Business
The Entourage’s Jack Delosa reveals how to become a market leader
Twenty years ago, there were really only three ways to get eyeballs and ears focusing on your business; rent commercials on television, buy ads in magazines, newspapers or billboards, and reach ears through paid spots on radio. That was it. And guess what this meant?
It meant that the companies with the highest advertising budgets could reach the most people, making it an uneven playing field for the rest of us. But then the world changed. The internet came along, and suddenly, we were able to speak to people at scale – provided that we had something valuable to share. As a result, the entire landscape of how we market and communicate dramatically shifted.
No longer were we using interruption-marketing, which is “Stop! Listen to me. Buy from me.” We are now in an era of relationship-based marketing, which is “Let me add value to you. Let me demonstrate that I understand you. Let me show you that I understand your problems, and let me prove to you that I have the solutions.” We stopped talking ‘at’ our audience, and we started talking ‘with’ our audience.
Now, the question that has arisen in this era of relationship marketing is: how do you become the most visible brand in your industry, making you the obvious choice for consumers? The answer: build relationships with our audience in a way that is scalable.
The best and most efficient way to build relationships with your consumers is through emanating and disseminating high-quality content that speaks to their hearts and minds, such that you are building relationships at scale. Here’s the process that can enable you to do so.
Step One: Build an Attraction Model
As mentioned above, gone are the days of ‘Buy this now!’ interruption marketing. If you want to become a market leader, then your focus has to be on creating and continuously strengthening relationships with your audience. We do this using one powerful principle… Recency and frequency.
The Recency And Frequency Principle say that when a consumer makes a buying decision, the brand that is front of mind is the one that has communicated with them the most recently and the most frequently.
Everything we do as human beings are motivated by two forces:
- The need and desire to avoid pain or anticipated pain – i.e. something that may cause physical or emotional pain now or in the future.
- The need and desire to obtain pleasure, or anticipated pleasure – i.e. something that will bring you pleasure now or in the future.
From what time you set your alarm this morning, to what clothes you decided to wear today, to why you started your own business, to why you decided to have or not have a family is your way of either moving away from pain or moving towards pleasure or both. There is no macro or micro decision that is not motivated by these two forces.
The same is true of your customer.
These forces are the key to speaking meaningfully to your customers, as they encompass your audience’s deepest frustrations, fears, wants and dreams. 
You want to be the business that is not only speaking to their customers’ wants but also speaking meaningfully to their frustrations, fears, and dreams. If you do that, the size of your audience, and the relationship you have with that audience, will grow exponentially.
Step Two: Lower buyers’ resistance and increase buyers’ intent through a structured marketing sequence
In between finding your perfect prospect and getting them to buy from you, there is a canyon of events that needs to occur to get them from point A to point B. What you need is a marketing system that elegantly and effortlessly moves prospects through a journey which lowers buyers’ resistance and increases buyers’ intent. We are all in the business of building relationships at scale. And this doesn’t happen instantaneously.
To achieve this, follow each of these three steps.
#1 Embed elegant call-to-actions (CTA’s)
Imagine a situation where you’ve come across someone you admire, and you feel an attraction towards them, but when it comes to building upon that initial connection with them, they come on too quickly and too strong. If you have experienced this situation before, you’ll know that when someone is too forthright in their approach, it changes the dynamic of the connection straight away. It can ultimately deter you from pursuing the connection further.
The same is true for marketing. You need to focus on building the relationship authentically and not ask too much, too soon.
Once you have attracted an audience, nurtured them, and moved them to your own land (usually, this is email), you have permission to talk to them, but you don’t want to abuse this. It is crucial when contacting your audience through email, text, social media or any channel that, when you ask them to take action, you do so in a way that is authentic.
The worst thing you can become in your customer’s eyes is a commodity. When your customer wants to stop spending or reduce costs, if they simply view you as a commodity rather than a genuine relationship, you’re out.
#2 Optimise your landing page
A lot of marketers will spend significant amounts of time developing content, capturing an audience, nurturing them and then sending them onto their landing page, only to find that they are not converting the traffic. Why? Because the landing page isn’t speaking to the hearts and minds of the customer.
There are two ways for you to optimise your landing page:
- Use the principle of Green Brain: Start by ‘green braining’ the wording, imagery, and offer. Using green brain language, imagery and offers means speaking to the emotional and creative side of your consumer’s brain, rather than solely the logical and rational side of the brain (the red brain side).
