Summary
- A permission asset is one of the most valuable marketing assets you can own, often more powerful and far less expensive than ongoing advertising.
- Instead of renting attention through ads, billboards, or mailers, a permission asset lets you own a direct line to people who actually want to hear from you.
- It works because reaching people who want your message has never been cheaper, while interrupting people who don’t want it has never been harder.
- A permission asset exists to deliver a specific feeling your audience wants, such as clarity, confidence, or peace of mind, not to talk about your services.
- Every permission asset should be built around understanding what your patients or audience care about, fear, and hope for.
- Consistency matters, but cadence must be realistic and sustainable so you actually show up and keep your promises.
- The right time to invite someone to join your permission asset is immediately after you’ve delivered real value and kept a promise.
- Once someone opts in, the job is simple: deliver exactly what you promised, no more and no less.
- Over time, permission assets compound and become more powerful than any paid advertising channel.
- As traditional advertising becomes less effective, building permission is one of the best ways to future-proof your practice’s marketing.
For our permission assets inaugural video, we’re going to talk about permission assets. Why should you even care about this? What is it? And how can you leverage it?
So, why should you care? A permission asset is probably the most valuable marketing asset you can own. Consider this. Some people spend about $10,000 a month just on advertising. You can have the equivalent of that for maybe less than $100 a month. The potential upside is massive. The potential of permission assets is like nothing else in marketing. It’s one of the most valuable assets you can own, so pay attention. I’m going to show you how to create it and how to leverage it, just like we’re doing here with this video.
So what is it? A permission asset is a type of propellant. Whenever you need to leverage something to get people’s attention, whether that’s because you have a new associate or a new service that you’re excited to get more patients for, you want to get the word out and you can leverage propellants. Propellants are things like advertising, sending mailers out, having a billboard, basically doing an activity to get attention. The things that let you get attention at will, that’s a propellant.
Permission assets are a type of propellant, but they’re based on two important concepts. One is that it’s completely owned by you. You’re not leveraging another platform. You’re not leveraging Meta or their network. You’re not leveraging Google ads or their search platform. You’re not leveraging mailers, their infrastructure, billboards, or anything like that. You completely own permission assets, so when it comes to reaching out to those people, you own the vertical.
The second thing it’s based on is that today, it’s cheaper than ever to reach someone who wants to hear from us, and it’s more expensive than ever to reach someone who doesn’t want to hear from us. Think of how prevalent things like ad blockers are. For example, I have a vinyl record player because I don’t want to be annoyed by algorithms or advertisements while I listen to music. As a culture, we’re shifting away from being advertised to and instead choosing a more ad-free lifestyle.
So it’s based on those two principles. One is ownership, and two is that times are changing, and this is the medium that’s going to best align with the times.
So how can you leverage it? How can you take this incredible thing and start to leverage it? First, you have to identify the desired feeling. If you haven’t already, check out the strategy course. There, you’ll figure out exactly how to identify the desired feeling of the target audience.
Basically, what your permission asset is trying to do, or should try to do, is fulfill that desired feeling. It’s not an asset where we just talk about ourselves, like, “Here’s my latest product,” “Here’s my latest course,” or “Here are my services.” That’s not what we’re doing. We’re trying to help the other person. We’re trying to say, “This is how you want to feel. These are the things you care about. This is what you’re afraid of. This is what you dream of. Let me help you with that.”
The desired feeling is the core of the entire permission asset, and that’s one of the fundamental ways we’re going to differentiate from other people, as you’ll find out in the course. Desired feeling is what we should lead with.
The next thing is cadence. How often are we going to deliver that desired feeling to them? There are two aspects of this. One is that we want to be routine enough so that they expect it and eagerly await it. The other is that it puts the ball in our court. It makes us responsible for committing to a schedule and actually doing the work of delivering desired feelings.
Setting a cadence is very important, but you also want it to be intentional. You don’t want to say, “I’m going to do this daily,” and then ignore your other responsibilities or be unrealistic about it. You want to be very intentional with how you set your cadence to make sure it’s sustainable.
Finally, you have touchpoints. When will you ask people to join your permission asset? Typically, this should be done right after you deliver on a desired feeling somewhere else.
For example, what I’m doing here. The desired feeling I intend to impart on viewers or readers is more clarity when it comes to understanding how to grow their practice and understanding marketing. The desired feeling I’m assuming you want from watching something like this is clarity, confidence, and feeling competent. That’s what I’m trying to do.
After I impart those feelings to you with this video, a promise has been kept. You come into this video expecting a certain thing. If I just talk about my own services and what I do, you’re going to leave feeling like that wasn’t what you were looking for, and you’re not going to come back. But if you come in with an expectation that I’ll deliver something and I do deliver it, then right after that is when I would ask you to join the mailing list or whatever permission asset you’re providing.
That’s it. You just keep doing that. You create a promise of, “If you join this asset, here’s the feeling I can give you,” and you keep delivering that. You don’t do anything more. You don’t suddenly start sending things people didn’t ask for, and you don’t do less. You don’t say you’ll provide something monthly and then never show up.
Over time, this permission asset grows into something massive. In my course, I use the analogy of Joe Rogan’s audience. Joe Rogan is a podcaster, and Spotify ended up leveraging his permission asset, his followers, for $250 million. People wondered how that was possible, but it’s really the strength of permission assets.
It’s the strongest propellant. It’s more desired than any other propellant. It’s more effective. It’s cheaper. And best of all, you own it.
That’s permission assets. You really need this. It’s future-proofing. In the future, I expect propellants to work less and less. In an economy where everyone is focusing on propellants, this is the perfect time for you to be focusing on permission assets.