17 Years of Marketing Advice in 46 Mins

So there's one thing that I'm good at, it is marketing. I have got thousands of clients. I've generated those clients, over $7.8 billion in sales. I've gotten these results in over 10, 67 different niches for clients that are in 136 different countries around the world. I've got 100 team members in my agency and I'm also an investor on Shark Tank. Today, what I'm going to be doing is just giving you everything that I've learned along my journey, all the mistakes that I've paid for in full so I can shortcut wherever you are on your learning curve on becoming a marketer. There is no way that you cannot watch this video. And if you take notes and actually implement the stuff that I'm going to tell you for you not to make way more money than what you're making right now. So what is marketing? Marketing in general, I believe, is probably the most important and valuable skill that you can ever acquire. Because regardless of the career that you choose or the different path that you walk down in your life, you're going to be faced in some way in either marketing a business or marketing yourself. And it is fundamentally a skill that can change the trajectory of your life like no other. Marketing is the activity of promoting and selling products and services. But more importantly than that, it's also in not only attracting and getting clients, but retaining them and then being able to deliver on your promises. Because all successful businesses are focused on not being in the order business, but being in the reorder business. You want to be in a situation where your clients are worth more to you than any other person in your industry and your market. Therefore, you can spend the most to not only acquire those clients, but to also service those clients and have team members come in and help you service them and being able to have the funds to actually pay for them. This brings us to step number one, product versus marketing. There are so many people in the business world that sit in one camp that it's like it's just all about product. If you have a great product, then you're going to be able to go out there and crush anybody. Because the word's going to spread and everyone's going to come to you and then they're going to want to buy your thing and then you've got another school of thought that it's just like all you need is marketing. Like, you just have like marketing and you can sell anything. I believe that both of these people are wrong. It's not about product or it's not about marketing, but it really is about both. Not all businesses are sexy. Just focusing only on product and thinking that that is the only thing that it is that you need is a lie. And I've seen so many businesses die because of this. They set up their business, they develop a logo, and then they just spend like a year or two years of their life perfecting their product or service. They launch their business and they never get any customers. Even though their product is great, they can never, ever scale it because they're not marketing it. And then it just becomes this job. But it's worse than a for them because they're not getting paid holiday. Instead of working 40 hours a week, they're working 80 hours a week. And their life is just left like the scraps of what's left from their business. And then you have the other angle where the marketer that goes out there and he has no emphasis on product and customer experience, he's got a shitty product that he's pouring gasoline on and it spreads and then negative word of mouth spreads and then it's gone and then they're on to the next business. They just keep on launching new offers and new businesses in new markets because they don't have any emphasis on product. And realistically, if you look at the biggest businesses in the world, those businesses have an exceptional product that they market exceptionally well. You really need to get out of the mindset of it's just product or it's just marketing. Which brings us to step number two, to sell something that the market is starving for. When I got started in my entrepreneurial career started by selling water filters and I had to learn a very hard lesson. Everyone in Australia at the time had the perception that it was completely fine to drink the tap water. So I was entering into a market that people were not starving for the product. And instead of having a compelling offer that solves a burning problem, I was trying to have a convincing argument. And everything was like just pushing a ball up a hill and swimming against the raging current. That was the river of the desires of my marketplace. When you're launching a business, you want to launch with a minimal viable product or a minimal viable offer. And that is just enough for it to be good enough for you to sell it. And you want to do that to test the appetite that there is in the marketplace. And then only once you have proven that there is an appetite for what it is that you're selling, do you then want to go and develop the back end. Of the business. Most people, as you speak to them, they all have a business idea, right? Like everyone has a business idea. And then they're like, oh, I can't do that because I saw somebody else had a business in that niche or I've seen that idea before and they spend most of their life looking for a completely unique idea for the business that it is they want to start. That is a horrible, horrible idea. You want to look for markets that there are lots of people in that niche and it is competitive