Most Business Owners Think Marketing Has One Job

Oh, good to see you. In business, most people think marketing only has one job, get more leads. The truth is, that's nonsense. There's 3 things that it needs to do. What you're about to see is a snapshot from a live workshop I hosted the other week for about 15 business owners. And in it, I'm gonna explain the 3 main jobs of marketing that you need to crack. The 2 big market forces that we're observing now that are changing the way our consumers behave and as a result affecting the strategies that are working well now. The key numbers that fuel the marketing that most people never bother to do. And also the 7-part offer enhancement framework that we use to apply to our core offers to make them more valuable so we can charge more for them and also get more people wanting them. Grab a pen. This is gonna be awesome. I think maybe it will be useful for me to share a little bit about, uh, our current marketing approach, if you will, because quite a few of the things that came up there were obviously want more leads, you want to drive more additional engagement. If we've got leads and they're not converting, why they're not converting, haven't get more calls booked in, all this kind of stuff. If it's okay with you, I'm actually going to share what is our kind of new and most current marketing strategy and model that I think will begin to get some sparks flying in your brains around your individual challenges. It will show you how we're approaching stuff and what we're kind of betting on, and then we'll go from that and segue into the specific challenges that face us all. Does that sound like a plan? What I first actually think is very important is for us to be aware of just the wider world and how things are changing. Our job when it comes to marketing is basically there's 3 things we want to do. Uh, we want to drive some traffic, i.e., get some attention, and get those people to click through onto something. We then want to convert that traffic from a click or a visit into some kind of expression of interest, i.e., becoming a lead. Raising your hand, opting in, and enabling a conversation to occur. That's the first step. And of course, once we've got conversations and expressions of interest, we want to go seal the deal. I want to close some sales because that is where all of the sweet cash, revenue, all the stuff that we like lives. And so in order to do those things effectively, for all of us, I always think it's well worth being aware of just what is happening in the world, because if we want to capture people's attention, then we need to understand where that attention is, is going. There's quite a few very interesting, quite significant factors that I don't think will be a surprise to you, um, that are at play. And it's important that as marketers we understand how these changes are influencing the behaviors of our markets. Because if we want to go out there and generate customers out of thin air, it pays to understand how people's behavior is changing. So what are these forces? The first one is the short-form video. We have seen the rise of the short-form video over the last few years. It is the most dominant form of media consumed en masse at the moment. Now, what does that mean? It means that a large chunk of our market's brains are being hijacked by this short-form video. Because when you think about what actually happens when you go on Instagram, TikTok, whatever your, whatever your poison, you now are fed with this feed that's determined by a very fancy algorithm that is attempting to show you all of these 30 to 60-second clips. And every single clip is specifically engineered to like try and give you the maximum amount of dopamine possible. Not only that, but it's from a whole range of stuff. Like you will all know what your individual feeds look like, but one minute it's some cute cat videos, some amazing sporting moments, but it's all of the best, most exciting moments across the entire human emotional spectrum just fed to us. And that's why it's so addictive. A 17-year-old girl came and did some work experience the other week, and she spent a day with me in the marketing team. One of the first things I did is I pulled out my phone and I pulled out her phone and we looked at our screen times because I wanted to illustrate a point about, um, you know, you should— depending on different people have different habits, and then based on who you're trying to target in your marketing, you probably want to appear in the place where they the people are consuming your media. But what struck me was her screen time in 7 days. How many hours do you think were on TikTok in 7 days for this 17-year-old girl? Uh, yeah, it was— she had, she had 24 hours in 7 days on TikTok and a further 13 hours on Snapchat. Yeah. No, not yet. Um, which was mental. And so anyway, that just got me thinking about these, these algorithms and the short-form feed and what it's doing to people's brains, because our little poor brain was not evolved to handle this kind of, you know, stimulation. And so what does that mean? It means attention spans are getting really, really short. And it means that a lot of people are like being trained to consume this kind of content, and that is having a big impact on a lot of our ads and how we approach capturing people's attention. Factor number 1. Crazy factor number 2, which will be a surprise to you guys, I hope, um, but is AI. So AI It's awesome in many ways, less awesome in other ways. But what is AI doing to our markets? Okay, we're kind of at the point now where everybody's becoming very avid users of AI. The usage stats are insane. And what does AI do? It takes our question, our thought, and in a few seconds it gives us a perfectly synthesized personalized response that generally is very, very good. And now we have the whole new wave of AI tools, agentic AI, that actually can do stuff for us as well. But thinking bigger picture, with