Harnessing the Power of Incentive-Based Marketing with Marco Torres

In this Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast episode, we'll be speaking with special guest Marco Torres - the Founder of MarketingBoost.com and a master in incentive-based marketing. Learn how you can unlock your business potential and reach new heights in sales and growth by incentivizing your customers with value-add incentives instead of discounts. Tune into this insightful episode as Marco shares tips and tactics for success that can help you reach financial freedom.

#FinancialFreedom #IncentiveBasedMarketing #GrowYourBusiness

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Transcript

Harnessing the Power of Incentive-Based Marketing with Marco Torres

[00:00:06] Ryan: Hey guys, Ryan DeMent from Chasing Financial Freedom Podcast. I hope you guys are having a wonderful day today. On the podcast we have Marco Torres. Marco is the founder of marketing boost.com. He has helped thousands of business owners worldwide boost sales in scale their businesses by as much as fivefold through the use of incentive-based marketing.

He teaches entrepreneurs how to source sales and marketing through the use of value, add incentives instead of discounts. Marco, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:38] Marco: Thank you for having me, Ryan. I'm glad to be here. 

[00:00:40] Ryan: You're more than welcome. Thanks for the wait for coming on. Happy to have you on. So before we jump into what you're doing, a little bit about who you are, and then we'll get into your journey.

[00:00:51] Marco: Good. Thank you. Yeah, I've glad to be here away cuz I've been an entrepreneur since age nine and I've my father taught me work ethic, was a very early age. There was no handouts for me and my brothers. There was no allowance, but we wanted to make, when I wanted to get me awin bike, he said you better make.

Figure out how to make some money or wait for Santa Claus . He suggested a paper out and, but he didn't just do that. He actually walked me through it. Back then there was no internet, so you had to go door to make the sales. You had to go back to the door, each door and collect the money.

You had to keep manual spreadsheets on who owed me money, who didn't. They had to get up at five in the morning to make the deliveries. And a few years later, by age 12, I was featured on the front page of building the biggest paper route they'd ever seen. So it was a learning curve that, that my dad helped me put together, including even leveraging from early on, one of the first things I learned to do was leverage relationships and I had my buddies helping me deliver the papers and so that I could focus on what I did best, which happened to be selling subscriptions and collecting the money.

It worked out good and by the time I was 23, I owned five restaurants in a nightclub and I was a very early adapter of internet marketing, which was what brings us here today is that I've been a internet marketer since 1996. So I've watched the very, all of the evolution of everything going on, and hopefully I can add some value bombs to your listeners out there that are considering starting your business, getting going and what have.

[00:02:15] Ryan: That's awesome. Nine years old. That is really cool. One what inspired you? Is it something that I know you wanted to bike, but was there anything in your family, was your dad an entrepreneur? What? What caused all that? 

[00:02:27] Marco: What spurd it. My mother was the entrepreneur. Really? She was the, was a real estate agent.

She was a Avon sales rep. She was Mary Kay. The rep of the year, got the got, drove the pink Cadillac way back when, if you remember that stuff, oh yeah. And and my father was a a risk taker gambler. He. You're an echo. He was the first to take our family. We are, we're Mexican descendants born in San Antonio, Texas, and all of my family, cousins, uncles, brothers, they all grew up in San Antonio.

Most of them were still there. And my dad was given the opportunity to go to the Caribbean and run the. Become the Vice President of General Electric Credit in the Caribbean. So he picked up the whole family. We moved thousands of miles across the, the ocean and a risk taker, and he ended up building up a huge, most successful wing of General electric credit was throughout the Caribbean and.

Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. So I happened to, was lucky enough to grow up in those beautiful islands and what have you. But but yeah, they, I had, my parents were great leaders and so I was fortunate enough to have that leadership role from both my mother and father and support as well.

When I did be decide to become an entrepreneur and dropped outta college, they were like, yeah, do it. You. Go for it. 

[00:03:44] Ryan: How long do you guys live in the Caribbean 

[00:03:47] Marco: for? Quite some time. My, my younger brother is still there. He is in Puerto Rico now and has a huge farming and coffee business.

He has farms throughout the island growing coffee. He's got coffee shops. He's got he. Brew and roasts his own coffee and sells it all over to all the shops and everything all over the island, coffee vending machines, and also goes, sells online around the world. So he's become very successful and still in Puerto Rico.

But we were there for years probably, let's see, I got there at age nine and left at age 27, so it was quite a while. . Yeah. 

[00:04:24] Ryan: That's awesome. So you saw that between your mother and your father and at nine you're out, running your paper out and so forth. What was your next evolution?

What did you, you stepped into restaurants and a nightclub, 

[00:04:38] Marco: correct? Yeah. What happened? There was a, when I got outta high, And I sold the restaurant route, the paper route when I was, again, about 13 cuz I wanted to focus on playing high school and junior high school football. And I didn't have time for that.

Anyway I actually was able to sell the route for what, back to then seemed like a lot of money and to me, up, I don't know how much it was, but we went on, then I got out of, high school and went to a year, about a year and a half of college. and realized this is not for me. I never was a very good student.

And so I'm like I wanna, instead of going to college, I wanna be in business and I wanted, so I convinced my older brother who did graduate college and had come back and my mother, who was the constant entrepreneur and Mexican descendants and would always throw me parties and cook up an amazing Mexican meals and everything.

And so I convince the family, let's open up Mexican restaurants. and my dad was in the finance world, the general electric credit. So you know, he, again, we had that family encouragement and they, my dad told my brother and I if you're serious about that, first you gotta go prove it by going, you guys don't know anything about the restaurant business.

