Why Your Outdated Marketing Funnel Is Killing Your Conversions (And How to Fix It)

We found out that a big strategy that everyone uses is paid shoutouts. So essentially what this is is you find a really big page, million followers, and you say, hey, can you promote me? I'll give you some money. And then you gain a bunch of followers. That's got nothing to do with having good content. But the caveat, guys, it works. If you're someone that, like, preaches organic and you're using this, I think it's highly deceptive.

The reason we were so frustrated is because we actually found out that three people that we had been taking advice from were not only using paid shoutouts and not teaching it, they were pretending like they hadn't used it. And they were also using Engage. Just be honest. Like, we're okay to tell you guys, hey, we're trying some payday shout out stuff. Like, we'll let you know if it works. If you're just honest and transparent, you're just gonna get so many more customers.

Welcome to episode 91 of the Success School podcast. We're closing in on the hundredth episode start. Steph, how are you?

I am pumped to be in the studio with you today, as always.

Oh, my God. Like, I'm buzzing on that. So we'll get into my personal update. It's. I've been using a tool called Sexmetrics. Sorry, Segmetrics. I didn't know that was coming. I swear that was my plan. Joke. Segmetrics had a call with them and essentially this is a data tracking tool for ads, email landing pages, all the really nerdy shit. And I kind of said to myself, if we're going to go to that next level on our goals, I need to be really across the data in terms of, like, where is funnel falling down? What step? What's the cpa? What's everything? Getting it all on a dashboard. I had an onboarding call with the company and they told me to put all these different tracking codes in all these funnels. And I felt like a real, like, whiz. I was like, I've stepped up as a marketer, so I've been deep in sex metrics and going really hard in that. And it's been eye opening for me. But it's cool to come out of the data world and speak to you today.

Well, you're a bit of a fly by the seat of your pants kind of guy. Like, don't get me wrong, you're a bit of a nerd when it comes to, like, Facebook ads data. Like, but outside of just like, Facebook ads, Data you don't like. It's not like you live and breathe data. You're not like the most analytical guy. You're very much like, what do I need to know so I can just like get to the next stage? So this is a new layer of depth for your personality to have to really dive into. It's not like, guys, it's not like Tim sits here and it's like, oh my God, the data is so fun. This is a requirement for the level we're trying to get to.

Yeah, 100%.

Very cool.

And what's your personal update, Steph?

We've been advertising for a role in our company and the role is for appointment setup. And we had a couple of applications come through. Very, very interesting by the way. But we had one application come through and we knew someone that knew that had also worked at the previous role with them. And so we contacted them and there was a few little red flags in the application process. But I thought, look, I'm not going to let other people's opinions of this person sway me. So I'm going to get on a call, we'll tee it up. So we teed it up. Monday, 10am you and I both got ready.

Public holiday.

Public holiday. But calendar invites accepted by both parties, all things, no problems. You and I both got ready, got down there, had all our interview questions ready to go, totally dialed in and ready to lock in. And 10 o' clock goes past 10:01. By 10:02 I'm thinking, very big red flag. By 10:04 I'm like, this person hasn't got the job. Just this person.

I think I walked out at 10:03.

Yeah. 1004 is like, this person's not getting the job. 10:05, I just shut the Zoom call down. At 3:00pm that afternoon he messaged me apologizing. 3:00pm Five hours later guys.

Dude, that fcking sucks.

Yeah, the worst. Okay, so shit. The thing I wanted to kind of push on here was that we have standards in our company and everyone's company is going to be different. Being on time is such a non negotiable standard for us. Like we live by this in our lives. Like we hate being one minute late to anything. And I used to be a late person. Tim really trained it out of me and like you cannot. We didn't have a lot of other good applications. Like the reason we were even on the interview in the first place was that we didn't have a whole host of applications for this specific role. We have now Found somebody, which is super exciting. But the most important thing here, guys, is that you always hold your standards. Even when you really need this person to come off, Even when you think, oh, but they could be right. Absolutely. No, regardless, if he'd gone on at 10.06-we still wouldn't have hired him because that's your first impression. What's that going to be like for a customer? For somebody who's coming into our world? What standards does that set for other people who are in our company? So please, please always hold your standards and make sure that if someone has enough, even honestly, more than one red flag, it's probably not F for your company.

I've said this a few times on the podcast, but I'd rather work ten times as hard than have someone that's not a good fit in the company. And that was like a mad red flag for me.

Yeah, totally.

