The physiology and marketing behind an industry that doesn’t deliver
If you’ve spent any amount of time on YouTube, Instagram, or really any social media (You can’t escape these guys). You’ve probably seen the guys dressed in $1000 suits, driving a Lamborghini, claiming that you can make $10,000+ a month from ‘this one little secret’, but to make your millions, you’ll have to buy their course which is painfully overpriced. What’s even more painful is that you could have saved yourself some time and money and picked up a business book or watched some free YouTube content to get the information you were looking for.
Coffeezilla, Mike Winnet, and others are doing a fantastic job of exposing specific gurus. But, if these ‘gurus’ are being exposed, why are so many people still paying outrageous prices for courses that don’t deliver? Gurus have learned to leverage their audience’s self-image and used some subtle (and not so subtle) marketing techniques to make themselves millions of dollars… and you can do it too!
Origin story
Back when I first started to get into entrepreneurship and internet marketing, I had just missed the Tai Lopez knowledge meme. I missed the golden era. Really sad, I know, but don’t worry, I was around for the Tai Lopez copycats!
I found Mike Vestil’s channel sometime in 2018. The idea that someone could make millions of dollars from selling someone else’s product was crazy to me. Affiliate marketing was completely new to me and I fell headfirst into the idea that anyone without any experience could make money doing it. If you don’t know who Mike Vestil is, he made his money from Amazon affiliate marketing, wrote a book, and started a YouTube channel on everything from business to fitness. Claiming that I could make my first $100 online with zero money to my name caught my attention, especially as a broke 18-year-old just starting college.
Then I watched video after video that had no real business strategy. There are certainly a few good tactics you can glean from Mike’s content, but I was never given the action plan or business strategies I was promised. Where was the foolproof method that would get me to $1000 a month without any experience and a full-time job? Regrettably, it took me several weeks and a few wasted hours of content to move on. The break up was rough and I rebounded to a few ‘live’ webinars teaching you how to travel the world and make 6 figures with just your laptop before I escaped the beginner’s business niche. I escaped without losing a dime. I am strangely thankful I wasted so much time on gurus. I learned that making money online was possible and I also discovered the best way to do it.
The Best Way to Make $100
Gurus can tell you about all the streams of income they’ve built. Maybe they made all their money in affiliate marketing, Facebook ads, or real estate, but the majority of their income is from them teaching you how to make money. The easiest way to make $100 is to teach others how to make $100.
Charging ridiculous amounts for digital courses leads to huge gross income. A digital product, once produced, costs you nothing when someone downloads it. There is a lot of work that goes into product creation, but no supply costs afterward. That is why no matter their motivation, so many people make online courses.
Every service industry has its own version of digital products. Photographers have Lightroom presets, entrepreneurs have startup guides, and marketers have SEO courses. All of these products are motivated around having passive income and it is easy to see why people want to have income from a product that needs little work after it is set up. In a recent interview with Gary Vee, Adam Banks, the owner of a social media marketing agency, said, “At the end of the day though like I got tired of just cold calling and the whole service delivery aspect of it.” It is hard work to consistently deliver results in whatever service industry you are in. Plus, you are primarily making money when you are working. Online courses provide an alternative.
When you purchase a Lightroom preset or an SEO course though, you are usually getting actual value. You would probably be able to get something similar for free on the internet, but you usually get what the course promises. This is not the case with entrepreneurship gurus, who promise $10,000 a month from home with no previous experience if you just buy their course. So how do they do it?
Leveraging Psychology
Before addressing the actual marketing strategies used by gurus that you should be copying, we need to look at some human psychology that makes these strategies so successful. Gurus don’t need to show the merits of their product to sell consumers. If this were so, their ads would contain lists of all the wonderful things in their product. Instead, they sell a lifestyle and get consumers to buy through their already existing ideas and attitudes about themselves and material goods.
First, the guru knows his target market’s ideal self. The ideal self is simply who someone wants to be. What characteristics do they want to have? Who do they want to be associated with? How do they want to be viewed by others? The ideal self is what someone is aiming to become and this heavily influences what products they buy. If they believe that a new brand of clothing, a new car, or in this case, a business course will help them achieve their ideal self then they will buy.
Gurus understand who their audience wants to become and promise to give them that. The classic line of “Most people would have stopped watching this ad because they’re not driven, not hard-working enough, or not fill in the blank enough, but you’re not like most people.” is touching the viewer’s idea of self. The viewer wants to be driven, hardworking, and smart. So, when the ad says that people who have those characteristics watch this ad, they keep watching the ad.
I would like to say as someone who has read and watched plenty about marketing and sales tactics, I would be immune to these attacks on my ideal self, but just last week, I saw an ad that said that most entrepreneurs would skip this ad because they didn’t understand the importance of social media advertisement. I am better than most entrepreneurs! I understand the importance of social media ads! Just like that, I watched the video until he tried to sell me a course and I snapped out of it. My ideal self is someone who has strong social media marketing skills and the ad promised to get me to my ideal self.