because that has proven that there is a need. And so the most pivotal thing above everything when it comes to marketing is market selection. You can have the sexiest logo, the best team, the most dialed in funnel. If you are in the wrong market, nothing else matters. And when it comes to product, the overarching advice that I can give anybody is to build a business that you would want to be a customer of. Third point is direct response versus brand. Direct response, if you don't know, is the format of advertising where you're putting out messages in front of a marketplace that elicits a direct response response. Call this number, go to our website, click this button, become a lead or buy something where you've got the brand world advertising to tell people that you exist, to reinforce a message or a lifestyle that you are trying to depict. If you ask most people like, what is the best brand in the world? Apple is a brand that comes up in that conversation a lot. And what you'll find is that a lot of these brands, they all got their roots in direct response. Like Apple, they were cold calling computer dealers to get their computers stocked into those networks. And a lot of the things that they were doing in the beginning like were direct selling. It was direct response marketing. Throughout their evolution, they earn the right to become a brand. This is an argument that I see a lot online. People are talking about, hey, like it's all about hardcore direct response. Or they sit in the brand camp and that is the only thing they think is important. The reality of it is there is big businesses that have been created in both of those categories. You've got businesses like Guthy renker, they do $2 billion a year in sales. They are behind Tony Robbins blew him up using infomercials. They've got like proactive, they've got brands with JLO and they've been able to build a massive monstrous business using direct response. You've got LVMH Group that have Louis Vuitton, they've got Sephora, they've got a Whole range of brands under their umbrella. Yet these guys, they spend $16 billion a year on advertising. I see so many people, they think it's all about brand. And they'll sit down and they'll come up with these beautiful color palettes and the typography and the sans serif and the logo and the brand mark and the website and all of this kind of stuff. They do not have a brand. Most of these people, they have a logo. In order to have a brand, you need to have customers. The best place to start is you're getting out and you do not have huge amounts of venture capital is to start in direct response. Whether it's at local markets, it's cold calling people, it's local dming people, it's you being the influencer and creating the organic TikTok content in the beginning. Only once you do that and you intimately understand your customer, you understand what's important to your market, will you understand how to actually build a brand. You're using direct response response, you're making money, you're spending that money to make the product or service even better. You're building the brand, you're attracting the right people that can help you then go and build that brand even further. And that just accelerates and accelerates and accelerates. And then you can focus on more brand building exercises of like, what is important to us as a company, what do we stand for? What is the problem that we solve for the market? Who is the customer and what is important to them? And you can start to spend money that emphasizes those things within your direct response marketing mix. And you can keep that going like a flywheel. And so that is what I have seen from all the brands that I have worked with, which is all the way from small to mom and pop businesses, all the way up to multi billion dollar behemoths. Point number four is organic versus paid. Another two very defined groups of thought. Some people think, hey, you always have to be able to spend money to acquire a customer. And then you've got one school of thought that it's like only focus on putting content out and getting customers organically and have that word of mouth spread. But both of those are resources that you're paying with. One of them is you're using money and the other one that you're using time. There is no such thing as free advertising. Organic is meant to be in a way where it sounds like it's free, but it's not. It costs money me to have these cameras and videographers and lighting And Mike and the time and energy that is required in order to produce that content as well. So they all come with a cost. When I started, you know, I started in direct selling, I was cold calling businesses, I got a few clients, I got enough to start running some direct response style ads. And only after I was doing more than $10 million a year in revenue did I start doing all of this stuff and producing YouTube content and doing all of those things. Things. I do believe that organic shows huge, huge potential. That's why I'm spending the time and energy and doing what it is that I need to do. But I would not rely purely on organic to build my business. One of the things that has become more apparent with Instagram Reels and TikTok is that you want to use organic to feed the paid engine. So it's a great way now that you can get distribution on these platforms without having huge follower bases. And for you to test hooks and for you to test messaging that works in your marketplace and then finding out what works organically and then turning that into an ad and