2024 Organic content roundtable discussion

One of the things that came up while we were hanging out with people who are making a million dollars a week, someone said, the people at the top are not doing more than you, they're just doing it better.

I'll give you the secret sauce to building a multi seven figure business. The way we convert clients is not on social media. Welcome to the Success School podcast. We're on episode 68. Today we're talking about the 2024 Organic Content Roundtable discussion. Steph hates that name.

I thought it was the shittest name. It was so funny. I was like, who wrote this name? And Tim was like, I did. I was like, oopsies.

Today we're talking about social media and how to build a powerful brand. Steph, how you feeling?

Yeah, I am very excited and I'll dive into my personal update first. Oh, shake it up a little.

Shake it up.

I've been bored.

You've been bored?

I have been bored.

Have you?

I. And we're going into a weekend. We're about to go into a weekend.

My confession.

Yeah. Hi, my name is Steph and I am experiencing boredom.

You have kids?

Yeah. Maybe that's what it is. Yeah, I don't think that's it. What I'm getting to is that I've been bored and it's been good. We're going into a weekend. I haven't got a lot to do and it feels good. It feels really good to not have a lot to do because we're usually always on the go.

Yeah.

And it's really allowed me to feel more creative. Like, I get into my weeks and I'm like, oh, I have so much energy to get stuff done. I'm sleeping better. Like, it's just been so good. And so I think a lot of us don't allow ourselves. Myself included. Like, gosh, I have not allowed myself a lot of time to be bored in my life. But boredom is sexy. Like, I'm thinking it's a very good thing for entrepreneurs to be bored. What do you think?

Boredom is sexy.

Yeah.

Okay.

As far as.

That's a new one. That's.

Yeah.

Statement. Quote me. That'll be on your quote post next week.

Quote post. Boredom is sexy. I don't know, it just. You need space.

Oh, 100.

White space. What?

White space.

White space.

White space. Empty space in the calendar.

Yeah, Empty space. Calendar, Totally. What's your personal update?

Well, we have made the decision to go pro.

Oh, we are.

That has been my personal update. So if you guys are seeing a. A difference on our Social media, podcast, quality of content. We have made the decision to go pro. This has come about because, well, we were, frankly, we were hanging out with a lot of people that were super successful and we did know the difference. We did see the difference between what they were doing and what we were doing is their shit just looked way more polished. And I actually even have a theory. I discussed it with M. Sparrow in DM and I said to her, hey, I've got a theory about social media. It doesn't actually have to be high quality content. It just has to look good. And I think there is a difference between stuff looking good being quality in terms of the content and then people that put stuff that looks shit and is good quality. I think if it just looks good, people are going to assume it's. It's better. High quality worth more and more valuable.

Controversial, controversial.

Opinion here.

Talk to us about what going pro has meant for us. Like, tell the audience, like, what does it mean?

Yeah, so I mean, we'll go from like, just the money stuff because, you know, analytical man here we have a podcast set up and that kind of looks like taking it to 25 grand, I think, like total spend. Cameras, equipment, all that type of stuff. So it's like the best of the best audio we have, the best podcasting agency, TBC Studios. Thank you, guys.

Shout out.

We're investing all the time in how to make stuff better.

You're about to go spend another $6,000 on cameras.

More cameras. Today we have a content creator on our staff who works for us 15 hours a week, scheduling two posts a day, going six social media platforms, emails every day.

We got on YouTube, testimonials professionally recorded rather than like doing it on zooms and looms and getting them send it over. We, like got a videographer, set them up. We got our website really professionally done.

For me, it just came down to, like, how do we separate ourselves from everyone else? And it's like, yes, we have great content. Yes, it looks all right, but can we make it look better to elevate our brand?

Well, one of the things that came up while we were hanging out with people who are making a million dollars a week was actually, I think, something that really stuck with us and probably snowballed this whole thing was someone said, the people at the top are not doing more than you, they're just doing it better.

Yeah.

And that really landed for us. I think that was a real point. We were like, oh. And we'd actually had a chat with, you know, a content creator that's pretty big online. His name's Matt Gray and we sometimes catch up with him and have some cool sessions and trade notes and stuff. And I asked him what I doing wrong with my social media and he was like, like, Steph, it kind of looks like, like he did, didn't he?

And when you hear that from someone that has 6 million followers and they're making a lot of money.

Yeah, he's making a lot of money. And. And I said, matt, you're so right. Like, it does look crappy. I'm using filters on B roll. Like I'm, you know, and it just doesn't look high quality. And he was like, you just need to dial in the quality, honestly, and then you can dial up the quantity. The quality has to come first. Which actually leads us perfectly into one of the questions today. Not the first question, but I'm going to jump around because I think this makes sense. Yeah.

