Stay ConnectedEveryone Hates Marketers is the only podcast for people sick of marketing bullsh*t. It’s reached 1M+ downloads in less than four years.
Every week, Louis Grenier interviews guests or shares his own no-fluff, actionable marketing insights so you can stand out—without being sleazy.
Copyright: © 2022 Everyone Hates Marketers
We’re going to switch things up this week.
Last month I asked if you had any questions for me. Quite a few of you reached out to me via LinkedIn, Twitter, and email.
Now I’m going to spend some time answering everything you submitted over the next two weeks. I’ll cover what you want to know about the podcast, dig into some marketing topics and discuss the future of Everyone Hates Marketers.
***
Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
How can we use story in our marketing strategy and drive more business?
Storytelling is a skill just like anything else. All it takes to write a mesmerizing story is knowing the key elements of great storytelling and practice.
In this episode, we’re joined by master storyteller Michael Hauge. He’s an author and story expert who has coached on countless Hollywood movie scripts since 1985. Tune in to learn how you can apply Michael’s 6-step storytelling formula to your own business.
***
Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
Want to learn how to write a sales hook for your business in 60 seconds?
Former stand-up comedian and copywriting coach Kevin Rogers joins the podcast to talk about personality marketing and how to use humor to capture your customers’ attention.
Not only does Kevin share his four-step system for creating an enticing sales hook, but he covers how you can apply this powerful storytelling formula to your business–even if you don’t have a story to share yet.
***Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
Want to create a better user experience for your customers? Start with user research.
Before you develop a user experience design you need to understand what your customer really wants. In this episode, Els Aerts joins us to explain what user research is, why it’s important, and how you can complete user research on a budget.
***Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
Who are social media influencers and how can they help your business?
In this episode, Tyler Farnsworth joins the podcast to cover a marketing topic we haven’t dug into yet: influencer marketing. We talk about the role influencers play in marketing today, finding the right social media influencer for your campaign, and how you should reach out to them.
***Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
How can your brand stand out in an oversaturated market today?
If you’re a frequent listener, you already know we talk a lot about branding on this podcast. It’s because I believe that branding is the core of marketing. Without a solid foundation in place, your marketing strategy will flop.
In today’s episode, Rebecca Vogels and I chat about the connection between branding, storytelling, and your personal brand.
***
Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
Who is Neville Medhora?
Neville Medhora runs a company called Kopywriting Kourse, where he trains business teams on how to write outstanding copy and content that performs. He’s an author, former eCommerce store owner, and has written copy for companies like AppSumo, The Hustle, and SumoMe.
What is the Kopywriting Kourse?
The Kopywriting Kourse is training that’s designed to turn beginning copywriters into pros. Businesses work with Neville to teach their teams how to improve their copy and profitability, while freelancers learn how to jumpstart their copywriting career.
Neville Medhora’s Copywriting Advice
In this interview, Neville explains why he doesn’t think of copywriting as words on a page. His philosophy? Copywriting is about transmitting information from one brain to another. It’s not only the written word on the page but the reaction in your brain when you read those words.
