Here’s what people want BEFORE they’ll buy in 2025

89% of people say that watching a video has convinced them to buy something.

A lot of the times we don't contact the people because we have insert idea or thought about. It's spammy, it's scammy, it's gross. They're going to tell us to off. In reality, when you're calling your prospects or someone that's inquired with you, you're calling them out of service, not to sell them something. Because everyone that reaches out to you has a.

Foreign.

Welcome to the Success School podcast. We're on episode 82 today and we have something super exciting. Steph, what are you excited about?

I'm so excited. I love our year. This year we have just got so many cool live events and workshops that we are bringing to the forefront. And in two days time, we are running a cool free workshop to help you get your next 10 clients. We're going to help you build out a heck yes offer. We're going to help you you nail your messaging around it and we're going to help you market it so that you can get your next 10 clients for free with ease. And we're super excited to run through that. And like I said, it's free, so you should definitely get there. We have hundreds of people registered already. It's going to be absolutely incredible.

The URL is next10clients.com and that is the number 10. And then it's going to be in the show notes below if you guys want to register. So maybe we kick off with personal updates.

I'd love a personal update.

So I have been sleeping with someone else. And Steph, I'm really sorry and I know I made the marital vow to never do it, but I've lied and I've cheated and I've been sleeping with the bed.

Is she hot?

She's hot. She's really on time, she's really punctual and she keeps great records. Yeah, so everything you're not.

Yeah.

So actually I'm lying. We bought a new bed. It's called eight Sleep. It tracks your sleep and it keeps your bed cold and hot and hot if you want it. So basically there's like an algorithm AI in there. I call her Stephanie because I call my wife Steph. So Stephanie is just like her alter SEO ego sister. And it adjusts to your body temperature to keep you in the optimal temperature for sleeping. It says it increases your deep sleep by 25%. And just in case you guys were wondering, I was the first person in our relationship to have 100 sleep score so defeated.

Which is. It's unusual because I am actually the sleep a sleep queen. But I was. But I have had two hundreds in a row lately. So it's been very, very good.

Three hundreds. Tim is.

Tim is ahead.

Have you found the eight sleep or.

The eight sleep has been amazing. Our. Our third wheel.

Yeah, third wheel in the relationship.

The eight sleep has been amazing. The first week was terrible. The first week was so bad. Do you want to tell the story?

Yeah. So we don't do anything in half measures around here on team success school. So the bed goes down to minus 10. So I was like, oh, you know, I sleep hot. I could take it minus 10. And I woke up in the. And my. You know what was shrinking because it was so cold and I feel like I had to go to hospital to get it revived because it was so cold and I woke up shivering. Everything was hurting and I was like, what is going on? This literally feels like minus 10. And then the next night I went too hot. So it probably took about three days to.

I did. It was the worst. And it takes. It's not like instant to cool up and cool down.

Yeah.

So it took some time. I didn't go minus 10, but I went think. I think I went minus six. And yeah, we really messed up. Like I was freezing.

Worst night sleep I've had.

So bad. So it took a little while to adjust to. But I do love it now. While we're on the biohacking, while we're on the topic of sleep, I will share my personal update. We have.

Moms are going to freak out. You sleep well.

Yeah. God. Guys, I share my sleep scores on. On Instagram and I get it. I know mums, I know you guys are tired. I get it. I totally.

You don't have to let Steph know.

But every single time you guys are like, well, you're so lucky and get. Get triggered by it. Condoms, baby loving reminder that we are trying to have children. Okay. Loving R.E.M. that that's not something that we have been gifted with yet. And when we are, I will join you in the ranks of sleepless nights and we can complain about it together right now. Mouth taping. Kinky. It sounds very kinky. Sounds more kinky than it is.

The complaints have dried up.