Go learn, go work for other restaurants. So we went to We went to Dallas Texas and San Antonio, and stayed with my uncle and went to work at every kind of similar restaurant we were planning on opening which was fast food operations and learned the, the, and we would take the late night job and like the lesson here to anybody listening is when you're considering starting your own business, one of the great ways to do it is don't just launch it.

Don't just gamble going out on your own and don't necessarily go out and buy an expensive franchise. But at least you had better go be an apprentice somewhere, go work for somebody that does exactly what you're planning on doing, whether it be volunteer or what have you. But we picked up all kinds of late night.

The, our favorite job was to pick up the midnight shifts so that we could be in the restaurant with very few people around taking photographs with everything. We were n taking notes, photographs. Essentially funnel hacking the restaurant business because we were figuring out what do they order?

Who do they order from? What kind of, what's their stainless steel equipment setup look like? Who, what are the equipment brands that they're using who are their suppliers? You name it. And after about a year of doing that with different companies and everything else, we had come up with our plan.

We had looked at franchising and realized we couldn't afford that. So we came back with a structure and a plan and we implemented it. And before long, in five years, we had five restaurants opened in five years between the family. So that was and then I launched off and did nightclub on my own, but when I was 23.

[00:07:11] Ryan: So how did you guys start these, you guys brought all your capital together as a family unit to. Yep. 

[00:07:17] Marco: He had capital from the family, and again, my dad was in the finance world. So he knew how to help us get financing and we closed on getting ourselves into the, one of the most successful.

Shopping malls in Puerto Rico at the time called the Plaza Las Americas. It's right in the center of San Juan. Oh yeah. Which is Yes. Which has about a million people a month back then used to go through the mall more than any other mall in America, because there's 4 million people on the island.

And they would all come to the mall at least once a month, apparently. , or at least a quarter of 'em would. And so when they opened up that food court, which back then was a new. and we were the, one of the third restaurant to open on a food court. So from the day one, we were like the, one of the first restaurants.

And it wasn't easy because Puerto Ricans, believe it or not, did not know or Mexican food. Yeah. So it was totally different for them. A taco to them was the heel of a shoe. , the word taco in Puerto Rico meant the heel of your shoes. So they did not, you, we had to educate them all on every facet of the menu.

What is guacamole? What is it? Cadas? What are tacos? What are burritos? It was just, a pain. Matter of fact, that's when I really bothered to learn Spanish. I did not. Growing up in Puerto Rico, I went to American private schools. It was cool to be gringo. It was cool to be American. We were more the American guys were more popular with the Puerto Rican girls, so I was like I'm from Texas, , forget about my Mexican heritage.

I'm from Texan. And then now what I I got a Mexican restaurant with my mother and my brother and my consumers. Our customers are mocking me cuz I can barely speak Spanish. So I had to quickly pick up and start learning some Spanish to keep selling some more tacos, . 

[00:08:52] Ryan: So I guess the question is, did you stay cool with the girls?

[00:08:55] Marco: Oh yeah, I've managed to do that. That's where the nightclub really kicked in.

[00:09:02] Ryan: So you hit the restaurants, you open up five. What's going on with the nightclub during this time? 

[00:09:07] Marco: The nightclub, I went in, opened that with another partner and all of this. Mind you, again, a couple of lessons learned here. I, leveraged relationships with obviously my brother, my older brother, my mother, and we leveraged that, we networked together and my fa dad with financing and bookkeeping and helping us organize the business on the back of the house.

And then the nightclub, I got another partner involved in that 50 50 partner and. We went into that role and before you knew it, we were open from till seven in the morning. It was, we opened at 10:00 PM to 7:00 AM in the morning. We were the late night crowd bar of San Juan Right.

In the tourist zone. And that was a fun experience. But shoot. And then we had a restaurant in St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands, which was. A dream. My brother and I were living in some amazing houses with amazing views of the Caribbean and of course working our asses up, but shoot, it was I knew back then I was blessed.

It was like, man, to be able to live in these beautiful Caribbean islands and know, you work hard, but we played hard, so those were good. . 

[00:10:10] Ryan: So with the nightclub and I want to go back to it cuz you're, you initially at the restaurants, you're using family money. How did you get the nightclub up and going?

[00:10:19] Marco: By then I had made some money with the with the restaurants and what have you. And so I had my own money, my partner put up money and we moved forward on that nightclub which was, it started in phases too. We had a smaller location, but we ended up taking, the locations next door upstairs and expanding over time.

But we turned into, we started off, we launched it as a jazz club and before we knew it, we were re importing rock and roll bands. That's when we really kicked it up a into gear. We'd fly, I'd fly over to Fort Lauderdale and recruit. American style, rock and roll bands to fly into Puerto Rico and put them on a route.

They'd spend six weeks in in in San Juan playing at my club. And then I'd send them on to St. Thomas to play it at at other facilities that I was friends and networked with. And in St. Thomas and in St. Croix. So I would end up putting the recruiting bands and giving them a three month. Gig. So it was a win for them.

It was a win for me as their, so to speak, promoter. So I was not only making money with 'em in my club, I was, bumping up the price a bit when I put 'em in St. Thomas and in St. Croix to help offset Mike costs for bringing the band down. And it was a, an ongoing thing. I always had bands coming in from Fort Lauderdale that were.

Keeping my club jam packed, for the six weeks they were in town. So it was a fun experience as an early age, learning how to do everything, advertising on the radio, running promotions and so on. And great experience as part of what later turned in. Then I got burned out on the restaurant business.

I got burned out on people, because I, one of the lessons I hadn't learned at the time is that the customer is not always right. There's some people believe the customer's always right. I've learned to believe no, the customer's not always right. But I didn't know that at the time.

And because of that, the restaurant industry just burned me out because I really, the consumers can. Bees, so over the top demanding that it can wear on you. And then it was, it started to become I, I wasn't enjoying the business, so we eventually sold some of the restaurants to Taco Bell when they came to the island.