things like ChatGPT and Claude having hundreds and hundreds of millions of users now, um, every single day, people are getting used to having this immediate personalized amazing response. The first time we do that, that was really exciting. And remember the first time they used ChatGPT? I can't— blew my absolute mind. I couldn't believe it. Um, but a few years later, it's kind of becoming the norm now. Okay, I have expectations that have been set by me using AI. Are you all familiar with the, uh, the term the hedonic treadmill and how As humans, we can get ourselves in a bit of a trap with how, you know, our brain seeks dopamine, it seeks reward, and we'll go out there and do something we might really want, you know, whether it's the fancy car or the nice watch or whatever it is, is the classic example. And you work really hard to get it, and then you finally get it and it feels good for like a day, and then boom, all of a sudden our brain adapts. We adapt. That thing that was really cool has now become the norm. We then chase the next thing, the next thing, the next thing. It's a little bit like that with AI because people's expectations now are being really set by what they can get from these AI models. Like, people are expecting very quick, almost instantaneous, very good answers and responses in, like, next to no time. And so therefore, as that becomes the norm, the expectation what will happen to us as business owners? Well, if we're unable to begin to meet people's expectations, then they're not going to be happy. And so there's great implications there for how we actually deal with customers when they come in and how we actually project ourselves online. Because in a world where people want information and they want it very, very fast, our job is to make sure we can actually do that and provide it to them. Because otherwise, sooner or later you're going to be, be the laggard that's just making it difficult for people. And people's expectations are shifting very, very massively. Don't even get me started on how in a few years we're going to have these feeds that contain like 100% pure AI-generated content that's indistinguishable from real life, that is perfectly crafted just for you and everything that you find most exciting and interesting. But anyway, so those two market forces are very significant. And so we have to factor them into our strategies moving forward, because if we don't, then we are most likely going to be left behind in some regard. So this brings me to the actual strategy itself. Now, every good strategy is built on very strong foundations. And so what are the foundations that we must have in place before we begin to even strategize about our marketing? The first is the numbers, the commercial economics behind your business and ultimately what you are trying to achieve. So you guys have been around EC for a while. You should hopefully all know your numbers, including hopefully your customer acquisition cost, what you would be willing to spend to acquire a customer. Again, you get to set your customer acquisition cost. That is a choice. There's no— right or wrong answer. There's only answers that make life easy and answers that make life very difficult. But you need to really understand, uh, what that figure is because your whole strategy really stems from it. Now, like I said, there's no right or wrong with the customer acquisition cost. It's either nice and big, which makes acquiring customers with that budget pretty straightforward, or it's really, really small and impossible to get any customers for that kind of budget. But that will change over time, and that is totally fine. The other element of your numbers is like, what are you actually trying to achieve in your business? Because all of you will be at different stages of, of growth and different stages of kind of achieving what you want out of your business. Businesses exist to, you know, make a positive impact in the world and also to the business owner and their team's lives. I think the perfect balance in a business is having a fantastic mission that is bigger than the business, that does contribute meaningfully in a positive way to the world, um, but that also contributes fantastically and very generously to the owners who are willing to take the risk and bear all the stress of running it, and to the team members that help them along the way. And so with any kind of strategy, you've got to always start with the end in mind. Like, what are we actually trying to achieve here? How much do we want to actually grow? In an ideal scenario, how many new customers are we bringing on? And ultimately, like, what's, what's the end goal? Because you don't strategize for strategy's sake. That is pointless. We want to be very specifically clear around what we're trying to achieve, because as the owners and the marketers, your job is to understand that, because you need these constraints of your customer acquisition costs. And let's just call it your goals, both for the business, both personally. You need those constraints because then once we have a very clear picture of what it is we are trying to achieve, then we can actually begin to decide, okay, what are actually the highest probability actions that are likely to get me to that goal? Because when you understand this stuff really clearly, actually your decision-making just becomes way more straightforward. And when you are a bit vague, that's when it's hard and that's when you'll feel pulled in different directions and there'll be a million and one things you could do because there always is with any one of your businesses, with any one of the problems you have laid out to me today. There are like a myriad of ways you could solve it. And so my job is to try and share the ways in which I think have the highest probability of solving it that are in line with your goals. Because again, when it comes to advertising and getting customers, there's really only 3 things