So I've been experimenting with mouth taping. I have always been a little bit interested. I know I'm a mouth breather and especially at night because I wake up multiple times in the night and my mouth will be dry and so I knew that I was a mouth breather. And I was told by a few friends that mouth taping really helps and that it helps you sleep better. And then we started looking up mouth taping before and afters on Google. And do yourself a favor, have a look up mouth taping before and afters and it actually changes your entire face shape, which is so, so interesting. So anyway, I started mouth taping. We're using a brand. I can't remember what it's called, so I can't even influence them. I think it's called Respire. And you tape your mouth for the night and you basically just breathe through your nose the entire evening. And as pretty much as soon as I started mouth taping, hundreds of calls. What do you know? The breathing through the nose is so cathartic. It is the most relaxing and calming thing in the world. So I'm loving it.

It's calming on the other end as well.

Yeah. Much less. Much less noise, much less like this.

Fucking little pug in bed, you know, like, that's what Steph is.

So today's episode, guys, what are we talking about? Not. Not biohacking. Although maybe we should do an episode on biohacking. Guys, you let us know if you want us to do an episode on biohacking. You've heard people use the saying that people buy from brands, and that's not entirely true. Obviously, there are a lot of brands that people buy from, but they definitely buy from people and trust brands that they know like and trust. And they're not going to buy unless they have those three key elements. And in 2025, Tim and I have been forecasting and we've been chatting with a lot of people and we're feeling our crystal balls. Our crystal balls are starting to, I think, get. Get warm and they're starting to move and vibrate with the energy of being correct. But we're seeing a shift towards long form format. A lot of long form content, more personal to points, for example, calling the leads, having a lot more interaction with your audience and with your community. And I think that while short form will always have a place, we're even seeing some short form turn into kind of long forms. We're seeing on TikTok, people are doing series or they're doing, you know, even Instagram still. But on TikTok as well, they're doing lives and they're talking for 10, 15 minutes. People want to get to know the people behind brands. And so we saw, and we've been doing some statistics and a bit of research around this but long form formats 11,000% growth in the last 10 years, which is huge. So more and more people are using it.

That was all Joe Rogan 80.

Yeah, probably was.

It actually was 10,900% Joe Rogan.

And 89% of people say that watching a video has convinced them to buy something. And we are 100% those people.

What haven't we bought on?

We buy, we buy a lot. Which is why I think that we're really good to coach because we are like the best consumers. We'll buy like we buy anything. I sent Tim an ad yesterday. I was like, this is a really good ad. Like we should like replicate it for our own business. It was something completely not what we do at all. And an hour later Tim was like, I'm watching that course you sent me. And I was like, no, Tim, I sent you the ad, not the course.

Yeah, but it led to the course. So I have to see what the implementation was.

And so we are the the best consumers of long form content and purchasing on the back of long form content. We've actually made like 30, $60,000 investments off the back of people's podcasts and things like that. So we know that this works. Right. So let's talk about long form and how people can use it. Because not everybody is ready to start a YouTube CH channel or have four cameras recording them doing a podcast setup. So if someone was wanting to do long form content this year, but they weren't quite ready to have a full on production, how could somebody potentially integrate long form into their short form?

How about we go one on one and then we'll see who runs out ideas first on how to implement.

Let's do it.

So I'll kick off a little bit of a outer left field one to kick us off today. So recording loom videos for people that message you say they message you with a question or email or whatever it is, you can go back to them on a loom video. Obviously explain it, give the why, give the reason, make it personal, make it the answer personalized to them. The goal here with this whole long form or why we're doing is we want to get someone to consume 7 hours of your content. So that's going to help. That's my first one. How about you, Steph?

Okay. My one will be off the back of that. Also using Loom. Loom is a great. If you're not using Loom guys, it's an incredible tech resource or tool, so I highly recommend getting onto it. But if you create like A lead magnet. That's a checklist or a document or a guide or whatever. Just record a 5 to 10 minute video of you talking through the guide. Introduce yourself, introduce why this guide's important. Just walk through the guide, add some anecdotes, stories, examples, those sorts of things. All of a sudden it might be going for 15 to 20 minutes. Attach it how you watch the video training here, and then you can even advertise it on your socials as a video training. Okay, so really easy win there, Tim.

