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Unbound is a weekly podcast, created to help you achieve more as a leader. Join Chris DuBois as he shares his growth journey and interviews others on their path to becoming unbound. Delivered weekly on Thursdays.
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Learn how you can incorporate incentives into your business with today's guest Are you a leader trying to get more from your business and life? Me too. So join me as I document the conversations, stories and advice to help you achieve what matters in your life. Welcome to unbound with me, Chris DuBois. Marco Torres is the founder of marketing boost.com, where he has helped 1000s of business owners worldwide through sales and scale their businesses by as much as five fold through the use of incentive based marketing teaches entrepreneurs how to source sales and marketing through the use of value add incentives instead of this counsel. He and his partners have revolutionized the incentive industry by making a complimentary hotel stay certificates from three to seven nights, and over 125 worldwide destinations. Plus hotel savings cards and restaurant vouchers are incredibly affordable, and allowing small businesses to stand out from their crowd and compete with the big boys. All through incentives. We're going to learn more about it today. Marco, welcome to unfound.
1:08
Thank you for having me, Chris. Yeah. So
1:11
I would love to start by Paul first. Being jealous that you're down. island hopping in the in the Caribbean, while I'm up in the frigid summer of of Maine.
1:25
Yeah, right now. I'm in the island of Puerto Rico. I grew up here in Puerto Rico, but I haven't been back in years. So I'm bouncing through one of my old stomping grounds. And where we used to go to surf. When I was a kid, we took a little air flight, the little tiny plane and Valentino went over the bottom to get landed and collabora and spent a few days on the island of collabora. So yeah, loving life at the moment living the laptop lifestyle.
1:52
Yeah, awesome. Well, let's, uh, let's get into your origin story.
1:56
Well, thank you. Yeah, so we, I've been an entrepreneur, and I understand most of your audiences as entrepreneurs as well, business owners, I started out very young as as a nine year old. Getting into paper routes. Back in the day, we used to be able to deliver papers and go door to door and do sales and collect money. I don't think kids can do that anymore. Which is sad. But yeah, I built that up, I built by the time I was 23, I own five restaurants and nightclubs. I went on to move to Florida took my family there. And my goal at the time was to you know, I was in sales, and because that's where the money was right sales and marketing. And I realized early on life is all about sales. No matter what industry you're in, whatever, no matter what you do, you've got to learn how to sell yourself first. And so embrace it, get used to it, because sales is where it happens. And anyway, long story short, my business I run today that I'm most excited about. And I've been in the travel space now since midnight, 1993. And internet marketers since 1996. So I've been around since before Google, Facebook, etc, to watch the evolution of online marketing. And that's what my passion is, today, I've got a company called Marketing boost, we teach business owners how to thrive versus just survive, and how to how to, you know, stick incentives into the mix. I mean, we're one of the tools you need to be successful as an online entrepreneur. Marketing boost is not the, you know, the sole solution. But no matter what, you know, what you're doing, we could talk today, ideas on how adding some incentives here there can really make a difference between, you know, for acquiring clients for generating loyalty programs for for lead, you know, Lead Generation Ideas, trade show giveaways, you know, we'll we'll cover some ideas here along
3:51
the way. Yeah, that's actually where I wanted to go first, just what are some of the most creative ways you've seen people use incentives?