Green Braining is so effective when it comes to accelerating decision-making because human beings make decisions emotionally and justify them logically.
- Always be testing:
Growing a business is not rocket science. Growing a business is about looking at what matters.
Start by A/B testing two landing pages with different headlines. If B converts at a higher rate than A, get rid of A and create a new version to continue testing. This applies to every element of your landing page; headings, sub-headings, imagery, CTA language, and length of the page. Test one element at a time, and whichever version converts better stays, and the alternative goes.
Please make a note of this: You should always, always be A/B testing.
#3 Reassure your customers
The biggest roadblock your prospect encounters at this point in their journey is that when they get close to buying (or giving you their name and email for service businesses), there’s a question that comes up in their head. And that question is this, “what happens on the other side?”.
When you first started out in business, you didn’t have any customers. And as such, you got in the habit of marketing in a way that didn’t incorporate success stories and testimonials from happy purchasers. Well, it’s now years later, you’ve got happy customers, and if you’re still in the habit of marketing without leveraging these case studies, this is killing your conversions. In order to help lower buyers’ resistance and reassure your customers, show them examples of people who have bought successfully from you previously. They are your walking, talking, breathing demonstrations of what happens to people when they buy from you, giving your prospect visibility of what happens ‘on the other side’.
Reassurance may be case studies, success stories, testimonials, product reviews or Google star ratings – anything that shows your prospects that what you’re promising is being delivered.
About Jack Delosa:
Jack Delosa builds businesses.
He is a 5X AFR Young Rich Lister, 2X best-selling author and the founder of Australia’s largest business coaching and training provider for entrepreneurs, The Entourage, which has a community of 650,000 members. Since 2010, The Entourage has helped its members add over $2 billion in value to their businesses. Under his leadership, The Entourage was previously awarded the 4th Best Place to Work in Australia, and the Top 50 in Australasia, by Best Places To Work.
Prior to The Entourage, Jack was the co-founder and CEO of MBE Group, a company that assisted SMEs in raising money from investors. MBE Group became one of Australia’s fastest-growing companies and enabled its clients to raise over $300 million in capital.
Visit The Entourage
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Transport providers, businesses and governments on Saturday are rushing to get all their systems back online after long disruptions following a widespread technology outage.
The biggest continuing effect has been on air travel. Carriers canceled thousands of flights on Friday and now have many of their planes and crews in the wrong place, while airports facing continued problems with checking in and security.
At the heart of the massive disruption is CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity firm that provides software to scores of companies worldwide. The company says the problem occurred when it deployed a faulty update to computers running Microsoft Windows, noting that the issue behind the outage was not a security incident or cyberattack.
Here’s the Latest:
Microsoft: 8.5 million devices on its Windows system were affected
Microsoft says 8.5 million devices running its Windows operating system were affected by a faulty cybersecurity update Friday that led to worldwide disruptions.
A Saturday blog post from Microsoft was the first estimate of the scope of the disruptions caused by cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike’s software update.
“We currently estimate that CrowdStrike’s update affected 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than one percent of all Windows machines,” said the blog post from Microsoft cybersecurity executive David Weston.
“While the percentage was small, the broad economic and societal impacts reflect the use of CrowdStrike by enterprises that run many critical services.”
Weston said such a significant disturbance is rare but “demonstrates the interconnected nature of our broad ecosystem.” Windows is the dominant operating system for personal computers around the world.
Austrian doctors’ group calls for better data protection for patients
In Austria, a leading doctors organization said the global IT outage exposed the vulnerability of health systems reliant on digital systems.
“Yesterday’s incidents underscore how important it is for hospitals to have analogue backups” to safeguard patient care, Harald Mayer, vice president of the Austrian Chamber of Doctors, said in a statement on the organization’s website.
The organization called on governments to impose high standards in patient data protection and security and on health providers to train staff and put systems in place to manage crises.
“Happily, where there were problems, these were kept small and short-lived and many areas of care were unaffected” in Austria, Mayer said.
Germany warns of scams after major IT outage
BERLIN — The German government’s IT security agency says numerous companies are still struggling with the consequences of a far-reaching technology outage.
“Many business processes and procedures have been disturbed by the breakdown of computer systems,” the BSI agency said on its website.
But the agency also said Saturday that many impacted areas have returned to normal.
It warned that cybercriminals were trying to take advantage of the situation through phishing, fake websites and other scams and that “unofficial” software code was in circulation.