you can do. You can run paid ads, you can post content online, whether that's videos, blogs, free content, or you can outreach to people. You can send emails, call people up, send them messages. It's all you can do. It's really— every type of marketing comes under one of those 3 things. Either paid ads, we're either posting free content, hoping people see and click through, or or we are doing some kind of outreach, whether it's cold outreach or whether it's warm outreach, emailing our list and so on and so forth. And again, your guys' business, the clues to how we actually are able to achieve a lot of your goals are gonna be in what you actually enjoy doing and what assets you have within the business that would lend itself to these 3 things being a success. But it all stems from the numbers. The second part of the foundation is who we're trying to sell to, aka your ICP. It's the little phrase that we like to use. And so the ICP just stands for your ideal customer profile. Again, asked you all about who it is you serve this morning. You have a pretty good idea of who your ideal customers are. Now, make no mistake, who you choose to serve here will have a very big impact on the reality of your business, how enjoyable it is, how stressful it is, how profitable it is. It really comes down to your proactive choice that you make around who you serve. And so we definitely want to put a lot of time and attention into who this is. I remember in my, uh, in my agency days doing exactly the same. So when I first started out, naturally take on any possible client we could, um, and then after a few years and after working with a whole bunch of different industries, quickly started to understand that there were some businesses that were great fun to work with. They were really easy to get results for, uh, they had no issues paying a lot of money for the service as well. They were big profitable businesses. And then on the flip side, there were the complete opposite businesses that were nigh impossible to actually get results for, and also very difficult demanding clients, and also very tight as well. And so a very useful exercise I highly recommend all of you do is looking at all of your customers, and sitting down and thinking, right, who are the top 20% of our customers? And you get to decide this based on the factors that are most important to you. Because yes, you know, profitability is probably one that you would want to consider, but equally, like, are they just an asshole? Because if so, we probably want less of them. So we would look at like the ease of success or the ease of getting them results. We would look at, uh, just, you know, their vibe. Are they fun to work with? And whatever criteria is good for you, and you then set about rating all of your customers based on these factors, and then what you will be left with is a sub-segment that represent who your ideal customers are. The most preferable type of customers. And so then what you do is go, okay, well, if these guys are my ideal customers, what is it about them specifically that makes them ideal? What is, you know, in a business-to-business setting, I would look at, okay, what was their turnover? What was their industry? What was their customer journey? You know, were they like lead generation or e-commerce? How many staff did they have? What was their customer acquisition cost? Um, what was the sales process? Did they have a sales team? Now again, this will be specific to your guys' niches, but the purpose of this is, okay, if we know these people are great, let's try and really quantify what actually makes them great and get very clear on the very specific set of real-life criteria that makes them good. Because if we just decide that things are good or bad without actually ever getting into specifics, then it's not really very helpful. You want to try and drill into the specifics as much as possible. And so going through that exercise will normally yield you some fantastic insight. Because in my agency, we quickly discovered that our best customers were in the kind of home services space. They were typically £1.5 million and above in annual turnover. They had the same kind of lead-to-appointment customer journey. They all had a customer acquisition cost like over £1,000. They typically have between like 15 and 25 staff. They had salespeople. And so we went from working with a bunch of different businesses to now a very clear, rigid set of criteria that enabled us to determine like if this person is good or not. Now, not only was that really helpful for us in terms of our strategy, but it actually made the sales process so much better. 'Cause on all of our initial discovery calls that we would have with people, we would just say, we would be like, right, the types of businesses we work with tick all this criteria. And we would just put it up on the screen and then we would ask them questions and see whether or not they fit the criteria. And that level of specificity really got the right people that truly brought in. And it also made it very easy to have the conversation that, ah, it doesn't look like we're really the fit here. Which again, when you're not clear on this stuff, you'll be way more inclined to, take on the bad clients and just take the money whilst it's there, which is always a bad thing to do. But getting the clarity over the ideal customer is key, and thinking about who the good ones are for all the different reasons that are important to you. The other reason why you have to get incredibly clear on your ideal customer profile will actually affect and be part of the answer to quite a lot of your questions today. Because anything to do with why won't people respond, why won't people engage, I've got all these leads and I'm emailing them, they're opening it, but no one's booking calls, I'm sending out direct mail and they're not responding at the rates I would like— the answer to all of that, in most cases, without actually