Because Business is Personal

Crafting Powerful Narratives: An Insight into Jason Hornung's Strategy

• Mike Caldwell • Season 1 • Episode 1

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Here's a promise: this episode will change the way you think about marketing. Jason Hornung, the undisputed champion of Facebook ads, graced our show with his insights and unforgettable story. Having experienced a tough upbringing marked by drug-addicted parents and teenage pregnancy, Jason's journey embodies resilience. His struggle in establishing his insurance business led him to discover the power behind crafting words and how they can control his income. Jason's grasp of empathic marketing strategies has allowed him to solidify stronger relationships, grow his reach, and significantly increase his sales.

We track Jason's fascinating journey from a master marketer with a suspended securities license to an expert who knows how to evaluate a product that works, link it to a unique market emotion, and skillfully craft a selling narrative. He emphasizes that despite the ever-changing online marketing landscape, the message and offer still hold the key in achieving the best results. But it's not all about the success stories. We also delve into the reality of internet marketing expectations, and Jason sheds light on how human psychology is exploited to sell products based on unrealistic dreams of swift wins.

Jason further elaborates on the importance of understanding your customer's awareness and sophistication levels for successful advertising. He emphasizes the need for direct and honest advice, cutting through the noise of false hopes and empty promises. Through his no-nonsense approach and two decades of experience, Jason uses his unique voice to help people navigate the often-confusing landscape of online marketing. Prepare to be startled, surprised, and most importantly, enlightened. With Jason's expert knowledge shared generously through our conversation, this episode is undoubtedly a treasure trove of marketing wisdom. Don't miss out!

To connect with Jason personally, visit his websites: https://academyofadvertising.com/ or https://jasonhornungagency.com/

Don't miss the opportunity to claim your free copy of my international bestseller, 'Empathic Marketing.'

Or if you're serious about fast-tracking your journey to the business of your dreams, book a 30-minute Gap Analysis call. Don't forget to use the coupon code "Podcast" for a 50% discount. And yes, I'm offering a unique 200% guarantee on this Analysis.

Visit https://www.becausebusinessispersonal.com/ to get your book or schedule a session today.

Eager to harness the power of Empathic Marketing to propel your business growth? Get your hands on my #1 Amazon Best Selling book, 'Empathic Marketing,' or book a '30-Minute Gap Analysis' session directly from my website: www.becausebusinessispersonal.com.

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Speaker 1:

Hey, welcome to the Because Business is Personal podcast, the podcast where empathy meets marketing strategy. I'm your host, mike Caldwell, but I'm also known as the marketing medic. Now, the reason for that is because, before becoming a marketing strategist, I actually worked as a paramedic for 12 years, and it was during that time that I realized how important it was to truly understand the problems your patient was facing before you started providing treatment. And it's this same understanding, the same empathy, is just as crucial when it comes to understanding our prospects and making sales, and that's why, in each episode, we'll dissect the art of empathic marketing, exploring how top professionals infuse empathy into their strategies to build stronger relationships, boost their sales and make a lasting impact. So buckle up and prepare to turn up the dial on your marketing effectiveness.

Speaker 1:

As we gear up to dive deeper into the realm of empathic marketing, I'd like to share a couple of special offers with you. First, you can get a free copy of my international bestselling book Empathic Marketing. You only need to cover the cost of shipping. Reading this will provide you with a much more in-depth understanding of the empathy-based marketing approach that we explore in this show. Next, I'm offering a 50% discount on a transformative 30-minute gap analysis session with me. Reading this session will identify the hurdles in your marketing efforts and together will develop an actionable roadmap aimed at winning you more clients and making you more sales. Just visit my website, wwwbecausebusinessispersonalcom to grab your book or use coupon code podcast to take advantage of my gap analysis offer.

Speaker 1:

So why wait? Let's start turbocharging your marketing strategy today. Now let's get started with our episode. Hey everybody, I'm here today with Jason Hornan. Jason is known as the king of Facebook ads, the goat of Facebook ads, but today he's going to tell us his secret as to why, even though he's really good at Facebook ads, it's not for the reasons that we most probably think.

Speaker 2:

Welcome, Jason. Hey, thanks for having me, Mike Appreciate it.

Speaker 1:

So let's just dive right. Well, actually no, what I want to do is because my whole thing is about empathic marketing. I like to get to know our guests on a personal level first. And man, you've got like I probably shouldn't have sprung this on you, but you've got one heck of a backstory Like, what sort of personal stuff would you be comfortable sharing with us about your life? Just so we get to know Jason, the non-Facebook guy, better.