All right, so we're going to get into our topic today. It's a bit of a teach. We're talking about the latest lead gen strategies that are working in business right now. So we're going to give you a paid one. We're going to give you an organic one. You can go do both. So we were discussing this on the car on the way here. Steph had a counter argument to me. We had a bit of a debate and we'll debate on the pod right now. In my opinion, lead generation, specifically organic, organically has gotten worse and Steph says it hasn't. So let's go the pro legion angle.

Here and then we're actually having a little debate.

Let's debate it out.

Oh, fun. Okay. I like to win, guys. So let's, let's freaking go.

Have you met me?

I have met you. I have versed you in many competitions and loss, and loss in most. You were saying that you think that organic no longer yields leads.

No, I didn't say. I didn't say absolutely no longer use leads. I said has gotten worse.

Okay, so you're saying that organic has gotten worse. And I tend to agree that tactics that used to work on organic no longer work. I totally agree. However, then I raised a counter argument with you, which was on Friday on our inner circle call, one of our clients, Becca, who has a low cost digital product, Becca told me that 50% of her purchases from her audience are coming from her organic traffic versus her paid traffic. And she was like, now she has been strangling her ads. You know Becca, she's like, loves it, leaves it, loves the data, lives for the data. And I was like, cool. So maybe this week, I told her maybe this week. What I would love to see her do is just to take a step back from ads for a sec. Not to change anything, don't dial down anything, but just stop checking them so much and use some of that time to just make some more organic content and see how it goes for you and see if we can increase over the next two weeks to see if it works. I don't think it's dead, but I think two things. Organic, you have to know how to make shit go viral. Yeah, you have to. You have to know what's working. You have to be on trend. Becca knows how to do trending reels. She knows how to make it work. She has a low ticket products, she's a student of this, so it works for her. If you're not currently yielding much from your organic and you don't know how to create content that's consistently going viral or knows how to go viral, it's going to be hard for sure.

My only caveat to that is on our last episode we did speak about offers a niche. Becca has a niche. That's why it works.

It's so specific.

If you are just general on social media, then it's obviously not going to give you results.

Yeah.

So we're going to be going through two tactics and strategies today. And they may shock you, they may annoy you, they may frustrate you. And that's how I felt when I learned about the first one today. So a lot of people in the business coaching space, marketing coaching space, they give it back Biggins. And what I mean by giving it Biggins is they give it big time about the results they have. And the most frustrating thing about the results they have is you just assume and they do market that the results they have come from posting organically where that is not the case. And we found out that a big strategy that everyone uses is paid shoutouts. So essentially what this is is you find a really big page, million followers, can be 200,000, 500, whatever it is, and you say, hey, can you promote me? I'll give you some money. And then they go, go and do that. And then you gain a bunch of followers from that and then you just keep doing that as a part of your strategy. That's got nothing to do with having good content or having nothing to do with what all these crazy organic coaches are telling you that they are doing. It's a completely different thing. But the caveat, guys, it works and it works really?

Well, yeah. You tried it recently?

We tried it. I tried it recently. I was like, I got to see what the fuss is about. So what I did is I search hashtag motivation, found a bunch of pages. There was a couple of business motivation ones. Messaged him and I was like, hey, how much for shout out? What are some typical results you had? Guy replies, There's 40 bucks. It'll get seen by 200,000 people. I gained 65 followers from it, which is not amazing, but not terrible. Just to give you guys some context on that's like 70 cents per follower. Ish. And then typically on meta ads for a B2B offer, like I have it probably two to three dollars a follower. So it's like six times cheaper. So paid shadows work. But if you're someone that like preaches organic and you're using this, I think it's highly deceptive.

So look, I want to dive in here because I think this is really cool. It's cool that it works. It's cool. There's like, I think there's a bit to discuss. Do you mind if we pull it apart?

Let's go pull it apart.

Two things. One, the reason we were so frustrated is because we actually found out that three people that we had been taking advice, had been given advice from, were not only using paid shoutouts and not teaching it, they were just using it and not teaching it and pretending like they hadn't used it. And they were also using engagement pods and were not teaching that. But people who work in their companies had told us it was 100% the case. Just be honest. Like we're okay to tell you guys, hey, we're trying some paid at shout out stuff. Like we'll let you know if it works. If you're just honest and transparent, you're just going to get so many more customers. So that was the most annoying thing. But let's talk about paid shout outs because yes, 65 followers. I hear people listening, saying yes. But are they the right followers? You know, like there's that con content, that concept that. Have we got the right ones? We don't know. It's probably too early to tell right now.