Recognizing what is happening won’t save you either. I had heard similar lines like that ad before and I knew what he was trying to do, but my pride wanted to reach my ideal self so I stayed. Whether it is being the best at social media ads, owning a big house, or achieving social status, consumers will listen as long as they believe you can help them reach their ideal self.
Another way gurus hook their audience is by leveraging their attitudes towards material goods. They roll up in their Lamborghini in front of their 5 million dollar home and the audience assumes they are rich and begin to like them.
According to Heider’s Balance Theory, people like to have balanced attitudes. If you like your friend and your friend likes rock music, but you hate rock music, you will either start to like rock music or start to dislike your friend to balance out your attitudes.
As is shown in the diagram above, all of the lines stemming from you are your attitudes towards the connected things. You want your attitudes in the triangle to be the same so either ‘like’ and ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ and ‘dislike’. The same triangle is created when a guru is in an ad with a fancy house. You like fancy houses, the guru is in a fancy house so you switch your attitude to be positive towards the guru. Positive associations will build trust. This is a quick way a guru can build trust in the first 5 seconds of an ad without having to give the audience much information.
Marketing Strategy
The marketing strategy of business gurus focused on social media. Their Instagram mirrors that of a travel Instagrammer and their Youtube ads highlight lavish lifestyles. Through social media channels and automation, business gurus have built huge customer bases.
Gurus use Instagram and YouTube as social proof of what they are selling. They have pictures and videos of them in Bali or on a private jet. Their content is to serve as evidence that they are the real deal. YouTube videos focus around giving vague business strategy and usually lack actionable steps. Mindset and visualizing success are common topics, but to learn the steps of building a business, you have to buy their course.
People get hooked to the dreams and the idea of a glamorous lifestyle but are not taught or pushed to achieve that lifestyle. Gurus keep their audience entertained. There is some helpful information that can be gleaned from their content. As I said earlier, I did have a mindset switch when first exposed to gurus, but only when I stopped watching their content and pursued substantial, factual content did I begin to learn about how to act on my new mindset.
There are 3 lessons you can learn from guru marketing strategies:
- Social media ads can be a huge source of leads if targeted properly.
- Automated sales funnels will save time and money.
- Content focused on realistic results will build a stronger brand.
- Social Media Ads can be a huge source of traffic.
The guru’s choice in the advertisement. Social media ads serve as the backbone of most business gurus’ marketing strategy. The algorithms behind social media advertising provide a great resource for targeting your ideal customers. Learning Facebook or google ads could allow you to reach a broader audience that you haven’t tapped into yet or better segment your market to be more effective in your communications. I am a huge believer in social media and advertising is undervalued on many platforms making social cheaper than traditional forms of advertising. Gurus have built customer bases without touching traditional forms of advertising so your business should get into the action.
- Automated sales funnels will save you time and money.
My dad works for a small t-shirt print shop as a salesman. He has had a great deal of success, but during his busy season, much of his time is spent collecting order information from customers that were already going to buy. Instead of spending his time selling, he was busy being a customer service rep. The business guru doesn’t have to spend time filling out customer order data because all of his customers do it themselves by ordering online.
If customers are already going to buy or returning to purchase another product, set up your website so they can do it without ever contacting you. This will save you and your customer time. If you can automate a system do it! Different businesses will be able to implement automated systems in different amounts. If you can implement automated marketing, sales, or inventory system, your business will be more efficient and you will have more time to focus on other areas of your business.
Your business may not even have a manual sales/marketing funnel laid out. Creating funnels, automated or not, will create uniformity across your customer relations and make your business more efficient. If you are interested in a sales or marketing funnel (automated or not), but not sure where to start, contact me to book a free hour-long consulting call to see where and how your business can be more efficient with its marketing touchpoints.
- Content-focused on realistic results will build a stronger brand.
In many ways, business guru content is a race for who can show off the most lavish lifestyle and sell the highest priced course. Short term this can produce results but fails to build a strong brand base when your customers don’t see the results promised. While success around these courses is in the large part up to the individual’s work ethic, the vast majority of the purchasers will never see the results promised and many don’t even make back their investment on the course.
A better content strategy for building a strong brand is producing content around the actual results of your customers. Your marketing should under-promise and your product or service should over-deliver, not the other way around. Content that highlights your product in actual use or your service being done will build more trust with your customers than showing life-changing results that you can’t actually deliver on. Testimonials are one of the greatest brand assets because they provide strong social proof that your company can actually address your customer’s pain points. They are real customers talking about real results.
Business gurus provide some great examples of how to use digital marketing and human psychologically to build a business. If you can automate areas of your business and build consumer trust, you will put yourself in a good position to succeed.