Empower Network Top Producer Formula (06) – Generating Highly Targeted Leads
Anyone can put an ad in front of a million strangers. The moment your business depends on real people walking into a real room on a weeknight, the problem changes shape: it’s no longer enough that a prospect is interested. They also have to live close enough to show up.
That two-variable problem, interest plus location, is what this session of the Top Producer Formula solves. It’s taught not by Dave Wood but by a field leader working out of Honolulu who fills live local events for his team, and it’s the most tactical session in the course: where targeted registrants actually come from, how to make sure the right person gets credit for every one of them, and what to do with the room once they arrive. As someone who’s ever burned money on advertising that reached the whole internet when you only needed your own city, this is the session that fixes the aim.
Where do local, targeted registrants actually come from?
His favorite source, by a wide margin, is Facebook, because it lets him stack both variables at once. He targets by city, down to the specific towns on the island of Oahu, and then layers interests on top by listing the names of other network marketing companies. Anyone the ad reaches now lives within driving distance of his event and has already shown interest in the work-from-home industry. That’s the whole definition of a highly targeted lead.
He shows his real numbers, and they’re worth studying precisely because they’re unimpressive. His first-ever Facebook ad for a live event spent $754.40 at about $3.30 per thousand impressions and pulled a 1.7 percent click-through rate, which he calls one of the worst he’s ever had. His second spent over $900 at $4.19 per thousand with a somewhat better click-through rate. Neither was polished, both were his first attempts, and both filled enough seats to be worth repeating, because the targeting was right even when the creative wasn’t. The lesson isn’t the metrics. The lesson is that a first, clumsy campaign aimed at exactly the right people beats a beautiful one aimed at everybody.
Beyond Facebook, he works local online periodicals: the city magazine’s website, the major newspaper site that reaches an enormous local audience daily, the TV news station’s site. Each sells ad space and will send you demographics, impressions, and banner specs if you ask. What he hunts for on those sites, in order of preference: native ads, which look like articles and click through to a full article you wrote yourself that ends with an invitation to a free workshop; banners embedded inside the content, which get clicked far more than sidebar placements because most readers have ad blindness for the right-hand column; and only then, standard display spots. Craigslist rounds out the online options, essentially free and aimed at job seekers, who he points out are really searching for an income, not a job. Clickable links are gone from those listings now, so his team members upload their banner as an image and tell readers to copy the registration link into a new tab. Crude, but it has registered real attendees who bought. Offline, he’s used classified periodicals and newspapers, and he’s watched others fill rooms with radio, which works but costs noticeably more.
How does every sale get credited to the right person?
Here’s the mechanism that turns one registration page into a whole team’s tool. Anyone on his team can drive traffic to the same page by appending a code to the address: a question mark, then id equals their username. The page loads identically, but the autoresponder database, whether GetResponse or AWeber, stores the exact URL each person opted in from. Before the event, he exports the subscriber list as a spreadsheet, deletes the columns he doesn’t need, alphabetizes by first name, and prints it. That printout is the registration sheet. When a guest checks in, the person at the table finds their name, reads the opt-in URL beside it, and writes the referring affiliate’s name in the bottom corner of the guest’s name tag. If that guest buys, the credit is already settled, in ink, with no arguments.
The same coding runs his co-ops, his name for a cooperative advertising effort. He builds the ad himself, because he’s the one who’s been doing it long enough to be decent at it, and team members buy in equally, at something like $100 or $150 apiece. Every registrant from that campaign is coded co-op on the name tag. Then, instead of splitting the leads the way online co-ops usually do, they split the sales that come out of the room, one per contributor as people sign up. If fifteen people funded the co-op and only ten sales came out, the five who got nothing move to the top of the list for the next event’s co-op. The effect is that brand-new team members get to borrow his advertising skill instead of learning it under fire, and nobody contributes to more than a couple of co-ops without a sale coming back.
What happens on event day before anyone sits down?
Registration happens outside the room, a rule his team learned the hard way after early guests wandered in during setup and overheard conversations meant for the team. His incubation emails warn that doors close promptly at start time, and he means it, they lock the doors after the introduction, so guests routinely arrive thirty to sixty minutes early. They check in at the table, get their coded name tag, and wait in the lobby until the doors open fifteen minutes before showtime.
Inside, the room itself is doing sales work. His show-up rate runs forty to fifty percent, so a hundred registrations means forty to fifty bodies, and he’ll set out maybe twenty-five chairs anyway. People are forced toward the front, the room looks oversold, and staff visibly add rows from the stacked spares as it fills, which manufactures scarcity and urgency before a word is spoken. Music plays a few decibels louder than people expect, upbeat and fast-paced, nudged up as bodies absorb the sound, a trick he learned from a presenter who closes most of a room. Add a projector, a screen, and a microphone, usually rentable from the venue, and the stage is set.
How does the presentation itself sell?
A team member opens, not the speaker. They welcome the room, tell their own story, and deliver what amounts to the first testimonial of the day: before I met the speaker, I was stuck, and here’s what changed. Notice the edification points at the speaker, not the company or the product. Then they introduce the speaker with either results or simply notable achievements, a community leader, an award-winning teacher, because if someone is edified correctly, nobody in the room questions their authority. The speaker takes the stage and spends ten or fifteen minutes on nothing but rapport: background, a funny story, and deliberate authenticity, like his own story of ditching the slacks and dress shirt after realizing the suit he wore as a mortgage loan officer never made him know one thing more about mortgages, so now the audience gets him exactly as they’d meet him at the supermarket.
Then he does the thing most presenters are too scared to do. He names the tension in the room out loud.
Some of you might be wondering, you know, is this guy going to sell me something? And the truth is, yes, I’m absolutely here to sell you something. And I hope that you buy it. And I want to be clear that I don’t hope that you buy it because I need to make money… I hope that you buy it for you.
He says you can feel the energy in the room shift when the apprehension is met head-on, and feel the tension grind through the whole event when it isn’t. From there the structure is a sequence you can map onto any offer: a shock factor to seize attention, in his case the difference between counting to a million, about eleven and a half days, and counting to a billion, over thirty-one years, to make the size of the internet audience physically real; then the problem and its pain points, which a teammate of his calls picking the scab until it bleeds; then what life looks like with the problem solved; then the product as the solution. He dismantles skepticism by separating its two forms: nobody is rationally skeptical that a proven model works, they’re skeptical they personally can do it, and he tells the room what a mentor told him, give up on your dreams or give up on your skepticism, because you can’t keep both. Notably, he also stops mid-presentation to state plainly that his results are not typical and not guaranteed, and makes the room acknowledge it out loud. Then come testimonials chosen to span ages and backgrounds so everyone finds someone to identify with, price conditioning that anchors the system’s worth high before revealing the actual entry price, and a close that divides the audience into three people: the one who’s decided this isn’t for them and may leave at the break, the one with questions for the team members in marked lanyards, and the go-getter who heads straight to the table at the back. Every option starts with in a moment, so nobody stands up while he’s still talking. One final emotional story, a thirty-minute countdown timer on the screen, and only buyers stay in the room for training.
This walkthrough is one session of the full Top Producer Formula, which pairs it with the registration funnel, the incubation emails, and the rest of the recruiting system it plugs into. If you’re new to it, the entire Top Producer Formula, this lesson included, is available for $99 at the Top Producer Formula course.
Your move this week: pick one local channel, Facebook with city targeting if you only pick one, set up your registration page with affiliate coding on the URL, and put a real date on a real room. Targeted means interested and able to show up. Build for both.