Speaker 2:

Yeah Well, I mean like so I break this in my bio, but I think my life really kind of reads like the warning label from an after school special Right, like these are all the things that you shouldn't do if you want to have a good life. So, like, I've been through like every kind of weird experience that anybody can imagine. Right, like my childhood was terrible. My parents were, like, you know, drug addict, alcoholic, very rarely around, divorced when I was young. So I spent most of my childhood like basically raising myself. And then I got into a situation where I actually had a teenage pregnancy myself, got my first girlfriend pregnant when I was 16. And so I had my first kid when I was 17. So I've been a father since before. I was even an adult.

Speaker 2:

And then, you know, like raising a kid, I went off to college, ended up dropping out after two years to be able to raise my kid and let my girlfriend who ended up being my wife, you know go to school, so she finished and then we got married, had a couple more kids. You know, struggled, struggled, struggled, as I was building an insurance business and I was building this thing off of what they taught me to do with marketing, which was to cold call people and knock on doors, and so for two years I built this business, making my 300 cold calls a day, and I would walk, I would walk it. I would cold walk into 15 businesses a week and just asked to see the business owner and then try chatting them up and see if they'd quote me their insurance, and I had done pretty well according to like the accolades that they give you. You know, like I would, I won all the life insurance awards and the property and casualty awards and the commercial insurance lines awards, but I was like I was making like four grand a month and I had three young kids at home and a wife and I had to work, like you know, 70 plus hours a week in order to do this. You know I'm like working 10 to 15 hour days, you know, six days a week, and so my personal life was just terrible, like awful. It was just awful, and so you know I couldn't do it anymore. I was burned the fuck out after two years of that, and so it's like what led me into Google searching. I'd realized there's gotta be a better way in the way. That has to be better is I need to get people coming to me.

Speaker 2:

So the way I thought about that my mind was just attraction marketing was the term that came up. I was googling attraction marketing and that landed me on this page for a book by Dan Kennedy called the ultimate sales ladder. And so I bought that book and I read it and you know, dan convinced me that writing words was gonna be the key to me controlling my income. Because I didn't have a college degree. You know I and there's a whole nother story on how I ended up getting into this insurance agency like that. I could go on for another hour on a loan. But you know, without this college degree, I happened to, you know, be in sales and I got recruited into insurance and I shouldn't even have had the job right Like they. They pulled a whole bunch of strings to get it for me, right. And so you know I'm a. I just get convinced that you know writing words is going to be the key to me controlling my income. So I go down this whole path of, you know, following Dan's advice on writing sales ladders to try to get leads coming in so I don't have to be cold calling people no more Right, and you know I go through the whole process.

Speaker 2:

Send out this letter. I spent. I spent a ton of money. It took spent me. You know, for me at a time it was over a grand to, like you know, mail out this first piece. You got to get all these different you know print the letters. You got paper postage. You got to envelope these things by mailing lists. It's crazy, right. And then the thing didn't work at all. But I'm pretty hard headed and so, you know, I just was like I'm just going to keep going and I figured it was something that I did wrong. I didn't think it was the letter that didn't work. It was like I must have done something wrong. I need to do better, right. So I just I did it. I did it again. No results. And again and again and again, until the sticks try. I sent out a letter, like what I would do every time I'd send out the letters. I'd sit by the phone for like two or three days waiting for that thing to see if it was there, right, and then usually it was like disappointment.

Speaker 2:

Disappointment like the two worst days of my life. Go home and drink, you know, and this one phone starts ringing. Phone rings off the hook. Everybody that's calling is like homeowners too, like, and I was like typically working with renters and low level prospects from these mailing lists out cold calling lists I was working on and so these but these people are calling me. They're like yeah, jason, I got this big house over here in this neighborhood and I got three, four cars and I need an umbrella policy and I want to get some life insurance. They didn't even say that right, like with the other people I'd be like I'd have to like squeeze their arm to even talk about it, you know. So you know it was crazy. And then they just wanted to give me everything Right, and so it was. It was like mind blown, and so that was what I just kind of expanded upon that and I grew my insurance business writing letters and this was like 2005.