4:00
Well, you know what, one of the things I've found when when people when I talk to business owners about incentives, is they don't really get it. What do you mean by incentive based marketing? So if you If you'd allow me I want to talk about two examples that everybody's going to recognize the first being Jeff Bezos with Amazon. So here's what I mean by incentive based marketing Amazon launched probably I don't remember when over a decade ago, Amazon Prime. And when we first launched it, it wasn't very few of us were really into streaming video. But we bought amazon prime for 99 bucks a year. Why? Because we wanted free shipping. Two day free shipping was the incentive so we bought Amazon Prime and now he had us as loyal customers fan, you know, shopping on Amazon for him and anywhere else. So boom, he's grabbed us in with that incentive. Next game, you know, here for decades. Here's another example. McDonald's McDonald's has the Happy Meal. and they have for decades now generated over three and $4 billion a year in additional revenue that they can track to the Happy Meal. Because parents are choosing McDonald's over other fast food restaurants because they could take their eye off of the price focus on the prize, which is you know, the they buy the snack, the soda the burger all in a package. And of course, it includes the toy. It includes the seasonal toy and gift that comes with the next Disney movie, etc. And so you know, they're generating they're having these loyal plans come back to me to McDonald's. So what is your adult Happy Meal is what I ask entrepreneurs often what are you doing to add value, or to stand out from the crowd. And that's what we at marketing boost provide, we've come up with a way, which actually happened by accident later, maybe I can tell that story. But we we came up with a way to offer entrepreneurs and make it affordable as a very low cost subscription plan, where any business owners, small or large, has access to our three categories of incentives, one being complimentary hotels, days, and 130 destinations around the world from three to seven nights days. They of course, don't include airfare food and beverage or government fees and taxes. And by the way, Chris, that's really the main disclaimer that anybody using our service should tell his client, if you're giving away one of our complimentary hotel stays, you're going to simply say, hey, you know, I've got your hotel stay covered. They don't include airfare, you know, transportation to and from the hotel. They don't include food and beverage or government taxes fees. Then we include hotel savings cards we have they come in increments of 123 and $500. They weren't kind of like a gift card, but they don't pay for the entire hotel stay they'll discount the room compared to the expedience price lineups of the world. And then we have restaurant savings vouchers. So now the key is you got these three categories of incentives. The question is, how do you use them? What could you do to entice a client to you know, bribe them so to speak, to take to do whatever your call to action might be? And and that's where we we teach our business owners within our Facebook group, we have over 30,000 entrepreneurs and one Facebook group of ours and they're always sharing ideas, and what have you. I understand you had some questions, Chris, or you're trying to come up with ideas on how you might use them. So let's let's get into that. Give me an idea. What's what's going on. When I describe this to you what comes to mind? What assurance or ideas would you have?
7:35
Yeah, so it's something that I've been thinking of is, obviously using incentives can be super valuable. But should it be tied to whatever you're offering? Right? So like, basically having a connection between x and y, if I am saying, hey, please book a call with us so we can sell our software? And we'll give you a free hotel stay? Because Have you seen that's more valuable than, say selling something that's more related to people who go on trips? No, yeah, they
8:05
can be used, like, they can be everybody loves travel. I mean, I've yet to meet somebody who says, you know, I don't want to travel more anymore, or I don't want to travel very often, you know, most most of us anyway, are still really do what we love to travel more often and love the idea of, of doing it affordably because especially with the the you know, right now, because of inflation, because the cost of everything is so high, these incentives not only are still attractive, but the idea of finding a way to save money and travel means they'll work for nearly any industry. So you don't have to be in the travel space to be offering these incentives. So as you just said, I just saw a post a little while ago in our Facebook group with a guy who's combining tuvar incentives with his offer. So he's he sells electric services, you know, and ever sold or what have you. And he's throws out, hey, you know, what are you paying per kilowatt? What are you paying for this, that and the other, if you'll you know, give us tell us what your electric bill is. And we'll give you a $200 hotel savings card just to give us the opportunity to compare what you're paying now, versus what will save you or what have you. And then he says then, in the same mad, you know, promo he's saying, if you do sign up for our service and switch from one electric service to the other, then we will provide you with a complimentary hotel stay as a bonus, you know, three nights and your choice of Las Vegas or you know, whatever, whatever because we have 30 us destinations etc. So that's an example of using two incentives in one call to action one being, I'm going to give you a what I call a micro incentive for the micro call to action. So that being I'm going to give you you know, $200 Hotel savings card just for allowing us to give you a free quote. And if you do decide to sign up with our service, we have another bonus for you. We're gonna give you a complimentary hotel stay on us, and then throw in the disclaimers somewhere. They don't include airfare don't include Food and Beverage don't include government taxes and fees. And then you've you've done the job of the hotel statements cards work very, very well to get people on the phone, to entice people to book that no obligation zoom call. And then all of your your reminder messages to remind them to show up for the webinar or the seminar or the one on one zoom call, can be saying, hey, don't forget, you know, we think your time is super valuable, we think ours is as well. If you show up on time for the our appointment, we're going to reward you with a $200 hotel savings card good at over a million hotels worldwide, for your next hotel booking. And that's an you know, an enticement that, by the way, only cost you as a marketing boost member all of these incentives. Chris, if you don't mind, I'll drop the price. Here, it's a super affordable, it's only $37 a month for a business owner to subscribe to marketing boost, and have access to unlimited giveaways of the three categories of our incentives. So you can be giving away as many of these hotel savings cards as you want, or the restaurant savings vouchers or the complimentary hotel stays with your $37 a month program. And the reason I mean, we make money on the back end, we make money on the you know, so how does that work? How can we afford to do that one, you know, we make good money, obviously, on the subscriptions, those that are paying us 37 a month, we have 1000s of monitors around the world, to we have this travel company that's fulfilling all of these trips. So we're helping people, you know, book, additional nights, upgrade room types, etc. And we've we've arranged your amazing relationships with the hotels and resorts we operate with around the world.