They wanted in on the major food courts that we had. And I moved on from the restaurant business and moved to Florida. And eventually I did all kinds of sales of everything under the moon and eventually fell into the travel space and online internet marketing and that. Has become, we've, I've generated over a billion dollars since 19 97, 97, and forward on the internet for the companies that I work for and my own companies and my clients.

And and that's become the focus that I do today, mo mostly it with my own businesses. It's in the travel space as well as, the supporting thousands of business owners right now that use our travel incentives with our company marketing. . 

[00:13:12] Ryan: So let's talk about marketing boost in what you're doing there and the evolution and how you could help entrepreneurs and small business owners.

[00:13:19] Marco: Sure. Thank you for that. The. Best part of the story in a way is how it came about because we were in the travel space, traditional kind of a discount travel website, and it was just, we started in 2010 with this travel site and it was really starting to do quite well, growing one of the fastest growing travel sites in North America.

And, but we were struggling to get video reviews. We wanted video testimonials, and we kept thinking to ourselves, man, if we only had our clients filming selfie videos from the resorts, the hotels, the beaches of the world, and if they were bragging about the hotels we were marketing, And our brand. We would leverage those and use them in our ads, in our Facebook landing pages, in our final, et cetera.

We just said, man, how could we get these video reviews? And we really weren't successfully generating hardly any. So we came up with an idea of offering a bonus trip and offering a three night stay in your choice of Orlando or Las Vegas to all the people that were travel. With through our website. And the key though here, anybody listening, here's the key that we, how we implemented it, that turned out to be a home run.

This is still relevant today. We still use this process every day right now, and we teach a lot of our clients to do the same, which is we would do a survey. When we expected our clients to be at their peak of happiness. So that's part of the lesson you need to take away from this right here. When your client, cuz we all need, we all should be soliciting reviews.

You need reviews, written or video. You need that social proof on the internet to prove what you're suggesting you sell is for real and produces results. We would do a survey the day, we would send 'em a message the day before they traveled and say, Hey, we see you're traveling tomorrow. We hope you have a safe and wonderful trip, but if you got any questions, don't forget, here's where the links to click and or call or what have you, if you have any problems.

Then the day after check-in, that's when we expected them to be at their peak of happiness. We'd send them a message saying, How is the hotel living up to your expectation right now? How has our service been so far? Can you give us a rating of one to five? Tell us where we're at and if they replied with a four or five happy about the hotel, then we'd send them another message Immediately on Automation autopilot, we'd send 'em a message saying, Hey.

Thank you. We're wondering, we're thrilled. You're having a great time in enjoying the hotel and the resort. Would you help us spread the word about this resort and do us a huge favor? Would you go the extra mile and film a selfie video from the resort for your favorite place? The pool, the restaurant, the bar, brag about the hotel, brag about our brand, and if you do that we'll reward you with a complimentary three nights day in Orlando or Las Vegas on us while the video review started.

Now we were able to take those real people. Paid actors commercials. . We had real people that were filming these video reviews from the beaches of the bars. The pools. And you could tell they were real cuz they were, not just a bunch of pretty actors. You had all kinds of people.

pretty, pretty ugly, slim fat, it was like , you could tell nobody would've paid this people for review. So No. But and so we had 'em all sorts coming in. And that we did exactly what we thought we could do. We could post those on our ads, we could use them in video, post them all over our landing pages, and we were leveraging those into thousands of additional sales.

And then of course, everybody started raising their hand to say, Hey, how do we use that free trip you promised? So now we were having to dig into our pockets to pay for those rooms for people, which was expensive. Yeah. So we went back to the hotel partners because we were in the travel space and we said, you know what?

You've got a problem and we think we have a solution for it. You've got, let's be honest here. Your hotel is never full year round. You're full uncertain. Holiday dates, certain weekends, special events peak seasons. But the 70% of the year, 30 to 40% of your hotel rooms are going empty. And we think we can help solve that problem.

So once we got 'em to agree, they had a problem that 30 or 40% of their rooms are not sold most of the year, says we can put some warm bodies in those rooms, couples, families, individuals that will spend money at the restaurant, the bar, the spa at the casino, the gift shop, the excursion desk, the room service.

They'll book extra nights, they'll upgrade room types and you'll get some revenue versus none. Cuz we made 'em realize, your. Would if that room goes empty. Once that clock clicks midnight, that's revenue you're never gonna see and there's no way to recoup it. However, if you have somebody in those rooms your fixed costs are still the same.

You've still got the maintenance, your mortgage, your maintenance fees, your front desk staff. The only additional cost is the maid service. But now these people are hopefully gonna spend money everywhere else on the property and you'll get some revenue versus none. So they agreed and we got a few to.

and then we had the ability now to give, they gave us those rooms next to nothing. Of course they d they don't include airfare, food, and beverage or government fees and taxes. But we had now the rooms at. Almost free that we could fulfill those free trips we were giving away to our own clients in exchange for the video review.

Then we thought, can you imagine if we solicited hundreds of resorts to participate in this in destinations all over the world, we would have another standalone business. And that is what became marketing boost.com today, where we provide, we provide complimentary hotel. From three nights to seven late stay in over 130 destinations around the world, where our business owners that join marketing booths have the ability to give away these very high perceived value incentives with whatever they're called to action is.

So we're tr, we teach our members how to position the, those incentives. Along, so we have the hotel savings cards. We have complimentary hotel stays and restaurant savings vouchers that business owners can use in a myriad of ways to acquire more clients, create loyalty programs you name it.