Speaker 2:

All right, and so I did that for like a year and I got on Dan Kennedy's newsletter and in his newsletter he started featuring this dude named Corey Rudle, and you may not have heard his name anybody that knows anything about internet marketing. Corey Rudolph founded it. He basically invented internet marketing, and so Dan was featuring him talking about how you can advertise on the internet, and I'm like Cory's talking about how you can get like these penny clicks and stuff like that and it's way better and centered out direct mail to so much cheaper and you can target and all this shit. And so then I was like I got figured this out and the only thing that I could think of was well, I mean, maybe I can make the in these sales letters I'm writing, I can make a web page, because that was how Corey in the newsletter was talking about doing it. Right, so I had to teach myself basic HTML. I was like the next step because they did. There was no thing like click funnels or any of that shit. It wasn't even word prep at the time, right, so I had to teach myself basic HTML and then I would write my sales letters on web pages. And then I went in and went to Google ads. It was actually called overture at the time, so that's how old this was. Yeah, this was before they even became Google ads, and I would run ads to these Sales letters, just like I would, and I would target people in the local area. Then they just bang, bang, bang, bang bang way cheaper leads are just flooding in blew up my insurance business fast forward.

Speaker 2:

A few years. I had actually moved from Minnesota, where I was at, and I had taken over another insurance agency and I'm doing all the things I'm doing. They find out about it. They didn't like it and so they labeled me as like a maverick. You know, like I'm, like I'm doing things outside of what they of the norm. You know what I mean, because they you know I wasn't doing all this the marketing stuff they taught you right and so they didn't like that and they started like coming down on me that they like filed a complaint with the National Association of Securities Advisors on me, which is this they suspended my securities license, it, which I and they found I didn't do anything wrong, by the way, but because all this stuff, that company soured me and I was like, well, screw this, I'm gonna go market online full-time and I like walked away from my insurance business and that was basically how I got into this place where I was marketing online full-time, started taking on clients.

Speaker 2:

Fast forward to 2013. Facebook ads comes on the scene, I started applying what I'm knowing have been doing to Facebook ads. That blows up. I built this force around what I'm doing. That blows up, and that's how I got to be known as the Facebook guy and the Facebook gang or you know, like whatever people like to say, I don't call myself any of those things unless I'm joking about it. You know what I mean. That's how I got known about that.

Speaker 2:

But really, if you kind of go all the way back to all that and this is what I've been telling you know, trying to really change my perception in the marketplace now is because what, what? I'm not a I'm not a Facebook ads guy. What I really am is a Person who understands people and I understand how to evaluate a product that actually works right. I want to make sure I qualify that because people will come to me with brand new things right. I only I can make things do really well for products that are already proven right and they already work and and I can find the unique thing in there and I can connect that unique thing to the unique motion of motion that is inside the market right now and Channel that emotion onto that unique thing inside of the product or service as the fulfillment of this emotional desire that people have, right, and I have a better understanding of that and I can do it faster and easier than I think anybody on the planet.

Speaker 2:

I can ask a few questions, look at a couple of things and, with in 30 minutes, I can have a complete selling narrative with a big hook or a big idea, a marketing hook that does all these things I just talked about and can, in some cases, you know, more than 10x sales by just, you know, changing some of this messaging that we do on the front end into an existing process Right, sometimes by even changing just a headline, landing page, we're able to, you know, achieve these kinds of results With, with people's ads and their marketing funnels, and it and, like I said, it, has nothing to do With Facebook ads, the medium doesn't matter, facebook ads that just happen to be that.

Speaker 2:

It was the right time, right place for that medium, with the skill set that I have, right, and that was the media that that, you know, I used at that time and continue to use as a way to achieve these kinds of results for people. Now the ability achieve those results over the years has become harder and harder and harder for people since 2013 I mean, that was 10 years ago already. Now you know Facebook has changed a lot in that time, but, at the end of the day, the thing that still matters is the message and the offer Right, and those are the two things that I've always studied and that I'm a master of, and that's how I'm able to still, to this day, get people the best results that they've ever seen with Facebook ads. But I don't do it just on Facebook ads either. We do Google, youtube, tiktok anywhere that you can buy ads. What I do and what I teach people applies to any of those platforms, and I have that kind of training available inside my membership site Cool.

Speaker 1:

So I want to get into your methodology a little bit, but before we do that, nowadays everybody wants a quick win, right? Because you can funnel, hack a funnel in 10 minutes. You're just one funnel away. It's so easy to make money online, right? Just anybody can do it, as long as you know a little bit more than somebody else. Than you can just rake in the dough, just rake in the dough.