11:35
Right? Seems like you found the perfect business model. Yeah, well work that out.
11:40
Exactly. And again, this kind of leads into how did this come about? Chris, if you don't mind, I'll tell that
11:45
go into.
11:47
So you know many things. One of the questions that comes to mind when people listen to this or hear about marketing business. Sounds too good to be true. What is the catch? Do I have to do a timeshare presentation or anything like that? And the answer to the above is no. So there is no no timeshare hook or sales presentations that all anybody needs to listen to. And the way this came about was the following we we've been in the gym, as I mentioned in the travel business for decades. And we were one of the we, in 2016, we were building one of our travel websites, and it was really doing very, very well. But we wanted video testimonials. And Chris, we couldn't get hardly anybody to go the extra mile and film a selfie video or testimonial about the hotels and resorts we were selling. So we came up with an idea that we figured would be a short term promotion. But we said hey, if you'll we sent people a survey Now mind you, this tip I'm giving can be used for any business out there, regardless of whether you use marketing boost or not. The idea being when to ask for a testimonial, we came up with a survey that we went out with when we expected our clients to be at their peak of happiness, which is, in our case, the day after they check into the hotel. So we've sent them an email and a text message saying hey, how's our service so far? How's the hotel that living up to your expectations? What do you think of us so far, give us a rating of one to five. And if they gave us a four or five, we're immediately sending them a message, text message and emails and we're thrilled that you're enjoying your stay so far and enjoying the XYZ resort. Can you do us a HUGE favor and help us spread the word about that hotel brand and ours. And if you film a selfie testimonial from the beach, the pool, the bar, the restaurant or whatever, and and brag about the hotel brand and brag about our brand, we're gonna reward you with a bonus complimentary hotel stay three nights of your choice Orlando and Las Vegas. Well, that took off. And before we knew it, we had dozens of these videos coming in, and then hundreds. And we're like, wow, we were getting and accomplishing exactly what we expected. We were able to use those video testimonials on our Facebook ads or YouTube ads or TV ads, you know, edit them up and make them you know, our testimonials that we needed. That social proof that we needed and boom, sales were booming. But we had to turn off the campaign because it was expensive to fulfill when people started raising their hand saying okay, well my free trip. Now we had to pay for their rooms in Orlando, Las Vegas, and it was expensive. So we thought well, it's a sad to turn this off because it's working really well. But now so we went back to our hotel partners in Orlando in Vegas is we're high volume travel company. And we said Listen, guys, let's be honest, you have a problem. We think we can solve it. Your hotels, they're not full year round. You've got 70% of the Year 3040 50% of your rooms go empty. I mean sure you're full on certain weekends, certain holidays, certain special events, peak season, but the majority of the year, you've got rooms available. And once that clock clicked midnight if it didn't get rented that's revenue you're never going to see again. So we got a couple of hotel partners to agree in Orlando in Vegas to give us access to unsolder between rooms that were likely not going to be sold. And we told them that we're gonna we're gonna put WARM BODIES, families, couples, individuals in those rooms, they'll likely spend money at the restaurant bar, gift shop, excursion desk, room service, upgrade room types, etc. And they agreed they said, Okay, so we got a few to start with. And then now we could fulfill those trips we were giving away at no cost. So we're like, Wow, can you imagine if we were successful at soliciting hotels around the world to participate with us, we'd have a whole new business plan. And that's what eventually became marketing boost.com, where we now provide those incentives with our, you know, to our community of business owners, that they too can give to their clients. And, and there are some restrictions, of course, you know, there's someone's gotta be over the age of 21, to use the incentive. They want allow group travels, so you can't use them to get all of your, you know, your downline, or what have you to meet you in a convention in Las Vegas on the same dates. Because, you know, group travel is the bread and butter of any hotels, not gonna allow them to be these promotional incentives to be used for groups. They want other this you've done, of course, they don't include airfare, food and beverage, government taxes, fees. But we've made it a super, you know, we turned the we're not the first to be the travel instead of business. But we really turned it upside down in the sense that we made it a win win win for everybody, it's a win for our hotel partners, we're helping them fill rooms, it's a win for the marketing boost member, because they have these high perceived value incentives to create additional value, whatever their call to action is, it's a win for whoever receives the incentive, because they're getting to travel off into places they never would have been able to afford to without the business owner without the incentive given to them by a business owner. And lastly, it's a win for the community because as the people that we're sending to Vegas, Orlando, you know, Chicago, New York, San Diego Cancun, Cabo San Lucas, they're spending money in that community. And that's part of what makes the world go round. So it's so it's a win win win for,
