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Most coaches think generosity builds trust. But what if all your free content is actually training your audience not to buy from you?
In this episode, Samantha talks to Lucas Lee-Tyson about why giving away your best stuff is backfiring, and how a simple, low-ticket paid masterclass can flip the power dynamic, build real trust, and reignite sales in a market that’s gotten skeptical, burnt out, and flooded with AI-generated advice.
They explore how AI is disrupting authority, how buyer psychology has evolved, and why a small paywall doesn’t just increase conversions, it builds commitment. If your funnel feels flat, your audience seems distracted, or you’re tired of giving value without return, this conversation is your turning point.
Samantha and Lucas also dive into the shift from DIY learning to done-for-you services, and how AI is quietly disrupting how clients evaluate expertise.
This conversation is a behind-the-scenes look at what actually works right now to turn browsers into buyers. If you’re ready to elevate your authority, create content that gets consumed and converts while building a business model that scales sustainably, you’ll want to hit play on this one.
IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL DISCOVER:
- How to position your knowledge as a product and shift from trading time for money to scalable digital offers (00:49)
- What to do when clients ask, “Why pay you when ChatGPT is free?” (06:00)
- Why paid content beats free (11:13)
- The psychology and structure of a paid masterclass that gets buyers to take action (19:10)
- How to craft ads that stop the scroll (28:29)
- Shifting your strategy from funnel-thinking to brand ecosystem thinking (34:08)
Want alignment as you scale? Let’s chat.
Table of Contents
Free Content Is No Longer the Trust Builder
A Tiny Paywall Changes Everything
Structure Your Offer To Sell Without Selling
Think Like Apple, Not Like a Funnel Bro
If Your Funnel Feels Off, This Is What’s Missing
Why Free is Costing You Sales
There’s something quietly happening in the online business space that no one’s really talking about.
We’ve all been told to give massive value for free, right? Downloads, PDFs, webinars, masterclasses, the works. But the truth most coaches are starting to feel (but not yet saying out loud) is that free isn’t converting like it used to.
And it’s not because you’re doing anything wrong. It’s not because you’re not brilliant either. It’s because your audience has changed. So the way we market has to change with it.
Free Content Is No Longer the Trust Builder
A few years ago, “just serve” was the mantra. Give and give until people see your value. And sure, that worked … for a while.
But now? People are overloaded. Everyone’s offering something free. Your ideal client has 12 open tabs, 3 half-watched trainings, and ChatGPT on standby.
Free content isn’t building trust anymore. It’s just contributing to the noise.
A Tiny Paywall Changes Everything
So, what now?
Did you know that charging a small amount for a mini masterclass or training does more than bring in a few bucks? It actually flips the whole power dynamic.
It tells your audience, “This isn’t just another freebie. It’s valuable. It’s focused. It’s for people who are serious.”
When people pay, even just a small amount, they’re dramatically more likely to actually watch the training. They’re more inclined to implement and see a result, which means they trust you more.
And they’re primed to buy again.
Structure Your Offer To Sell Without Selling
Your goal here isn’t to stuff everything you know into one training. You’re not trying to deliver 12 modules for just $27.
The magic is in teaching one core idea and using that idea to eliminate all the other noise your client is hearing. Show them why your way makes sense, and why other approaches might be a waste of their time, energy, or money.
When you make your method feel inevitable, the next step becomes obvious: working with you.
Think Like Apple, Not Like a Funnel Bro
People don’t buy in a straight line anymore. The old funnel mindset (you know, tripwire to upsell to high-ticket) just doesn’t reflect how people behave these days.
Think like Apple. Let people enter your world at any level. Maybe they start with a $27 training. Maybe they book a call. Maybe they lurk for a month then binge everything you’ve made.
The key is to make your ecosystem magnetic. Make every entry point lead them deeper into your world.
If Your Funnel Feels Off This Is What’s Missing
If you’re feeling like your funnel’s broken, your audience has gone quiet, or your ads just aren’t landing, this shift might be the reset you need.
Don’t throw out your brilliance. Just package it in a way that today’s buyer actually wants to consume.
Because value isn’t about how much you give away. It’s about how clearly and confidently you lead.
ABOUT LUCAS LEE-TYSON
Lucas Lee-Tyson is a digital marketing expert, speaker, author, and the founder of LLT Research, a marketing agency dedicated to helping subject matter experts scale their businesses. Lucas built his first business to over 100 employees and over $50 Million in sales. His free email newsletter supports a community of over 300,000 entrepreneurs.