Use them to generate reviews, solve customer service problems. There's a million ideas there, but Ryan, at the end of the day, it's not so much whether to use Marketing Boost or not. Coming up with your, what I call your, what is your adult Happy meal? What do you do McDonald's to stand out from the crowd?

What is, , what do you have as a business owner that helps people select you over your competitor and you opt, you should be finding something just like Amazon did with. With Amazon Prime to get free shipping. See, those are incentive marketing. We all recognize Amazon Prime is we all bought into Amazon Prime.

Even before we were into streaming video, we wanted the gift, the incentive we wanted was free shipping. So we bought Amazon Prime and then eventually we found out, hey, these videos, they have not too bad, but we bought it not for the videos, for the free shipping. And then we all became loyal clients of Amazon.

McDonald's has that. And addicted. And addicted. And if you recall in the early days, you might find something on macy's dot com, you'd go check Amazon to see if they had it because you wanted the free shipping. And we still do that. So yes. And then what do they do? They forced the rest of the world to try to offer free shipping.

Then McDonald's has the Happy Meal. They get parents all over the world choose McDonald's if they have children, because they have the, they take the eye, their, they end up taking their eye off the price, focusing on the prize, which is the bundle of the burger, the soda, the snack.

and the toy, the little, the , the seasonal toy with the next big movie, Disney movie, what have you, and the collectible toy. And now, they're generating billions of dollars a year in extra revenue that they can, that they know is subject to the Happy Meal, which they've been doing for decades now and haven't gotten rid of it.

And I actually heard they now have an adult Happy Meal that they're launching in some markets to test . So I don't know what that is even, but the point being, Creating an incentive to get people to take action instead of just discounting, which can also make me a dig, a big difference in your bottom line.

[00:21:14] Ryan: Can I ask you this? Can it work across any industry with what you guys are doing? 

[00:21:19] Marco: Now that's a great question because most people listening to this would be thinking I can't imagine how a travel incentive would've helped me as a lawyer or helped me as a online, retailer or what have you.

But yeah, we have my Facebook group, for example, one of my Facebook groups has over 30,000 entrepreneurs alone in it. And in that group we. There's all kinds of people that are using these incentives from every industry, from those that are doing home improvements to multi-level marketers, to retailers brick and mortar to offline, online and offline to, you name it, everything from lemonade stats to car dealerships in Chicago.

What is it, how would, give you an idea Ryan, how they can be used in so many different industries? It's. One, not many of us are doing online things of one sort or another. And so you could be using incentives, for example, to get people to show up for a webinar. You could be saying, Hey, register for the webinar.

We're going to be giving away three trips on this webinar at the end of the webinar, one to Cancun, one, the Kabul San Lucas, and wanted to Hawaii. So make sure you register for for the event, stay till the end. Be engaged and the, and we're gonna. Three winners from those of you that are on the live event.

So you're giving people a reason to come and a reason to stay till the end. Obviously, if you have more people come and more people stay to the end, you have a better shot at selling more of whatever your product or service is. Another way that all kinds of industries are using incentives. We all today thanks to Covid, have all gotten used to zoom.

For sales presentations, so our sales staff doesn't have to drive all over the city in the town of the state to meet people in person anymore. We can do it on a Zoom call, and that's everybody's not only cool with it, that's what they expect, but people book appointments, which is the first challenge. Can you get somebody to book an appointment with you?

The second challenge is can you get 'em to actually show up? Yeah, because there's big no-show rates. So one of the ways we rec, we've seen people have huge successes is to use one of our smaller incentives, what I call a micro incentive for a micro call to action, such as, You book that you know, if you book a no obligation free consultation phone call, we're gonna give you a $200 hotel savings card, good at over a million hotels worldwide to save you on your next hotel booking, just for booking the appointment and of course showing up on time.

So if you show up on time for the appointment, we think your time is super valuable. We think ours is as well. If you show up on time, we wanna reward you with a complimentary hotel savings card on us. For your next hotel booking, that's gonna raise your show rate. And if you do that for your sales team, you're likely doing what?

Adding to your bottom line. 

[00:24:01] Ryan: Adding. So let me ask you the next question, cuz I'm the obvious entrepreneur and business owner. Let's say I wanted to do that and let's say I wanna do a $200, gift card like you're talking about. , what is that how does that affect my bottom line in cash layout and how does that work off of my side as the business owner or the business?

[00:24:19] Marco: That's a great question cuz I forgot to tell you how simple this is, how we designed it. We really created a, an incredible win situation. One, for example, those complimentary hotel stays that I talked about. 130 destinations. There's no timeshare presentations, no hoops to jump through by you or your client.

There's an online portal after they activate the certificate, which by the way, obviously these complimentary hotel stays don't include. This is the three disclaimers that we teach our members to give the client. They don't include air fair, they don't include food and beverage, and they don't include government taxes and fees.

Which is what's expected. The consumers are like, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. And so I'm paying your hotel, the, the hotel stay you're on the hook for your own airfare, your own food and beverage, and of course the government taxes. So when they receive that complimentary hotel stay, they pay the an activation fee, which covers which most of our clients let their client pay the activation fee that can be paid by the business owner as well.

They want to, if you've got a high ticket sale, you're a coaching deal, you sold a $30,000 annual coaching program, you might wanna go ahead and pay the a hundred dollars, activation fee or whatever it is for the hotel taxes for that room, and be, and give them a completely complimentary hotel stay.

But most of my clients, we all give that. We just. Give the proper disclosures and send them the incentive and let them decide if they want to activate it or not. And if they do, then after they activate it, they'll have 18 months to select travel dates from an online portal and so on. So your, as a business owner, Ryan your membership to Marketing Boost is only, it starts right now at only $37 a month.

Wow. And you have the ability, With that, you have the ability to give away as many of these incentives of all three categories that we offer with no limitations, so you can use them and as whether it's just a little bit here and there, or full-blown marketing campaigns, giving away hundreds of thousands a month now.

