Why Your Marketing Is Being Ignored

I need to talk to you about the moose in the road. Yes, you heard that correctly. The moose in the road is a critical business concept. If you're a business owner and you run any kind of marketing advertising, you want more customers, then the moose in the road might just be the way that enables you to achieve that. You see, right now we actually have a very significant problem for the vast majority of business owners. You see, everyone flipping sounds the same. Everyone's regurgitating the same AI-produced crap. And everybody's so afraid to share what they actually think about their business, their industry, their own thoughts and opinions. And this is fantastic for people like me and you who are brave and ready and willing to embrace what we truly believe and to put it out there in the world. So the plan for this video, I'm gonna explain what the fuck is a MOOSE and why you want to have them in your business. I'm gonna explain the difference between content that scales and content that fails. And this is applicable across paid ads, which is where we do the majority of this, organic content as well, and any kind of outreach. And finally, I'll share the 3-step process so you can actually build your own MOOSE within your business. And enjoy all of the benefits that they deliver. So we'll dive in. My name is Elliott Botterill. I went from working in the big advertising agency to quitting, starting my own agency, scaling it to 7 figures before joining Entrepreneur's Circle, exiting the agency. And I've had the great pleasure and fortune of working along many of the latest and greatest, brightest minds in the space over the last many, many years now. And so what the hell is the moose in the road? Well, this is a critical concept that for us, where we spend around £100,000 per month on advertising and generate around £1.1 million in return. Currently, the Moose is a critical element of that. So I want you to think for a second that people cruising in their car, driving on autopilot as you tend to do on these long drives, that is the majority of your audience when they are consuming media on their devices. Doomscrolling. Okay, now we need to throw a big moose in the way. What is that? The big moose is a piece of content, an opinion that is so flippin' clear and obvious and attention-grabbing you cannot possibly miss it. That is the moose. And the moose is rooted in our own genuine thoughts and opinions about what we do that are different to what everybody else says. And as a result, if we craft a moose that is genuinely compelling, we are able to stop people in their tracks. 'Cause a moose in the road really does stop people in their tracks. Fun fact, if you drive into a moose, you're pretty much dead because you hit their legs here and then they fall through the windscreen and you are flattened. Now we're not trying to kill anyone, we're trying to capture their attention. And so this applies across paid ads, across content and outreach. The only 3 ways to advertise to make people known about your stuff. And we use these moves everywhere. By deploying these moves tactically, you will see a tremendous uplift in the performance of any of these channels. So this applies to them all. And crafting your very own MOOSE in your business helps you answer the number one question. You see, we run an event every year, it's called the Implementer. And at the Implementer, we have about 350 of our customers come and we have a bunch of expert roundtables where different experts on different things sit and all of the customers can come and get direct advice in 15 to 20 minute sessions on solving whatever challenge they have in their business to do with that thing. And so every year I go and I host the marketing strategy table, and across the 2 days I had a lot of interesting chats with 61 different business owners, to be precise. And one of the recurring elements that came up when people would start by telling me the context about their business before asking for some advice on the marketing strategy, I would always ask them the question, why should I choose you and your business versus anyone else in your space? That is a tough question. If I ask you, you, dear viewer, why would I choose your business versus your competitor? What is the answer that you can give? How sharp is the answer? How compelling is the answer? Because when we're going to craft these MOOCs, you see, these MOOCs will help you answer this question because they are the contrarian opinions and beliefs that you hold to be true that the vast majority of people don't., and that is a core belief of your business and it affects what you do and how you deliver it and therefore creates a compelling case as to why I should go with you and not everybody else. And of course, if we can do that, we will increase our conversion rates across all 3 of the potential advertising methods and channels that we would opt for. Well, it's critical we do this because if we don't, if we stay parroting the same stuff that everybody else in our space talks about, we will just become invisible. You see, the essence of capturing attention online is all about identifying pattern interrupts, things that are not the pattern. Because whether we are running paid ads or posting content or outreaching to somebody, our message is appearing when they are doing something else. Most of the time they're scrolling, looking for entertainment, consuming random videos, and bang, we have to appear either on their feed or in their inbox and capture that attention. And so if our stuff just looks the same as everybody else's, it will not be effective. You know, Google have research that shows the average person now sees over 10,000 ads in a given day, in a 24-hour period. And so we have to put a lot of energy into thinking about what makes us different, because we are all going blind. Okay, we have developed somewhat of a psychological shield to adverts, and it's very hard to penetrate it. But these, having your own Moose in your arsenal, will enable you to do so. It's also critical because of the age we live in. There is an increasing volume of people that are outsourcing their thoughts and their opinions. And we see this online a lot. LinkedIn is a very prevalent place. Where people spout all sorts of nonsense that they've just generated with ChatGPT or Claude. But more worryingly, people are outsourcing their thinking, and there are studies now that are demonstrating the problem of AI brain atrophy, i.e., the weakening, the shrinking of people's brains and their corresponding cognitive function, i.e., their thinking, problem solving, and memory, because they are relying on artificial intelligence to do all of the heavy lifting for them. And so, in a world where people are literally outsourcing everything about what they should do, what they should think, their thoughts and opinions about stuff to AI, the fantastic opportunity for us to prevail is to not do that and is to go the opposite way, to do our own thinking, think about what we truly care about, and then publish that to the world. 