***
Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
Scarcity and urgency are powerful persuasion triggers, but are they ethical? We’ve all seen companies misuse urgency with fake limited time offers. They sell “live” webinar replays with only 20 seats left or slap a countdown timer on their sales page that resets when it hits zero. How can we use urgency in sales funnels without being sleazy? In episode 72, Jack Born joins the podcast to discuss the misconceptions of deadlines, marketing automation, and more. Listen to this Episode: The Power of Persuasion: How to Use Scarcity and Urgency to Sell More   00:00 / 1X Download file | Play in new window Subscribe: iTunes | Stitcher | Spotify We discussed: Why scarcity and urgency are powerful persuasion techniques Why makes people motivated to take action on promotions with a deadline The best way to determine if there’s a market for your product or service How to make a compelling first offer to your target audience When you should start preparing your customers for a product launch How to hold people’s attention with email marketing The day promotions are proven to have the highest number of sales How many emails you should really be sending to your list Why it doesn’t matter when people unsubscribe from your email list Resources: Deadline Funnel Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Thinking, Fast and Slow Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products How to Send Emails with 83%+ Open Rates (Not a Clickbait) Perry Marshall Sphere of Influence The Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords Advanced Google Adwords Full Transcript: Louis: Bonjour, bonjour and welcome to another episode of EveryoneHatesMarketers.com, the marketing podcast for marketers, founders and tech people who are just sick of shady, aggressive marketing. I’m your host, Louis Grenier.In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about those shitty, fake countdowns that pollute the web and discuss whether there’s an actual ethical way to leverage urgency and scarcity. You might have heard what I just said. I have this very weird feeling about these countdowns that I see on websites and things like this because I always assume they are fake and they are creating an artificial deadline. My guest today will help us to check whether that’s true or not, or whether I should take it easy and maybe consider that some countdowns are helpful. The concept of scarcity has been popularized by the book, Persuasion, by Cialdini and it’s a book that many guests in the past have mentioned and I think a lot of listeners will be familiar with this book. My guest today is a software entrepreneur. He has helped entrepreneurs maximize their sales through marketing automation. He’s a technical co-founder of DeadlineFunnel.com, which is a tool to build–you’ve guessed it–countdowns on your website or even email. Jack Born, welcome aboard. Jack: It’s great to be here, Louis. Thank you for having me. Louis: Thanks for playing the game as well because listeners might not know that, and actually they don’t because it’s an email thread, but a common friend, Andre Chaperon whom I interviewed in the podcast in the past, said I should talk to you and interview you. As soon as I saw what you were about, I said sorry, I don’t think I can talk to this guy because he’s a bit on the shady side for me because I only saw countdowns and I was like sorry, that won’t work. Then you came back with a nice answer and I realized I was a bit of an asshole in the first place. Jack: Laughs. Louis: Let’s go through it in more details and let’s dive into this particular topic because it’s super interesting. First question is: Why do you think I hate countdowns so much? What’s going on in my head right now? Jack: I would guess probably the reason why you automatically assume that because I founded a company that helps people–among other things–add countdowns to their website, and it really is more detailed than that. We’ll get into that in a little bit. But you probably jump to the assumption that it was shady marketing tactics because just like me, you’ve seen it used incorrectly. One of the things that I believe is that you can take almost marketing tactic and some people will use it in a way that’s ethical and also do it in a way that’s extremely effective, and we’ve all seen the same marketing tactics and strategies employed in a way that are either shady or just completely ineffective and they completely fall flat. The reason why … Going back to the origin story, and I’ll keep this brief, but really the whole genesis for why I created Deadline Funnel was because I wanted to be able to leverage something that we all know works, which is urgency and scarcity but do it in a way that was both automated and authentic. What I saw out there at the time because I really wasn’t looking for a software to build, I already had other stuff I was doing at the time, so I just assumed someone surely has solved this problem, but no one had. Basically all there was available out there were the timers that you hate and I hate, which are someone puts a timer on their page and when the timer hits zero, if you come back tomorrow, it’ll be counting down again. I didn’t want to use that but I wanted to be able to leverage urgency in a lot of my followup marketing, a lot of which has to do with lead generation and then automated email follow-ups. That really set me on the path to creating something that I could use and then once I realized that this is a problem that I had, maybe there are others out there that want to solve the same problem. That was really the genesis but I think it comes back to … It is a tactic. The use of a countdown is a tactic that in its earliest iterations in the early days was used to increase pressure and to drive more sales but at the core of it, it was fundamentally based