looking at your individual cases, it's nearly always a messaging problem. Your messaging has missed the mark. It has not been compelling enough to get that person to take action. And if you operate your business in a world where your ideal customer exists in the vague, then you will never be able to dial in your messaging to the point where it is super effective. Because you just, you just can't. You have to understand in the specifics who these people are that you are trying to get after. And you don't have to go mental. The thing that trips people up a lot with this kind of stuff is like they focus too much on like demographics, like, you know, people are either builders or they're plumbers or electricians and all that kind of stuff. No, no, no, no, no. Whilst that is one way to drill down into your niche, the other way is what we call situational, situational niches, which is exactly what I had in my agency. Because actually, whilst we did have a lot of good home service-based businesses, we worked with a bunch of other businesses in completely different industries because they matched all the other criteria. An interesting insight, it wasn't a determining factor. And if you tick the boxes in terms of having the right customer journey and the right customer acquisition costs and so on and so forth, then our stuff absolutely would work. And so we had a very specific situational niche which enabled us then to not just bang on about home services all the time, but to speak to the people in that precise situation and talk about the challenges and the struggles that they face. Don't ever feel bad for not having a one specific demographic or one, you know, type of consumer that is you. Think about the situation because that is where you find the crossover. How do we get specific on the messaging? Two key things I want to go into here, two little models and frameworks that we use. So we have this little phrase and it's called the moose in the road. But what you need to know about a moose is they are humongous. Fun fact, if you drive your car into a moose, you're pretty much like 100% dead because of how tall they are. You hit their legs and boom, they just go straight through the windshield. Anyway, sidetracked. Which does actually happen quite a lot, 'cause people speed around these roads, certainly in Sweden they do, and then every now and then, ah, there's just a moose there. And it's like, it's actually a very deadly scenario. We believe it's critically important that as a business you have your own MOOSE. What is the MOOSE? Well, just imagine somebody's driving their car down the road, and they're just, you know, cruising on autopilot. When you all drove here today, driving this route that you've probably driven before, you know, so much of the time you're just on autopilot, okay? You're on autopilot. Our brain's natural inclination is to try and conserve energy. And so once we are doing the familiar, whether that's driving somewhere we've always been or scrolling content on our feed, we're kind of in that autopilot mode. And so what that means is it's very difficult for us to really stand out and grab somebody's attention. If we can do a better job at grabbing somebody's attention, then all of our marketing just begins to be infinitely more better. And so the Moose in the Road concept is that with our messaging as a business, we want it to stand out like a moose in the road. We wanna stand out like a giant flipping moose in the road, AKA our messaging is just unavoidable. 'cause it's so spicy, it's so direct, it's so awesome that the right people, not everybody, but the right people cannot help but stop and read and engage. And so as a business, you wanna go through this activity of creating your moose in the road. Because again, people get so used to seeing the same kind of stuff over and over and over again. And so, I mean, Google did a study relatively recently. On average, average person sees 10,000 adverts every single day across all mediums. It's absolutely nuts. Okay. And how many do you remember? Yeah, next to none most of the time. Okay. So our brains are exceptionally good at filtering out adverts. There's some other factors at play because on places like Facebook, um, which we're going to talk a lot about Facebook ads today. Um, they changed the algorithm recently, and all you need to know is that when somebody gets shown your Facebook ad, Facebook immediately shows them your competitors' ads. Because if they think that somebody's interested in this thing, some new lights, then your ad's going to get an impression and they might engage with it and be like, oh, that's— yeah, I like a look at this. But then they're back to scrolling and immediately they're going to get served with like your biggest competitors because they think, ah, this person's interested in lights, ah, they didn't buy from this person, let's try a few more. And so they spam all your competitors. And so that has big implications because it means not only are people just getting shown our direct competitors all the time, they're able to actually compare side by side what's going on. And it also means that once people enter a buying cycle and start getting served these ads, that they are quickly forming views around this thing. And so what we notice as an example is we started to get just a lot more, uh, solution-aware people into our marketing funnels. Because we might show them an ad for whatever it is, Facebook Ad Accelerator or something. And then next thing you know, they've been shown 20 other ads from other Facebook ad-related things. And so consumers actually get more educated on what your thing is, which is also kind of interesting as well. Needless to say, back to the moose. This is why you need a flipping moose. You need something that really, really truly stands out. So how do we actually, how do we actually do this? Because the essence of a moose in a road is creating a kind of core messaging