WHERE TO FIND LUCAS LEE-TYSON
- Website: https://lucasleetyson.com/
- Website: https://licensetoprint.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lucasleetyson/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lucasleetyson
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lucaslee-tyson
CONNECT WITH SAMANTHA RILEY
Instagram @thesamriley
TRANSCRIPTION
Samantha Riley 0:00
Welcome to today’s episode of Business Growth Lab. I’m really looking forward to this. We’re going to talk about paid master classes, and I’ve invited, whoops, I’ve invited our guest today, Lucas Lee-Tyson, to chat about this topic. And he’s got a very specific way of bringing new clients into your funnel. So Lucas, welcome to the show.
Lucas Lee-Tyson 0:21
Thank you so much for having me. Samantha, I’m excited.
Samantha Riley 0:25
Yeah, I’m looking forward to this. We had a couple of goes at trying to tee this up. We finally got it happening with, even on the third try, with a whole heap of tech issues. But we’ve got there, and I’m really looking forward to this. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about where you’ve come from, what’s your journey to getting to where you are here and landing on this marketing mechanism that we’re going to talk about today?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 0:49
Yeah, absolutely. So I got started, my very first real job in the real world was I was a Facebook ads media buyer. That was actually the very first internship that I had in college, just as a way to pay some of my bills. And then after that internship, using some of the skills, I actually got started as a freelancer on a platform called Upwork, and that was pretty much my entire business for close to two years. I never really had employees. I really just did everything myself, worked with every single one of my clients myself, it was until COVID happened. So I graduated college in 2020, so in March, everyone got sent home, and you know, we had to finish our classes online. And within about like a two week period of that happening, I lost every single one of my clients that was paying me to do their marketing for them. Part of it was, you know, like supply chain and like, you know, shutdowns and things like that. Then the other part of it was just fear. People that were afraid of, you know, what was going to happen, and they basically just wanted to hold on to every dollar that they could, which I couldn’t blame them. So I was thinking, I’m going to get out of school, be this hotshot CEO, and then I was back at my parents house with no income, so I had to figure out some new way of making money, because I continued to try to do Upwork. But, you know, with the pandemic just hitting, no one really wanted to hire the college freelancer anymore, and even I wasn’t really that expensive, but I think people still did not want to pay me. So this is when I started to transition my business out of an agency model, where I was doing everything for clients and basically just trading my time for money, to moving towards more of a consulting, more of a coaching and more of a digital product role. And actually I ended up hiring a mentor. I ended up hiring a coach who had already done this. He had already transitioned out of an agency and had turned it basically into a coaching and consulting business. He was actually the one that I learned a lot of the early advertising strategies that I did, and I think obviously, I had a lot of help. I had a really great mentor. I had a lot of motivation, because I was either going to make this work or I was going to have to try and apply for jobs, which was also not great prospects, parents, house, yes, yes. There were a million reasons why I was like, I’m going to work 16 hours a day and just try anything. And I took the little amount of savings that I had left, basically just dumped every penny that I could into advertising. And what, what my mentor initially taught me the very first month that I started doing this, I basically broke even. I spent maybe like 6000 and made 6000 back but the important thing was, the model that he had taught me, and the model that I obviously really rely on now, was that I was essentially selling a course. What I was doing back then, I’d priced at $1,500 we do it a little differently nowadays, but my mindset was if a business owner, historically has paid me around, like 1000 1500 a month for me to do their Facebook ads, it would be justifiable for me to charge $1,500 one time for a business owner or a marketer or an aspiring entrepreneur, whoever to learn how to do this themselves, and then they would never need to pay, you know, someone like me, and I think, because of the pandemic, that resonated more with people, because they didn’t want to have to pay for something every month, it made more sense, you know, to be smart with your cash. And, you know, try and do it yourself. And this was before AI or anything like that. So this was obviously an area that someone like me, a 22 year old, could still carve out a niche for. But the very first month basically broke even. But the most important thing was it gave me data to operate off of, and actually the second month of advertising obviously had a lot of help, had a lot of guidance. I spent around, like 30, 40,000 and made almost 200,000 back in sales on, you know, this digital product that I had created, and since then, you know, obviously seeing that level of success in my agency, I had never worked with maybe more than, like, four or five clients at a time, and in that month, I had like 80 people signing up for my course. That was when I was like, oh my god, this is just so much a better business model, and it’s what people want to pay for. So I had all these signs kind of pointing towards it. So for the past four or five years, that’s pretty much exactly what I’ve done. I pivoted away from digital marketing agency, where I did everything for the clients, and now we teach the social media advertising. Initially it was on Facebook ads. That was what the original course was about. Was like, how to run Facebook ads, how to run Instagram ads. And now recently, we teach a lot of YouTube Advertising too, but that was kind of how I initially got started, and, you know, learned about this whole industry.
