Why Selling Fluff Doesn't Work (Especially Now)
Have you ever been hooked by an ad that failed to deliver?
It pays to be proactive about preventing this situation with your online business. The LAST thing you want is for your buyers to feel like they’ve been duped.
If you want to learn more about…
Providing offers with integrity
Understanding the parameters of your guarantee
Emphasizing the legitimacy of your side hustle I’ve broken it all down for you in a recent podcast episode.
Tune in here.
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Show Notes:
Hey, Risers. Welcome to episode 160 of Empathy Rising. My voice was scratchy. I was like, "ehhh risers". I have a funny story to tell about how I explain what I do for a living. Often, there's a group of us that go and work out at the gym together. We all come in separate cars, obviously, but we all come from the same direction. We've all dropped our kids off at school and then we drive over to the gym and then it's all a group of five of the same faces.
None of us know each other. We don't know each other's names or anything, but we all do the head nod from across the room, like, "oh, hey, nice to see you" or whatever. So one day three of us, me and other girls and a dude we're sitting there just chit-chatting a little bit while we were doing our workout and just got to talking and they were like, "so what do you do? Do you just go home after this?" and I say, "yeah, I go home, but I work", and they were like, "oh, what do you do?"
Whenever I'm faced with this question like, "what do you do?" I've tried to explain it in a few different ways. The one that I default to right now is "I own an education company", which sounds really fancy. They're like, "Oh, okay". They have no idea what I'm talking about, but they're like, "oh, that's interesting". Then it usually gets them to say, "well, what does that mean?" like, "tell me more about that".
Then I can elaborate because when I used to say, "oh, I have some online courses than an online group program and this and that" they have no idea. It was so far over their head. They didn't even know how to ask. They'd be like, "oh, interesting" and then they'd be like, "oh, so you're an influencer" and you guys know how I feel about that because I recorded an episode about it a couple of weeks ago.
The other one I used to say is, "oh, I'm a business coach" and that is the one that they felt like, or I felt that they understood the most, but it's so far off from what I actually do. It feels like it belittles what I do.
I go now with, "oh, I own an education company" and then they ask, "oh, what does that mean?" and I say, "oh, you know, I've created a couple of different curriculums that are proprietary to me" (again, another fancy word) "and then students pay to study with me. Some of them study with me, on a lower-touch basis, and some of them spend a good part of a year learning from me". At that point, it's like, "oh, that's cool". That's me. Then it's an easy way out of the conversation.
I think that that story is going to lend nicely to what we're talking about here today in terms of why selling fluff doesn't work. It doesn't work anymore. It certainly isn't going to work in 2022 and I don't see it ever working again. If you've listened to my shows before, you've heard me talk about the fact that customers are only getting savvier.
People are starting to read labels on their food ingredients. People are starting to ask questions about the values of companies and the sources of their ingredients, the sources of their clothing. Is this sustainable cotton or is this fast fashion, or things like that. People are starting to care about those things a lot more.
When I explain what I do, I feel like I am adding this layer of legitimacy to it. I think all therapists can kind of resonate with that because I've talked about this during this year how regulated the therapy industry is, gives us a level of legitimacy.
We all have graduate and/or doctoral degrees. We all have completed thousands of hours to obtain our licensure. We have these letters after our name and we have this validity, this credibility in the therapy industry. But when we step into the online space, we have to create that validity for ourselves. We can do that by describing what it is we do or what our business is, but that's on the surface level.
What I think that we can do even better is just create high-quality programs. That in itself, when our programs can speak for themselves and when our programs get results and our students are satisfied that in itself creates legitimacy. That in itself creates credibility. We're going to talk about that more today.
There are some other points that I'm going to bring into this because one of them is the fact that I know I'm not the only one who's keeping a close eye on the economy right now.
At the time of recording, the gas prices have just kind of, in my area, started to go down a little bit, but two, three weeks ago, they were record highs for our area. Any of you guys out in California, the west coast, I feel bad for you. What is it? It's like 70 cents higher in Arizona than where it is here.