pillar. Something that you truly believe in in your business that just is very different to everybody else. And so some of this, you might just have a core belief that is very different, and that's fantastic. For a lot of people, we kind of need to, we need to craft it because it has to be something that you do genuinely hold true because we're in the business of integrity and telling the truth. But sometimes the way we position or talk about something, we can do it in a way that makes it stand out.. And this is more important than ever, especially in the world of AI-generated slop that exists out there. So one of the strongest things you can do, and this applies to any form of marketing, your paid ads, your content, your outreach, one of the number one ways you can make it stronger and make your business more memorable is by having a moose in the road. So how do we actually create the moose in the road? We want to get clear in the first instance, what are the sacred beliefs that your industry holds as the norm? What are the common assumptions that people are going to have around your thing? Because whenever anybody interacts with you and your business, they have some preconceived beliefs most of the time around your thing. Having bought a few bits of furniture before, my belief was that I want a cool, cool sofa. But when I've looked at sofas before, they flip and take like 10 to 12 weeks, which I find really annoying because I'm very impatient. But I just accepted that as a reality based on my previous experiences before. So that was my assumed belief. I then do a quick little Google search for some sofas, and I come across a company— I think it's called The Sofa Club— and their whole thing It's next day delivery on sofas. And I was like, wow, that's fucking awesome. That completely smashed through my belief, got my attention, and we ordered a sofa from The Sofa Club. And so they took the common belief in their industry and they kind of went all in on saying, screw that, we're going to do next day delivery. And they engineered their model around that, which gives them a very, very strong moose in the road. Very, very hard to compete if you're slightly impatient like I am and all these other companies have nice sofas, but they're 4, 5, 6, 10 weeks away. The speed is going to win in that case. So you probably have some similar beliefs, assumptions that will exist in your industry that are like that. The things that people would hold true, you know, and everyone might be, you know, like a dentist, the whole idea that you just got to come once a year for a checkup. We just all assume that is the very standard normal advice. The fun part of this then is once we've got a bit of clarity on these sacred beliefs, and of course you could use, use AI to help you ideate with this, we then want to flip it. We take one of these beliefs and we flip it into a MOOSE. So again, another example, Sofa Club did it very effectively. Standard belief, 10 to 12 weeks for a nice sofa. Boom, next day delivery on all sofas. Now, in the, uh, kind of online marketing world, to give you another example, one of the big beliefs at the moment is all around personal branding and how personal branding is just the key to success and to life and is the absolute best strategy you could deploy right now if you want to have a really super successful business. And that's like quite a big, big narrative around a big portion of the market. And so my version of my moose with this belief is screw your personal branding. I think personal branding for most people building an audience, one of the worst things you could try and do. One of the worst things you could try and do. And I genuinely believe that for most people, because you see, unless you love creating content, and I mean love it, because you're gonna have to create an absolute fuckload for a very long time with no guarantee of any success or results, then it's probably not for you. And the thing I don't like about personal branding is people get caught up on building the audience, building the asset, and chasing these vanity metrics, and that takes all of their attention away from actually building the conversion mechanism, the thing that actually converts the eyeballs into revenue, which is why I believe for most established businesses that are up and running, paid ads is the best route. Because with paid ads, you absolutely control exactly how many people see your thing, see your offer, and it forces you to confront the beast, which is how the heck can I spend some money on an ad, get somebody to click, and turn it into a sale? And that's a tough problem. That is a hard problem. But you know why it's hard? Because if you can do it, it's fucking magical and will absolutely change your life. And so for me, let's solve that problem first, then do all the personal branding, then do all the organic stuff, because that's like an accelerant on the fire. Once we have our moose, we've then got to get that sucker working. We deploy the Moose, which simply means we just weave it into everything. Okay, we talk about the Moose on our landing pages, we talk about it in our ads, we talk about it in our content, in our emails. The Moose becomes very central to who we are and what we believe. And you'll know you have a good Moose because all of a sudden the right people start to respond and engage, and equally the wrong people start to not respond or respond angrily. And that's fantastic. That's how you know you've got something good. Because the reality is most of the marketing that most people put out is just, it's just boring. And it's just harder than ever to actually capture people's attention. And so we need to spend some time thinking about how we can make our message truly stand out. And the Moose positioning is very, very key. So again, one of the One of the best ways that we use AI here, and you can absolutely use AI to help craft this— again, the big caveat is you have to believe this. You