Number three for me. And we were on a call with Jade Spooner the other day and she gave us this idea. And I know a lot of you guys are going to be like, my life's boring. I can't do this. But a day in a life just to take you through us, through the Watcher. Exactly what you do in your days, like a coaching call, clients, you helping them, running through your service, building a social media management plan, whatever you do in your business, but walking us through it. What does your breakfast look like? What is your lunch? Do you walk your dogs? Do you play with your kids? Like, what does it look like for us to be in your shoes? That could be a minute, could be 2, could be 3, could be 10, could be whatever it is. But you've just got to realize that unless you're probably like an accountant and you wake up and do nothing and drink a coffee and go to work and go to bed, then just probably stuff that people would be interested in your life.

Cool spreadsheet stuff.

Cool spreadsheet porn.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. We could watch on the back of that. Guys, you don't even have to record it as like a YouTube. You could record it just on your stories. Yeah, just like literally document like 10:30, like 10:32nd. Just parts of your day. For sure.

Yeah.

All right. Number four for me would be Instagram lives. Instagram lives are a really great way. You can go live on your own. You can go live with other people. Maybe. If you're going to pop your Instagram live cherry, a really good way is to do it with somebody else. So just ask them questions and have a conversation, just like Tim and I are having right now. They still perform really well. And if you use two people like myself and Tim, if we both go live, the benefit is that our followers would follow the other person as well. You can save it to your feed, you can hide it from your feed. It's up to you. So that definitely works.

Tim, number five, we're getting towards the pointy End here. These are getting a little bit harder. But what I'm going to go is long form writing instead of video. Right there. You didn't see that coming. So a lot of people have turned their Facebook or personal Facebook pages into blogs and they basically just blog about what they're up to, their day, what they're doing in their life, what are their thoughts, what are their thought leadership on certain things in their industry. And I see this play out on Facebook and I love it. I love following heaps of people that just write interesting shit online. It's incredible. So long form writing, especially if you're a writer and you've got a face for radio, could be much better for you.

So polite. Okay, well off the back of that, this is not where I was gonna go. I'm gonna go here now. Blogs. So actual blogs. Actual blogs. Actually that's how I started. How's the hobby? So my first ever business, I started with blogging because I wasn't really. I couldn't sell tickets. So I just thought, what can I do? You were just like, just write stuff. And so I used to write these blogs and then I'd write the blogs and publish them on my website. Obviously there was no website traffic. So then what I would do is I would take the link to the blog and I would post it on my personal Facebook and on my Instagram and I'd be like, hey, I just wrote this blog about X. Go have a read and like people go and read it. And then it built over time. Like blogging is cool and great for SEO as well. Next.

So this is probably the last one.

No, it's not. I've got more.

Oh, Steph's got more. Yeah. Well, let's take it to email.

Oh, let's.

Let's share your thoughts on Facebook on email.

Okay, I'm gonna go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so email. Tick tock.

Lives. Dead lives. You can't just keep going lives.

Okay, what about Twitch? Twitch streams.

It'S gonna twitch your day.

I feel like there's definitely more, but you guys get the point. Okay? You, you can do a lot of long form even when you have short form. It doesn't mean you have to have a full on channel. It doesn that you have to have three cameras recording you for a podcast studio set up like this gets to be. It can be a lot smaller, but I highly recommend trying at least for one a month on long form.

Corey, just admit here. Steph said the same thing four times for all of her, just in different mediums. And format. Steph, give us some time here. How much time does good long form take? And, like, how would you approach the process of doing long form?

Oh, we actually just recorded a really cool training and success call called the long form formula. So if you're a client and you're watching this, go have a watch of that. But anything new takes time. I'm going to just put that out there. If you're starting something from scratch, like, for the first time ever, it's gonna take you forever. If you're just starting copywriting, you're gonna suck at it. It's gonna take you ages. If you just start, you know, taking video content on your phone and you've never spoken to camera before, you're probably gonna do 42 takes before you press live. Like, it takes time. Like, you have to suck before you get good. But if you have already got a background in speaking and, you know, you were speaking to school students every day, for example, if you're a teacher, then podcasting might be really natural and really easy for you. So I think probably do the thing that feels most natural for you first. And if none of it feels. If you're really, really bad at speaking, then maybe start with writing. I think just start with where your natural skills lie and try not to go too far out of your natural skill set. How long does good long form take? Honestly? I mean, we've seen.

