Daniel Burstein Uses Psychology and Philosophy To Drive Conversions

Daniel Burstein of MEC Labs Uses Behavioral Psychology and Philosophy of Mind To Drive Customers Through Conversion Funnel. His research-driven methodology takes a deep look at human psychology and what resonates with them in order to drive them through a conversion funnel and ultimately make a purchase decision.

Check out his website: https://meclabs.com/

Here's the video interview:

Here's the full transcript:

Ryan Shank: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of growing your agency. I'm your host Ryan shank today. Super excited. We have Daniel Bursting Mech labs. Daniel, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for being here, Ron. A A. So, so Daniel, you have a, an interesting business. I would love to just hear a little bit about, you know, your business and what you're, what you're seeing out there with, uh, with a lot of your clients and some of the success that they're having.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So I'll just tell you about us briefly at a high level because honestly, your audience doesn't care about us. They care about them, right? Let's just start with just some credibility so they understand where we're coming from. A Mech Labs Institute for more than 20 years, we've been researching to understand the answer to a fundamental question. Why do people say yes? So we've got a lot of research about that, a lot of methodologies. We're going to talk about that briefly today and we publish through to a pretty widely known website, marketing shirt, Breton marketing experiments where we have data and case studies and how to information, all that type of stuff. And that's what I bring you today. Some of the information we've published that can help your listeners, you know, your viewers improve how they're using the phone and improve their marketing in general for themselves and their clients.

Ryan Shank: Yeah. Awesome. So, so tying into that, uh, you know, what are some, I know, I know a lot of our listeners are, you know, they're driving, you know, ads or they're driving traffic through ads, referral marketing, um, all that sort of thing to either website or landing pages and then, you know, and then I think that they run into, so questions, how can I capture a lot of, a lot of that traffic and really turn it into, you know, warm leads that I can then deliver to the client, uh, or to themselves if they are the client. So what are you seeing out there? You know, what are some, some things that people are doing in terms of best practices and using either phone or forms that they're able to then convert those, uh, that traffic into, into actual people and conversations?

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, sure. So let's, we'll talk about digital in a minute because digital is viewed, right? Everyone's talking about digital. That's the popular kid at the party. But when you think about it, a phone call itself, that is an offline media, right? We're stepping away from the computer and having an interaction. So let me tell you about a surprising finding we had with some research few years ago. So we, uh, surveyed 1200 consumers here in the u s and it was a representative sample. So it was a, you know, sample of young people and old people at males and females and all different regions. And we asked them, when you're, you know, which type of advertising channels do you trust more when you're about to make a purchase decision? Right? So this is the fundamental question. It's not, hey, what do you like to go do on the weekend?

Daniel Burstein: You know, where you kill your time or anything like this, it's when you're going to make a purchase decision. Which advertising channels do you focus most on? And the number one answer this, this maligned media that you know is kind of getting killed lately with print newspapers and magazines. That's the number one place people go. And it makes sense when you think about it, right? At first, yeah it was like wow, I would think, you know, Google or something like that. You know, when it makes sense when you think about it, because print, you know, it's just, it's got that trust factor and so, but why is print getting killed so much when it comes to media buyers and marketers? It's that lack of tracking, right? We love that Facebook ad. We love that, that Google ad, we can see exactly how many people viewed it and where did they go and did they buy.

Daniel Burstein: But with print it's Kinda hard to make that connection. And so that's where things like, you know, having right URL structures so you can track clicks, having coupons, having post surveys, but also, you know, tracking phone calls. And knowing and tributing, hey, it's coming from this print ad. It's driving this amount of business. But then it brings up the fundamental question, like you said, well how do you get people to make that phone call? How do you get people to visit that website? How do you get people to go to that landing page? Can't get too deep into it today, but I want to talk about the value proposition, right? You're probably familiar with them value proposition, you've heard that term, right? Yeah, but so we have an entire methodology we've built after more than 20 years of research into how to have an effective value proposition.

