Lessons - How One Marketing Strategy Built a Multi-Million Dollar Insurance Empire | Justin Brock - Founder of Bobby Brock Insurance

In this lessons episode, discover how media and smart distribution can outperform innovation when scaling a business. Learn how leveraging social platforms help build a legacy business in a modern way. Learn why chasing quick wins without long-term value can backfire and learn how high integrity marketing creates loyal customers and lasting success. It's interesting because when you look for business opportunities, most people, I just had a conversation about this this morning. Most people look for technological innovation and they ride away and that's how they become successful. They find something that's never been done before and they try and innovate. But there's another way to be successful and it's distribution. It's marketing distribution. It's media distribution. What's so interesting and what so many people can learn from your story is you went into a very old school industry is basically one of the most legacy old school outdated industries you can possibly find yourself in and a little bit of marketing prowess. It's not like you went to school and then you were like a you know you're not like the pick a marketer, a Seth Godin and Neil Patel, these guys that all they do is market all day since they were like five years old. A little bit of marketing and a $70 million exit later, that's fascinating. So when did you first understand that media as a form of leverage and distribution was a game changer for you? So what the origin is I was I was actually driving house to house doing things through old school direct mailway because you would first come in the old school, the old guard if you will you know this is how you do it. So I started doing it that way and it worked but it's very slow and so I was listening to productivity podcasts and I didn't again I didn't know anything about marketing. I was like I'll be on these long drives from house to house and so I was like I don't learn something so I started listening to you know sales training and then it was you know I was like my sales are good I don't know if I'm a good salesperson but I'm closing a very high percentage of these people I need more people to talk to so then it was productivity and then I would listen to the productivity and it's like well yeah that's great but I still need more people and so then eventually it was like you need marketing but I did it like you said I'm not a I wasn't a professional marketer I I just had no idea but I did grow up in what I would consider the vine era when all these people got really really famous for vine and then came you know the Jake and Logan Paul's and the David Dobricks and in the you know YouTube famous and I was one of those kids as a teenager making YouTube content then I joined the Marine Corps and kind of quit but that um I hadn't know you know we were making it back then we didn't know con like the concept of becoming famous off of content online wasn't really there for me looking back I was probably 20 videos away from having some kind of breakout and being some little internet celebrity but you know at the time I wasn't thinking about that but I understood seeing being a small content creator as a teenager seeing you know these guys that were doing it at the same time become these mega celebrities that the internet was definitely you know social media was definitely the way to go and so about you know about really I'm close to 11 years ago now when I got into it so about 11 years ago 10 years ago I'm going house to house I'm watching these or listen to this productivity podcast and eventually I came across a guy who was in life insurance he wasn't doing the same thing vertical I was but very similar and he was talking about his name is Jeff Root he's a good friend of mine now and Jeff he lives in South of France has a very successful digital brokerage for life and he was talking at the time about SEO for life insurance he was popping up many sites where he would have very hyper specific um he had one like cell term life calm but there was a lot of websites that he was creating for like diabetes or diabetics that wanted life insurance like and he was hacking these these long tail or mid mid range keywords through pretty easy SEO at the time um and like it's much more difficult to crack into that nail but at the time he was part of that way and so I was I realized like something was going on there and then he made a recommendation at one point he was talking about something Russell Brunson said so that was my intro to Russell Brunson early on Russell Brunson.com secrets expert secrets I was listening to that listening to the perfect webinar and that's how I kind of got into Facebook ads because Russell was talking a lot back then about Facebook ads and this was early Facebook monetization you know and uh in Facebook works now but back then it was like you know it was like given cocaine to kids on there I mean it was it's like so so you know crazy I mean you put an ad up and people didn't realize it was an ad because the entire platform had existed for years now with no advertisement and so and it didn't say sponsored and so I made a page that was just just in Brock so it wasn't because back then you couldn't advertise for your profile so you had to make a page so I made a page but I named the page my name and then I run advertisements and then they would go viral because they're getting pushed into these uh into people's feeds because they're ads and people would share it and like it and comment and and I was telling them to call my cell phone this is how dumb the ads were and my cell phone was ringing off the hook and all it was was a dental insurance ad because in my eyes I was like what what this is probably part of Russell's page is like what do people want to buy and they say sell them what they want then sell them what they need well people wanted dental insurance because they wanted their teeth to look and feel good like that's a different type of thing nobody