That's the complimentary hotel state. The hotel savings. Cost you nothing or your client? Nothing. When they receive it, there's no activation cost. The only time they have an expense is if and when they ever actually book a hotel and then they're gonna save, they work like a gift card, but they don't pay for the entire hotel stay.

They offer a. From 10 to about 50% off the retail price compared to the Expedia of the world. So it buys down the retail price and saves them from a hun, 10 to 50% off. So there's no activation fee at all on, on your part or your cl client's part until they're, they shop and they're ready to book and they see the savings.

They can see real time comparison rates to what the, what it would cost on price line, Expedia, whatever. And if they like, Boom. They click, they buy, and that's when they're paying for the reduced rate that they're traveling at. And then the restaurant savings cards work the same similar way. They they save people, they get buy one, get one 25% off, 50% off, 10% off, depending upon the vendor.

There's over a hundred thousand participating businesses and offers throughout the USA and Canada. So those are what I call them micro incentives. The restaurant savings vouchers. Or the hotel savings cars that can be used with smaller calls to action and then save the complimentary hotel days for a bigger transaction or a bigger commitment.

Maybe it's, again, regardless of what industry, and maybe you're dangling the complimentary hotel stay. Hey, if you buy our six month program we'll reward you with a complimentary hotel stay. You might be a multi-level marketer. You might say, Hey, if you start today and get our quick.

Program going, and in 90 days you, you bring six people to the sign up for the program. You get automatically six days and five nights in Cancun on us when you reached your 90 day goal. So you might be using it as a carrot for your own sales team or your down line to reach goals or so forth. There's just, you if you got a little bit of.

You can find ways to use these incentives in a million ways or tune into our podcast, tune into our training in, in, within our Facebook group where we're sharing all these ideas that people are using to make these incentives work for them. 

[00:28:23] Ryan: You've got me hooked. You really have, because I'm working on a couple of things right now and one is working with investors for real estate development.

It's workforce housing, and we work specifically with self-directed IRA investors. and they're very I have a fickle, I, that's the best way I can describe it. On an open podcast, and and it's competitive. It is a very competitive market, and being able to provide them something that's above and beyond what I can normally provide in an ROI or maybe some additional points, now I'm giving them some pleasure at the potential of pleasure to go spend three nights at a hotel or get $200 discount or whatever the case is.

Everybody likes to, at least I know, likes to travel, so why wouldn't they want to go enjoy some tropical location? And just kick back and relax. That's a huge incentive. 

[00:29:10] Marco: Yeah, absolutely. And mind you, speaking of everybody wanting to travel during Covid, we've been doing this since 2017, so when Covid hit we, we had a lot of our business owners, our members kind of panic and say , who's gonna want travel incentives during a, a pandemic?

So we lost 30, 40% of our member base that were using the incentives. But those that stuck with us, what they found out was that their consumers still had hope to travel down the road. So the people were still ac using and interested in activ, in grabbing the incentive, activating it, although I have to.

Very few people were actually traveling during 2020 and half of 2021, but once midway through 2021 came around and the vaccinations seemed to be working and people were either that or just fed up with all the lockdowns and already got covid. Were ready to travel. The, it turned into revenge travel and it still is.

Every, people are sick and tired of the lockdowns if they haven't already taken vacations. They are each, they wanna go somewhere and they wanna go more than they ever did before. Cuz they also learned that time is the only thing that, one thing we learned in Covid is family memories travel.

, these are the things that are, we value the most now versus going into the office and. Chasing the, the old American dream, which was climbing the corporate ladder. There's more entrepreneurs today than ever. There's more and people are trying to, work from home in one way or the other.

But the point being really is that tr demand for travel has never been as high. So if it's never been a better time to consider using these travel incentives in your mix of tool bags, Because there's the acceptance rate. People see that and they go, shoot, I'll, that's interesting. I want to, I wanna save money on my travel.

And then with inflation so high, even more so it's like a discount travel offer. Let's see, what's that all about? Yeah, they're interested in, they're act, using these more than ever before. So we're seeing our clients, our members getting a lot more success than they. I love 

[00:31:10] Ryan: it. You and I'll have to talk afterwards cuz that's that's pretty interesting.

I like it. I like what you guys are doing and it's just you to stand out in the crowd. You're right, you have to have that social proof, but also having a little bit of a carrot there does not hurt whatsoever to entice people to do something. And like I said earlier, a lot of people want to travel and now you use the word revenge travel.

I think I've traveled less after Covid than I did with during Covid. I just, here's, I'm opposite cuz I was on the road almost every week. Wow. Up until Covid hit. And then during Covid I was every other week. And then it got so bad to travel. I said, okay, I haven't stopped and I really haven't traveled since.

And I gotta get back into traveling every week again cuz we're gonna break ground on another development that'll have 14 houses in it. And guess what? I gotta be on the road and I just don't wanna deal with all the craziness in the airports. I pick people up here. I'm in Arizona, pick.

Pick my friends up, family up going to the airport. It's a fricking zoo. It's a mat house and 

[00:32:09] Marco: Yeah, that, that's true. And, but that's one reason, one of the things that our incentives, we have 30 US destinations with the complimentary hotel states, so some of the most popular are like the drive to markets.

Yeah, one, one way to do it is if they're close to, Vegas, they're driving to Vegas, or they're driving to San Diego, or they're driving to Orlando, or they're driving to Myrtle Beach, so the. The demand is there, but yeah, there's a lot of people true, that are, would prefer to drive now versus getting in the, going through all the airport, especially when, leave it with the, when it used to be required to wear a mask on the flight the whole way and all that.