Daniel Burstein: And sometimes when we talk about value proposition, we're thinking about, hey, you're the CEO of a company. You're thinking, what's the, what's the value proposition of my overall company? What do I tell investors? Right? What do I, what do I tell it to customer? But the value proposition exists at many levels and one of the levels that's often overlooked is we call the process level value proposition. So you're looking at a print ad. It's not just, okay, the value proposition for the entire company. Someone sees a print ad for let's say phone wagon, they're not ready to buy right away. What you're trying to do is say, what value proposition can I give them to get them to take that next step? How can I get them to make that phone call, visited, that landing page, whatever step I want them to take. And so when you're looking at your offline and then we'll get the landing pages in a minute, you've got to think about that. Not you're not selling the company yet, you're selling action. How can I just get them to take that action

Ryan Shank: that makes it, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, that's actually interesting. And I was talking to someone recently and they're talking about the value of copy, kind of what you're saying, copy being, you know, being able to express the value proposition in a way that gets them to, to move on. The, this particular client was doing it with like, you know, video sales letters and that sort of thing. But you know, cause my first reaction when I was looking at their site, I was like, oh, they kind of looks like sloppy though. It actually doesn't matter. Like sort of design at this stage like doesn't matter. People want to be able to resonate and like hear the value proposition and say like, oh, I really have those pain points and really sell into pain points. So, um, totally, totally makes sense. So what happens, what happens next? Right? So you, you craft a good value proposition. How do you get people to kind of move down the funnel and further along?

Daniel Burstein: All right, so let's talk about, we'll talk about the two different places they can go. Right? One of them would be the landing page, but yeah. So once you have that process level value proposition, again, you're not selling them on the entire company, right? You're just selling them to take that next action. Then there's the landing page itself. So we had a really interesting experiment with a health insurance company recently was within Aetna. There was a startup called health spire and they're selling Medicare and Medicare advantage programs. And they were trying to get people to, you know, from that landing page, which they sent traffic to from digital sources, trying to get people to make a call, get on a phone call with one of their tele advisers. Right? So they can pick the right medicare medicare advantage plan. And so they had a short landing page.

Daniel Burstein: Right. Cause I'm sure you've heard this a lot, like you just mentioned about the long sales letter, but a lot of people here, hey, you know, you can't have a long landing page. No one's gonna read it. Right? A major problem I see especially you know with some younger marketers is they see a long landing page and they say, I would never read that. Right? Well the challenge, especially if you're a younger marketer, you're not necessarily your customer, you're not your audience. If that person is in, is that right? Ideal prospect for that product. They might read a lot of information, they might need to take in a lot of information before they're willing to take the next step. So in this case we did an experiment and as we talked to have links with visuals and interviews and people can click through after we're done with this and see all the details about this.

Daniel Burstein: We did an experiment with actually a much longer landing page and it got 638% more calls, more leads into their call center, and the reason for it getting to that process level value proposition with that short landing page, they're just trying to get people to act, right? We have this kind of company focused mentality. We want people to do a thing so let's just tell them to do it right, but would that longer landing page, it weren't selling the company as much. They were selling that process level value proposition. They were selling the value proposition of getting on the phone with someone because most of us, when you think about, oh, make a phone call, you think about, oh, I'm going to make a phone call. I'm going to be sold to. Nobody wants that. Right? Why do they want to make a phone call? I want to be helped. And so laying out that value proposition that they wanted them to take, the action of making that phone call, they laid out the value proposition, here's who you're going to talk to, here's why you want to talk to them, you're going to get value out of it. It's not about the company getting value about the person making that phone call at the end of the day. They got a lot more people to pick up the phone to make a call.

Ryan Shank: Got It. Got It. That's a, yeah, that's incredible. So in talks, in terms of like measuring that, so what, what does that look like? You know, are you measuring, you know, each stage of it from, you know, people who picked up the phone and called and then from the next step picked up the phone and then, you know, went onto even the next, you know, action down the funnel in terms of like completed a consultation, I guess. What does it look like in terms of like funnel metrics?