then amplifying it. The customer journey is not like a funnel anymore. It's changed. The people that are going to maybe discover you from an ad, they're going to do a Google sniff test, go to your YouTube, watch two videos, then get retargeted on Facebook, download a high value content offer or some type of opt in or register for a webinar, watch that go on your email list, get five emails, book in a call and buy one feeds the other. You want to have a combination of both. If you start with organic and there's no one looking at your stuff and that frustrates you and you stay there, that's ultimately going to kill your business. So it's not either or, it's both. Point number five is storytelling. Storytelling above all else. When it comes to building businesses, brands and going out there and getting lots of customers is, bar none, the most highly leveraged skill that you can have. And a lot of people talk about storytelling, but then they don't really tell you like what are the steps that it is that you need to take in order to become a better storyteller. And that's what I'm going to do for you. And the best place to start is, is being a good writer and being able to clearly articulate what it is that you want to say because you've got a side of your business that's going to be the employer brand and wanting to attract team members into your business where you're going to need to be able to very clearly articulate why it would be great to come and join your team. And then you've got the storytelling component of how do you actually tell compelling stories that get people to want to buy your things? So the first thing to understand is that a good writer is a good thinker. They have clear thoughts. Because when you sit down and write something, by definition, you have to get clear of what it is that you want to write. Whether it's a job ad or it's a Facebook ad, or it's landing page copy, you have to actually crystallize your thoughts and then write them down. You then want to think about the clarity of your writing. And a great app that I use that helps with this is the Hemingway app. Now, I have studied the New York Times bestseller list, the best YouTubers, the people that have been elected into the most powerful offices in the world. And the commonality that you will see in all of their forms of storytelling is that they write and speak at a sixth grade reading level or below. And the reason for that is that you will not alienate people by having your message too clear to consume. But you will certainly alienate people by making it so verbose and over the top and hard to comprehend that people will stop paying attention to your message. The next part of storytelling is really in your communication style. So communication is something that you need to create time in your week or in your schedule to become better at. Because you're going to be communicating until the day that you die. And you're not only going to be getting the leverage in that within your business, you'll be getting that in all your relationships. Like anything, it's a skill that can be acquired and you need to practice it. The next thing when it comes to storytelling is hooks and framing. And a hook, by definition, is something that does just that. It hooks people. It is a statement that you can grab the attention of a group of people and make them pay attention to what it is that you've got to say. One good hook is worth more than a thousand of the most masterful crafted copy that exists. And you want to spend a disproportionate amount of your time on the hooks. Because if you can't hook somebody, it doesn't matter how good the rest of that piece of communication is. With this, you want to be a student of markets, you want to go on to TikTok, you want to go onto YouTube, you want to be going on Instagram reels and having a look at the videos that get the most views and have a look at what it is that they're doing in those hooks. And the last point on storytelling is what you say is infinitely more important than how you say it. Most people spend the majority of their time finessing words on how they are saying a particular thing. When instead what you want to do is you want to focus on saying the right things in the first place. And the way that you do that is you look at customer service complaints, you look at reviews, you be in Facebook groups, you look at YouTube comments, and you really understand what that beating pulse is of your marketplace. So that when you write words, they strike like lightning because they specifically talk to the pain points of your marketplace. Once you know that you're saying the right thing, then think about saying it in the best way possible. Point number six, the very, very first sale that you will make is the sale for somebody's attention. And we're living in a day and age where attention is a new form of currency. We all hear that all the time. You're no longer competing with Bob down the spot street, that's in a similar business to you. You're competing with all the other alternatives that possibly exist for your prospect to spend their time and attention on Netflix, Instagram, YouTube, everything is on the phone, right? And this thing is the arena that you must compete in to get people's attention. And if your stuff is boring and dull, then you are going to be dead on arrival. And if you look at what the biggest brands in the world are doing, how they stand out, I used to like look at them and think like, like, how is this gonna sell anything like this? This is the most