on a lie. That’s why we created this software so that marketers like us could use urgency without lying. Louis: Why is that working so much? We all know urgency sells if you’re in the marketing world and as I mentioned in the intro if you’ve read the book, Persuasion by Cialdini, you would know that scarcity sells. What’s happening in your brain that makes it so powerful? Jack: There have been a lot of studies that have been done, some of them have nothing to do with the marketing realm but there’s something that physiologically is going on. They’ve even put participants in functional MRI machines and presented them with scenarios and situations where something that they own is being taken away from them, and they can see that something physiologically changes in their brain. I believe it goes back long before recorded history where we had to fight for our survival on a day by day basis, and resources that were scarce were usually the ones that kept us alive. I think that hard wiring in our brains really has persisted even to this day. It’s a trigger that is really built into us. Fundamentally, when we have something and it’s being taken away, whether it’s the opportunity to take advantage of a special offer or special deal, and we’re about to lose that, we feel pain. There have been studies that show that people experience the fear of loss more than they’re motivated to take action based on a potential gain. That’s been shown over and over again. The book, Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow–I might be butchering the title a little bit–but that’s a world-renowned economist who’s done many studies that show this over and over again in various different scenarios. The other thing that’s going on is just that in today’s busy world, people procrastinate and we have a whole lot of things demanding our attention, from running our business to other marketing messages hitting us on a minute by minute or second by second basis. We’ve got iPhones, iPads and all sorts of other slack notifications and things like that, so there’s a lot of things demanding our attention, so the natural set point, the natural default is for all of us to procrastinate as long as possible. By having a deadline of some sort, whether you use a countdown or not, by having a deadline on your promotions, you’re gonna have more people take action just because of all the people who are interested in paying attention, there’s a large percentage of them who didn’t take action because they’re just going into that natural default mode of procrastinating as long as possible. Fundamentally there’s a lot going on, but even if you just think in terms of, “Do human beings procrastinate?” The answer is we all know, yes. If we’re being honest, we procrastinate, so a deadline forces people to make a decision. You’re either in or you’re out. Louis: From experience, having deadlines, works with customers, potential customers, visitors but it also works for you as a company, or as an individual because if you set yourself a deadline that in two weeks time or three weeks time, this will need to be done, you naturally focus your attention on making it happen and take off all the fluff so that you focus on what matters. What I’ve found sometimes is having a publicly available deadline that is for both people outside and people inside works super well. Surely those people who didn’t take action, let’s say in a control group that didn’t see the countdown, and those people who saw the countdown and just basically took action just because of it, do you have any proof or studies with your clients that show that those people who converted because of it are as qualified and as good as a lead or as a customer than people who didn’t go through? Jack: That’s an interesting question. I have proof that there’s definitely a surge of sales, near the deadline. I’ll cover that first. I’ll cut to the end and say I don’t have any proof that the quality of the client who’s buying right before the deadline is either better or worse. You’re the first one who’s asked me that, but I would disagree, before I give you the proof that the deadlines increase conversions, one of the things that I would say … Shoot. Lost my train of thought. Let’s talk about the proof that deadlines increase conversion. Anytime someone does a product launch, whether you’re coming out with your product for the first time or you’re doing a black Friday sale, Cyber Monday, etc. if you look at the … There’s a time where people can jump in, and there’s a cart open. There’s the opportunity for you to jump on the sale, where previously it wasn’t available. That’s usually where there’s a spike in sales. During a multi-day promotion, usually the sales are gonna taper off, but then it’s right before the deadline where sales really surge and usually that’s when there’s the majority of the activity, right before the close. Although I don’t have any studies whether a client is either good or bad or worse or better, depending on when they purchase, I definitely know for a fact that the biggest spike in sales is right before that deadline … One thing, I do remember what I was gonna say. You mentioned in the lead up to that question, you said people who bought just because of the deadline. I don’t think that people buy just because of the deadline. One of the things that I tell people all the time is that you can’t steer a parked car. In other words, if your product is not wanted by the market, if your marketing message is horrible, if people just don’t want what you’re offering or your presenting it in a really crappy way, it’s not like throwing a countdown timer on your page is going to all of the sudden fix that. What urgency will do, what a deadline will do is it will take something that’s already working and make it all that much better. It’s a maximizer. It’s a conversion rate optimizer but if you’ve