What are we doing? What segment is this?

This segment is schooling. So we've got three questions from three different clients throughout our portal that we thought are relevant to the social media roundtable discussion.

2024.

2024. And one of the questions was question two. But I think we'll dive into it right now because it's on topic.

Yeah.

What should you prioritize when building a social media presence? Should it be quantity or quality? Which leads us perfectly into this.

Man, that's such a loaded question. And there's like no right answer here. And I'm going to give you, I'm going to give you two answers if you're just starting out. I feel like it's all about quantity and getting the reps. So getting the reps with copywriting, getting the reps with hooks, getting the reps with your captions. I'm not going to say hashtags, so they don't work anymore, but like just getting the reps in general, you can't really do that if you're doing a post a week or you're writing an email a week or whatever it is. And, you know, I did speak to a friend of mine this morning and he, he reached out to me. He's like, hey, man, I need a coaching call. So I did, and he was telling me he has this marketer in his company and all they do is use chat GBT for all their captions and hooks and copywriting. And I said, bro, you're gonna have a business if you're relying on chat GBT to write all your content. They're actually not getting the reps and the skills. And I think the most important thing, especially maybe like under seven figure, is volume. Getting really good at captions, copy those type of things and then dialing in the quality over time. Like, what do you think about that?

Yeah, I would say, I would say definitely if you're under 500,000 a year, 600,000 a year, definitely. You just need the reps. And what Tim means by the reps is you need to post and figure out what people are responding to, what stuff gets traction, what stuff people are engaged with, and you just won't know, like, no one has the answer for you. You know, we can give advice to our clients and we do do, but like, ultimately it's trial and error. Like, you got to figure it out. And you don't get better at something by reading about it. You get better at it by doing it. And so copywriting is one of those that you just have to do and you have to do a lot of it to figure it out. And so, yeah, I agree. Up until probably, I would say probably 600,000.

Yeah.

In this world, in the world we live in right now, I think that social media, the landscape is changing. It's always going to be changing. It's going to constantly change. I'm sure this conversation mid next year will be irrelevant and changed again, which is why we have so many episodes about it, because it is in constant space, say, to flux. And so I do think that right now quality does matter. And I think that you can put out a lot of stuff, probably up to 600k a year, and then trying to dial in from like, you know, 50k a month to 100k months or whatever that looks like for your next big jump will come probably down to an element of adding quality.

And I'm going to curveball for you, Steph. So let's say we sell high tickets. So our stuff's like, yeah, yeah, so what if you got a low ticket product that's 100 bucks a month, do you still think you need quality in the full production?

Like, we have absolutely not. 100. 100. That's. This is such a relevant topic. If you sell low ticket, don't worry about it. You can, you can just. It looks, you can 100 just do crappy photos and filters and iPhone stuff. Like no problem at all. It honestly is not a problem. If you sell high ticket, that's when it has to look high quality.

Yeah.

And I think that. And the sooner that you do that, the better. So, for example, speaking of M. Who's A beautiful person in our program. She sells high ticket websites the best that you can get. And so if it's going to be the best high ticket website, then you need to have the best high ticket social media. Like if you're selling high tickets, it needs to look high ticket, it needs to feel high ticket. It needs to, you know, if you've got luxury brand names. I remember having a conversation with one of our clients about this a couple years ago. She had all these like luxury like photos on our website, like Chanel and all this stuff. But then her social media was all like shot on an iPhone with like crappy lighting and you know, shitty filters. And I was like, those don't make sense to me. Because Chanel is not that the aesthetic has to carry the whole way through. So I think that if you want to be high ticket, it needs to look high ticket. So therefore you'd probably focus on quality.

Yeah.

And you know, you look at Maria Wen and you know other people online, Jamie C. And there's heaps of people who do low ticket stuff online and do that volume based content. Most of this doesn't look good. It doesn't look good. It doesn't look bad. It's just not high quality.

Yeah.

And it doesn't need to be, which is great. Like I think Maria went $400,000 a month on like iPhone photos with filters on them. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. That works. But where we went wrong.

But if you sell anything over 500 bucks a month, like you've got a service, you've got whatever it is, it's got to look good.

We made this mistake.

Yeah.