Samantha Riley 6:00
Yeah, so I believe you, well, I know that you haven’t been in the industry long, but I also know you’ve been in the industry at a time where I’ve seen so much change. You know, the way the market was in 2020 was different to 2022 is different to now 2025 What are you seeing in the coaching industry right now?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 6:23
Well, the interesting thing, like I just said, during the pandemic, I think there was a big transition away from done for you work, like people wanting to hire out work, and people really wanting to learn a skill, do things themselves, and, you know, hire to acquire knowledge, basically, in the past year, year and a half, I’ve seen the reverse, the transition away from this. And I actually think, you know, part of it is obviously, the pandemic was very unique. A time people were at home, they had a lot of free time, and they wanted to be smart with their cash. So it kind of made sense. But in 2023 we, it was like, I think it was 2022, around ‘20, ‘23 Chat GPT came out, and since then, it has only exponentially gotten better and more intelligent and scarier in so many regards. And I’ve had, not only in my business, you know, we’ve been affected by this, but in many of my clients, people that I consult and coach, they’ll have products that have done well for three, five, sometimes upwards of 10 years, and they’re telling me they’re like, I don’t know what’s happening. Like, it seems like we’re speaking to the same amount of people, like, we’re still doing all the same marketing, but people just aren’t pulling the trigger. And I thought about this for a while, and obviously, you know, I don’t have a crystal ball, but my best guess as to why this is happening is because, because of Chat GPT and all of these different AIS, people are always kind of comparing what they would pay for in a course or a coaching or a consulting engagement versus just what Chat GPT or an AI could tell them. And I’ll notice myself about this. Like, I have three different coaches and mentors that I pay for help with, you know, business, strategy, and finance, and things that I am not good at at all. And these are people that I’ve already paid for, like the I have them basically in my corner for the next, like, 12 months, and I’ll catch myself sometimes, like, not even bothering to, like, send someone who I’ve already paid a question, because I’m like, Well, maybe Chat GPT can just answer this for me. And, you know, I don’t want to bother them, and it’s just so much more convenient. Just like how, you know, when Amazon really made a push for two day delivery, next day delivery, it would be almost unheard of now for an e-commerce business to say it’ll take a week for your order to arrive, you’ll be like, well, I could probably find something similar to this on Amazon.
Samantha Riley 8:49
Yeah, where everything is longer. Australia has not caught up to that yet. I can tell you, Oh no.
Lucas Lee-Tyson 8:57
That’s good. That’s good. There’s still, there’s still opportunity in that market, totally. I think it’s, you know, every single industry, like with e-commerce, with like things like food delivery and rideshare apps, every single industry moves and accelerates towards just making things better for the customer. And no matter what sort of niche, or what sort of industry you might have a business where you’re teaching someone something, you’re consulting them or coaching them on something. The comparison everyone’s making in their mind is, well, could I just ask Chat GPT this? And could I figure out how to do this with maybe just a little bit of prompting and a little bit of back and forth. It used to be people saying like, well, could I learn this on YouTube for free, or could I learn this from like, a blog post or a podcast for free. And now we have the superhuman version of that, which is an all knowing AI. So it’s not to say that, you know, people don’t value information and people don’t value coaching and consulting. But we really have to ask ourselves, what is someone ultimately going to get uniquely from you that they truly would not be able to get from Chat GPT, and what can you provide for them? What sort of assistance, what sort of support, what sort of hand holding would you be able to do that would make things, you know, 10 times easier. And I think that’s a reason why a lot of businesses, a lot of clients that I work with now have, they’ve not necessarily shifted away from courses and coaching, but they’re starting to add in more done for you, services like more agency services, more things where they’re, you know, having to hire team members to do things for them, because it does add a differentiation point. It’s something that Chat GPT and all of these, you know, generic AIS cannot do is go into someone’s business, go into someone’s life, and actually take care of things for them. So overall, I think it’s a good thing, you know, for the end customer, because they’re getting a better experience. They’re probably going to get more value for hopefully less money. But it does also make it very competitive that people are always thinking about the value of what a business is offering and if it’s not something they could get elsewhere. That makes sense.