got no conversions to optimize, you can’t optimize a zero. You can’t polish a turd. Louis: Exactly. You can’t polish a turd. I agree with you. Thanks for going through this exercise because I know it’s not easy. I’m trying to challenge you as much as I can so that I can convince myself that in the future, perhaps I could use countdown in a very ethical way, which is what we want to go through together. I’d like to go through a step by step with you that explains how we can use scarcity and urgency in an ethical manner, without being shady marketers, without trying to trick people to do something they don’t want to do. By the way, before we go through this, I just have one more point. I came upon this article from Nir Eyal, who is the founder of Hooked, building products that stick and that people are hooked to, air quoting right now. He came up with an interesting concept which he calls the regret test. I think this is the answer to the question as well, and to the debate we’re having right now is as long as people buy from you a good product, first of all, a product that makes their life easier and is good intrinsically, if they bought it because of the deadline as well, that really helped them to move from I’m not buying to buying and they don’t regret this decision after the fact. They’re actually happy with this decision. Then it’s all good. Jack: Absolutely. Louis: I feel that the regret test is good when people regret their purchase or their actions as soon as they’ve done it. In this instance, it also probably means that the product wasn’t good enough, or that there was too many shady marketing tactics at once that really put them under pressure to buy it. I think it’s a great way to think about it. Will your people, will your customer regret doing what you wanted them to do, or will they be happy with it? Jack: That’s a great one. Here’s another one. I was recently at a conference in Chicago, and the speaker at the front of the room brought this up and I jotted it down. The idea is if you truly love someone, if you think about someone that you truly care about in your life, it might be a family member or a dear friend, assuming that they would possibly be an ideal prospect for what you’re offering, would you sell your product to them? Would you use everything that you could in order to convince them? That’s really an acid test to see do you really believe in your product–because I think you and I have both bought things where we had the buyer’s regret. Doesn’t matter whether they had a countdown or deadline or not, just what we got versus what we thought we were gonna get was two totally different things. Obviously the person promoting it, at least from my point of view, I’ve thought many times before that it really reflected on the person who was the marketer, who was the person selling it because obviously, they needed the cash flow, because this is not something that they would in good conscience sell to someone that they cared about. Louis: The mom test. Would you sell that to your mom? Would you write this email to your mom? Would you sell this software to your mom, is usually a good test whether or not you’re doing good marketing. Thanks for that. That’s also a good example. Let’s go to the practicality of it. Let’s say we have a business. We are selling whatever online, could be software, could be something else. We do want to use urgency and scarcity to try to encourage people to take action but we want to do that in an ethical way. What will be a step by step process that you would go through with them, starting with step one? Jack: Sure. Step one goes back to what I was saying where you can’t polish a turd. You’ve gotta make sure that there’s a market to match, that people in your market actually want what you’re offering and probably the best way to do that is to do a live promotion. That might be if you have a subscriber list and this is the first time you’re bringing your product to the world, this is some form of a product launch or a product announcement. It could be a partner webinar that you do with someone but whatever it is, you should do the live promotion for several reasons. One is because frankly, it’s just easier to implement. In terms of an MVP, it’s a lot easier just to get the promotion out the doo…
Full show notes at the publisherScarcity and urgency are powerful persuasion triggers, but are they ethical?
We’ve all seen companies misuse urgency with fake limited time offers. They sell “live” webinar replays with only 20 seats left or slap a countdown timer on their sales page that resets when it hits zero.
How can we use urgency in sales funnels without being sleazy? In episode 72, Jack Born joins the podcast to discuss the misconceptions of deadlines, marketing automation, and more.
***
Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
So you want to learn how to start a marketing agency? You dream of a new challenge. You’re ready to build a business and a team you look forward to working with each day.
I get it. I was in your shoes not too long ago. In 2015, I started my consulting business because I was fed up with bad marketing and all of the noise online. My goal was to build a no-BS approach to marketing.
Did it go perfectly? Not exactly. But I gained a lot from my experience, and I wanted to share some of the lessons I learned along the way to my podcast listeners.
For starters, most marketing agencies are BAD.
Can this be true?
Unfortunately, there are too many sleazy marketers out there. So I brought David Baker on the show to share his thoughts on why this is and provide a strategy for how to start a remarkable marketing agency from scratch.
***
Tap on this link to access show notes+transcripts, join our private community of mavericks, or sign up to the newsletter: EveryoneHatesMarketers.com/links
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