Well, I checked out the. The pages were good. They weren't like people from Pakistan or Bangladesh. No. No offense if you're from there, but they seem legit. Everyone's from western countries. It was all good. Our we messaged them. I'm starting having conversations with them. They all seem great. Our set is happy and I think.

It comes down to finding the Right, pages.

Yeah.

And checking and doing your research, like you just can't reach out to any page. Like we've noticed some pages that definitely, if you just check the comments and the people who are currently engaging on the stuff, you will see. It's very, very easy to see for sure.

Steph, do you want to tell us about the next strategy? So it's a vsl. Do you want to tell us what a VSL is, what it does, how it could be beneficial for someone to implement? And then we've got an organic strategy and a paid strategy. You can go through the organic and I'll go through the paid.

Amazing. Thank you so much for the structure and I love it. So VSL is basically a landing page that's on video, but it's you talking through it. And it's not really a landing page, but it's basically a video sales letter. So it's you selling your thing and there's a whole structure to it. This is not just like you've been like, hey, this is my product and.

This is buy my shit, buy my stuff.

And this is what's included. That's not it. There is an entire psychological like structure to this to like build, know, like and trust throughout it. But effectively at the end of like a 10 minute or 15 minute VSL, you should be able to get a ton of calls booked off the back end. Okay. That is the concept behind the vsl. Tim, what's working with vessels and ads right now?

So what's working with VSL and ads right now is essentially just running them. But they are super expensive to get a call book. So it can be 2 to $500 to get a call booked. But if you're selling something for 10 grand, you're spending to 500. You close every third. Like that's still a good deal. But I think it's getting your VSL good enough for people to be interested. It's like on the last episode, if you guys haven't listened to it, we're talking about offer. You have to nail the offer. There has to be a promise, there has to be an outcome, there has to be a unique mechanism. You have to be talking them through what you're doing and if you don't have that, it's going to fall flat on its face. But that's just business in general. If you don't have that stuff and you go to market stuff in ads, it's not going to go as well, I guess. Do you want to tell us an organic strategy on how to do it like link in bio, driving traffic there, that kind of stuff.

Yeah, totally. Just on this, guys, like it's really important, you know, when you're spending 2 to $500 to acquire a lead that you have a funnel to sell that lead. Like you, you cannot be spending. You know, I was speaking to one of our clients this week and she was saying that she spends two and a half thousand dollars a month on, you know, SEO and she got like three qualified leads last week. And I was like, you kind of can't do that, you know, like you kind of. Because only probably one of those is going to sell. Like you kind of can't afford to keep doing that. Right? So you do need to make sure guys, that. And so we're just working on dialing in her funnel before we even think about driving more stuff through it. Because she needs to dial up the conversions, right? So it's really important that if you're going to be spending this money to drive, whether it's paid shout outs, like this is no point getting paid shout outs and then not talking to the audience. Like there has to be funnels in place on the back end or systems in place on the back end to make sure that when you actually spending this money or you're getting these people to your thing, you actually turn that into more money. Otherwise you're just spending money for the sake of it all. Right? The way that VSLs work in Insta is like, guys, I don't know if you looked at your insights recently, but there are so many people who are clicking the link in your bio and right now a lot of you have like 4, 5, 6, sometimes 10 fricking links in there. They're going nowhere. They're just clicking the link and they're looking at all the links and they're going, I don't know where to go. So they go fucking nowhere, right? And so they don't look at any of your stuff. But if you put a VSL in your funnel, you pretty much every single person, because it's only the one thing that they can do is going to go there and they're going to look at it and they're going to watch it and then they're going to be very rapidly falling in love with you. And likelihood is very much more likely to book a call with you. And so that's the way that the organic works, that you just drive everything to link in Bio or even your many chat sequences would be driving to this one thing, this one place. If you just do that for a month and you just optimized that and then you optimize where they're falling off in your VSL funnel. So like, let's say they're watching a vsl, they get three minutes in and everyone's just kind of dropping off around three minutes. Probably something to fix in that moment. So I think that's how it works. I think it works really well. We're about to test it.