Oh gosh, . So yeah, it's it's, but it's coming back around and, even with all the grief that you're referring, The airports are packed. You can see from the volume of flights. The only challenge we have right now and I don't have my finger on why, is, why are so many flights canceled?

Why are, why are so many late, and so on and so forth. So hopefully they can get, we can get back to full speed and get the back, all the pilots back working again, without all of the vaccine mandates that they had to fire. Have the staff and so on and so forth. So yeah, it just, 

[00:33:11] Ryan: but it gets down to a point.

And are you guys in this kind of off topic, when we go back to it, are you guys starting to see anybody or wanting to cut back on travel? Cause I'll be honest, I travel to the Midwest from here to Phoenix. I have to stop in Dallas, Fort Worth, cause I fly American. I've been there since God knows how long.

And then I fly to Indiana. That flight before Covid was $288 average every. , it's now $1,100. And that's not first class. That's not business class. That is back of the bus. And I'm a platinum member and I still get 1100 bucks a Actually, last week I lied. It was little less than a thousand dollars, but at the peak it was 14, $1,300.

Right around. Wow. Yeah. To fly there and it's are you kidding me? So that's why I stopped knowing that I can manage my business remotely and I have great people on the ground, but I do have to get back. And it's like that's gotta start pinching people's 

[00:34:08] Marco: pocketbooks. Oh, absolutely. Which is why the comp the hotel incentives this count.

Offering the hotel savings card or the complimentary hotel stay becomes more attractive because it's like, shoot, if my airfare is this expensive, then yeah, if I can save on the hotel stay, I'm interested. So yeah, they, because we still, many of us anyway, the majority of the country still likes to travel.

We still, oh yeah. We still want to, it's certainly, there's reasons to be discouraged about it with the prices of. , with the increase, cuz not only is, are typically not only is airfare higher or gas if you're driving, so is the hotel stays are up 30, 40%. , so it's it's an expensive.

Pleasure or luxury item to travel nowadays. And, but yet people still want to, and that's where these incentives can still be, make a big impact in whatever your call to action is. But you know what, besides that, I like to point out cuz not to sound just like a big infomercial for my travel incentives, the key is, coming up with Value Stack, right?

In other words, you probably do this, you've seen it and we've all seen it on other people's sales funnels, et cetera. Regardless of whether you use Marketing Boost or not with your business, what are you doing to add value with whatever you're call to action is? That can be done in a lot of ways.

You can be doing, creating additional incentives. That maybe have nothing to do with travel or marketing boost, but you've, for example, maybe it's about networking with other colleagues in a similar industry. And I'm just getting ready to do this, for example now with one of my colleagues. So I'm gonna offer one of my courses, training courses for free when he sells his product to his clients.

He'll be able to say, when you buy my product, you get, this other training course from my colleague over here at Marketing Boost included free, and I'm gonna include. His training course for free with products that I sell. So it becomes where by leveraging relationships, I'm adding value that doesn't cost me anything by having somebody a partner of mine that we're gonna be working together essentially with.

And I'm actually looking to bring in several more. Colleagues like this so that I can create a value stack of when you get involved with this program, you get this from me, this from Joe, this from, . And I'm adding value that is related to exactly what I'm, where we're promoting, helping you build and grow your business, for example.

And Where it's not, a throwing in a separate product. So that's just trying to give your, get your listeners out there thinking about what could they do that doesn't cost hard dollars, or, cut into your profit line to add a another bonus. Product or offer to help them, help create that scarcity and urgency.

If you take action before the following date or before the end of the day or before you leave this page or whatever, you are then saying, if you do this now and help people get, help people not procrastinate by giving them additional value to take action today or this week or this month with this promotion you're running and add these additional value units, whether it be your own units that you've brought in with.

Colleague maybe it's something you, the course you used to sell last year, now you've got an updated new course. So maybe you're, I don't know. I'm just trying to spark some, give you some ideas on how others are and how I do it as well. With and without our travel incentives creating value because it's been proven by hundreds of studies on, on, on us as humans, we react more to additional value.

Even a buy one BOGO offers, for example. More so than we do with 10, 20, 30, even 50% off the bogo. The value add of something else thrown in has a higher perceived value for us, which is why grocery stores all over the country when as soon as you walk in, they've got all these areas, buy one, get one baskets, and now they've got you buy in.

All they really did in many cases is double the price but we. We walk in and we end up buying two cans of beans that we didn't even need. Cuz it says buy one get one. . Yeah. 

[00:38:06] Ryan: Or you could be like Costco and they suck you in by those sales right when you walk in. And then all the good stuff is in the center of the store.

So you've gotta go back there to find it. 

[00:38:14] Marco: So it's part of that. Yeah. It's that, that trip wire or the lead magnet. They ca you got you in for the, that's like when you gotta buy a quarter of milk. Why do they not have milk at the front of the store? You gotta go all the way to the back of the store to buy milk when that, if that's, by the time you get back to the cash register, you picked up five or six other items.

[00:38:31] Ryan: Yeah, for sure. I like the value add and the value stack and not, discounting. What would be, I know you just said you're sharing across platforms with other creators. What about with somebody? I'm trying to think of something that would be how about somebody, I think you mentioned earlier, somebody that does remodeling or construction, what could be some value ads that.

[00:38:51] Marco: Yeah, I do. I've been involved in a number of re remodeling and flipping homes as well up in the Orlando market, so adding value there is with real estate market. I haven't. That's a unique question because it's, you gotta be very careful, at least in Florida, and the laws vary in every state in the country.

 When it comes to adding an incentive with a real estate transaction can be tricky because you, there are laws that you gotta be careful with, so I don't wanna stay away from that. But it wouldn't be against any rules to be doing, for example, a the lead generation or creating a lead magnet that says, here, download our PDF and make sure you know how to buy and invest in flip homes and without losing money, how to make, and here's the top 10 ways to flip homes and make sure you're profitable.