How long's a piece of dream?

Yeah, we've seen, I mean, Joe Rogan's podcast go for three hours. Unless you're Joe Rogan. I probably. Or Chris Williamson. I probably wouldn't recommend doing that. You're probably not there yet. Yeah. But good long form recording time, somewhere between 20 to 30 minutes, is pretty much the sweet spot. And it will probably take you a little bit longer to prep. Probably a half hour before that to prep and to get everything set up. And, you know, maybe an hour it should take for good long form content. Again, if you're new to it, it's probably gonna take you two, because that's just how long it takes. So it does take some time to get good at it, I think. Off of the back of that, Tim, how would you know it was time to start a YouTube or podcast? And I guess who should start a YouTube or a podcast.

You'll know it's the right time to start YouTube or podcast when you have the commitment piece dialed in. And what I mean by the commitment piece is if you can commit to it for one year. Okay. And whether your cadence or Frequency is fortnightly or weekly. Pick one, stick to it, commit to it for a year. If you can do that. And you can go through the planning, you can go through the writing, you can go through the recording and editing and publishing, and you can do all that consistently on whatever cadence you're at, you're ready for it. You've just got to really know that it's probably going to suck. Okay. Especially when you get started. It's going to be really bad. You're going to have one viewer, no subscribers, and it's going to be very hard to get started. If you're okay with all of that, then you're ready to get started. But if you're expecting to go zero to Joe Rogan in three months, you're going to be sorely mistaken, because long form is even harder to get views than just short form on top of that. And it's got to be better because you need to keep people entertained for quite a long time.

Yeah. Like, what episode number is Joe Rogan up to?

Like, two and a half thousand.

Yeah. And I feel like he only got good in 2020. Like, really now, in 2020, so. And Chris Williamson's been doing it for five years before he. I think that's his name. We always just call him Chris Will something. Something like that. And we have a anecdote or a story about a guy who wrot blog for seven years, but. And then all of a sudden, one day it just blew up and everyone was reading his blog. Like, guys, it takes time. So if your ego can't handle the fact that you're going to be. To start with, like, how many subscribers do we have?

I mean, we've only got 300 now on YouTube.

And we are so grateful for every.

Single one of you.

Thank you so much. And we've been doing this years. You can't let your ego drive the show when it comes to starting something new like this. You have to be okay with the fact that it's going to take the better part of a decade to produce something. Something really magical, if this is what you want to do.

We've done 400 odd episodes between us of a podcast, and, like, we've just got 300 subscribers on our YouTube channel. Think about that, guys. 400 episodes.

And everyone's like, it takes us an.

Hour to set up the set here.

Yeah.

Like, think about how much effort goes into this.

Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's such a commitment.

Steph, give us your number one lesson you've learned from long form and Then I'll give you mine.

I think ours will be the same. I think this is. I'm not going to use the word, but I do think you need to be completely yourself. Yeah, but I didn't do that for a very long time because I was scared that. Honestly, I was scared that people wouldn't like me. That, you know, the way that we converse now, if you listen to our earlier episodes and if you listen to my previous podcast, which is called the Steph Gordon show, like, it. It really didn't. I was really scared to make jokes or have fun because I didn't want to offend somebody or to piss somebody off or for somebody to be like, oh, she said this. Or to get canceled back when you could get cancelled.

Yeah, I don't think you can anymore.

Like, we just watched a friend get taken down pretty badly.

Did we?

Yeah, Tony.

Oh, yeah. I mean, that's not that bad.

Oh, yeah. But I wouldn't want to go through it.

Yeah, no one would.