17:05
for everybody. Yeah, so I'm curious, going back to, when you were sending for getting testimonials, by offering this were you seeing any difference like noticeable difference in kind of the language or even with some of the some of your clients are using it now, where you can say, hey, if you do this, we'll give you this versus a if you do this to show our appreciation, we're also going to throw in you know, something special, you notice any difference with just how you actually go about and you know, the psychology of presenting these incentives, really,
17:36
there's a different way you know, you want to test that and and figure out whether, you know, make it Customer Appreciation Month, we're offering the following bonus if you do the following You know, as a as an appreciation, we're doing this, you can use these incentives for loyalty programs, give you an idea of one member comes to mind that he generated almost $500,000.04 days Chris by he had clients that were already paying him $97 A month for a subscription model that he gave them, you know, with his business tips on on, on when to sale, buy, sell trade stocks, and Bitcoin all that kind of stuff. And he came up with a night we found marketing moves and he said listen, if you'll get if you'll pay us came up with a promotion to reward his members. If you pay a year in advance, we'll give you your choice of Five Nights in Cancun or Hawaii. And if you pay for six months in advance and become a whatever he called that membership level, we'll give you your choice of three nights in Vegas or San Diego and for example, and then he had about 300 of them step up and pay for a year in advance and another 100 or so pay for six months in advance. So those that paid 300 was over $1,200 each for the year and he generated almost $500,000 in four days. And that became an ongoing program for him now as as after they started 97 A month they see the value of what he offers he offers the appreciation hey if you'll pay become a platinum whatever he calls the member you get the following bonus but there's so many other ways to skin this cat Chris So depending upon your business, you sell software you could be rewarding clients for referrals you could be rewarding clients for for video for testimonial after using the service for a period of time. You could be rewarded clients for you know paying loyalty though, you know, on their anniversary of using your service for or renewing their servers after six months or 12 months. Here's a bonus we're giving you just as a as a thank you you know so to speak. There's really a lot of different ways to use these incentives that are very powerful way you know, you can revive an old database that's getting stale and send everybody you know an email Hey, we're gonna you know, let me put One thing that comes to mind as well, to me is a lot of business owners don't visualize how they would plug these into their offer, you know, or would it be believable and so they sign up for marketing booths. And one of the things they'll do is they'll sign up for marketing booths, and they'll put a post on their Facebook say, Hey, who wants a free vacation? And then maybe nobody, nobody raises their hand because it sounds ridiculous. So, but if it was Verizon Wireless telling you pay for a year in advance of your phone service, and you're gonna get the following five nights and choice of Cancun or why you'd believe it? If it was Coca Cola telling you, by you know, when you when you buy a 12 pack of soda, you get entered to win five nights? And can you believe it. So in other words, it's your brand, these can be these can, you do need to find ways to still create scarcity and urgency and believability in the offer. And you need to present yourself as partnering with us, like the company that fulfills these trips to our company fulfills these trips is called redeem vacations.com. So your client will not hear about marketing boost, we are b2b, so we're not out there, we're not going to communicate with your client offering them that they too can join the marketing boost incentive as it becomes your little marketing secret, your mastermind marketing secrets. And so they'll redeem these unredeemed vacations.com. So we teach our members for example, to say, Hey, we've partnered with our travel partner redeem cases.com. And we're providing you with this complimentary hotel stay when you do the following action, or when you have earned the following bonus, you know, by let's say you're selling retail, or you're an online retailer, I mean, you might be saying, man, your average transaction is maybe only $150. And you wish it was $1,000. So you might come up with a loyalty program a point system, when you reach $1,000 or 1000 points, you know, $1,000 in sales, you will be rewarded with your choice of you know, $500 in hotel savings cards or your get a complimentary hotel stay. So now you're you're dangling these carrots at different levels. And, and you're explaining the Hey, even though I'm not in the travel business, I've partnered with this company redeem vacations.com to provide you with this bonus trip, if you do the following. And, and then it you know, again, it makes sense. So if you're just getting started in business, and you come out with, Hey, I'm giving away five trips to Cancun on Saturday, it doesn't mean that sound believable, and actually hurt your brand. So you've got to, you know, make it sound believable and make it and not have even though you got the ability to give them away like candy, because we do say you can give away Unlimited, we don't recommend it can create scarcity and urgency and believability in, in in value stacking making that your client earn these incentives by doing something for you.