The agency said it was not yet clear how faulty code ended up in the CrowdStrike software update blamed for triggering the outage.
European airports appear to be close to normal
LONDON — Europe’s busiest airport, Heathrow, said it is busy but operating normally on Saturday. The airport said in a statement that “all systems are back up and running and passengers are getting on with their journeys smoothly.“
Some 167 flights scheduled to depart from U.K. airports on Friday were canceled, while 171 flights due to land were axed.
Meanwhile, flights at Berlin Airport were departing on or close to schedule, German news agency dpa reported, citing an airport spokesman.
Nineteen flights took off in the early hours of Saturday after authorities exempted them from the usual ban on night flights.
On Friday, 150 of the 552 scheduled inbound and outbound flights at the airport were canceled over the IT outage, disrupting the plans of thousands of passengers at the start of the summer vacation season in the German capital.
German hospital slowly restoring its systems after widespread cancellations
BERLIN — The Schleswig-Holstein University Hospital in northern Germany, which on Friday canceled all elective surgery because of the global IT outage, said Saturday that it was gradually restoring its systems.
In a statement on its website, it forecast that operations at its two branches in Kiel and Luebeck would return to normal by Monday and that “elective surgery can take place as planned and our ambulances can return to service.”
Britain’s transport system still trying to get back on track
LONDON — Britain’s travel and transport industries are struggling to get back on schedule after the global security outage with airline passengers facing cancellations and delays on the first day of summer holidays for many school pupils.
Gatwick Airport said “a majority” of scheduled flights were expected to take off. Manchester Airport said passengers were being checked in manually and there could be last-minute cancellations.
The Port of Dover said it was seeing an influx of displaced air passengers, with hourlong waits to enter the port to catch ferries to France.
Meanwhile, Britain’s National Cyber Security Center warned people and businesses to be on the lookout for phishing attempts as “opportunistic malicious actors” try to take advantage of the outage.
The National Cyber Security Center’s former head, Ciaran Martin, said the worst of the crisis was over, “because the nature of the crisis is that it went very wrong very quickly. It was spotted quite quickly and essentially it was turned off.”
He told Sky News that some businesses would be able to get back to normal very quickly, but for sectors such as aviation it would take longer.
“If you’re in aviation, you’ve got people, planes and staffs all stranded in the wrong place… So we are looking at days. I’d be surprised if we’re looking at weeks.”
Germany airline expects most of its flights to run normally
BERLIN — Eurowings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, said it expected to return to “largely scheduled” flight operations on Saturday.
On Friday, the global IT outage had forced the airline to cancel about 20% of its flights, mostly on domestic routes. Passengers were asked to take trains instead.
“Online check-in, check-in at the airport, boarding processes, booking and rebooking flights are all possible again,” the airline said Saturday on X. “However, due to the considerable extent of the global IT disruption there may still be isolated disruptions” for passengers, it said.
Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates have canceled hundreds of flights
DALLAS — Delta Air Lines and its regional affiliates canceled more than a quarter of their schedule on the East Coast by midafternoon Friday, aviation data provider Cirium said.
More than 1,100 flights for Delta and its affiliates have been canceled.
United and United Express had canceled more than 500 flights, or 12% of their schedule, and American Airlines’ network had canceled 450 flights, 7.5% of its schedule.
Southwest and Alaska do not use the CrowdStrike software that led to the global internet outages and had canceled fewer than a half-dozen flights each.
Portland, Oregon, mayor declares an emergency over the outage
PORTLAND, Ore. — Mayor Ted Wheeler declared an emergency Friday after more than half of the city’s computer systems were affected by the global internet outage.
Wheeler said during a news conference that while emergency services calls weren’t interrupted, dispatchers were having to manually track 911 calls with pen and paper for a few hours. He said 266 of the city’s 487 computer systems were affected.
Border crossings into the US are delayed
SAN DIEGO — People seeking to enter the U.S. from both the north and the south found that the border crossings were delayed by the internet outage.
The San Ysidro Port of Entry was gridlocked Friday morning with pedestrians waiting three hours to cross, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
Even cars with people approved for a U.S. Customers and Border Protection “Trusted Traveler” program for low-risk passengers waited up to 90 minutes. The program, known as SENTRI, moves passengers more quickly through customs and passport control if they make an appointment for an interview and submit to a background check to travel through customs and passport control more quickly when they arrive in the U.S.
Meanwhile, at the U.S.-Canada border, Windsor Police reported long delays at the crossings at the Ambassador Bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.