'Cause trust me, in this world where everybody's using AI, standing out has actually never been easier. And you've got to understand that your real genuine thoughts and opinions are your unfair advantage. This is what people find interesting, okay? Nobody cares about information generally anymore because there's an abundance of it. Nearly anybody anywhere in the world can access any bit of information almost instantly. So what matters more than ever is the person behind the information why they're saying it, and their honest thoughts and opinions about it. So if you think for a second about all of the people that you follow online, you will follow them because they have a unique viewpoint that they express about the world, and that is what draws you in, and that is what you find curious about them. With that all said and done, we now understand what the MOOSE is, we understand why the MOOSE is so important, and why there's an opportunity to be capitalized on right now. Let's talk the practical implementation. Let's talk about the how. So how do we actually craft these MOOCs? Well, it's actually pretty straightforward. This is the 3-step process. Step number 1, we're going to list the 5 sacred beliefs that are held true in your industry. So you have to think, what are the 5 most common beliefs that people in this space assume? Operate on as if that is true. So I want you to think about your competitors. What is in their positioning? What are the fundamental principles or beliefs they hold true about what you do? Okay? What is gospel to them? So here's a few examples. You know, some people might say Instagram is the best channel right now. Instagram is the best channel to go viral on. Heck, you need to go viral in order to get views and get results. And views are actually really important. If I was a dentist, you know, getting a checkup every 12 months is a piece of very common industry practice that everybody just assumes broadly to be true. And so you will know what these things are within your business. You wanna list at least 5 of them down. And again, this is actually a place where we can use AI to help draw this out if you're really struggling. But once we've got the 5 sacred beliefs, the things people would hold gospel in our space, then step number 2 is all about flipping each one into a moose. Because we're going to take the common belief and we are going to flip it, and we are going to go contrary to it and create our new belief that stands out. Now, this is really important. We're going to flip each truth to the contrary, but only in a way that you genuinely believe it. Because of course, we're not about to make up a bunch of BS. That defeats the whole point. This has to be in line with your genuine thoughts and opinions. You have to genuinely hold these as truth, otherwise plan failed. Okay, major error. But we're going to take X and we're going to turn it into Y. If I was a dentist, I would go from get your teeth checked once a year to the modern diet rots teeth faster than ever, so we recommend getting your teeth checked every 6 months. That is a contrary belief. If I was an agency where a common belief is in order to be marketing effectively, you got to be everywhere. I could say that omnichannel is a lie sold to you to increase retainers. One channel, one offer, one avatar is all you need to get to a million pounds a year. If I was a business coach where the common advice is more leads is the fastest way to grow, I could say no, you don't have a lead problem, you have got a follow-up problem. See how we take the commonly held belief, and we flip it into something that is the contrary, that we genuinely do believe in and stand by. And you do this process and you start to sharpen your beliefs. And this takes us to step 3. How do we actually then take these beliefs and push them out there into the world? Because we want to weave these into everything. So all of our ads will be centered around one of these moose. All of our organic content will revolve around each of these moose, and our outreach will definitely involve these moose as well. We want to put them literally at the forefront of everything, whether that is in the ad copy on our landing pages, you name it. The repetition is going to be what makes you known for them. And believe me, you need to do a lot of repetition. People's brains are very much like goldfish in most cases, and so they have to see it, see it, see it, see it. But I promise you, when you do this Providing your moose are actually interesting and compelling, you will start to see an uplift in the conversion rate if what you are now putting out there involves your particular take, which is genuinely different to what the vast majority of other people are also saying. That is how you get the big boosts. And again, one moose is a ton of content, 'cause once you've got your core moose, and you're probably gonna have 3 to 5 in your business, Each one is so many content. There's emails, there's social posts, there are ads, there's landing pages, frankly, about your actual beliefs. All of them can be turned into at least a month's worth of content in every case. So that is the Moose in the Road theory and why crafting your very own moose in the road is such an important part of an effective marketing strategy moving forward as people continue to outsource their livelihoods, their brainpower, and their thinking and the ocean of stuff being produced by AI continues to be more and more boring and samey. This is how we stand out. I hope you enjoyed this video. I've been Elliott. I appreciate you tuning in and watching. Don't forget to drop a comment if you have any questions or like and subscribe. We drop videos like this every single week sharing what we're learning on our way to building a truly awesome business. So thank you so much. Peace and love.