Daniel Burstein: Exactly. So the funnel metrics, great point. What we call it is the customer journey. I'm sure you've heard that before. The way we look at it is you've got to flip the funnel. So when you see the traditional funnel, it's kind of like this here. Let's see if people can see it, right? And it doesn't that look beautiful because people just come in at the top. When you see that funnel, they're just going to fall down,

Ryan Shank: get on down there, right?

Daniel Burstein: Well, we say you've got to flip that funnel, look at it this way, right? Because you've got to push people up that funnel every step of the way, right? Gravity's going to pee. People are going to want to fall out. You know the, everything's working against you. You know the board there are different, there's another product, all these things you have to think about. What value proposition do they need at each step of the funnel to keep them moving to the next state. So to your point, you got to map out that customer journey. And I can send you an example of this and you say, okay, at each level, what do people need to understand to move to the next step? And let's track it at each level and then we can see where we have the biggest fall off. So one case it might be, for example, see the print ad, right? Then they need to go to the landing page, then they need to make the phone call and then from the phone call they need to, you know, buy the product, whatever that is. And then you can track at each step how your conversions and you see where you have the biggest fall off. But also what you're tracking when you're looking at is what value, what information do people need to know in each step along the way to keep them moving up that funnel.

Ryan Shank: Yup. And then do you, do you, uh, how do you craft that I guess is my next, uh, is my next question. Like how, how do you understand, you know, how do you, how do you build out, I guess the initial funnel, I know it's going to vary based on like industry based on product. Like, how do you, how do you actually want your, you know, let's say going into a funnel building session or you're white boarding it out, how do you, how do you say, like, all right, you know, this industry, this insurance industry right here, they're going to need, you know, five touch points versus maybe like an ecommerce site. Like boom, we can just drive them to, you know, maybe one, two touch points. Uh, you know, I guess the question is how do you figure out as a trial and error, is it, you know, hey, I know best practices or do you of, is there like a lot of assumptions for, for some of these funnels?

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. So there's a few different tactics. We use, one we call friends of data analysis. The one, you know, actually getting rid of company and teaching them how to look through the current metrics. They have to understand what is that funnel cause some of these funnels exist, whether we decide to make them or not. You know, one example for us is, you know, social media, we produce a lot of charts and those sorts of things. And we don't have a Pinterest account per say, but people choose to put those charts on Pinterest. They are choosing ways to interact with your company. So one of it is simply looking at the data. Another is talking to customers, interviewing customers, surveying customers, and then also understanding what's going on individually. So one of the things we do is run a value proposition workshop. We get a lot of key members of the company inside and also see, okay, what is their sense of what customers are doing, how they're approaching it, what value they need to understand at each level.

Daniel Burstein: And we also do a competitive analysis to see kind of what competitors are doing, how are they walking it through? We don't want to be blindly bought into just mimicking what competitors do, right? We want to see what they're doing. And then, you know, also test, uh, compare it to that. Because at the end, what we're doing is we're putting all these things together, all that data, all that information, we're creating hypothesis and then we test. So, for example, one that tests we might give is, um, okay on this landing page and this ad, do we direct them directly to make a call now to purchase or do we direct them to just get more information and get like a white paper, let's say? And from those tests we can get a sense of, okay, where are they in their thought process? Where are they in their customer journey and do we need to give them more value before they'll take the next step? Or can we just jump right ahead to the next step?

Ryan Shank: And tactically, how are you doing those, uh, those tests? Are you, um, are you setting it up and actually doing paid ad buys and like driving media to, you know, to one of those sites? Like are you doing, are you using some like user testing kind of, you know, tool where you actually get it in front of like, you know, users, like how are you getting statistically significant amount of data to do those tests?