Speaker 2:

Oh well, that's what. That's what the people stop shoveling the shit tell you, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and so From your, from where you came from, like you, like you say, you got knocked down a whole bunch of times. You're, you're. You had to send out five letters before a five at a grand a pop before one of them worked. So you said you had a hard head. Now is that lost in today's Businesses, or?

Speaker 2:

oh my, oh my god, are you kidding me?

Speaker 2:

The expect, hey, no, this is one of the biggest problems I have with the internet marketing industry and it has to do with the people, that most of the people coming into this space or in this space, the people they idolize, right, a lot of them Create these Expectations that are completely wrong with their marketing, because they highlight the unicorn scenarios right, like these fast wins, the, the big, huge results and they make in some cases, they can be from people that just come on the scene Do.

Speaker 2:

That is because these people are masters of psychology like me, and they understand that the thing that sells is Is that big, fast, quick win, because human beings are dumb, fucking lazy people, and, and, and, and. What they're doing is is they're purposefully using messaging and they have proof to back it up because these unicorns happen, right, but what they do is they use this and extrapolate it out, to use messaging to Implicate to everyone that that's possible to them, because they're also using the concept of hope, which is another highly powerful human emotion, to get you to buy their shit Right, and, and then the vast majority eat that fucking shit up. I idolize these people while not getting the fucking result that they're promising anywhere remotely closed, but they still eat it up. And then they keep buying more shit from them because these guys keep shoveling the fucking dream that they want to hear, right yeah, I call those guys Hopium dealers.

Speaker 1:

They're Hopium dealers.

Speaker 2:

Exactly.

Speaker 1:

Right, they get you hooked, and then yeah, then you're. Once you're hooked, then they got you, yeah.

Speaker 2:

You know that whole one funnel away thing, right Like? I've written many, many posts about this particular phraseology in particular, because, like you were talking about before we started recording the funnel doesn't fucking matter, it doesn't, right, like you could use umpteen bajillion funnels, but if you got a shitty offer and bad messaging or one or the other, that funnel ain't gonna work. And that's why all these people come by the time they get to me, because I preach a message that people don't want to fucking hear. Most people don't, right. They don't want to hear this is hard. They don't want to hear that you got to make something unique. They want to hear that you can just copy and paste and fuck off your way into success.

Speaker 2:

Right, but that's not how it really works. And so you know, only the people that understand reality will resonate with me right away, or after they've been kicked in the nuts a million times by buying the dream and spent half their life savings on it, will they finally buy into my messaging. And then they're reluctant to do what I want to do and they don't even want to pay me the wages that I asked for, which is quite a bit less than what most of these clowns are doing with the dream, selling them the dream. They don't even want to pay that anymore because they're fucking out of money by that time. Right it's. It's the weirdest thing, dude. I hate it, but that yeah.

Speaker 1:

I just brought it. I brought in a client a couple of weeks ago and I was a little bit nervous because I knew what she needed. I knew I could serve her and I do. I do done for you services. But when I got on the call with her, she told me she had just bought a $10,000 certification program where she was going to learn how to do all this.

Speaker 1:

She's got a full time job, like and you know how hard it is to learn to be a marketing expert like $10,000 doesn't matter what you spend, it's not going to happen unless you put in the hours. And I was like, oh man, she just spent all of that money, like can she afford me now and again, I don't charge as much as these other guys. But she just dropped all that and I'm like that's, it's gone, like you're never, she's never going to get the value out of that. And so she ended up hiring me and now we're three weeks in and we're almost ready to launch. But had she just spent done with her own stuff, oh my God, she'd be years away.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I see that kind of dumb behavior all the time. These people will buy these high ticket things because they they get easily influenced by master marketers and sellers. Right, they'll buy these things knowing full well that they can't fully implement it. Sometimes they're even in the mindset of you know, if I write this check, it just means that and I buy this thing, it just means I'm entitled to a return of some other form of money, even if I don't do it all. And then they'll do these kinds of things where they'll buy coaching programs like that and they'll have people that they'll have multiple coaching programs where they're listening to, trying to get advice from multiple people on different things at the same time and they're working with the professional at the same time and they're trying to make you do this, that or the other, and then they're questioning you about these things that they're doing.

