let’s not do that.

So scan your market, look at the channels your competitors are advertising on, look at your competitor’s shopfronts, browse their websites, etc., and note their offers. You’ll quickly notice

• All their offers are the same
• You’re probably doing the same thing too

Keep that list as a reminder of the offers you won’t use.

Imitating Other Irresistible Offers

Now you’re going to create a second list.

Take note of any offers from businesses that catch your attention. This is your might-do-list.

Marketers call this a swipe file – I guess the idea is when you need inspiration, you can swipe some from this might-do-list.

Granted, curating this list might take a few weeks or months. But keep paying attention, and you’ll build up a massive resource of ideas.

The point of this approach is not to reinvent the wheel. You can save yourself a ton of time and energy by stealing your ideas from others.

I got the idea to pay people to train – from web3/crypto gaming where people can play to earn – I just took that concept and applied it to our gym.

However, read on if you wish to be a tad more intellectually honest.

Creating Your Own Marketing Offer

You can copy a simple framework that mimics how we ran our Tribe promotion and the billion-dollar infomercials of the days before cable tv.

Your offer needs six parts.

• Promotion
• Offer
• Extra’s (‘but wait, there’s more)
• Scarcity
• Urgency
• Guarantee

Promotion

This is your hook – Your goal here is to get someone’s attention.

But like I mentioned before, if your hook is the same as everyone else – it won’t get anyone’s attention.

“We’ll pay you $77 to train at our gym for a month” got people’s attention.

Generally, promotions are either something for free or a discount and need to be related to what you want people to buy.

Keep your promotion as concise and to the point as possible. Less than 15 words is ideal.

“Get $50 off your next Air Force 1’s pair.”

“Free oil change with every warrant of fitness”

Offer

Your offer is what you’re selling. And what you want to focus on here is the outcome your customers want.

You’re not selling ‘babysitting‘. You’re selling ‘a relaxing night out with your partner’.

You’re not selling ‘lawn mowing‘. You’re selling ‘a yard that makes your neighbours jealous.

You’re not selling ‘a warrant of fitness. You’re selling a car that won’t let you down.

There are a couple of ways you can look at this. The two obvious and easiest benefits to sell are time & money.

A classic fitness industry Offer is ‘lose x amount of weight in 6 weeks’ – We all want instant results.

You can also offer convenience – we love making life easier. Or, like I’ve re ferred to above, you can offer something more aspirational.

The offer for our gym membership was super-boring; it went something like ‘earn money, have fun & get fit.

Extra’s

I’m not 100% convinced that these actually make any difference. But I did watch my Dad buy a few magic dusters back in the day, and he seemed pretty chuffed with all the weird extra attachments, so perhaps they do…

This is the ‘but wait; there’s more stuff‘ that every infomercial ever offers.

We hide ours in our tribe offer. We gave each new member a welcome pack but didn’t tell them about it till afterwards… Why? I’m not sure. Generally, you’re probably better off stating these upfront as a deal sweetener.

Like ‘And we’ll throw in a free hedge trim’ or ‘And we’ll replace any broken windscreen wipers for half-price.’

You want to add as much value as possible while spending as little Extra as possible here.

Scarcity

Scarcity is scientifically proven to work. It even got a whole chapter in Robert Caldini’s epic book Persuasion.

Scarcity is the perception that products are more attractive when their availability is limited.

I mean, this is kind of how the whole diamond industry works. When something is limited, we think it’s worth way more than what it is.

The simplest way to do this is to restrict your offer to the first x amount of people. Or you could steal a classic big-box retailer line ‘until stocks last….’

We limited our tribe membership offer to 15 people – this was more out of necessity than me being clever, as we only have one salesperson – but hey, it worked.

Urgency

Urgency is just another form of scarcity but works differently.

When people drive past your billboard, they will forget about your ad as quickly as they can change gears.

You want to try and get people to act right now, or they probably won’t. Faking urgency is how do you make this happen.

We said our membership offer was open for two weeks, if I remember correctly. Some infomercials were as aggressive as saying that the deal only lasted until the end of the ad.

Again though. I wasn’t being clever here. For other reasons, we wanted everyone in the ‘getting paid to train group’ to go through our program simultaneously.

I haven’t read anything about it, but I imagine someone has already scientifically proven that urgency works.

Guarantee

Adding a guarantee to your offer makes the purchase less risky for your customer.

None of us wants to be the fool that got sucked into a gimmicky ad. Or pay for something that makes our lives worse, not better.

Guarantees like ’30 day money back’ or ‘full refund if you’re not satisfied with the outcome’ help us overcome our customer’s fears about buying.

If you’re confident in your product, you can even guarantee people an outcome or a result within a certain period of time.

We didn’t include a guarantee in our tribe membership offer because we were already paying them to train – they didn’t exactly have much to lose.

But generally, we offer all members a 30-day refund window. So they can cancel their membership at any stage during the first 30 days, and we’ll give them a full refund.

Irresistible Offer Example

Okay, bringing that all together, here are a couple of examples of offers that will work.

[Promotion] We’ll pay you $77 to train at our gym

[Offer] Need some motivation to get fit. We’ll pay you to train you for the next month.

Over the next month, we’ll help you look better, feel better and make some friends.

[Extra’s] And you’ll get a free gift box with lots of healthy food to kick you off

[Urgenc + Scarcity] We’re only opening this up to 10 people we feel will give this their best efforts. You have to apply before the end of the week if you’re interested.

[Gurantee] The best part is that you’ll still make $77 while doing something good for yourself, even if you hate it.

[CTA] Hit the link below to apply.

^ I know it’s not amazing – I wrote that in less than a minute. But you get the point. And the best thing about this framework is that it takes very little work to create a high performing offer.

Wrapping Up

So, if you want to increase your click-through rates and conversion rates and decrease your customer acquisition costs, start with your marketing offer.

Don’t do what your competitors are doing; steal a good one from another industry or use the framework above to create your own.