Samantha Riley 11:13
Yeah, totally. So let’s talk about your paid masterclass model off the back of everything you just talked about, why would someone want to consider a paid masterclass model, you know, as a marketing tool, and how is it working in this era, this era of AI where people are just able to jump on and get an answer. And I just want to preface this personally by saying I think that, yes, we can get an answer from Ai, but information isn’t going to implement. So I’d love you know, and that’s kind of what you were just talking about. So yeah, take us through this.
Lucas Lee-Tyson 11:53
Yeah, absolutely. So this is something that almost coincidentally, we started doing in our business in like, early 2023 so before that, 2021, 2022 we did the high ticket model, which I would assume a lot of your audience is familiar with. We had something that was relatively or we had something that was premium. It was expensive. It was our flagship, most amazing doorbuster offer. And the goal was to try and get everyone into that ASAP. And that worked really, really well for a lot of reasons, and that, you know, you’re helping people at the highest level. They’re paying you, you know, theoretically, the most amount of money you charge. So it’s a lot of money to reinvest back into your business. The downside of that is number one, competition. I can’t really think of any client of mine that I work with that they don’t have at least like, three or five or 10 other people who also have now a high ticket program teaching this thing and that it can be compared to in some way. So there’s a lot of competition flooding the market. We just talked about AI and around 2023, at least here in the United States and in many parts of the world, there was a lot of economic uncertainty. Interest rates started going up. A lot of companies began pausing hiring because of AI. They started to evaluate, do we really need to hire 1000 more people, or could we replace them with AI? And thankfully, nothing catastrophic has happened, but there’s a lot of businesses and there’s a lot of dollars that are being tightly held onto. So the idea of someone seeing you for the first time on social media, seeing you in an advertisement, and immediately throwing down 5000, 10,000, $20,000 it began to get harder and harder and harder and harder. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen anymore. It absolutely does, but people are skeptical. People see that there’s a lot of options, and you know, for a lot of good reasons, they don’t know who to trust. If I am someone that, if I don’t know anything about weight loss and fitness, if I see five nutritionists and five fitness weight loss coaches, I have no idea who’s actually better than the other to me, someone who’s uninformed, they all look the same to me. So people became, people have started to really slow down their very premium. You know, in many ways, major life decision purchases. And this is one of the reasons why the paid master class model ended up taking off like a rocket in our business in 2023 and it’s why we’ve recommended so many of our clients to make the same shift. And essentially, what it is is, instead of the conventional high ticket wisdom, which is, give away all of your best stuff for free, just teach, provide value, educate, and people will see the value and then want to pay you for your most premium offering. That’s kind of the idea, that’s the goal. Again, it absolutely does work to a degree, but what often happens is people watch the free content. They’re like, Oh, that was cool. Then they keep scrolling, they go about their day on social media, and they never end up purchasing even though you’re giving them a ton of value. So the idea with a paid master class model is, rather than just giving away every single thing for free, we just put it behind a very small paywall, which is usually around $5, $10, $30 I wouldn’t do anything over $100 and the real key difference with this model, it’s not the fact that we’re radically changing, you know, what a client is teaching or what they’re offering to people, we’re really just changing the psychology around the relationship that they have with their audience. Because ultimately, we’ve run this test so many times, I’ve put together, like many of your listeners, probably, I’ve put together so many trainings and teachings and seminars that I think are, like, truly transformational, like, I think they’re like, literally things that could, night and day, transform a business. But when I go onto our watch time, when I look at like, the retention graphs of these videos, like, 80, 90% of people never even watch past like, the first couple minutes, so I’m like, wow, I just spent the last week, the last month, making the most amazing training, the most amazing course, and no one even watched it. They didn’t even have the chance to implement it, because they never even learned the information. What we found it was kind of the whole idea of this model was when we took those exact same things that we were putting all this effort into, and we were essentially giving away for free on social media and on our advertisements as lead magnets, when we just put a pay wall in front of them, even if it was just like $7, $27 immediately, the engagement rate went up. Immediately, there were more people that were watching to the end, that were actually engaging with it. And even beyond that, to your original question, the amount of people that we would get follow ups from who said, Hey, I watched this training of yours and I did it, and this is what happened, like people who are actually following through on what we were teaching them. It was like a night and day difference, like it was not even upwards of five to 10 times the amount of people who are actually implementing what we were teaching. And the whole reason that, the whole reason that you know you have to ultimately educate, or teach someone like, I can’t just go on social media and say, Hey, I’m a marketer. Give me $10,000. We have to prove to people like why they should work with us. We have to prove why we are valuable. The only way that we can truly show someone like our credibility, our credentials, our authority and our experience is if they first are willing to invest their time into us. And we just found it almost impossible to get people to invest if you’re doing it the same way as everyone else, which is just give it away for free, just contribute to all of this noise on social media, when instead, if we just put a price tag, if we put an actual dollar value on this, it’s going to add that little bit extra step of friction to get people to actually consume the thing that we’re putting so much time and effort into. So that’s kind of the core foundation behind it. And there’s a lot of people that will, you know, teach all of these bells and whistles and different modifications you can make to the funnels, but most of the ways that we do this are incredibly simple, like literally just a landing page with a headline a video and then a button to buy the thing that you’re offering. Because the ultimate goal is not necessarily to get rich selling things for $7, $27 again. The goal is simply to get people to consume what you, to consume your marketing message, to consume and learn why you should be the best person to help them, grow their business, increase their productivity, lose weight, whatever it might be that you’re helping them with, and the best way that we’ve ultimately found to do that is Just take the exact same content that you’re giving away. You’re giving away for free, put it behind a small paywall, and that’s what we call the paid masterclass model.