Speaker 2:

It's crazy, bro. Yeah, people, people, I understand them, and the more I understand them, the more I just can't fucking get it Right. So here's the thing like you know, you can understand people and you can. You can play with it to your advantage, or you can play with it to their advantage, right, and then you can advantage off of other people's advantage. That's the game that I play. It's it's not as a profitable of a game, it's not, but at the end of the day, I can live my life in 100%, in integrity, right, and I see a lot, I know. I know everybody in this industry. I know what happens behind doors, I know what's in the secret rooms. I part of that.

Speaker 1:

I was working with a. I was working with a coaching client for a couple of years and he was doing great. I helped him make over three, three million dollars in two years. But then he decided to retire and that's cool. But anyway, he was retired for two months, decided to come back to work. He asked if I wanted to return. I was like, yeah, no, I don't, I don't, I don't think. So I was doing my own thing by the.

Speaker 1:

So he hired somebody else and I talked to him. He's like oh yeah, I got this new guy and he's going to really help me because he knows some sort of like loan, because he had a $24,000 program. He knows, like this loan shark guy. So the people who come into my program, if they can't afford it, they can get financed by this guy. And this guy's had some unicorns like some rock stars that have made a lot of money. But we know the reality in these coaching programs the majority of people fail through no fault of my client, through no fault of the coach. Right, and for my level of integrity, I'm like so you're going to get your students to sign up with this loan shark, knowing full well that 80 to 90 percent of your. Your people aren't going to ever be able to pay that loan. Yeah, because I go. I was like how can you do that to some? He's just he's going to destroy.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, because they don't care. They, like a lot of people, don't? They don't care or they don't think about that, right, the only thing that matters is I got to get my money. Yeah yeah, I'd rather, I'd rather get, I'd rather earn every dollar and feel like good about that. I'm actually like helping people in that exchange than taking Right. I just I'm not a taker, I'm a giver. You know, I can't, I can't do that.

Speaker 1:

So let's do a ten thousand dollar mastermind in the next 15 minutes. Ok, so what? So when you're starting a new campaign, what's the first thing you do to? To learn about your audience.

Speaker 2:

Well place right now where I can get everything I need with a few questions from a customer, because I've I've worked in pretty much every niche market imaginable and most of the people that come to me are going to fall into the usually into the major niches. Right, there's health wealth and finance, or health wealth and fitness. What health wealth? Why am I getting that wrong? I know. Anyways, there's three major markets. Right, I'm trying to. Yeah, I'm missing the. I'm missing the relationship Health wealth and relationships. Those are the three.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I mean, I know the general avatars on both sides of those coins, right, and I know like a lot of how to market to them already in general. Right, so, what, what I do when I bring out a client is we have an initial kickoff call and I'll just grill them about the people that are buying from them already. Right, because, like I said before, I'm only working with people that have proven offers. Right, this is a lot harder when you're making something new, right, you can't do these kinds of things, right? And so the people I'm talking to, they have buyers all the time and they're getting there. They're possibly having phone conversations with them, you know, they're getting emails into their customer support. They're having comments on their ads and stuff like that and blog posts and things like that. So we have a lot of data points that we can reference, and the first question I always ask is what are, what are the people that are buying from you? How are they describing the problems that they want you to solve? Okay, because that's that when I, when I say it that way, how are they describing it? What are? When they come to you and they say, hey, mike, I need your help, this is what I need your help with. How are they saying that? Because that allows us to.

Speaker 2:

From the you know, there's this concept called entering the conversation in the prospect's mind. That comes out of the Robert Collier Letterbook, which was written in the late 1800s, but it's a very common copywriting axiom, and the reason that that's important is because we want to be using the language in our advertising and our marketing to lead into our selling process with the language that people are using top of conscious, because that's how they can identify that we understand their issue. All right, and so that's absolutely crucial to success in advertising is being able to create that identification that you understand their problem and, ideally, you want to be able to understand, show that you understand it better than they do, and you do that by being really clear on what their problem is, because some people aren't. You know this all varies depending on the market and the product and everything like that, and this is why you had mentioned I in the when you came out here.

Speaker 2:

I talk about awareness, because that level of awareness is of where they're at with even with their own problem, right, like people might just be aware that they've got an issue, but they're not even really sure of what's causing that issue, for example.

Speaker 2:

But other times there's people that are really crystal clear on what's causing that issue, right?