can't just use AI to give you some random opinion you don't actually truly hold true. That defeats the point. This has to be something you do genuinely believe in, but you can use AI to kind of tease it out of you. My favorite way of using AI is instructing it to ask me questions one at a time, and we go back and forth on a topic. So I might say, hello Claude, which I'm using at the moment. Um, I want to help craft myself a series of MOOCs, some key contrarian positioning statements that are going to make my messaging absolutely electric and magnetic to the right people. I want you to ask me questions one at a time to understand my business, my context, my ideal customers, what the industry believes in, and how we can flip my beliefs into some awesome positioning. Let's go. And then it will come back one at a time and we'll just have a little conversation, which is basically how we do all of our work now. Anyone heard of Whisper Flow? Whisper Flow is magical. Um, it's AI-powered dictation, so I like hardly ever type now. I press this button and I just, I start speaking. Um, and you see that little sound thing at the bottom there? It's recording what I'm saying. And then boom, you let go, and wherever you have got your cursor, it's going to dump in a bunch of text, but it's fantastic. We love, we love WhisperFlame. Okay, that was the moose. The next part is the bridge. So what is the bridge? I like to call it the Bridge of Destiny. But if you really understand these two models, then pretty much all of your messaging worries start to go away. Spiky rocks. So— Boom. Okay, gotta burn this into your minds, guys. The Bridge of Destiny. So this is the idea, and that nobody ever wants to buy a thing. They want to buy the transformation that the thing delivers. Okay, no one wants to buy, you know, whatever it is, cabling as an example, but they want to buy beautiful smooth office with fantastic signal where everybody can work and be super productive. Right, that's what they want. And they don't want, ah, hosting events and the Wi-Fi cutting out. How's that? Oh yeah, oh, stressful. Um, we want it all to run smoothly. Therefore, in order for us to attract the right people, we want to get very, very good at articulating what that transformation looks like for them. And the Bridge of Destiny is our guide to help us do that. So what is the Bridge of Destiny? The Bridge of Destiny on this left-hand side has the person in their current state as they exist right now before interacting with you and your business. And so this is where we need to understand their current situation, the current scenario they find themselves in, because they, they're getting rained on, they're cold, they're wet. They hate it. They hate life. And so different types of businesses— some businesses solve what we call a bleeding neck problem where people are in so much immediate pain, they just want to get it solved right away. And for those guys, you just really have to appear to that person and boom, you will just kind of get the sale. But for a lot of us where our thing is more of a nice to have, this is where you need to go hard on because you need to make people realize that even though they might not be feeling this wave of terrible emotion around their situation right now, we want to agitate it. We want to make them aware of actually how, how bad the scenario is so that we can then contrast it with how amazing their life could be. So spending a lot of time understanding and going back to your ideal customers, what was their specific situation when they discovered you for the first time? What problems were they having? And again, the more specific, the better. What was their average day looking like? What were the emotions they were feeling, the inconveniences that were surfacing? And again, the power is in the specificity of what you are able to go into. I highly, highly recommend asking. A lot of your best customers, if you can't remember. We did that with EC many years ago now. We did the whole exercise around who our top customers were, looked at a bunch of data over many, many years, and then we actually sent out a survey to all of the best customers, and we asked them a bunch of questions around, uh, what were you doing before you found us? What were the specific problems that you had? And so on and so forth. And that was really insightful actually. My hypothesis was proved incorrect around why our best people join us, which is kind of interesting, um, because you never truly know until you actually get out there and ask. Then on the other side of the bridge, way— this is the place they are heading to, okay? This is the desired outcome. This is how fantastic their life is going to look once they interact with you once they buy your thing and once your thing delivers them the result. This is the transformation. And we basically take everything we've identified on the left-hand side and we basically do the opposite. Here is what life is like when all of those problems are gone, all the benefits that you stand to gain. And again, the devil is really in the specifics of how their life will change. And your ability to paint that picture. How do you paint a picture very well? You can visually show it, but more importantly, you can learn to articulate it with the words, with the phrases that the ideal customer would actually use themself. Because again, the effectiveness of your messaging will always be determined by how well you speak the language of the customer. Because you want to match it so hard. The same phrases they might use, the same words they might use. They want to feel understood. If they feel understood, then boom, we stand a great chance of getting the result. So you've got the before, you've got the after, and that's what gives us the contrast to clearly articulate the transformation. But of course, there's all these painful spiky rocks covered in blood, uh, in the Valley of Death here. And so what are