23:02
Right. So let's actually go right into that the difference between are the benefits of value stacking versus discounting? Well,
23:09
that's a great point, because people studies have been shown by many university studies and what have you that that consumers are more likely to purchase with, with additional value than with a 510 20% discount. If they see additional, you know, bonus buy one, get one free. For example, I walk into grocery stores in Florida where I live in. And as soon as you walk in the door, there's these huge, you know, barrels of baskets and what have you with buy one, get one free offers, and you ended up buying stuff, you had no intentions of buying, you know, the cans of mayo that you didn't need or cans of beans, or cereals or what have you. And if you really loaded many of them were charging almost double of what they were the day before but they put them up front now they say bye. And you're tempted to buy two boxes of cereal, you know and pay almost what they cause normally, but you have that feeling that you're getting the value stack, you're getting the buy one get one free. And so whether he's marketing boost or not you we really strongly recommend to business owners find ways to add value, versus just offering discounts to compete with your, you know, your competitors. And that value stack can mean you know, again, whether you use marketing boost or not. What can you add in in whatever your offer is. What can you add that maybe is is value and in line with your product line. So if you can, for example, and that might mean co work co branding with somebody else that you're working with another, for example, Chris, maybe you work with somebody else, you can say hey, when you buy my software, you get a test version of this following software package to go with it. And you do the same you let somebody use your software as a bonus for their offer and let it A portion you know, a part of their software in your package purchase. And now you're adding additional value stack additional bonuses that are benefiting you, and maybe a, a, somebody else in the community that has a, you know, a complementary product or service that might add, you know, value and give them a bonus or the trial of the of your competitor. Or maybe it's an old, it's an ebook that you wrote a while back. So now you can include that ebook free with the purchase of this product, you know, create these values, people see they're there. They will take action more often when there's additional bonus add value, and a timeline and scarcity and urgency take action before you know the end of the day, before Friday, the 25th or before the end of the month. And to get all these additional bonuses free, including, you know, maybe the marketing boost $500 Hotel savings card, or restaurant $100 Restaurant savings vouchers, or what have you.
25:58
Awesome. Well, Marco, you have provided some awesome tips for one just breathing new life into your marketing, separate from even using incentives, right, just some ideas for how people can re engage old lists everything like that. I would love to now go into our archives. Quick, quick three questions. The first, what book? Would you recommend everyone read a
26:25
recent book that I've been reading and recommending is called 100 million offers by I should have had Matt on top of my tongue here. Yeah, Alex, I think that book is very powerful for anybody getting out there and coming up with ways to create those value stacks, as he says in his book, you know, he teaches doesn't dozens of ways to make sure your offer is so good. You feel stupid saying no. And that's exactly what I'm talking about what I refer to building that value stack. So 100 million offers by Alex are mostly as a great book I read.
27:02
Yeah, actually, I don't know, depending on when this episode comes out. I think his second book in the series will be out by then all about generation I live, I should be getting that. And yeah, me too. What's, what's next for you professional, especially
27:19
for me is I'm going to be traveling even more now. So we're, my wife, and I decided we're going to do more of the laptop lifestyle for a while and live what I preach. Because as one, you know, I need to want to travel or continue to negotiate these hotel partner relationships around the world. And, and I also, you know, I just love the idea that you know, travel, it creates memories it creates. I think people live longer. When they travel more often they're creating, they're reducing that stress. And so anyway, I just want to show people and give people ideas on where they should be traveling. So I'll be doing that more. And professionally. The other thing is we're, we're really planning on going we've already gone global with our company, but we're currently only dealing in English. And so our goal for the down the road future here soon is to using artificial intelligence and what have you, we plan on being able to provide the services and marketing boost in multiple languages and currencies around the world. So we can continue to grow globally. Make it and more importantly, provide the customer service and multiple languages. So other than it's easy to just translate the website or what have you. But we need to be able to provide the customer service in multiple languages as well. And we haven't done that yet. So
28:41
yeah, yeah. Gotcha. And finally, where can people find asking?
28:45
Yeah, go to Marketing, boost. solutions.com marketing boost solutions.com. There, we provide a variety of services over and above just just a marketing boost of incentives we've been talking about, or you can go to marketing boost.com Marketing was.com was just about the incentives, you can get a free trial, you can sign up actually you can get a free freemium version of marketing boost with no credit card required. So you can go to Marketing booth solutions.com and click and find marketing booths sign up for free no credit card required and given and start seeing what we're all about. Or if you sign up for the paid version and something like 37 bucks, easy no brainer for anybody out there.
29:26
Right. Awesome. Thank you again for joining me lots of great tips in this episode. Thank
29:30
you very much. My pleasure to be here.
29:36
If you enjoyed today's episode, I would love a rating and review on your favorite podcast player. And for more information on how to build effective and efficient teams through your leadership. Visit leading four.com As always deserve it
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