When I say we massively, I really feel me was the big also. Yeah. I really made this mistake. I was like, okay, well if Maria went and all these girls are online and then guys and a couple other people were doing it, then I should also do that. Like they're making $400,000 a month. Like obviously copy them. Like let's just like just replicate that. So like I started doing the same stuff and we, it started not working. It was getting worse. Like things were getting worse for our company. Like we had to spend more on ads to acquire clients because the social media organic wasn't working as well because I was trying to plug and play a low ticket method into a high ticket product. And so there is so much discernment that needs to happen.

Yeah.

At this level, like if you sell something over 500amonth or you sell something over a thousand dollars if you're selling a digital product, then, yeah, like, you need to dial it in for sure, 100%.

Yeah, yeah. Just like a. Kind of like the lengths that we go to for this as well is like just at our last Bali retreat, I basically wore black shoes, black pants, and a black shirt the entire time. It was 35 degrees the whole time. Because that's my brand and that's what I rep and that's my professional brand. It doesn't waver for me at all. Like us being cut polished, wearing black, having everything slick dialed in, having great copy, great hooks. All of our stuff looking really good. That's the overall brand because we sell high ticket. So, like, I guess the thing wanted.

To wear board shorts.

I wanted to wear board shorts. I wanted to wear a single. I wanted to look shit.

Yeah. Where is Crocs around?

Yeah, I want to wear Crocs, but I couldn't do that because it's not my brand. So, like, I'm asking you to, for a little bit of a reflection here in your brand is like, are you living it? Are you representing it? Are you showing the brand? Do you fucking rep your merch? Like, is your website polished? Is it all dialed in? All this stuff matters. We have clients that sell money or they sell high ticket things, and their brand doesn't reflect the thing they're selling. Therefore there is discernment in their audience and they have a harder time selling it.

Yes.

If you sell something that's high value, you have to look high value.

Okay, so this leads us into another question then. How do you know which social media platforms are worth your time as a small business owner?

Yeah, like the easy answer here, and you've heard this a hundred times, is just go where your clients are. But I personally do believe once you've got the quality dialed in, you should be everywhere. You should be on all platforms building a presence. I watched a whole Mosi video the other day and he did say the best one was YouTube, second best one was Instagram, third best one was Facebook, and then fourth best one was LinkedIn. So, you know, if I were a business owner, right now I'd be focusing on those four. Steph did mention before, in the break, we were talking about TikTok and how it's great for certain people, which is cool. But essentially, Hormozi did say that his lowest value clients came from TikTok in terms of how much average income they had and how much they spent and those types of things on his product. So that just goes to show that the demographic that's on TikTok is not his demographic of business people that want to like make heaps of money. Obviously they're on YouTube watching long videos, educational stuff, which is epic. So I guess, like for us we have business people. They're super intelligent, they're about learning, they're about all that stuff. So we're on those four platforms. That's where we're scaling at now. What do you think? Like, where do you think business owners should be hanging out?

Yeah, 100%. Like, I think if you sell low ticket, yeah, Tick Tock would be great. Like, that's fine. Products or products. Like, if you're a product based business, probably this, hopefully this podcast is helpful for you. But for the most part, like, you know, Tick Tock's fine. I think that Tick Tock is a little bit shiny object syndrome. I think that for, for most entrepreneurs. But if you sell low ticket, I think Tick Tock is great. The thing I would also add to this is go with your native platform. So when I say native platform, it's like, which one feels easiest and best for you to use first?

Yeah.

In saying that, you know, especially if you do too high ticket and especially if any of your stuff is in any way educational. YouTube, like and I, we had a really cool discussion this week. We were on a really cool call with Sam Ovens.

Yeah.

Who is the founder of School and then partner with Alex Hormozi. And we were on this like cool Mastermind call with him. And he basically kind of talked through the evolution of marketing and he was like, you know, there was this period where it was like, you know, affiliates and partnerships and funnels. Like funnels was a huge thing.

Funnel for everything.

Yeah, yeah, click funnels. And everyone wanted like the, the photo thing in the frame and like funnels for everything. Right. And then we moved to like the ads era and then it was like, you know, everyone just all the ads bros came out and Facebook ads were the answer to everything. And in all of this time, there was basically no organic. Before all of those things, there was email. Everyone was like, you got to build a list. And then there's been the organic season, which has really been the last couple of years where people have been like, wow, we can really blow up organically for free. And now we're entering the long form season and I think my prediction for 2025 will be long form as the answer. And so, yeah, YouTube podcasts, like somewhere where people can really get to see you and know your brand is going to be super valuable for most entrepreneurs.