outrageous ad. It has nothing to do with even selling the product in the first place. And the thing that I didn't understand at the time is the game that these guys were playing is that they were winning the first game, which is to get attention and to get people to consume. The message in the first place is this piece of marketing communication, this ad, this video, this promo, this subject line, is it enough that it is worthy of my customers attention and it is greater for them to consume than all the other alternatives that exist that are probably infinitely more entertaining than what it is that you've got to sell. And if you can't fundamentally answer that with a big resounding yes, then you have already pushing the boulder up the hill. And the thing that you can do to get the most amount of throughput in your whole funnel with everything that you do is just to Increase consumption. And the best way to increase consumption is to by definition, have something that is entertaining, to have strong hawks and very good packaging to that content. Point number seven is building desire versus selling. Marketing's job is to make sales redundant. You should be building so much desire in your marketplace that people are already sold before you even ask them to buy. You build enough desire that people are coming to you and they're lining up, asking for help for what it is that you're selling. Think about an Apple Shop, right? You don't have to ever go into an Apple Shop and the person there's like aggressively selling you a MacBook Pro. Like the people that are in an Apple Shop, they're just order takers. They have earned that right. They have built enough desire by creating incredible products that solve pressing problems in the most elegant way that exists. They can charge a premium for doing so. And there's so much desire around that that people are literally, by definition, lined up out the front of their stores to buy their products at a premium. And that's a good telltale sign that they are absolute masters at not only creating an exceptional product, but they are also exceptional marketers. That is literally your job as a marketer, to be articulating the pain points, showing them how your product solves them, agitating those pain points, and then presenting your offer as something that is truly unique and exciting and unlike anything that they've ever seen or heard about before. So whenever you're in those situations and people aren't willingly handing over money, just understand that the reason that they're not doing it is because you simply aren't good enough yet. And you haven't built enough desire in your marketplace. And you're either not marketing enough or the marketing isn't effective. Point number eight, pricing. Price is what you pay and value is what you get, to quote Warren Buffet. And a transaction takes place where value exceeds price. And in business, you really want to get into a situation where you have way more demand than supply of what it is that you've got. And then you play with the price elasticity equilibrium. That is, you figure out where on the demand curve do you need to price your product so that you can fulfill and you can able to actually meet the demand for what it is that you've got, and you have enough supply to meet that demand at the highest premium possible. Most people, when it comes to pricing, they look at how much it costs to deliver that product or service, and then they mark up a multiple of what they think is reasonable. This is the worst thing that you can do. Because a lot of the time when people do that, they never factor in all the other overheads that exist in order to acquire a customer. The ads, the sales team, the product innovation team, the packaging, inflation, all of those things. Instead, what you want to do is you want to prescribe a value to the problem that your product solves. And that is the thing that you want to think about what it would be worth to my customer in order to help them solve that problem. The more money that you make, the more that you can invest in your product and service, the more people that you can hire, the more innovation that you can spend on to solve that problem in a better way for more and more people. Which brings us to the next point. The chef versus the business builder. Most people, they start their business because they are the chef that loves cooking. They think, hey, I really love cooking. Why don't I start a catering business? They think that their love for what it is is enough for them to build a business. And there's an underbelly to this. They are the person juliating the carrots and scrubbing the potatoes. They're all so plating up the food. They're doing all the accounts, they're doing the tax returns, they're doing all the errands that need to be done within their business. And they end up overworked and underpaid for what it is that they're doing. And the amount of stress that they're burdening from themselves, they get basically put at a fork in a road, which is, do I continue doing what I'm doing right now, which is very, very stressful, or do I hire people to help me come in and grow this business and the problem is what got you here is not going to get you there. And the skills that you do of being on the tools and doing all of those things, you realize as you start to bring people into your business, like, hey, like, I can't do this anymore if I want the business to grow. And I need to start focusing on things that actually move the money needle and bring enough cash