Speaker 2:

So if you got, if you're marketing a product to people that aren't really clear on what the issue is, you got to make them clear on what that issue is first, right, before you tell them about the solution, because they're not ready to accept that there is a solution until they know what their problem clearly is. Right Now, other markets are already aware clearly of what their problem is, and so all you got to do is tell them about your solution. So what you do in your copy and your advertising is entirely informed by a deep understanding of your ideal customer and particularly an awareness of understanding what their level of awareness is for their own problem, for the problem that you solve, for the fact that there is a solution out there right, and for the fact that your solution is the best. Okay, that's the sequence of thought we have to take people through and we start with that conversation in their mind around how they're experiencing whatever problem it is that your product or service solve.

Speaker 1:

Yes, that's the way I identify that. Now there's two levels of understanding. There's first the experiential understanding, and that's what you just talked about level of awareness and level sophistication. That's their experience, where they've been awareness of their problem. And then what have they heard? What is your competition saying? Like in the weight loss space, we've got a highly sophisticated audience right. Like they've heard everything under this time.

Speaker 1:

Like so hard to come up with something new. I just I started working with a client a couple of months ago and he's a lawyer who sues financial advisors. That's all he does. So I was like, oh my gosh, like I haven't seen this one ad for, hey, if you lost money with your financial advisor, we can get it back. Like it's that simple. I don't need a unique mechanism, I don't need a big idea, because there's no, there's no crowd in that marketplace. But again, if I was doing a weight loss thing, oh my gosh, then you got to have a level copy writing skills Mm, hmm, mm hmm.

Speaker 1:

Yep, that's exactly right. And with the speaking the audience's language, I just got a three X increase on conversions Cause and I knew my copy was good. I like talking to a generating revenue, like let me help you generate revenue right, and it wasn't converting. And then I said let me help you make more sales. And guess what? Right, like it means the same thing. But how many people have ever come to you and said, hey Jason, you know I need to generate more revenue? Like, they don't say that. Hey Jason, I need to make more sales and I need to make them today.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so that's a really good point there, mike.

Speaker 2:

So this is this illustrates what I'm talking about and why I asked that question in the beginning of you know, when I'm working with customers, of what are people, how are people describing the solution that they're looking for, and stuff like that.

Speaker 2:

Right, because when we, when we, as a business owner or media buyer or advertiser, when we start writing, we have a track in our own mind of what we want to say, right, and that will color the words that we use, and usually there's like an educational piece that's coming to.

Speaker 2:

You know, it's influencing that thought process on how we're coming up with the words that we're gonna say. And so we'll say things like generating revenue, where it sounds amazing in our own head, right, like, oh my God, this is totally while people are thinking about this, but no, it's actually only how you're thinking about it in that moment, and that's a really common example. And so, by switching it to the way that they are, actually because I've talked to tens of thousands of business owners now over the years you know every single one of them when they're talking about what they want, they want leads and what sales, the exact words that come out of their mouth always right. They never say I need revenue. No one ever says that right, yeah, so you know. And that's why, when you switch to the word, I've got a master's degree.

Speaker 1:

I've got a master's degree, Jason. Like I should speak at the level that I'm educated, yeah but that's another big mistake.

Speaker 2:

In writing. Yeah, and that's why, if you so, I teach people about using this thing called the Hemingway app, where it measures what's called the flesh kingcade readability score, which has a grade level that it assigns to it. One of the secrets of oration is that the average human being reads and listens at a fifth grade level, no matter what their education is Okay, and if you take any state of the union address from any president and you plug it into this thing, it'll come out at fifth grade level or lower every time. Oh yeah, yeah, cause all speech writers know this stuff and they actually use this, because when you're talking, when you're talking to people, you need to talk clearly. The only way to talk clearly is to talk at lower grade levels. That doesn't mean you're dumbing things down. It just means you're not using extraneous language, if you like. How I use an example of that right there. You're not using extraneous language that can confuse people or bore people.

Speaker 1:

Exactly, yeah, no, I use the Hemingway app all the time cause, like say I smart myself way too often and I think what's gonna happen now like just the world is getting so much easier and like, say, one funnel away and you know 15 minute hacks, and now we've got AI and chat GPT, like chat can just write me a script now and I can just copy and paste, but chat's not understanding the audience, I don't think.