these? Well, these are all of the other things that this person may have tried before and all of the possible reasons they might believe a solution like yours might not actually work, or all the things that could potentially go wrong with it. That is the problems of their past and also the objections and preconceptions they might have about your thing, because we've got to contend with those as well. We've got to understand, okay, sure thing, I understand you're here and you want to get there. And I've got this thing, but why are you not going to believe me? What are you going to challenge me on? Because again, you want to get very, very clear on those. Because once we're clear on those, we can build the bridge. The bridge of destiny. Because the bridge is your thing. This becomes your thing. And so the single most compelling argument argument you can make to somebody is, you are here, it really sucks. I want to get you to this place that I know you want to be. I know you've tried some things in the past and they didn't work, and you probably got a bunch of these objections, but let me just show you why this is different, how we can prove it. Here is the bridge, and we invite you to walk across. And if you get that nailed, then boom, your messaging starts to become truly electric. Especially when elements of this, especially around what you actually do, are embedded in a MOOC that is contrarian and different as well. The final foundation is, of course, the offer, what you are actually selling. I categorize offers in two ways. I believe we have lead magnet offers which are designed to generate signals of interest. And of course, we have what I would just call your core, your core offer, which is how you make money, because these are normally, normally free. And the core offer is where we, you know, actually, actually get paid. But the Bridge of Destiny and the Moosh applies to, to any and all of them. Some businesses, you don't even need a lead magnet. There's the truth of it. You can just absolutely have a bunch of fantastic, uh, core offers and the job is done. But for most businesses, you benefit amazingly from having some fantastic lead magnets, um, because if we have got a large number of people that we can communicate with and speak to that are interested in our thing, then stands to reason that we should be able to pretty rhythmically peel off some customers from that list. Which is always a very important thing. The route you choose to go, and we'll get into some strategy specifics later on as we kind of go around the room, um, always depends on, uh, the price of your thing. Because if your thing is really expensive, it's going to be much harder to just get somebody to buy the thing straight away without there being some kind of communication or conversation. But also how like complex your thing is. And so I always think about how much warming would someone need, how much education would someone need before they're ready to buy my thing. So when you operate in industries, uh, or your thing is actually really unique and it's like a brand new thing that people maybe have not heard that much of before, then you're almost certainly going to want a bunch of leads because you have to take people on a longer educational journey before getting them to actually pull out, pull out their wallets. All 3 of these things are important. The offer, the ICP, and indeed the actual strategy we're using to try and get the ICP to buy the offer. But the offer is so important. It earns its place at the top of the pyramid for me because the difference between an offer that is truly attractive to the right people and an offer that is pretty standard and just not that attractive and very similar to other people's, um, is absolutely huge. And I've seen enough crystal clear examples throughout the course of my career where really crap marketing to a really good offer, it will always outperform the world's best marketing to a very bad offer. And so what does that mean for us? It means that actually thinking about your offer and how you present the offer is one of the biggest determining factors in how easy your life is. And just never underestimate the power of a fantastic offer. Which brings me into a little section where it's like, okay, that's all well and good, but what, how the heck do you actually even make a good offer? Like, what actually goes into a legendary offer? And so we have a little framework that I'll quickly touch on before we have a, have a little coffee break. Um, and so the first element is Ties into the Bridge of Destiny. But what is, what is the actual dream outcome that this person wants? Again, understanding nobody wants the thing, they want the transformation the thing delivers. So how big is that thing? Because if I promise you, you know, £1 million versus £100, immediately you can tell the difference in the value of those offers, right? And so how can we increase the value of our dream outcome. And often you can do that by just articulating it clearer and moving away from like selling this thing that has these features to selling this thing that delivers this specific outcome. The second element is the perceived likelihood of achievement, and this is one of the first sharp, spiky rocks that exists in the Bridge of Destiny. Which is, okay, if I actually buy your thing, then what's my perceived likelihood I'm actually going to achieve the dream outcome? Because yes, you might be making an incredibly big, bold promise, but do I truly believe that if I buy your thing I'm going to get that result? And this varies with what you do. If you're in the service business where you like do it for the customers, you know, you go in and do some installation, then the perceived likelihood of achievement is generally very high, which is awesome. And so that not only makes it more attractive, enables you to charge much more, versus, you know, in the, uh, the teaching space or the education space. So look, we're