We're about to test it. We'll let you guys know. So I guess takeaway from this section, guys, is if you want some different results, you're going to have to do something a little bit different. Maybe you need to test some paid shout outs, maybe you need some strategies for that. Send me a message. Or you need to test the VSL and take out the 42 links in your bio because no one's clicking them anyway. Maybe you need to drive them. So what we're going to do, guys, we're talking through a news discussion that is going on at the moment. So I'm going to present an article and Steph and I are going to talk through it. I know Steph got a little hot under the collar when we brought up this topic last time. It was a bit of end of the world and she's sighing very heavily at the moment. So Nvidia CEO says AI chips are improving faster than Moore's Law. Steph, what is Moore's Law?

Moore's Law is the concept that technology processing power is going to double every 18 months.

Epic. And we were at dinner the other night and we were discussing AI and there were many chats about AI. Do you still think it's going to take over, ruin the world? And we did have some different concepts on this. We did agree that there was going to be short term pain, but at the end of it there is going to be a Utopia, in my opinion. Do you still think this or has your opinion changed?

Yeah, I don't think anything. I discuss all options. That's where I live in AI at the moment. Look, I think the fact that it's improving, it's actually improving three times faster than Moore's Law. That means that it's improving very, very fast. Guys, like, I don't know what the math is, but if it's 18 months and it's three times, it's soon, okay? And so it's fast and it's only going to get faster because they're fighting for this race to like the first AI. I don't know what it means. Except for that I think that soon humans are going to be AI's best friend. Like, we're going to kind of like be the dogs. Like, you know, dogs. And dogs are great dogs. And so I'm going to be happy to just be pet all day by my big giant robot that's going to love me.

Have you noticed that ChatGPT has gone better?

So much better.

Like, in the last couple of days, I've noticed it's gotten better. It's gotten quicker.

So fast. It is, absolutely. And I'm asking it more complex things and it's just picking it up and, like, pulling it together so quickly. It's phenomenal. And I do think that it is going to change. Obviously, it's going to change a lot about the way that we do things. I don't know how it's going to change. I know that you think the world's going to go to. And then we're all just going to go back to being beings, you know, we're all just going to stop working so bloody hard and having all this, like, you know, oh, my God, I've got to do this. I'm going to scrail. I'm going to have all this money and. And we're just going to end up back to, you know, being in community and sitting around fires and, like, being human, you know, And I think that that appeals to you and that's. It's really beautiful.

Guys, big takeaway from this section is Terminator's coming. So prepare, get your Faraday cages and guns ready because we're going to be fighting like Sarah Connor.

Yeah.

With this. We're out there. Where is John, guys?

Tim is wearing his tinfoil hat if you haven't started watching.

All right, guys, we're going to get the listener question today and we're going to set the scene a little bit. And this is from Jess W. Why are my ads not working? And just to give guys some context on this, this was a general lead magnet on 50 things that VAs can do. And just from the outset, Steph, why would that not work on paid ads?

Look, that would have worked a little while ago. That would have worked. It would have been fine. Because there weren't that many VA agencies on the market that were in Australia that were trying to do this market, but now it doesn't work because there are. If you go to Google and you type in VA agencies Australia, it's shedloads, like, more and more popping up every day. And so, you know, that no longer is going to kind of cut the mustard. There's a few of those out there now. And cut the mustard, by the way. Who have I become?

Craziest episode ever.

So, no, it's not specific enough. So what did you do?

Yeah, so I had the pleasure of looking into this ads account and took the cost per lead from $105 to $7, which is.

Tim was very proud of himself, very happy about that. And you should know, guys, that when Tim does something that he's very proud.

Of, I tell everyone.

He lets everyone know, yeah, fuck, I'm good.

So I used what we spoke about in the last episode in terms of the offer. I made it. I made it time bound and I put a result on it. So 50 things a VA could do, can do for real estate agents. And I think, I don't know, I wrote something else on there as well. Yeah. So I made it super specific. Change the headline, change the lead magnet. Change the copy.

Obviously. Change the targeting.

Yeah, change the targeting, change the copy. And then in terms of the copy, it was more like, imagine what you could do if you had 10 to 15 hours back in your real estate agent, in your real estate agent business. And then all the copy was centered around that. So a couple of tweaks there. I didn't. We didn't reinvent the wheel. We didn't rewrite the lead magnet. We just put some more specific stuff on there. So what I want you guys to learn from this, guys, if you're running paid ads, it has to be specific. Okay? If you're just running general shit on ads, it's not going to work. It has to be super specific. All right, guys, if you had some value from this episode, please subscribe, whether that's YouTube, Spotify, or Apple, and send us a message with your key takeaway.

I had a lot of fun today.

Good.

I'll see you next week.