But no. Yeah. Anyway, so I do think that for me, it's taken a long time to be ballsy enough to be myself. And once you do, one, podcast listeners, like, froth it way more. You build way more loyal fans. And two, it's just way easier and way more fun to create content. Content. So my advice is, like, just be yourself early in. It's not going to make a massive difference.

Yeah.

Yeah. What about you?

Yeah, mine exactly the same. Just from my perspective, I'm quite a shoot from the hip kind of guy. And I'll just say whatever is on my mind. I don't really filter it. And then, you know, back in the old days, coming on the podcast. Back in the old days, I mean, like a year ago, coming on the podcast and having to politically correct myself is not the funnest way to spend my afternoon recording three podcast episodes and having to put on a filter and. And tell our editors, oh, cut that out. Don't do this, don't do this. It's just not fun. And I guess, like, we do do this business thing and this podcast for fun, and if it becomes unfun, it's. It's not fun for you guys either. Fun, fun, fun.

It's not sustainable either. Like, if you're not enjoying it, guys, it's not sustainable. So I want to circle back at the beginning, we kind of spoke about. So there's long form. Amazing. But at the beginning, we also spoke about the fact that, you know, this year we are going to see a lot more people interacting with their communities and interacting with their audience. So we've given you a lot of options about how to do that and really build that brand. Tim will call it brand with brandability, how to really build that brand using long form content. But there are other ways that you can touch base with and connect with your audience. And so one of the ways that we spoke about earlier was calling the leads. Tim, do you just want to talk us through what calling the leads actually is and why people have such an aversion to it?

Yeah. So calling the leads, if someone inquires and submits their details on a lead magnet of yours or a download or a VSL or whatever it is and they say, here's my phone number, give me the thing. They are indicating to you that it is okay for you to contact them on those mediums because generally they're ticking a box at saying so anyway. And then a lot of the times we don't contact the people because we have insert idea or thought about. It's spammy, it's scammy, it's gross, they're going to tell us to fuck off. You know any other reason why you wouldn't call someone? But in reality when you're calling your prospects or someone that's inquired with you, you, you're calling them out of service, not to sell them something because everyone that reaches out to you has a problem. That's why they've raised their hand and they've said, I have this problem that you solve. And whatever this is with the lead magnet download or VSL or whatever it is, you're solving their problem. So it would be incongruent or dishonest or not doing the right thing. In regard to what you said in business, if you didn't reach out to them and you didn't offer them help and that's the way I see calling the leads. I don't see calling the leads as hey, you download a lead magnet for success, go and call you up and fucking sell you shit right now, immediately it's no, you've got a problem, we're going to solve that problem.

And I think that, that I want to be really clear when we talk about calling the leads, we're not calling people to sell them stuff. Just to be very clear. Well, you're just saying, hey, you've downloaded this thing, obviously you've got this problem. Is there any way that we can help? That's like 95% of the way the conversation goes. And if they say they're not looking to get any Support with it right now. That's cool. We'll send them something else for free. If they say that they are looking to get some help, we might offer them another call to help them brainstorm or, you know, booking one of our scale sessions or whatever. And if on that call they, you know, we show them enough value and they feel like they have enough interest and know like and trust with us, then yeah, maybe they'll book successful. But that's not the necessary intention. Like, it is about building a community. It is about having a lot of touch points for people. It is about warming your audience. It's not always about making sales. And we are so big on the audience build and the audience touch points. And that's why we do it it.

Steph, why did we start calling the leads, like officially or immediately?

We started calling the leads because we could see that DM outreach was no longer working the way that it used to. You know, I've been really big on building community for a long time and we've been running DM strategies since before DM strategies became a thing. And two, two and a half years ago, I was reaching out and touching base with every single person that followed me personally. Like I was getting in there and having conversations with people and saying, thank you so much. It was such an incredible way for me to build my community that, you know, I taught it to other people. And then obviously everything, it's not that started it, but everything becomes very mainstream and everyone's doing it. Instagram brought in regulations around who you could dm, who you could DM and how you could DM and all this stuff. And it became harder and harder and we were like, well, why don't we just take this and try calling people and talking to our community and seeing if they need help or what they're struggling with and get some more data on the board. So that's what we did. Why does it work and do people like it?