In California, I'm sure it's even more than that. We're looking at these indicators of inflation and we also are seeing it in the housing market, not only the inflation of prices but also the speed with which houses have been selling and wondering if it's a bubble and wondering all these things. There's just a little bit of economic instability going on that people are going to be paying attention to.
Now in the therapy industry, (this is from a business standpoint, I'm not trying to sound like a jerk) this is usually a good thing for the therapy industry because when the rest of the economy is shaky, your business is up. When people are concerned with the state of the world or the state of affairs or whatever, therapist businesses do well. That's just the way that it is.
I don't want this uncertainty to affect our desire to create a side hustle because as we've seen from the last few years with this instability and with all this drama of the world around us, it's burned a heck of a lot of us out. We may have had an easy time getting clients. We might've had an easy time staying full or too full, but there are consequences of that as well.
While there are some things that are going on around us, in our economy, and while there's this need for legitimacy beyond therapy, I don't want either of those to keep you from moving forward with your side hustle. What we need to do is to make sure that what we're doing is legitimate and that what we're doing has integrity. That's what we're going to talk about more today.
You guys have heard me talk about the pyramid scheme effect that can happen in online income where it's the programs that are being sold are coaches coaching coaches on how to be coaches, and it's just like, "oh, I'm going to pass on this knowledge down to you, and then you're going to just take it and be my disciple and pass it on to the next group of people who are then going to become your disciples", and it all gets yucky for a couple of reasons.
A) It's like a game of telephone, strategies not only get passed on but they get watered down or diluted or miscommunicated. It doesn't actually end up benefiting anybody when they're like two or three generations down the line.
The other thing that can happen is that they're passing on strategies that don't even work. This is when it becomes really illegitimate, "oh, I kind of heard this one thing” or “I'm gonna make it up and I'm going to sell it as my own", which is totally fine.
The programs that I sell, like I said in the beginning, they're proprietary to me. I developed them. But I developed this through research and I develop them through implementation and through trial and error. They're not just spaghetti thrown at the wall. Passing on strategies that don't even work is something that can happen in the online income industry that starts to not only discredit the industry, but it starts to create illegitimate offers in the industry.
Beyond that, what I think is even more common is not that people are trying to hawk things that don't even work or things that are completely BS or completely made up. What I see more often is passing on strategies that worked one time or for one type of person, and then selling it as a solution for everyone.
That is where I think more people fall into the trap. That's where I think more consumers feel like they've been baited and switched or feel unhappy with their purchases because they were sold a one-size-fits-all solution where the strategy doesn't fit all. It fits maybe one type of person or works in one type of scenario. I don't think that this has ever been a good business strategy and I don't think it's very ethical in my opinion.
When times are good and people are spending money more freely, online sellers can get away with this. Online sellers can just throw up a sales page and there's going to be somebody who's going to buy it. There's less attention to detail, less attention to "does this actually work" and perhaps a tendency to have less integrity.
I'm not trying to say that everyone out there in the online income industry is out there to swindle people. I'm not. The students that I work with that learn from me are certainly not. All of us are trying to do better in the world and do good in the world and create outcomes in the world, but there are online sellers in the online industry that are doing this type of stuff.
Personally, I've bought plenty of courses and programs that have been complete letdowns. This is where there is a difference between your marketing ability and your offer creation ability. In fact, I was just voxing the Side Hustle students about this earlier today, where I came across a membership site where the first half of the sales page was amazing. I was all in. I was like, "this is speaking exactly to me. I'm so excited".
Then I got to what the offer actually was, and it was all jumbled together. It was just a bunch of like mumbo-jumbo and it was a bunch of… I don't want to say crap. It just felt very disorganized, and it felt like this offer was going to shove a bunch of stuff at me every month in a disorganized way that I was going to be so overwhelmed that I wasn't going to be able to utilize everything that was in the program. I was just going to be spending money and not actually using it. That's how I ended up feeling by the end of the sales page.