gonna, we're gonna teach you how to do this, because I could teach you a skill that's going to give you an amazing outcome and a fantastic life. But actually, for some people, their perceived likelihood of achieving, of actually getting that result from coming to, you you know, whatever it is, a workshop or a webinar, might be quite low because they know once they've got the information, they then have to do it and they have to do this thing for a very long time. And so that would decrease the perceived likelihood of achievement and actually lower the value of the thing. So it's the general principle why done-for-you stuff is always easier to sell and you can charge way more for it than things that are not kind of done for you. Scarcity and urgency, two of my favorite forces when it comes to marketing. How can we incorporate elements of scarcity and urgency? Because again, both of these help give people a reason to act now and not later, which again, for quite a lot of you could be the missing link and why your stuff isn't working quite as well as you would like is because actually, okay, yeah, this makes sense. I know I need to do that thing at some point, but I don't have a compelling reason to do it right now. And Two of the best ways to do that are to have some scarcity, i.e., a capacity-based reason why you should act now, i.e., there's a limited number of available slots that are gonna go, and we make that known, or urgency, which is just a time-based reason to act now. So an actual hard deadline as to when this thing might expire and when you can lose out on it. So we love those, and often, adding those in, in a way that is true and believable. So if you make them false and not believable, the opposite will happen and people will not trust you and they will not buy. But if it is true and believable, that will absolutely skyrocket your perceived value. Then we always look at the time to value as well. So time to value, if I pay you money, how long does it take before I get value? The thing that I'm paying you money for. Because a big promise delivered 10 years from now is less valuable, less exciting than big promise delivered next week or today. Like the Sofa Club. Sofa Club, get me that sofa next day, happy days. But thinking how you can compress the time to value, which sometimes you can do, and if you do that properly, massive moose for you and your business. Um, but equally, it doesn't always have to be the whole end result. It can be how quickly can we get you a quick win or a milestone once you come aboard so you feel like they're satisfying progress. Um, and that goes a very long way in that. We then have the level of effort and sacrifice involved from the person. So if you're buying something and it's ticking all the boxes, but it's just going to require you to work incredibly hard for a very long time in order to achieve it, that's going to put some people off and it's going to diminish the value. So ideally, we want to try and decrease where possible the level of effort and sacrifice required from the customer. And so again, depends on what you do. In some industries, so easy because you just do everything, so there is basically no effort and sacrifice. But in other industries where you are relying on people to show up to do work What can you do to support them and actually make it as easy as possible for them? Which brings us to the next one: risk reversal. How can we remove the risk from the prospect's mind? If they do make an investment with us, they are safe and that this is a risk-free endeavor. Because if you can genuinely remove all that risk, you will get a lot more people through that sit on the fence. Because in all of our markets, there's a bunch of people that sit on the fence, and we want to nudge them off the fence. And so we are a big fan of doing guarantees, money-back guarantees, where, look, we promise you we're going to get you this outcome, you know. If we don't, then fair enough, we have failed, and you can get your money back. I believe that's a very good, honest way to do business, to put your money where your mouth is in many regards. And it works a treat because there's a lot of skeptical people and that little push, that little safety net will get them over the line. And there's a lot of different ways for guarantees to work in different businesses, and it can become a fantastic moose if you're in an industry that traditionally doesn't have any kind of risk reversal. All of these feed into the final one, which is the pricing. How are you pricing your stuff? Because the purpose of thinking about this array of criteria is not only so we can increase our ability to articulate the offer and make sure we touch on all of these things and cover all the bases, because once you understand this is how— these are all the main levers that people perceive value with— that forms how we talk about it in our emails and our landing pages, etc. But it also helps us manipulate the price, because one of the biggest levers we all have when it comes to our business, especially when it comes to revenue, profit, etc., is the pricing. And I'm a big believer that you want to be, generally speaking, pricing high. Okay, you want to be pricing high because it's a real virtuous cycle of pricing. And when you charge high, you appeal to generally affluent audiences. And all my experience tells me that they just tend to be much better customers as well. Now, of course, not always possible. And we do have, you know, this is where your, your goals come into it because do you want a price for maximum profit, maximum ease of life, or do we want a price for impact? Because we actually do hold the impact very true and we do want to be able to positively impact as many people as possible and therefore have a lower price and so on and so forth. So there's a whole thing around that as well. But understanding these 7 variables is how we make our offer super juicy and super exciting as well.