Daniel Burstein: So for each company it's a different situation. For example, we are working with a, a major home buyer [inaudible] you know, there are big enough company where they're so much traffic driven to a specifically have the traffic, right, where you can test on that forum or smaller companies. Yeah. It's a sense of do they have to buy the traffic, do they test in the channel, do they test in, you know, Facebook ads and they test in Google ads because to your point, and I don't wanna get too deep into it, you need to make sure you have a statistically significant, big enough sample size because if you're running on too small of a sample size, what you're seeing might just be random chance, right?

Ryan Shank: Yup. Exactly. Exactly. I think so many people either like give up or they declare something, a wild success when they got a, you know, few conversions on like, you know, sub 20 visitors. It's like, come on, you, you know, that's not anything that, uh, that you should be taking out as material, as a material amount of data. Um, all right. Awesome. So just a couple, couple more questions. I'm curious, you know, when you're engaging, just going back, get more into your business specifically when you're engaging with client, what does that engagement look like? They find you talk to us, I guess about your own funnel and then your own kind of like sales processes of like onboarding a new client, retaining reporting back to them.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah, so we're, I mean we're a research driven organization. We're a very content driven organization. What we're doing right now, this is the type of thing we tend to do all the time we publish to our audience. So 99% of them don't, they'll never buy from us. I'll just get some of this helpful information from some of our methodologies, from some of our research and they'll help themselves. Then we have a little bit of a next level where we'll offer them training. So we have online training, we have in person training where we can come alongside them in general, teach them. We have a whole patent and methodology about how to increase the likelihood of conversion, how to test, how to maximize the effectiveness of your value proposition. So there's a certain segment that they're going to just say, teach me. And then there's a much smaller segment where we're going to come alongside them, not just teach them in general, but come alongside them and work directly with them so they understand the methodology and so they can improve things themselves, right?

Daniel Burstein: So we have things. So at the content level, for example here, I just have a copy right here. Here's a book from our CEO. The marketers, philosopher kind of has a high level paradigm shifting look at how to change your value proposition. Um, but then when it gets to more specific working directly with companies, we have something called a quick wind clinic where we'll work with them for a day and a half, two days specifically look at their data, you know, look at their funnels and help them find the biggest opportunities to increase revenue right now and further opportunities for testing, for learning about their customer. Because for us it's not about, no, we're not, we're not an agency or something. We're not doing things for you. We're about teaching, transferring that knowledge coming along, marketers coming along, businesses. And helping them understand how they can be the heroes and how they can improve their results.

Ryan Shank: Love it. That's awesome. And then, um, so, so people are coming to you and is it a one time fee? Is it a retainer? If they want to like engage in kind of like get the, you know, get the advice, get the, you know, content that you guys have. Like what, I guess just what does that relationship look like between you and whoever wants to engage? And I know there's different tiers and stuff.

Daniel Burstein: I mean it depends on the company. For some of them it's that, that direct intense two day quick win intensive we have with them. And then some would like ongoing coaching and certification of their tests. For one thing you mentioned, you know, validity, making sure a test is, you know, statistically accurate. It's more than just the statistics, it's how you're running the task. There's things like history of fact, right? So some of those things that have coaching and certification where we're come alongside them for a certain amount of time each month on an ongoing basis to help them and their team. And this is important for marketing leaders to, as they're continually onboarding people, it's very difficult to train people to be effective witness, right? Very. A lot of marketing organizations have kind of lumpy performance, right? There's that star performer and you're hiring all these other people who don't get it. We can come alongside and continually certify and coach and kind of bring them along to, again, make them the stars, help them, you know, kill it in terms of conversion.

Ryan Shank: Got It. Awesome. Awesome. So this is just been a, a, a great conversation. What else? What else are we forgetting to ask you that you want to, you want to share?