into the business in order for me to hire people, to train people, to retain people, to lead people. And your skill set goes from being the practitioner to actually being the business builder that is responsible for growing this business. And they are two entirely different skill sets. There is, like this place that I call Death Valley. And it's where you, as the business owner, you're doing absolutely everything that is required in your business yourself. You're working Very, very long hours. You're very, very stressed. Yeah, you're making good money, but you don't have any time to even spend that money or spend with your family or do any of those things because you're so busy doing all of this stuff. And then you're like, shit, this is not the reason I got into business. I got into business because there was going to be like lots of freedom and I'd be making more money and I might have location independence. But then you realize that that's not the case and then you're like, oh, what do I do? Okay, I need to hire some people. All right? In order to hire people, I need to have enough money to hire those people. And then if I go and hire them and then I'm going to be spending all my time training those people, then who's going to be delivering for my clients? Like, how am I going to do that? It's the chicken and the egg. It's a cycle that I see all businesses have to go through and it is very character forming and you learn a lot about yourself and it becomes very, very stressful. And you need to understand that that is typically a season or a chapter and it's not going to be forever. And you need to quickly get in and get out of that situation. And the way that you do that is focusing on the activities in your business that are revenue producing. What are the things that are going to ring the cash register, bring in customers so that you have enough funds to go, they're going to hire people, build a team, and then as you build the team, they could become more competent, help you come in and run the business, and then you can focus more on the revenue producing activities. The better that you become as a marketer, the more highly leveraged tasks that you'll be working on. In the beginning, that might be the one to one interactions of getting customers and then it might be marketing and running ads. And then it will be like, oh, you're focused on your employer brand. You always want to look at how much is a unit of time worth to you. Take the total amount of profit that you earn in a month or in a year and divide that by the number of hours that you work in a month or year. And you do not want to be doing anything that is below that hourly rate that you could then go out and hire somebody to do those things. Point number ten, take big swings. The more success that you get, the more money that you accrue, the more that you will have the ability to Take big swings. And in the beginning, success is usually by taking lots of smaller swings that aren't going to put you out of business, but the more financial resources that you get. If you want what others don't have, then you need to do what others don't do. And the best way to do that is to take big, violent, wild swings of something that no one else in your marketplace is doing, nothing else that you've ever done before. Those are the things that are really going to give you the most disproportionate results to what it is that you're doing. The more years that I get under my belt in business, the more I realize that the bigger swings that I take, the further that I can hit the ball. Point number 11 Master 1 channel. In marketing, you've got demand capture and you've got demand generation. And you do not want to start by trying to master both of those things straight out of the game. If there are people that are actively searching for what it is that you sell, the easiest path for you to go down is demand capture. That is, are people on Google actively looking for for a solution to what it is that you provide? They are the easiest people to convert. You do not need to have crazy offers, hooks and storytelling or anything to be able to convince those people to buy. They are customers that I call have a bleeding neck and they're looking for an immediate solution to that problem. Demand capture are where the millions are made, but demand generation are where the billions are made. And that is being able to go out into a marketplace and to generate demand, to be able to put out ads, offers, hooks and stories that actually gets people to want what it is that you've got. So think Facebook ads, YouTube ads, and this is the channel that unlocks the most violent scale in any business because you're not limited by the number of people that are specifically searching for what it is that you've got. It also requires a much greater level of skill because you need to take somebody that is not remotely even interested in what it is that you've got, and you need to pique their interest in order to then provide a solution to what it is that you've got and actually get those people to buy. Which brings us to point number 12, the larger market formula. Basically, what it shows you is that in any given market, there are 3% of people that are looking to buy. They're the people that already know that they've got a problem. They're on Google, they're looking for solutions to their problems. Then you have a further 17% of the market. They're the guys that are in information gathering mode. They are kind of out there seeking out information. They might not be