U.S. filings for unemployment benefits rose again last week and appear to be settling consistently at a slightly higher though still healthy level that the Federal Reserve has been aiming for.
Jobless claims for the week ending July 13 rose by 20,000 to 243,000 from 223,000 the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. It’s the eighth straight week claims came in above 220,000. Before that stretch, claims had been below that number in all but three weeks so far in 2024.
Weekly unemployment claims are widely considered as representative of layoffs.
The Federal Reserve raised its benchmark borrowing rate 11 times beginning in March of 2022 in an attempt to extinguish the four-decade high inflation that shook the economy after it rebounded from the COVID-19 recession of 2020. The Fed’s intention was to cool off a red-hot labor market and slow wage growth, which it says can fuel inflation.
AP AUDIO: More Americans apply for jobless benefits as layoffs settle at higher levels in recent weeks
AP correspondent Shelley Adler reports filings for unemployment benefits have risen.
“The Fed asked to see more evidence of a cooling economy, and for the most part, they’ve gotten it,” said Chris Larkin, managing director of trading and investing at E-Trade. “Add today’s weekly jobless claims to the list of rate-cut-friendly data points.”
Few analysts expect the Fed to cut rates at its meeting later this month, however most are betting on a cut in September.
The total number of Americans collecting unemployment benefits rose after declining last week for the first time in 10 weeks. About 1.87 million Americans were collecting jobless benefits for the week of July 6, around 20,000 more than the previous week. That’s the most since November of 2021.
Continuing claims have been on the rise in recent months, suggesting that some Americans receiving unemployment benefits are finding it more challenging to land jobs.
And there have been job cuts in a range of sectors in recent months, from the agricultural manufacturer Deere, to media outlets like CNN, and elsewhere.
The four-week average of claims, which evens out some of the week-to-week volatility, rose by 1,000 to 234,750.
Strong consumer demand and a resilient labor market has helped to avert a recession that many economists forecast during the extended flurry of rate hikes. As inflation continues to ease, the Fed’s goal of a soft-landing — bringing down inflation without causing a recession and mass layoffs — appears within reach.
While the labor market remains historically healthy, recent government data suggest some weakening.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.1% in June, despite the fact that America’s employers added 206,000 jobs.
Job postings in May rose slightly to 8.1 million, however, April’s figure was revised lower to 7.9 million, the first reading below 8 million since February 2021.
Darden Restaurants is adding Tex-Mex to the menu.
The parent company of Olive Garden, LongHorn Steakhouse, Yard House and other chains, said Wednesday it’s buying Chuy’s for approximately $605 million.
Darden said it will acquire all outstanding shares of Chuy’s for $37.50 per share. Those shares closed at $25.27 apiece on Wednesday, then soared past $37 in after-hours trading once the deal was announced. Darden shares fell 1% in after-hours trading.
Darden said the boards of Darden and Chuy’s have unanimously approved the acquisition. The deal is expected to close later this year, if it’s approved by Chuy’s shareholders.
Chuy’s Holdings Inc. was founded in Austin, Texas, in 1982. It now operates 101 restaurants in 15 states and has 7,400 employees. It’s known for its eclectic decor and fresh food, including handmade tortillas and sauces.
Like Darden, Chuy’s owns and operates all of its restaurants. Darden President and CEO Rick Cardenas said Chuy’s is a differentiated brand with strong growth potential that will expand Darden’s dining options.
Darden, based in Orlando, Florida, operates more than 1,900 restaurants and has 190,000 employees. It also owns Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Cheddar’s Scratch Kitchen, The Capital Grille, Seasons 52, Eddie V’s and Bahama Breeze.
“Based on our criteria for adding a brand to the Darden portfolio, we believe Chuy’s is an excellent fit that supports our winning strategy,” Cardenas said in a statement.
Chuy’s Chairman, CEO and President Steven Hislop said the acquisition will accelerate Chuy’s business goals and expand the brand to more communities.
The deal comes as both restaurant companies have been struggling with a downturn in customer traffic due to consumer concerns about inflation.
In Darden’s fiscal fourth quarter, which ended May 26, same-store sales — or sales at restaurants open at least a year — were flat compared to the prior year. Chuy’s same-store sales were down 5% in its first quarter, which ended March 31.
Investment bank Jefferies downgraded shares for both restaurant chains earlier this month, saying they’re being squeezed by price promotions at fast-food chains like McDonald’s as well as at casual dining peers like Chili’s and Applebee’s.