Samantha Riley 18:49
I think the trust in the marketplace right now is so low, and everyone is saying how good they are, I can do that. And it’s a whole nother thing to actually show people and say, Hey, come along with me and do this thing and earn your trust, rather than tell people that you’re trustworthy.
Samantha Riley 19:10
So I love this. Obviously, to be able to ascend people into something else, we’re going to have to provide them a quick win in this masterclass. So to be able to do that, what’s the basic structure of flow that you’re using in that paid masterclass? So that people don’t think, Oh, I got everything I need in that $7 and I don’t need to work with them anymore.
Lucas Lee-Tyson 19:35
Yes, great question. The ultimate goal, and this is something that you know, I think any subject matter expert deals with, is sometimes the problem of over teaching, like I’ve probably already done it on this podcast, like every single person. It’s like, we get excited, we want to share, like, everything that we know, everything that we learn, without realizing that if we get too deep into the weeds, you. 80% of it just goes over people’s heads. 80% of it just doesn’t get remembered. So it’s the same issue as before. If I have the world’s most amazing training, but people don’t watch it doesn’t matter how amazing it is. If I have the most amazing training and people don’t remember it, it also doesn’t matter how amazing it is. So you’re 100% right. We want to make sure it’s something that actually gets them a quick win. And the real key is that in the era of Chat GPT, where information is endless, it’s really become a commodity. The real thing that we’re not trying to do is necessarily teach them like a new shiny object or a new thing to do. Instead, we’re trying to teach them why they shouldn’t be doing anything else, other than what ultimately we are going to be teaching to them. So a simple example, let’s say there’s a woman who’s a, you know, a weight loss coach. She’s a nutritionist. She helps clients lose weight by using the keto diet, by cutting out carbohydrates. For example, She is ultimately not in a $27 mini masterclass, whatever, she is not going to be able to help someone lose 10 pounds. 20 pounds, it’s just not going to happen. The amount of people who are going to watch it, consume it and actually implement the actions that are required to lose that weight. It’s a tiny percentage, but what she can do, what would be really valuable for everyone that buys that and everyone that watches that, is showing people why it’s a major waste of their time and effort to be doing a lot of the traditional weight loss diet advice, like constantly restricting calories, doing these really grueling workouts, doing all of these things that are in many ways miserable and they’re not sustainable over the long term. The only goal she would ultimately have with her paid masterclass is convincing people why they should just focus on cutting out carbohydrates, if that happens to be like her unique angle, her unique mechanism. Because if someone pays $27 and they feel like, wow, like if I don’t have to add anything extra to my plate, but I just need to stop doing all of these things that she just told me are a massive waste of time. That is a huge mental win, because now I know all of the things to avoid and to your point, in the era of Chat GPT and AI and information overload, people have no idea what is worthwhile and what is worth doing versus what is going to be a major waste of time. So the example that I gave before, if I’m someone who’s trying to lose weight, and I see 10 different nutritionists, 10 different weight loss coaches on my social media feed, they could all be saying different things. One of them could be saying, cut out carbohydrates. The other one’s saying, You need to lift heavy weights. And then the other one is saying, No, you need to run 10 miles every single day. I have no idea who’s right and who’s wrong. So ultimately, the person, the coach in that example, who’s going to win that customer, is the one who sells their method better, the one who sells why all of those other things might work sometimes, but they’re probably going to be a big waste of time and effort most people, it’s not going to bring you the results that you want. And here’s why you should do it my way, because, like you said before, in the era of overwhelm and era of distrust, anytime people feel like you’re just talking about yourself and how amazing you are, and how amazing your clients are and all the amazing results that they’re getting, people’s warning bells immediately start going off in their head. They’re like, I’ve heard this before. This is a sales pitch. Here comes the high ticket program, whatever. But if I’m selling people instead on my idea, if I’m simply selling people on, why cutting out carbohydrates is going to be the best way for you to lose weight. And here’s a study from Stanford and Harvard and all of these scientific researchers that prove