looking to buy right now, but they're certainly thinking about it and they're open to it. Then you have a further 20% of the market that is problem aware. They know that they have a problem. They know that they need to lose weight, they need to buy a car, they need to meet a partner, but they're not actively out there seeking out information and looking to buy. And then you have 60% of the market that is not problem aware. And that's where it's your skill as a marketer in the demand generation to be able to go out to those people and to be able to get their attention, to hook them in, to keep them interested, to build enough desire in what it is that you've got and then make them an offer and get them to buy. Once you master the skill in being able to do that, that is when you unlock a different level of geometric growth for your business. Step number 13, quick fast money versus big slow money. The longer your time horizon, the bigger the payoff is. And if you're focused on making as much money as you possibly can right now, then you are going to be leaving a huge amount of money on the table because you're not playing the long game. And longer games have fewer players in them. And you want to play in decades, not in years. But most people, they're just so impatient that they want that quick win, that they're just concerned only about how much money that they're going to make this month or this year. Where if you look at the biggest businesses in the world, take for example Amazon, they lost money for over a decade before they started making money. They had such a long term, persistent perspective of being able to build out a logistic hub of their business that would allow them to reach all the customers at the scale that they are today. And that required a significant investment. But because they were willing to do that, they get to reap the biggest money, the big, slow money. And you want to, in the beginning be focused on quick, fast money because you need money. It's the oxygen that keeps, you know, the lungs of your business full. But the more success that you see and the more money that you kind of squirrel away, then that earns you the right to be able to play longer games and really think about not where do you want to be this time next year? Where do you want to be in 10 years, what is the type of business that you want to be building? And when you start thinking that long term, it completely changes your perspective of the things that you invest in in your business. I learned very early on in my career that people don't want to get rich, they want to be rich. You want to go and fish where the fewest go because the fishing is best where the fewest go and the fewest go where those long term games where you're playing in decades. But the payoff for those things is going to be infinitely more than the whole pool of people that are playing for the quick, small money. Point number 14, focus on the skills that have the longest half life in business. There are infinite things that you can focus on. And the more success that you see, the more that you want to engineer your week, your month and your years to be focused on acquiring the skills that are going to compound throughout your whole career. So as a marketer, you might start as the salesperson, you might start as the media buyer that is running the Facebook ads. There is in Facebook ads all day long. What we know from Facebook ads now is going to be entirely different, likely in the next four years. So I obsess over the next year of becoming the best Facebook media buyer in the world. Those skills and all the time that I spend to acquire them, they are going to be completely different in four years. Therefore they have a very small half life. Instead, leading people, communicating with people, being a clear writer, these are all things that are going to continually compound in whatever the skills or whatever the business is that you run in the future. And as you continue to work on those skills, the biggest hack that I have found is just to try to make yourself redundant at every step of the journey so that you can focus on those skills that give you the most leverage long term and that are going to serve you. Because if they give you the most leverage, you're going to get the most throughput and you're going to build a much bigger opportunity for everybody that's involved. Point number 15, spend 80% of your time focusing on how to increase the average lifetime of a customer and spend 20% of your time focusing on on how to reduce your customer acquisition cost. If there's anything that I see more common in the marketing world is broke marketers obsessing on how to lower their cost per lead or to lower their customer acquisition cost. And they obsessively run crazy split test. They're buying every single Facebook media buying course that exists out there and they just myopically focused on this thing like it's the detriment to their business. And instead what you want to do is focus 80% of your time focusing on how do I deliver a better product or service that either gets people to buy more or to buy more frequently and just provide an incredible experience where my customers lifetime value is higher than anybody else in my industry or my category. And therefore I don't need to obsessively be focused on how do I have the cheapest customer acquisition cost. I can afford to spend the most to acquire a customer because I make the most off each customer. And you're able just to snatch up everyone in that marketplace because