Download this pdf. And then in that, lead gen idea, you're like, By the way, you know when you download this free pdf, you also get a hundred dollars restaurant savings card to save money in your zip code. So download it. Now, put it cuz people are interested in these league magnets, but then they, sometimes they get trigger shy on putting in their name, phone number, and email.

So they don't get, they don't wanna get emailed to death, they don't wanna get spammed. But now you throw in the additional incentive to what you might already be using that's effective to capture a lead. Now you throw in one more good reason. to go ahead and give you that accurate email, phone number and and name.

So now you're saying, get the PDF and be entered to win five nights in Cancun on us. When you download this, free information pack on how to, how to buy and make sure you don't, buy at the right time. Sell, buy, buy low, sell high, whatever it is that use your lead magnet in whatever industry you're in.

You could add to that by saying, , all entries are entered to win a five night trip to Cancun. Then you can even make it go viral and say, share this and for every person you share this with and give 'em a form where they can put five emails or so. If you know for every entry, every person you share this with, you get another chance to win our weekly drawing for five nights in Cancun, Mexico at a AAA four Diamond Resort on us.

Then of course, airfare is not included food and beverage, neither is hotel government of Texas. You did your disclaimers, but now you're getting people to register and even share, so you're creating viral promos with. For example, by using these high perceived value incentives, I've seen people grow their Facebook group from zero to 10,000 members in less than 90 days by using the travel, the complimentary hotel stays as contests to share the Facebook group with others, and they would just, be growing that.

Once they have a big Facebook group, you monetize that by putting on your own webinars, providing content, providing reasons for people to be engaged with your. 

[00:41:36] Ryan: I love all this great tidbits. So can anybody join your Facebook groups or do you have to be a 

[00:41:43] Marco: paid member? No, the, our Facebook groups are open to anybody to join for free.

And you could just go search for Marketing Boost on Facebook and find our Facebook groups like that. Or if you go to our website, you could, we have links to join the Facebook group as well as joining our our our promotion right now. . 

[00:42:04] Ryan: So if someone wants to join Marketing Boost, what? What could they expect to pay on a monthly basis?

[00:42:09] Marco: Speaking of that, Ryan, I've got a special offer for your listeners right now. You could go to. Cool I love marketing boost.com. I love marketing boost.com and get a free version of Marketing Boost. It's our freemium offer. Which means it's free, no credit card required and you can be giving away our top seven destinations.

It does not include the hotel savings card. It does not include the restaurant savings vouchers. It does not include all of the 130 destinations, only seven. But it gives you an opportunity to see a little bit about what these what we do and how these incentives how you can at least join our community, get, and actually start sending yourself.

A trip or your clients a trip, and use that for as long as you like with the free plan, or eventually see the benefits and value of becoming a paid member as well. And a paid member is only $37 a month or 347 for the year if you become an annual member. There's a whole ton of other bonuses that we throw in as well to make that even more enticing, including our annual members actually get paid.

For each of those incentives they give away when they get, when somebody activates them. So our hotel partners. We make money on the back end. The way we make our money mostly is we also own the travel company that fulfills all these trips. So we, most people are, up upgrade. Many people are upgrading room types.

They are upgrading to all inclusives. In Mexico, for example, they're booking additional nights. They're booking excursions, and so we're a part of all of that. So we're making money when people actually do travel. So we, that's why we can afford to have this freemium offer with no. For our members to give away these top seven destinations because we're ra, our hotel partners are paying us to help send them these people.

Now it's become a, as I said earlier, a win for everybody. 

[00:44:03] Ryan: That's awesome. We will definitely share that link in the show notes. I'm gonna go check it out cuz I was already gonna look at $37 a month or whatever a yearly is cuz I'd like to be able to offer that out to potential coaching clients cuz we've started some financial coaching.

There's a high cancellation rate cuz these people are somewhat afraid to come in and talk about their, financial health and where they're at. And a little enticement wouldn't. 

[00:44:27] Marco: Exactly. So yeah, the paid membership is e obviously worth every penny of it. We believe in overdelivering on value.

So only $37 a month, and that gives you access to all of our programs and products and our training all, if you get the annual plan, you get our training, get all kinds of add. Bells and whistles but yeah. I'd get started at 37 a month@marketingboost.com or go get the free version at I love marketing boost.com and we're here to help.

[00:44:58] Ryan: That is awesome. One other question. So when you are a paid member and you're in the Facebook groups, and let's say I'm a brand new entrepreneur and I don't know where to start, is there some help on your website or in the groups that you can reach out to people and try to get some direction on how to use these offers effect?

[00:45:18] Marco: Yeah, thanks for asking. You would think I paid you to ask that question? . 

[00:45:21] Ryan: Whoa. Wait a minute. Sh shh. Don't tell them that 

[00:45:23] Marco: yes. First thing we offer for all members, regardless of the level that you come into, is a free 40 minute onboarding training call. So we're. You know where you'll have access to join up, to be, hearing ideas where we're gonna show you sample sales funnels from a number of your, including maybe even your industry niche.

We'll show you how we, how to position the offer in a sales funnel, how to set up the the disclaimers. How to show that what's included, what's not, and how to make. Believable for your client to actually take action and so on. So we do have a training process that's and we have a whole library of video training.

We have a library of video assets for ad campaigns for almost every industry niche out there that's included available at the paid versions. Of Marketing Boost. So we have banner ads and video ads for solar companies, financial business coaches. So there's, showing and plugging in, take action today with our, this, that, or the other, and get the bonus.