Speaker 2:

No, I mean it doesn't understand audience. So here's the thing about any software and AI in particular, or I mean so many things, including your body, like, there's this phrase. It's called garbage in, garbage out. So the copy that you get out of chat GPT is only gonna be as good as the prompting that you put into the thing. So in the vast majority of business owners that I talked to, they don't know dick really about their audience. That's why I gotta ask them all these pointed questions to get out the truth. If I ask them, oh, tell me about your avatar, if they know anything about it, they're gonna spit off a bunch of big level generalized demographics, right.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, age salary political.

Speaker 2:

And usually they're off base with that stuff. Once we dive into who's really buying, cause like we can validate these things. You know what I mean? It's funny, like cause, like a lot I'll get. I'll work with a lot of big organizations where they got multiple departments and I'll ask the owner about their avatar and then they'll give me that kind of thing and then I'll ask the guy that's doing the sales hey, dude, tell me about who's buying. And it's like this guy. The owner told me that people that are buying are dudes and the sales guys like now, all the chicks are buying. So, like the, how much the business owner really actually knows their customer is usually not a whole lot, and it's if they know it at all, which is which is shocking, right? So when people start saying, yeah, I'll just use chat GPT to figure it out, no, you won't, because you don't even know who you're going after begin with. That's why your shit ain't working right.

Speaker 1:

All right. So if you were to give one piece of advice for a business owner to really move the needle for sales, for revenue, what would you, what piece of advice would you give?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, actually spend the time to really get to understand your customer on a deep level, you know, on the emotional level, because the things that they're going to tell you on the surface that's not there. Are most old things, right, like they're always going to say it leads to sale. Any more leads to sale right Now. If anybody's been in selling, they've probably heard of the concept of probing down. Right, and this is probing down is how you get to the emotional core, and you really need to keep doing this over and over again in your market to get to that emotional core, right. So when people say I want leads in sales, yeah, well, why is that important to you? Why are leads in sales important to you? And they'll say because I want more money. Well, why do you want more money? Well, more money is going to give me more time. Well, why do you need more time? Well, you know I'm coming up on this age, I've been working really hard, I'm actually getting tired and burnt out and I want to spend more time with my family. Why you want to spend more time with your family? Why is that important to you? Well, because you know when I was a kid, my dad wasn't home very much and that made me feel this way. Bam, emotional core, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so you know you're going to find, when you do this kind of probing, that there are. There's the general motivating emotions, right?

Speaker 2:

So, like when I went from the level of leads and sales down below, that it was money, right. And I said, well, why do you want more money? It's because I want freedom, right. And the reason I said that is because every business owner I've ever talked to, when I walk through that chain of questions, those are the exact same answers that they will give me. They say I want leads and sales because I want money. They say leads and sales because, if they say I want money, that's not socially acceptable. It makes them seem like they're greedy. So they use leads and sales to conceptualize money. And then you ask them well, why do you want that? Then they have to reveal that it's because they want money, unless they're going to lie to you, right? Which, again, is not socially acceptable. So I'm diving into the psychology behind this stuff, right? You got to understand these things if you want to be good at this shit, right? So the reason that then they'll say money, right. And then the only reason that people want money is because they know that money is the vehicle that gives them freedom. That's the only way that we can have true freedom in this life. To say, fuck you, I'm going to do whatever I want is I've got enough money in the bank to do that. Everybody knows that Right, and at the end of the day, anybody that's ever bought a got into a business. They got into a business because they wanted freedom, and most of them end up just building themselves a J-O-B that has extreme amounts of stress, anxiety and responsibility tied to it that you don't have with the J-O-B.

Speaker 1:

Right, that's right. Yeah, yeah, cool. Let me just check my list of questions, but I think we I didn't nailed it all. I wish this was like a live call, because I'm sure people would have like yeah, did we?

Speaker 2:

did we meet in die, in Meander or around the map? Enough there to bring it full circle.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly, we started there and we ended there. There we go. Okay, I think all that's left is you've clearly provided value. Clearly provide can help people, help businesses. If our listeners wanted to reach out to you, what's? What's the best way to?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so I got this website that's academyofadvertisingcom, and so, you know, people, can, you know, contact me through there. They can learn about all the different ways that we can help people and then, if they're interested in, you know, experiencing some of the trainings and stuff that I have, there's an option for people to get a free course on there. So they can, you know, register for that and they can, you know, apply it to their campaigns, get results and makes them extra money and then use some of that to hire, you know, work with them on a deeper level.