that this is scientifically the best way to do it. I don’t even need to talk about myself. I don’t even need to show them a client testimonial, because I’m helping eliminate the mental effort of thinking about, should I be doing this or that, or any of these other million things that I’ve heard about on social media. So when we work with clients, and we help them, you know, really clarify their their message and ultimately, what they’re going to be marketing inside of their paid masterclass, we really try and strip everything away and really get down to the core of what makes them different from all of the other competitors that they’re teach that are also kind of promising the same result. And then we want to have an argument, essentially, just like a lawyer in a courtroom, we want to have an argument about why all of these other things that these competitors are saying you should be doing are ultimately a waste of time. And here’s why you should be doing my way, my specific thing instead. And that’s ultimately like we were talking about before. That’s going to be the way that you get that quick win with someone. And it builds a lot of trust, it builds a lot of belief, so that then they’re much more likely to want to work with you at a higher level.
Samantha Riley 24:50
Can you explain a little bit what the deliverable looks like? Is this a one off? You come on live and you work with me like an actual workshop, because I had a look. Um, with one of your products, and it was like a pre-recorded and there was quite a lot of, I don’t know I could call them bolt ons. There was a quite a lot of pieces to it. So can you, can you share a little bit more about what is it that we’re actually delivering, and how are we delivering it?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 25:19
Usually the simplest answer is, depending on the client that we work with, we’ll usually take a look at the materials that they already have and just repurposing those. Because oftentimes the best paid masterclasses are just going to be a small little piece of whatever your flagship ultimate high ticket program is, we found for like 70, 80% of our clients, they already have it kind of inside of there. Generally speaking, we want to give them as little pieces as possible. So I’m sure everyone’s bought a course, and you open it up and it’s like 10 modules. There’s 10 lessons underneath each thing, and you’re like, Oh, I’ll get to that Saturday.
Samantha Riley 26:02
And then your bookmark Saturday, never comes, right?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 26:05
Yes, exactly, because it’s just, it’s just too much. It just seems like, Oh my God. It’s like a book that’s 600 pages long. It just seems too intimidating. So almost every single one of the the paid master classes that we help clients with, that we use inside of our own business, it’s usually one core video, which is ideally the best possible pre recorded video that breaks any beliefs about any of the other alternatives, any of the other competitors that might be teaching the same thing, and really just gets them focused on your method, whether that’s losing weight by cutting out carbohydrates or advertising on social media, whatever it might happen to be that’s really the 80, 20 is usually just like one really, really solid video, and it could be anywhere between 20, 60 minutes in length, kind of like, you know, a pre recorded webinar. We will usually also offer four to five other like, supplementary videos. And the real goal of this, it’s honestly also psychological. It’s so that people feel like, you over delivered. It’s so people feel like, oh, wow, I paid for this thing. I didn’t even know I was going to get these other five bonuses about how to make a meal plan and how to, you know, go to the grocery store and shop for these different things. We generally find that the consumption of those is actually very low, okay, but the ultimate goal is just showing them. Hey, I have this business where I do all of these things. If you did want to learn this on your own, you could, or if you wanted me and my team to help you with it, you could absolutely speak with us to learn about that as well. So really, the main consumption, the only goal is just get people to watch one really good video. And if a client doesn’t have that, then we obviously help them record that from scratch. But again, the goal here is not necessarily to get rich off of $7, $27 sales. It’s to have this, be that first foot in the door transaction, that first interaction that you have with the customer to really impress them, to really show them that this isn’t a scam. This is something that like, actually delivers real value. And to eliminate all of the other alternatives, to eliminate any of the other competitors that they might be thinking about, and ultimately get them focused on working with you so that then, you know, if you do have, you know, kind of a flagship high ticket program, then they’re excited to do that as well.