Those who like it really like it, and those that don't, really don't. So you're going to have a subset of a hundred people and let's say 20 people are absolutely mad fans of yours because you've called them and you've taken time out of your day and you've given them energy. And it's not just some copy and paste message. You can't replicate it, you can't AI it yet, which is incredible. And a lot of people think like that and other people are like, leave me the alone. Why are you calling me? So some people really like it, some don't. It's like people prefer different things, you know, some people prefer reading, some prefer audiobooks, some prefer listening. So from us, as a business perspective, we call, we text, we email, and we die. So we do the full gambit. Whatever platform you like, if you like some form of communication and you want to hear from a human ever, we got you covered. But we wanted to add that in, and it's been super fruitful for us. We've got some of our best clients that have joined and we've helped from calling them.

People have been calling leads for decades. Yeah, like, I honestly, it's the most used form of contact ever. Obviously, before we had text messages, before we had Instagram, this was the only way of doing business. And I learned calling when I was 21. I had a recruitment position and we had to do a hundred dollars a day and make as many touch points and try and build as many relationships as we could. And that was just part of. I did that every day for two years, you know, six days a week. So if you're sitting here and you're thinking, like, oh, I couldn't do that. Like, businesses have been doing this forever. It works. It has worked forever. I think it's the clients of ours that have started calling the leads. Yeah, they're like, oh, my God, this is uncomfortable calling. This is scary. But they're also like, wow, this really works. Yeah, so it does work, guys.

Sure. Hey, Seth, how does it work in successful? Like, if you wanted to start calling, like, what are the keys? What do you need? Is there a script?

Yeah, you do need a script, guys. And I know the scripting can sound really gross, but, like, you do need to take control of the conversation. It does need to feel like you're not trying to sell something. You're definitely not calling somebody to say, hey, would you like to come and buy my program that I've got? Like, that's. That's no good. Don't do that. You definitely need to lean in with more service. How can we support you even quiet on this problem? You know, we do provide a script to our clients. And successful. We do help help our clients tailor and change their scripts within success school. But you definitely need to roll with some sort of script that has ifs and buts in there. So if they say this, then you would say this, like, those sorts of things to make it work and to make it viable. And also because, let's be real, you probably don't want to cause leads forever. So you may want to outsource this task to somebody else at some point. And if that's the case, then you will definitely need a script to train somebody else on. So do not wing it. Definitely. Highly recommend putting something together.

All right, guys, so the takeaways today is you need to adapt to the market. Long form is coming. Adapt or die. You will get crushed. We've given you a few ways to get started with long form without having a YouTube or a podcast. There's tons of ways to do it. It's a really good connection piece with your audience. And just call the damn leads, guys. Yeah, if you get leads, call them. Really simple. And if you don't want to call them, text them. And if you don't text them, email them. And if you want to be a real Savage, do all four.

And if 2024 was a bit shit for you and you got to the end of 2024 and you're like something needs to be different in 2020 are no longer working the way that they used to. If you've been feeling that way, then nothing changes. If nothing changes, like you have to do something different. This is the way that the market is adapting. These are the things that will work in 2025. So I highly recommend that you take the lead here and do something different. And if you need take the lead. If you need help with this, we would love to invite you to our workshop again two days time how to get your next 10 clients. It is going to be absolutely phenomenal. We're going to walk you through marketing channels, going to work through making a haircare software. We're going to walk you through how to message it so that people genuine put their hands up are super interested in it. Www nextemclients.com with a 10 number 10. We'd love to see you there. Last two days to register.

It's in the show notes guys as well if you just want to click through. As always guys, thanks for checking out this episode. We would really mega super love and appreciate you. If you hit that subscribe button. If you're already subscribed to us, leave us a review. Tell your friends, tell everybody. Share the stream show. Don't be a ho until next time.

Love you guys. Bye.