Speaker 1:

Cool. I came into your world a few years ago and the first thing I found from you is that you tend to over deliver. I was like holy smokes, like I can't believe I paid this little and got that much. That was the first thing I got from you and the second thing I got was, like man, this guy's harsh. But the thing is, is I like harsh? I remember once I hired some I was going to put I live off the grid and I was going to get a wind turbine put up at my house, and so I hired this wind expert to come and give me the stats for whether we should have wind here or not. Anyway, we put the wind tower up and we get really good wind from the west, which is where you should come from. But we've got a hill in the northeast. Wind doesn't usually come from there, but that hill in the northeast causes like a eddies to form. So even when we have a good west wind, we didn't have a clean wind, anyway, to shorten the story.

Speaker 1:

So after, when it wasn't working, he's like oh, yeah, yeah, no, I, yeah, I expected that to happen. I'm like well, why didn't you tell me that? He's like you just hired me to tell you. Tell me what you wanted to hear what. No, I hired you to know whether I should put the wind turbine up. He thought I wanted a wind turbine. I wanted him to validate it, but he should have told me the truth and I would have saved like $12,000. And so that's what I like about. That's what I like about you is that, like I show you my, my funnel page and it sucks. You're not going to pat me on the back. Oh, good, try. You just said well, it's not going to work. And these are the three reasons why I'm sorry.

Speaker 2:

I don't apologize for anything.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, no like you know, this is, this is what you're doing wrong. From my 20 years experience, I know what's going to work. You can either do it or not, but that's it Right and that's uh. There's not enough of that out there. Like, say, you're not a hope?

Speaker 2:

Well, I mean like and that comes out of my you know my childhood. You know my parents were around much, you know, and if I needed anything I needed to go make it for myself. You know I didn't need to make it happen. So I've never had I didn't. Participation.

Speaker 2:

Trophies don't mean shit to me. Uh, only thing that matters to me is winning, and I think that there's people are far too soft these days. You know what I mean. Like all they, all they want to do is have their feelings coddled and, at the end of the day, money could give a shit about your feelings. You know what I mean. Like nobody, no, I don't care about anybody's feelings.

Speaker 2:

Like I care about your results and so, like, if what you show me is going to, in my opinion, is going to get you the results that you're expecting, I'm going to be like hell, yeah, this is awesome, Right. Like you don't see that a whole lot in my group, because there's not many people that actually put good stuff together right away and I'll tell them like, look, this is, this is what's wrong, and I'll be blunt about it. I'm not going to be. I don't become harshly critical for no reason, right, but I, what, what, what, what I think you're getting at there and I've kind of been explaining this a lot lately is, you know, because I'm I? I I like Tony Robbins a lot, Right, and you've heard me curse a few times on here, and this is really where the harshness comes from is because I'll I'll use cursing, like Tony Robbins does, in order to pattern, interrupt people, to jolt them out of the things that they've been doing that are keeping them from success.

Speaker 2:

Right, and a lot of times this see, a lot of people will send things, not because they intend on actually doing anything with it, but they're seeking approval. You know what I mean. And and so you know, like you got to do things like this to get people out of these bad patterns that are keeping them from getting the result that they want. Now some people respond to it and then they get results. Others, like they're like oh, you can't handle it. Then they go off to somebody that's gonna, you know, rub baby oil on their butt and tell them what they want to hear. There's all kinds of massage parlors in town you can get that from.

Speaker 1:

All right. Well, thanks for thanks for coming on my show, jason. You're like the first, first formal guest I've had, so this is.

Speaker 2:

I appreciate it, Mike. So I hope everyone got value. And again, if you want to, you know, learn more and you're down with a, with an insane clown like me, you can go to Academy of Advertisingcom.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'll put a link in the bio, for sure.

Speaker 2:

All right, appreciate it, mike.

Speaker 1:

Jason. See you next time. And that is a wrap for this episode of Because Business is Personal. Thanks for joining us and don't forget to take advantage of my two special offers. First, you can get a free copy of my bestselling book, empathic Marketing. You just pay for the shipping. Or you get a 50% discount on my Gap Analysis session with the coupon code. Podcast Just head over to wwwBecauseBusinessIsPersonalcom or check the show notes for details. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please don't forget to follow, subscribe, leave a review and share the podcast with others who might benefit. Your support means the world to us, so stay tuned for our next episode, where we'll continue to delve into the intersection of empathy and marketing strategy. Remember, because Business is Indeed Personal, every Connection Counts Until next time. See you then.