Samantha Riley 28:29
Yeah, how are you seeing, or what are you seeing is working in regards to paid ads? Because we, I’m a big believer that you do need paid ads to build your audience, to grow your audience. Are you seeing meta ads working well, YouTube ads. And what, you know, if it’s a mixture of both, is it a niche that’s doing better in what you know, where should people look for this?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 28:55
Yeah, great question. We do a mix of both. It sways back and forth, kind of like the percentage. I would say most of the clients that we have on YouTube right now are very financially focused. So it’s usually like business consultants, business coaches, investment advisors, investment coaches, things like that. I would guess that those do really well, because there’s already really established categories for those things on YouTube. So if I teach people, you know, business operations, like how to spend less hours working in your business and on your business, there’s a million business YouTubers, I could put that ad right in front of and it’s very, very easy, and they’re already watching videos on it. It’s easy to take them to my sales funnel that’s mainly videos. If you have something that’s a little more, I guess you’d say consumer focused, like we have one client who actually, literally just teaches dog training, and it’s like a course about dog training that does amazing on Instagram, because you can imagine it’s a perfect match for where people just scrolling and kind of wasting time, and we just advertise it right in front of people that already say that they’re pet owners. So there’s not necessarily a perfect formula, but I think the benefit of YouTube is that the attention spans are slightly higher, which makes sense. You know, people are intentionally watching videos which are usually, like, 10 to 15 minutes long. So if we’re sending them to purchase a video a master class, and it’s, you know, a video based funnel, it’s a very easy transition for them to go off of YouTube to purchase, you know, kind of like this mini course, Facebook, Instagram, there’s definitely money to be made, but the the attention spans are a little shorter, so the more explanation your product needs, the harder it’s generally going to be. But Facebook, Instagram, just like for e-commerce, it’s great for visually easy to understand products, like, if someone can just kind of get it from the first glance, or within like 30 seconds of, you know, watching a video, then it’s really easy to get those impulse purchases from people who just want to buy something right then and there. Yeah, but it’s a pretty even split, you know, in terms of clients who do both.
Samantha Riley 31:13
Yeah, I love that. What do people need to really keep in mind when they’re running their ads to cold traffic?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 31:20
I think one of the biggest things is, and we’ve talked about it a little bit so far, is that people ultimately do not care about you. They care about how you can help them. The odds are very high. No matter where you advertise, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, the odds are very high that your ad is not the first one they’ve seen. For whatever it is that you’re doing. You’re not the first business coach, investment coach, dog draining coach that they’re ultimately seeing. So the most important thing is not necessarily being better, because, like I said before, if I if I’m uninformed about weight loss, and I see 10 weight loss coaches, I don’t know who’s better than the other. I just know that they’re all saying different things, and I don’t know who to trust. The real key is ultimately being different, and it’s why kind of this approach of the paid masterclass model of not necessarily selling yourself or selling your results, but instead selling an idea, selling why someone should do a specific way or a specific mechanism. And that’s ultimately, you know, a lot of your advertising, we find that the less we talk about how amazing we are, how amazing our clients are, all the results that we help people achieve, and the more we just focus on the angle of what we are selling, the idea of, ultimately, what we’re teaching to someone. Those are the sorts of things that do really well, and obviously makes sense, because if you look at the videos that just naturally, organically go viral on social media, they’re not sales pitches. They’re not, you know, Oh, I lost 10 pounds, and so did my clients, or I made a million dollars. They’re usually kind of like interesting facts, or they’re like shocking things that you feel like you’ve never seen before. So the easiest hook, almost the easiest way that we script every single one of our clients’ ads, we always start with the three words. Did you know. We always try and put our clients’ first ads into that format, because we know it basically forces you into trying to think of a fact or a statistic or something curiosity-inducing that the audience has never heard before. Like, did you know people who cut out carbohydrates lose weight faster than people who work out 10 hours a day? If I heard that, I would be like, Oh, my God, I didn’t know. Yeah, exactly. Versus, if I start out the ad saying I used to be 100 pounds overweight and now I have a six pack, people are like, I’m are like, I know what this is, and they just scroll. And it doesn’t matter how much better your results might be, because, again, the audience has no idea of differentiating what’s real, what’s fake, what truly is better than any of your competitors. So the key is really trying to shock them, trying to spike curiosity with differentiation, and that’s why we really like that, ‘Did you know’ opener on the hooks.