Yeah. We track, like everyone that signs up for Success Call. We track where their first touch point with us was, where their last touch point with us was, and how long it took them to become a client of ours. We've had a few people when we've been on sales calls, we ask our sales team and they'll say things like, I listen to every single episode of the Success School podcast. So all 69 at this point. And I listened to every single episode of Steph's original podcast and my gym podcast before I made the decision to join Success School. And the only reason I did join is because I feel like I know you guys.

Yeah.

And this is massive. So I hope that's really sinking in for you guys. A reason we make a lot of high ticket sales is because we have this platform where we can talk to you on Spotify, YouTube, etc. I think that, you know, on Seth's point, I think you need some kind of long form in your business. If you're selling anything that's over 100 bucks a month, I think people need to see your expertise. They're not just going to sign up with you. Like, manifesting doesn't work. I hate to break it to you guys, you can't just hope that you're going to make sales and people are going to be attracted to brand. You literally need to do everything in your power to make them or get them to know like, and trust you. And you need to show all the aspects and facets of you.

And even if so if you're a service business right now and it doesn't make sense for you to have a podcast, which could make sense.

Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

Then go do podcast rounds.

Yeah, yeah.

Go on other people's podcasts. Yeah. Go on other people's YouTube channels. Like, go and get in front of other people's containers. Go and present in other people's audiences. Like, for sure. But like, long form is key here. Like most of the time we will acquire a new lead or someone will come drop into our world from an ad. Yeah, pretty much all the time.

Yeah. I'm going to give away the secret sauce here, guys. And you guys are listening and you're loyal listeners, so I appreciate you. So I'll give you the secret sauce of building a multi seven figure business. Like, and this kind of leads into our third question. The way we convert clients is not on social media.

Yeah.

Okay. And a lot of people, like, that's a mind bomb for you. So we get people into our final on paid ads. So we spend anywhere from 5 to 10k a month. You don't have to do that. That's all relative to how much we're making. Then we send them a lot of emails. And those emails are links to our podcast, they're linked to our YouTube, they're linked to everywhere. They come in, they book a call. Usually they check us out, they'll go through our podcast, they'll check out our social media pages, they'll jump on LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, all the places and they'll see where they're at. So people come in the funnel through ads, they're nurtured on email, they're nurtured through our podcast and YouTube and that type of stuff. And then they become a client of success call. When they're a client of success goal, usually they refer. And that's how we grow our business because we do a ripper job. And a ripper job means a great job if you're from North America. So answer the question.

Yeah, it does. And the one thing I'll add to that is like, yes, social media has a place. And what it means is that, like, obviously people are spending time there. So your omnipresence. So they've come through an ad, they're getting our emails, they log into social media. There we are. Hello again. We might send you a message, you may say, hey. And you know, now your algorithm is even more filled with us. And so that's kind of how it works, guys. Like, it's an omnipresent approach. It's not one thing. There's no secret sauce, there is no special hack. Like, it's all of the things.

Yeah. So question three, Steph, is how can you convert or use your social media to convert followers into clients?

So many ways.

So many ways. Tons of ways. You can have way different answers to me as well, which is. Which is good. Do you want to start?

I'm going to link below a really cool little training I made a couple of weeks ago called the trust amplifier. So I'm going to give this to you guys for free today. So go and check it out in the link below. But effectively, this is going to be definitely a different answer to yours. You do need to build trust, and there are certain types of content you need to be creating to build trust. You cannot just be educating people all the time. Like, no one's going online to be educated. Like, they're going online to be entertained at some level. And so you do need to Have a mix of things in there. So trust based content will be proof based content. So you definitely need to have some proof based stuff. So you know, if you're in fitness before and afters, like 100% need to be shown all the time. You know, pre based content for us would be like telling a story about our clients or sharing a case study showing clients signing up into our program, sharing client wins, sharing our own personal wins. Just showing a lot of that constant proof that one, we know what we're doing, two, we're actually doing it. Three, we actually have real clients with real results and I think that needs to be part of it as well as the education side. Like here's five ways to. Or here's how you can. You know, I think, personally, I think that it needs to be a lot of different trust elements that have been added in. I think we've moved away from just that whole like slap it up. Like I, I still see some organic social media accounts where they're like disgusting, just have, they're just like did you know like. And I'm like, no. Oh my goodness. Like people are not getting online to be like, did you know that your gut health and flora and fauna, like we like, we don't care, you know. But if it was like here's how to lose weight by mastering gut health and be like, okay, tell me a little bit more about that. Yeah, totally. What about you?