Daniel Burstein: Well, I'll just say at a high level, what we'll, we'll put a link in there. We have a whole methodology to help you increase the probability of conversion. So we offer a lot of this information. Free Marketing, sherpa.com publish a ton of information marketing experiments.com meclabs.com and all comes down to that. So if I could just say one essential piece of information, I'd love to tell every mark in the world. It comes down to customer first marketing. So the challenge is a marketer, I can see you know you, you do this, I do this, we live and breathe our companies. I mean 40 80 a hundred hours a week, you're probably going to thinking about phone wagon, talking to investors, talking about customers, and proving the product. So to you and to me for my product, right? We're so focused on that, but we have to do what we can to step out and try to live our customers' lives, bring that humanity to it and see the see life through and see our marketing through their eyes so we can ultimately improve what we do because they don't care about our company. Right? I mean, that's what we said when we first hopped on. I'm like, I don't want to start talking about my company. A bunch of, none of your viewers care about my company. They care about their company to kind of step out and look through their net customer lines and those customer eyes. Then we really have transformative improvements and results.

Ryan Shank: Love that. I think about that a lot. I actually, I tried to be very, very self, uh, self aware to not say like industry lingo all the time and not think that, you know, if I'm diving into our software, talking specifically about like what we do and kind of, you know, just industry lingo in general. It's like I want to try to speak like a human speak, like someone that doesn't do this all day, every day. So, you know, I, and a, I was even talking to a marketer yesterday, they were saying like, even even when people search, like, you know, if they're looking for a certain type of business, they might do a search term for a completely different type of business just cause they don't know the difference between like, uh, like, you know, like chiropractor and physical therapist if they're searching for like an exercise for instance, that they need right. Like back hurts or whatever it is. Um, so yeah, I think it is definitely important, um, to, to kind of zoom out and, you know, put yourself in the mind of a customer. Especially especially for the messaging part of it, right? You can be the expert once you're actually in the conversation and then you feel like you're actually talking to them but still don't go like too specific where it's like you're saying things that are just like not common language. Um,

Daniel Burstein: yeah, I'll take it one step further beyond the messaging. Like, you know, I'm sure phone wagon is your baby, right? You, you're so invested in that you've built, you've built this beautiful thing and you want everyone to know, and this is marketing Sherpa [inaudible] this is my baby. But we also have to recognize what are the offers that are really gonna resonate with the customer and who is our ideal customer. And it's not always everybody. And being able to tell some people, hey, this isn't a fit for you to better serve the people that it is a fit for. I mean that's a challenge because no company wants to turn down customers, but you don't really have a powerful and unique value proposition unless it's laser focused at the people you can help and you're actually helping those people and putting them first.

Ryan Shank: Yup. Yup. Awesome. Final thing, what is your morning routine?

Daniel Burstein: My morning routine. Oh, I like that. Uh, let's say I wake up, I drink a cup of coffee, I read the paper and then I come in and that's before, you know, I get into work, listen to the radio coming in and uh, uh, then when I get in it's, you know, linkedin, Twitter, email, stuff like that. Hop on social media first thing

Ryan Shank: we're catching up on news content.

Daniel Burstein: Yeah. Yeah. And also just I love the most fun thing about content marketing is people will reach out on Linkedin or Twitter once they see something like this and you can really connect and help them on a one on one basis. And if I started, I started in print, you know, many years ago and you didn't have that interaction. It's great getting that interaction off the social where you can actually connect with people and helpful and then learn from them. And some people hop on there like, Hey, you were wrong about this. And you know, it's great to hear that too to improve our own. Nothing was wrong today though. Just want to say this was perfect, so nothing was wrong.

Ryan Shank: Yeah, of course. Of course. And where are you guys based?

Daniel Burstein: We're based out of Jacksonville, Florida. So

Ryan Shank: Jacksonville, Florida. Let's go. All right, awesome. Thank you so much. Uh, so we're going to wrap it up. Daniel Burstein, MEK labs institute. Where can everyone find you?

Daniel Burstein: Oh, we're at [inaudible] dot com that's our parent company. And you're going to marketing sherpa.com or marketing experiments.com for tons of free content.

Ryan Shank: All right, Daniel bursty, thank you so much for joining us, growing your agency guys. That is the episode today. We'll post the show, show notes in a, in the description links back to a link backs to Mech labs institute. And Marketing Sherpa. Thank you so much for joining us.