While the person marketed effectively to me, they caught me, they caught my attention with an ad, and then I clicked on the ad. When the ad brought me to a sales page, I was very pleasantly engaged and pleasantly interested until I got to the actual offer, until I got to the actual program.
The thing is, I know how to read between the lines. There are a lot of customers and a lot of consumers out there that don't. This is when it happens where we end up being marketed to very well, but the programs themselves are executed very poorly. When we get into the course or when we get into the membership site or we get into the group program and we start experiencing the actual thing we bought, we can have a letdown.
That's happened to me a couple of times where I was sold this all-encompassing solution only to get in there and find out it was a bunch of Facebook lives that were sold as a several thousand dollar course, and I was very disappointed. Customers are getting more savvy and they're becoming more picky and choosy with their dollars. We need to ensure that our products are up to par and are worth purchasing.
We cannot just sell fluff, we cannot rely on pretty words and pretty pictures to sell our programs, A) the customers aren't going to buy them, like me when I got to the point of like, "okay, this is great, but what am I actually buying? What will I be doing on a monthly basis?" I don't know, that offer could have been fantastic. It was just very poorly communicated.
Either they wrote the first half of the sales page well and the copywriter dropped the ball on the second half of the sales page, which is harder for me to believe than they're great marketers and not great executors. Not great deliverers or program creators.
That's what we need to do. We need to be ethical in our intentions. We need to create a program first that's going to deliver results and then we need to learn how to market it effectively. Also, if the program is communicated well, I don't want to say it'll sell itself, but it will certainly help with conversions.
If I had been as happy as I was with the top of that sales page and gotten to an offer that was well executed and well communicated and organized and made me feel like, "oh, I'm going to actually participate in this membership site" then I would have pulled out my credit card immediately. I wouldn't have had to read another sentence on the page. I was emotionally invested until logically I couldn't participate anymore.
Unfortunately, some people will continue the marketing and they'll just be like… um, how did I talk about it on Voxer…. putting lipstick on a pig. The sales page will be so beautiful. It'll be so well-written. Then when we get into the program, we'll be disappointed. As I said, that's happened to me.
This is why we start with the offer concept first. You've probably heard me talk about this in terms of building an audience. We have to know what we're building the audience for, so we have to have the offer concept first, but also we need the offer concept first so we know that we're working from a platform of integrity. We're working from something legitimate and something that is not fluff so that when we go to market, we're marketing something that works, that's intentional, and that's effective.
I think we can take this beyond economic uncertainty. Right now in 2022, that's something we need to consider. People are going to be more conscious of where they're spending their dollars, so we need to make sure that we are selling something that is worth them spending money on.
Let's say in 2023, the economy gets better. I don't want to get political, I don't want to get controversial, but let's say miracle question; we open our eyes one morning and everything's better. There are not always going to be economic concerns that keep people from purchasing. There's going to be other things like this conscious consumerism, people asking about the values of a company, the ingredients, the sourcing, the sustainability efforts, all of those things that I mentioned earlier, we might not have those exact things.
We don't have ingredients that we're selling or we're not sourcing products, but what we are is representing a set of values. I believe in autonomy. I believe in choice freedom. I believe in improving your economic situation on your own terms. These are things that are values of mine. I believe in creativity and fun at work.
These are things I talk about all the time. These conscious consumers, they're not only going to be purchasing my programs, but they're also purchasing from someone whose values align with theirs. The values and ethics of our offering are something we have to consider going forward, no matter what ends up happening with the economy.
This is where integrity comes in. This is where I said "marketing is like makeup, putting lipstick on a pig. It's what we put on an offer to make it enticing to our target market, but we don't want to be a catfish. We don't want to put out this picture where we look one way or we appear a certain way, and then we get on the first date, and then the makeup comes off and we don't look like that.
Let's reverse that. We don't want to go on a date with somebody who's put up a sexy profile picture, and then we end up on the date and they look nothing like their pictures. Let's think of it that way instead.