you're not worried about trying to shave 2 or $3 off your CPA. 80% on increasing LTV and 20% on reducing your customer acquisition. Cost. Point number 16. Advanced people always do the basics. I see people all the time obsessed over doing the most advanced and shiny things as possible. And whenever I used to read like biographies of billionaires or I meet with people and I would ask them about their journey, I would feel like they're leaving out all the juice. I was like, when are they going to get to the tactical stuff? Like the exact sentences that I can say, the exact ads that I can run that are going to make me successful, successful. And they always spoke in like, generalities and like in frameworks. And I was like, yeah, like, that's all good, but like, give me the juice, dude. Like, give me the actual specific things. Like, yeah, okay, cool. Like, have an exceptional product, right? And have it so exceptional that you can charge premiums and then make more profit per customer so that you can hire the best people to come in and help you with the business and make sure that you break off a percentage of your annual profits into R and D. I was like, yeah, that's all cool, right? Like, give me the tactics now. Give me the shiny tactics. And I realized after reading lots of books, speaking with lots of people, these advanced people, they always did the fundamentals every time. Whereas you look at like a lot of gurus online, and if you look a lot of business experts, they will be selling you the most advanced thing, the most advanced tactic. And a lot of the times they don't have big businesses because they're not following the fundamentals. They're obsessed over the most advanced funnel that you can have or the new Facebook ad targeting strategy. I can save you all the heartache right now. None of that shit matters. If you just do the fundamentals and you do them exceptionally well, you will wipe the floor with the people that have the most complex advanced funnels and ad targeting strategies that exist. Point number 17, skepticism. In the 17 years that I have been in business, one of the constants that I have seen is that the level of skepticism in all markets keeps on increasing. Now that you have TikTok and YouTube and all these organic traffic engines that exist, the barriers to entry to start a business keep on getting lower and lower. Then on the other end of that, you have the whole guru model, where there's a whole bunch of people out there that are selling courses about people quitting their 9 to 5 and starting their own business. You have more people than are not experts that are in business in every single category that exists. And as a result of that, there is a lot of incompetence. And that incompetence adds to people's bad experience, which also adds to their skepticism. People are just jaded. They're more skeptical than ever before. And you need to be very, very present of that in all of the marketing that you put out there. And the antidote to skepticism is value. And the thing that I have found that you want to focus on is by proving to people that you can help them, by actually helping them, there is nothing that you can do. There is no headline hack, there's no ad targeting hack that is going to trump that. And when you do that, you get a much larger group of your market that actually does buy because you lower that skepticism meter of them being burnt in the past. And you provide value, and you prove to people that you can help them by actually helping them. Then in addition to that, you also provide all the goodwill to your marketplace by helping people that are never, ever going to buy off you as well. So you need to throw stones at the other alternatives that exist that aren't your product. And you need to show how those products have not been able to deliver on the promise that they make in the first place, which forms into something called a unique mechanism. So we'll take the weight loss market, right? If someone's in the weight loss market, the chances are that they have tried another diet, they've tried paleo keto, intermittent fasting, they've tried all of those things. Yet here they are, still overweight and wanting to lose the weight. And you need to be able to articulate why all of those things have failed the individual. And then, and only then, then do you present the unique mechanism behind the solution, which is your product, to solve that problem. And you need to compare and contrast and show people how it is superior to all the other alternatives that exist in the marketplace. And unless that you're doing that with your ads and your funnels and your promos, then you're never ever addressing the skepticism that is rampant in the market. And unless you address that skepticism, your conversions will always be low. Point number 18 a godfather offer. A compelling offer is infinitely more powerful than a convincing argument. In any transaction, there is risk present. And in most transaction, the business owner is asking the prospect to wear all of that risk. They're like, this is the product, just buy it. This is the price, just buy it. When realistically, you want to be aware of the risk that is present in every transaction and you want to burden the majority of that risk as a business owner. And the more that you do that, and the more clearly defined the end benefit that your offer enables, the more compelling your offer is. Now, the biggest rebuttal that I get when it comes to making a godfather offer is that like, oh wow, you want me to