wants health insurance until they're sick and dying and then they need something to pay the bill nobody wants life insurance really you know those are harder sales people need some of those things but they didn't necessarily want them but they wanted dental insurance it was those the vanity product that I sold and that ad man it it changed my entire philosophy on the internet because all of a sudden I'm like I can throw up an ad and spend at the time maybe 25 bucks a day and just get phone call after phone call after phone call no it's not quite as easy anymore but um you know everybody like if you just try a bunch of stuff eventually you can find a honey hole like that and the only thing I didn't realize is that honey hole was going to dry up and if I knew that I would have spent a lot more money a lot faster that hindsight's always 2020 I mean but that but by the way that is like such a good lesson because I know a lot of people right now are talking about for example like TikTok shop people are saying you can make a ton of money on TikTok shop selling consumer goods now whatever happens in in a in a couple days when when maybe it doesn't exist anymore in the US that remains to be seen but the point is yeah can you build a foundation yes but then you have to be smart enough to figure out a diversify and how to go into different channels how to explore new things like the the process of testing and finding new like grand slam marketing it's never ending and I'm sure you've gone through a thousand different versions of marketing over the course of actually building this business and even you know tomorrow you're going to see lack of performance which slightly worth performance on one of the million things you're trying right now and you're going to try a couple new things as just business it's just business it never ends I think that you have to keep disrupting and reinvent it it's kind of like you were talking before this we're talking you talk about the distribution of this of your platform being on OTE well I talk about OTT all the time you know at that is a medium we use right now for like OTT over the top television advertisements through different streaming platforms and it's like television for targeted avatars so if I'm if I'm going out and I'm able to target a range an age range and I'm in Medicare that's always great because you know I don't want that are 25 looking at a Medicare ad right but OTT's been great it's like the best of broadcast television but like really targeted but these are yes and I became a junkie on advertising so you know I now I've done I've done and do most of these I've done radio broadcast television OTT billboard campaigns lots of different social media done some on tiktok don't them linked in I've done I've I will try and I still use direct mail but we use direct mail now using kind of the Dan Kennedy magnetic marketing method where we're like trying to not really high quality pieces that invoke an inbound response you know not a not a bait and switch spam y stuff because the insurance industry is full of people marketing to look either look like a government entity or using a bait and switch campaign and and I'm like if you just come up with quality marketing quality messaging you don't have to do that and then you build higher lifetime value customers and that's just been our approach is like let's let's get clever but not gimmicky you know I mean I think that listen there's people like you that are going to come in and they disrupt and obviously I mean you look at your own success so if you if you do prioritize the customer if you have like a high EQ marketing strategy if you actually speak to problems they have no bait and switch bullshit if somebody does that it's going to work for a while until it doesn't then somebody who actually markets properly is going to come in they're going to take you know they're going to take market share they're going to clean up because that's what customers want customers are smart customers aren't stupid I mean it's kind of predatory if you're going after old people with these bait and switch tactics for sure but even then they're smart or someone in their circle of influence or their family is going to be a hey this is not exactly what it seems to be but and that's what we see in our reason it's the bait and switch marketing has plummeted the average lifetime value of the customer meanwhile hours range really high but they they don't understand that like you know they people would come in with money into this industry and they've got oh wow I can spend $200 and acquire a customer that's worth you know $1,500 that's great you know and you don't get all that right away but the lifetime value of that customer right and the 1500 is a realistic lifetime value of the customer if you can keep them happy for a long time but it's not realistic if they if they pop on a plane realize they got bamboozled and hop all three months later or six months later then you're actually losing money and so we've had a lot of these people come in and they think oh the customer for 1500 let me get as many of as possible but if you go and do it the wrong way it's not 1500 it's 500 400 300 and so that's happened where it's kind of lowered the lifetime value on average but meanwhile hours have stayed the same so it's been you know honestly it's refreshing to see when you're in business and you see someone come in and do something the wrong way and then and then get kind of you know capitalism penalizes them for it eventually you know the free market works if you let if you let it you sometimes they'll be like trying to add some regulation to fix something and I'm like if you guys just wait it's gonna fix itself because these people are getting fucking hammered on the back in because they're doing business the wrong way you know thanks for tuning in if you found this valuable don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and if you want to dive deeper into this conversation check out the links in the description to watch the full episode see you in the next one