That's what good marketing but a bad offer is. It's catfishing. It's putting lipstick on a pig. While marketing is certainly a skill you need to learn, it's secondary to learning how to craft a good offer. The same bait and switch that can happen from the dating profile is what happens if we're not consciously creating our offers.
We can wrap them up in pretty bows, but there has to be substance there, there has to be something meaningful there so that when people purchase, they're pleasantly surprised and the results are going to work for them and the program is going to serve them in the way that we promised it would.
The best way to ensure that you're bringing integrity and substance to your program is to check in with that promise of your program. Remember, there's a difference between your customer's ideal outcome and what your program promises to deliver.
I'm going to run with this dating analogy. I have a previous coaching client/student who was going to create a dating course for queer women. Of course, the ideal outcome is to find the woman of your dreams to (perhaps this is an ideal outcome) find the woman of your dreams, to maybe get married, to have a 50-year wedding anniversary. That's one ideal outcome.
Now, my student can't promise that, she can't promise that you're going to meet the woman of your dreams, but what she can promise you is to teach you how to look at online dating profiles, how to use discernment, how to identify red flags and how to best present yourself authentically on your dating profile so you're attracting the potential woman of your dreams. That's the promise.
We can never promise the ideal outcome. The ideal outcome is the by-product of what we deliver in our program. What we deliver in our program is what we can promise. We need to get clear on what you can provide and what you can guarantee. I know that word is scary for therapists, but we are going to have a promise and a guarantee.
When you do this, you'll be in alignment with your values and you'll be providing a solution that customers want to purchase with their discretionary funds, whether that's a little bit of discretionary funds or a lot of discretionary funds, depending on all of the circumstances. That values-alignment, the substance is what matters.
Another thing to consider is to design your curriculum with multiple perspectives in mind. This doesn't mean we have to have different ideal customers. That's not what I'm saying. I definitely still want you to niche down, I definitely want you to still identify your person, but we need to understand that each customer that buys from us is a unique person.
For example, every student inside Side Hustle is a therapist. That's my niche. Therapists who are too full, who want a side hustle because they want to shrink their caseload. That's a version of my ideal customer.
They're craving autonomy and they want the creativity of a new business model. Those are the things that unite my ideal customer. In the last few rounds, I've also had several clinicians join that have ADHD. They fit my ideal customer, they're a therapist with a full private practice, craving autonomy, and craving creativity, but they're also neurodivergent, which means as the program provider, I've had to think about two things.
I've had to think about my curriculum and if the strategies I'm teaching work for diverse learners. That's on me, that's my responsibility to make sure of that because they fit my niche because they fit my target market, my ideal customer, they have ended up in my program, but everybody learns differently.
Am I meeting the needs of diverse learners? And also, is the way that I am presenting and communicating the information that is followable for diverse learners? You might not have as high a touch program as me. You might not have delivery time or coaching call time or stuff like that, but you definitely want to take in a variety of learning styles as well as potential neurodivergence or whatever for your customers.
When you're able to maybe provide video and audio and maybe captions on your videos, and then also maybe workbooks for more of the kinesthetic learners who like to write things down or take notes. This is going to meet different learning styles, and it's going to make your customers feel so seen and taken care of. That is a great way to bring integrity into your program.
This way, students and customers are going to be satisfied with their choice to purchase from you and not wish that they had saved their money and spent it elsewhere. If you are somebody who's like, "all right, I believe that creating the program first and making sure that the program has substance and that the program has integrity, then I can market it" I would love it if you sign up for my free masterclass over at marissalawton.com/masterclass.
This is the start to teach you how to determine what kind of program you want to do, what should be in your program, how you want to deliver your program, if you're going to have high touch or low touch, and what type of marketing you want to do for your program?
All of those questions are answered inside of this masterclass. It's the first step to taking the first step. It's the first step to crafting your offer so that you can take something with substance out to the marketplace. Again, that link is marissalawton.com/masterclass, where you can head on over and check it out. I will be back next week. Until then guys, keep on rising.