burden all of that risk and then if I do that, there might be refunds and that's going to cost me a lot of money. But the thing that most business owners don't take into consideration is that we are all in the business of going out there and getting attention and then converting that attention into customers. The more compelling the offer, the more people that you're going to get to actually convert and that is going to lower your customer acquisition cost. A compelling offer is more so about having a very clearly defined promise that you're making and then removing all the risk. And my litmus test for this is if the offer does not keep the founder up at night, then it simply isn't strong enough. Think about what is it that you can add to make your offer more compelling, or how more clearly defined that can you make it, or how much more risk can you burden for your prospects to make this a no brainer for them? Do that and watch your sales explode. Point number 19, showmanship and service. I believe that showmanship is one of the most long lost art forms that exist in business. People will forget about what you say in your ads, what you write in your emails, what's in the specific thing that it is that you've got. But they won't forget about the way that you made them feel. Not only just being a showman, in your promotion and in your ads, and in the way that you get attention, but even in the way that you service, delight and surprise your customers. And a great example of this is Be Ritz Carlton. They're kind of been studied as like the gold standard of customer service. And one of the things that they've got is that they give every single team member in their business an allowance of $2,000 for each incident, not each person staying in their hotel, each incident to right a wrong or a complaint that a customer has while staying with them. They don't need to get approval. They all have $2,000 as a budget to write that. And as a result of that, that just has people having the most incredible experience ever when they stay at their hotels. Because if anything ever goes wrong, that person that is serving them and has the authority and power to spend $2,000 to make sure that that experience is no longer an issue and use that opportunity not to just overcome that problem, but to surprise and delight the customer. Not thinking about what is reasonable, what can you deliver on. Start with the extremes and then you think about how can I inject some of that in my business? What is it that I would be able to do to surprise and delight my customers so that they have a remarkable experience that they by definition want to go and leave a remark about and tell other people and then you get more customers. And I have found that the more showmanship that I inject in my business, from the way that I promote and market to how we service and delight customers once they come in, there is nothing quite like lighting someone up with a big smile or getting handwritten letters of saying what a surprise and how delighted that they are. It's also good business. Which brings us to AI and the future of marketing. Not a day goes by where I don't receive an email, a handwritten letter, or somebody asking me, sabri, what about AI? Like, how is this going to make all agencies redundant? Isn't this going to make most businesses redundant? What are you focusing on as a marketer as AI comes about? And what do you think is the areas that I need to focus on that aren't going to be replaced by AI? And I think that over the last couple of years, like I have been completely in the trenches on AI and applying it to my clients businesses, to my businesses. And the more that I use it and the more that I have my team use it, things become apparent. A lot of the manual tasks that we do, like interpreting data, operating within these auction pools, on Facebook and Google Ads, and doing media buying, all of that stuff is eventually and inevitably going to be completely automated. But if everybody is using AI for all their media buying and all of these marketing campaigns, that they're running, then what is going to be the differentiator? What is going to give people an edge? Everybody has the same advantage. And that's been a question that I've been obsessing over for the last year and a half. And the thing that I keep on coming back to is it's all about the ideas. And imagination is more important than knowledge, to quote Albert Einstein. And I think that that is going to be something that's going to ring true over the decades to come. And it's going to be people's ability to come up with big ideas and to apply their imagination that then we can guide AI into to help us do all the logistical script writing, media buying, running the ads, writing the headlines and doing all of those things. And when it comes to like ideas and creativity, the thing that I have found that help that is that solitude is the wind that stokes the flame of creativity. And you do not want to be in a constant state of consumption because the more that you consume, the less that you create. So if you want to create more, you have to consume fewer things. And when you allow time and space to transpire and you allow quiet to happen and you go for a walk without your phone, that's often the time when your imagination runs wild. It's these big ideas and the these concepts that is going to be really the differentiator with the coming of AI. So I hope this serves you wherever you're at on your business journey, like subscribe and I'll see you in the next one.