So we try to make it where you've got all the assets you need professionally created assets for whatever industry needs you're in to help promote your product with the add-on of a travel I. , 

[00:46:41] Ryan: that's great. There's a lot of value add, and guys, if you're listening, you need to at least go check this out because man, if you can offer something that's free and it doesn't hurt your bottom line, it's gonna help people show up, help close more sales, generate more revenue.

It's a win-win all the way around. I It just makes a lot of sense and no, Marco didn't come on here to pitch his program. I've opened it up the door and we've walked right through it because I think it brings value to you guys in the community, but also sets you apart from your competitors.

you're gonna offer something your competitors don't have, and that's huge. That's gonna change. That potentially could change the trajectory of your year end or sales numbers that you're trying to hit. It's, and it doesn't cost you anything other than $37 a month, right? I If you can't afford that, then.

I don't know what to tell you on that point. , 

[00:47:30] Marco: sorry. Yeah, you gotta put a little money out to see the money come back. But, and then there's no long-term commitment or anything, so it makes it, again a no-brainer to give it a shot. And of course, the one mistake many business owners make with the use of our incentives, for example, is they'll test it by going to their Facebook group and saying, who wants a free trip?

And then maybe PE people don't respond cuz it sounds. Out of the Too spammy. Yeah, it sounds too spammy. Sounds too crazy if you don't, if you don't do it right, obviously if people don't jump, yeah, I want a free trip. Then you think, oh, this don't work, and you drop it and you drop the program when you really need to.

We we teach our members, even though you have the ability to give away an unlimited amount of these, We don't recommend that. We want you to make sure you're creating UR scarcity and urgency and reason why marketing. What is the reason why you're including, you're using these bonus incentives and explaining how you can afford to give away these incentives, and that's what we have on that onboarding training call.

We're gonna show you how you. Implement these and be believable. And he be able to create that scarcity and urgency where people take click, take action, enter to, become a lead or to purchase your product or service and go from there. Ryan, I've been in business for a long time.

I've never seen a, a company like the, what we deliver overdeliver on value. So it's a great option to consider. We all, we should have probably stayed on subject as well, on other ideals in business. I'm sorry, I got so run off. I got carried away with Promoting Marketing Boost, but I, I just get excited about it cause I've helped thousands of business owners.

Truly, in some cases, series amount of money, over a million dollars a year, and extra revenue that they know strict specifically comes from adding incentives to their offers. So 

[00:49:11] Ryan: don't worry about it. I open the door, I wanna do it. You bring value and at $37 and they can go to the freemium that you said and start there and try that out first before they say, okay, I wanna start paying $37 a month.

I'll raise my hand. I'm gonna go in, check it out and I'm gonna figure out how I can make it work in our businesses cuz we wanna stand out and I think I've been pitched quite a bit of times on something similar to this, but their pitch was spammy so I never signed up cuz it was what you talked about was, oh, who wants a free trip?

It's not it wasn't done. So I want to check out what you have going on. And I think a lot of people listening to this will do the same thing because it brings value. . . 

[00:49:47] Marco: So yeah, that, that is the key. Whether it's marketing Boost or anything else. At the end of the day, always be looking to how you can add value to whatever your call to action is.

And you know it. I'll, I gotta tell you one more thing, Ryan. Here's another alternative on how to use these incentives Where it helps your bottom line, and even if you only use it occasionally, and that is solving a customer service issue. At the beginning of, when I first told you about how Marketing Boost was born, we told you about, we used it to generate video testimonials, but another way that we have found for many of our clients who don't necessarily use it in all of their out outbound and inbound marketing campaigns, they use it whenever they act, when they do have a complain.

When a customer is upset, something one of you or your team members did, you didn't deliver fast enough, you de shipped the wrong product, whatever. If you made a mistake and the client is now ready to go write negative reviews or maybe they already wrote a negative review, you can get ahold of that client and of course try to fix the problem, right?

You have somebody upset. You wanna say, look, can you give us a chance to hit the reset button and we're gonna fix this ship that do the new, reset it, give it. Just for your aggravation, we want to give you a complimentary hotel. Stay on us. We'll send you your choice of three nights in Orlando or Las Vegas or whatever you want to give them, just because of our screw up.

But by the way if we could fix everything for you and I send you a complimentary hotel, stay on us, would you consider taking that negative review down? And you'll find that most, yeah. Most people will consider re if you fix the problem and you send them the complimentary hotel stay, not only are they likely to.

take the negative review down. You might turn somebody who is upset at you into evangelist for your brand. Now writing positive reviews and away you go. You're helping control your online reputation, including having negative reviews if you have any. And if you're doing a lot of business volume, let's be honest, if you're doing a lot of volume, you, it's almost impossible to please everybody.

Somebody's gonna write a negative review and that's okay. It almost sounds more believable when you got. 97% positive and a few negative, but some of those real negatives could, they'll live on the internet forever. So you want to try to get 'em down, and this is one way you can actually use these incentives to actually get people to remove a negative review when you've won, fix the problem, so you don't do the same to them or anybody else.

To you've offered them an incentive to remove the review and it often will work just as another tidbit of another idea on how these can work. I love it. 

[00:52:19] Ryan: It's a great idea and it's a great way to calm the situation down and get people back in the right place where you want 'em, they stay as a customer.

So that, that is awesome, sir. I know we've we've hit that hour mark and we're at the end, but I wanted to first thank you for coming on to sharing what you're doing and the passion that you're doing it with because it does bring value and. The listeners got a lot out of this, and I know I did just for the simple fact we learned, but we also found another tool that can help us build our business.

So thank you. 

[00:52:51] Marco: Thank you, Ryan. 

[00:52:53] Ryan: I hope you have happy holidays. Merry Christmas, and we'll be chatting. 

[00:52:59] Marco: See you. Thanks.