So big concept here. I just thought about it as we were kind of rolling but ready. I'm about to drop a philosophy here. So we want to brand in public and sell in private. Brand in public. Sell in private. Let me explain. So brand in public. What I mean by that is all your social media pieces, are you developing no like and trust. Are you getting people into your network, that type of stuff. And then we're going to sell in private on email, text and call. Okay. Because that's a private medium. That's a one way to one way communication form. So on email we're telling stories, we're making offers, they're going to say yes or no. They're only seeing that email themselves. There's no community, there's no comments, there's nothing like that. Then on text obviously we can send them offers and then we can obviously call people that inquire with our program or download our lead magnets or something like that. So everything's in private. Everything we do in public is basically public facing for a brand point of view and to build no like and trust. Steph and I Were not that out there being like, sign up success, go with 70 and a half thousand on payment plan. It's XYZ. Like you should join because I think that's pretty gross. It's not what people are going on social media for. They're going on there to be entertained and to build a relationship with someone on social media. So we keep all our selling in private and then the public facing stuff is the brand stuff. Easy for us to say because we have lists and we have emails and we have ads and we have all that stuff. But listening to this podcast, guys, you can do this too. It is not rocket science. We don't particularly rate ourselves as smart people. We just take a lot of action and we just take a lot more action than most people.

Like Jono, he's just been in our program like he's been out like four weeks. Yeah, he's turned some ads on and he just said this morning that he's been getting two to 300 new lead emails a week for $30 a day. That's 210 bucks a week. Yeah, he's been getting two to 300 new emails on his list per week. He's going for a launch in January. Could you imagine the size of his email list in January? It's going to be insane, dude. It's going to make so much money. So like, I just think that you don't have to even be spending a lot of money. You don't even have to be necessarily like, you just need to be constantly building that list so that you can sell in private 100%.

Just want to like hit the caveat of, you know, getting omnichannel multiple channels to not and just focusing on Instagram, which most people do. So the algorithms, they all work and they change all the time. So if you're killing it on one platform and then it stops killing it, your business is kind of wrecked because you're just focusing on one platform. So that's why we're kind of all about being on multi platforms being omnipresent. Because if one goes down, one goes up. That's kind of how they work. But if you just stuck on Instagram, posting, Getting 3 likes, 10 likes, no one's really inquiring. I don't think it's it for growing your business.

Reactive, yes, you might have something that's working really, really well and then they change your algorithm or they change the rules and now it doesn't work well anymore. Now your business is going to zero and it's just like it's so stressful and if you look at the people at the top, they're not playing those games because they can't play those games. Because if you play those games you get burnt. So like you can't rely on its constant, ever changing algorithm and having to like, if you're feeling like reactive in your business, the last thing that you need is to be trying to play algorithm games. Just get an omnipresent, an omnichannel approach which is exactly what we teach in compound marketing. It's exactly what we teach in successful is to be everywhere and then you don't have to rely on any one thing. One can go down, the other's will start to go up. It doesn't matter. You will always be safe. So if you guys like consistent, safe, easy businesses, if you like, and you like money, then yeah, like you got to get on more than one channel.

So Steph, just in summary, give us your like big prediction. This is a roundtable, this is a discussion. 2024 was good, but what do you think is going to happen in 2025 for social media, branding, that type of stuff?

I think 2024 was the rise and I think, I think it will be the fall of organic. And I think that going into 2025 we're going to see a pay to play model which we're already seeing come through like Instagram, Facebook, I mean that's the same company, they want to get paid for eyeballs, so they're going to make it harder and harder to get eyeballs unless you pay for them. So ads are going to trend up. I think that long form is just such a huge play and I really think like we've got a couple of clients that have made the jump to get onto YouTube and are absolutely crushing. And I just think that if you know that you're in the education space in terms of like you educate people, YouTube is just, it is such a good platform right now for really being on. There's so many easy ways to win at YouTube right now and you've got to be everywhere. And emails, I mean emails have always been a thing, much to our very, very big frustration. Our clients just learn this one really slowly. We love you guys, but please don't listen to us. Emails.

Most frustrating thing as a coach when our clients don't listen to it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, please send emails because emails are where I would say 90% of our call bookings come from. Emails.

Don't give it all away.

Sorry, but all it's, it is like you guys have got to be sending emails.

Yeah. It's 100% superpower, guys. That most of you are not doing is. We send a lot of emails.

Good emails.

Good emails. It is a superpower. We have a long form medium that you guys can get around.

Yeah, totally.

All right, guys, if you got some value from this episode, please let us know. Send us a dm. But, like, if you got extra value, hit the subscribe button on whatever you're listening to or watching on. We would strongly appreciate it. This is our third episode in our new space. So, like, the feedback. We really want the feedback, don't we? Like, do you love it? It's took me 90 minutes to set up.

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