Samantha Riley 34:08
Yeah, I love that. I’d love to know, you talk about an ascension model. I hear a lot of people talking about why ascension models don’t work, because people don’t just automatically go, I’ll buy this low ticket, and then I’ll buy this higher one, and then this higher one, do you is this part of more of a flywheel where people can kind of come in wherever, and I’d love to know, like in your business specifically, or is it this is the only thing that you put in front of people and then you ascend them?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 34:44
Really great question. It’s more of the ladder. I would agree with you. I don’t think it’s natural to force someone into an ascension. Or I’ve heard some people call it like a ladder, where first you go on this step and then this step. Because that’s not really how any huge business works. Like Apple does not force you to buy the headphones and then the phone and then the computer, like that would just be weird. It’s like, I walk into Apple, I look around and I kind of decide what I want to buy. Apple, I think, is a great example of that. Same with Disney, because both of them have these very cohesive ecosystems. It’s almost like an ocean or a library of products that you can fall in love with, and you could buy everything if you so desired. Or you could go in and just get the headphones for 200 bucks. You can go to Disney World and the tickets are like $100 or you could leave with like $3,000 worth of merchandise and hotel tickets. So both of them are really great examples where the foot in the door to enter into the business and experience. Like, the value that they offer is very, very low. Like, probably the cheapest thing that Apple offers is either, like, the headphones or the watch. It’s a couple 100 bucks.The computers are obviously, like, three, 510, $1,000 sometimes. But if I’ve already bought the Apple headphones and I’m like, Wow, they’re so easy. They just connect to my phone automatically, I can just slide them in. They’re amazing. I’m going to expect that if I spend $5,000 on the computer, it’s probably going to be a similar experience. And that’s, I think, the reason that Apple has done so well for so long, same is true with Disney. It’s obviously a completely different type of company. But if I’ve gone to Disney World once, and I just got the normal ticket, I went around, I went on a few rides, the next time I go back to Disneyland, I’m going to be a lot more likely to get the FastPass and, you know, buy all these different merchandises and get all these extra packages, because I know that they have a reputation for delivering, ultimately with me, and I like using Apple and Disney as examples, because they are two businesses that are very different, but they have extremely high returning customer rates. I think Apple is over 90%, so over 90% of Apple’s customers have at least two of their products. And Disney, if someone goes to the Disney Park once, they’re 80% likely to return at least one more time.
Samantha Riley 37:09
Wow, they’re both really high numbers, yes, yeah.
Lucas Lee-Tyson 37:13
And when you look at, you know, a lot of information or consulting and coaching based businesses, I think there’s a lot of misinformation where or it’s not misinformation, but I think it’s a little outdated, where the goal is just to kind of try to hit people over the head with the most expensive thing right out of the gate, when in reality. And I kind of understand why that happens, but if we shift our focus to that returning customer rate, just like Apple, just like Disney. If I think about how can I if I knew that 90% of my customers would come back and do business with me again, I don’t care how much they spend with me on day one, they can spend $5 because I know they’re going to come back and they are eventually going to be willing to spend 500, 1000, $10,000, if I’ve already delivered that great experience the first time. So Apple obviously does this. Disney obviously does this. If you look at the fortune 500 almost every single business will employ this in some way. And to me, it just feels like a more natural progression to a business relationship. So 100% I’m with you that I don’t 100% agree with, like, the forced ascension. I do 100% believe that you should meet people where they’re at. And there are absolutely people who are like, I need this solved ASAP. I’ll pay you 10,000, 20,000 whatever it’ll cost. Just help me with this right away. Like, there’ll always be those people. But that’s generally not going to be the majority of people. Majority of people are not going into Apple never having used an Apple product. And they’re like, give me the $10,000 computer. They’re probably gonna baby step their way into it. And I think this paid masterclass model is a very organic way of modeling that for selling, coaching, consulting and information, similar to how they do it.
Samantha Riley 39:01
Yeah, I love that. For people that have listened to this episode and they want to stay connected with you and learn a little bit more about what you do, how can they do that?
Lucas Lee-Tyson 39:09
Easiest place is probably Instagram or Facebook. So it’s just my name, Lucas Lee Tyson. I check all my DMs myself. I respond to them. I don’t have like, a team member or anything in there. I think on both of those, we have a few of our paid master classes linked. So if people wanted, like, a live example of it to kind of see what it looks like in practice, that’s a great way to see it as well. But yeah, my DMs are always open. I love hearing from people. I love giving, you know, free audits, just taking a look at anyone’s funnels or ads or anything like that, seeing if there’s any areas of improvement. So yeah, I’m always open for a reach out.
Samantha Riley 39:45
I love that. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Lee-Tyson Lucas, it’s great to have you here. That was so Australian. Australians always use the last name, slip of the tongue. Thanks so much, Lucas.
Lucas Lee-Tyson 40:00
Yeah. Thank you, Samantha.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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