The Secret Ingredient to Compelling Marketing Messages with Billy Broas

In This Episode

• [02:15] – Stephan asks Billy Broas how his book Simple Marketing for Smart People was created. Billy walks us through the 5 Light Bulbs Framework he developed.
• [08:06] – Stephan and Billy discuss the importance of building beliefs in marketing.
• [16:06] – Billy underscores the practicality of his advice on copywriting and rewriting headlines. He shares how these simple actions can lead to a significant boost in sales, demonstrating the power of effective messaging.
• [22:59] – Billy brings the 5 Light Bulbs framework to life with real-world examples. He illustrates how this framework can revolutionize marketing, using a compelling argument and engaging illustrations.
• [32:48] – Stephan and Billy talk about the application of the 5 Light Bulbs in marketing, with Billy recalling the process of connecting the dots for people and leveraging experience in the field.
• [38:02] – Billy identifies existing beliefs that law firms have about marketing, which could be shifted to Stephan’s beliefs.
• [44:18] – Billy elaborates on exposing marketing myths and biases and offers resources for learning more about the secret to crafting captivating marketing messages.

Jump to Links and Resources

Welcome onto the show, Billy.

Hey Stephan, it’s awesome to be back. Thank you so much for having me.

You bet. I would love to hear how this book, Simple Marketing For Smart People, ended up coming together because this is no small effort. 

Yeah.

What was it a year and a half in the making? This is not light work. Any book created as more than just a free pamphlet downloadable PDF is an undertaking, and yours was especially big, right?

It was quite the project. Thanks. I think your listeners are going to find this refreshing. That’s the feedback that we’ve been getting on these topics. There’s just so much overwhelm in marketing out there right now, so much complexity. You’re deep in the trenches of marketing. There are so many tools, tactics, and gurus. And when that happens, I think it’s really important to go back to basics.

That’s really what this book is about. You know how it is. You’ve been doing this a while, like myself, and there’s something to be said for experience and looking back over your shoulder over the years, and only when you do that can you distill it down to what’s essential. I first started online in 2008. I had my own business for a while. These beer brewing courses that I was selling online, and then left, I sold that website to be essentially the behind-the-scenes marketing guy for these big-name entrepreneurs. 

Some of them are friends of ours. So it’s been about ten years doing that, and now I can look back over my shoulder and say, “Okay, well, what was important and what was not.”

So that’s really what this book is about. I created a framework, which we’ll talk about later, called the  Five Lightbulbs, a messaging framework. What I realized, and although I’m going to write a book on that one day, I realized that I needed to write something that was even a prequel to that, that was even more foundational, even more axiomatic, to put it that way.

So, what thread took the person from a need or gap in their business and in their IP, for lack of a better word? Then they need the book, and then from there, they need the Five Lightbulbs Framework. Walk us through that.

Yeah. So, I call myself a T-shaped marketer. So I didn’t have any marketing experience. I’m not like a natural marketer, salesman, or anything. I was a Latin nerd throughout school and was really into science. My career was in the clean energy industry. But then, when I left that to do my own thing and become self-employed, I realized, “Oh, man, I really got to learn marketing and how to sell stuff.”

So, I tried a bunch of different things. I call myself a T-shaped marketer with a broad set of marketing skills. But I went deep on messaging on words because I found that that was the thing that gave me the biggest ROI. We get the words right, and then everything downstream of that works better. That’s why I developed this Five Lightbulbs Messaging Framework. Within that, I really discovered that we can get even more foundational than words. And what it comes down to is belief. And I found that often, if we’re marketing something, we’re just not on the same page as our prospects.

The job of you marketing is to instill the beliefs required for the prospect to value your product fully.

There are assumptions that we are making, especially if you’re like a lot of people I work with who are subject matter experts, where you have this thing that many people know called the curse of knowledge. There are a lot of different places where that curse of knowledge comes into play, but it really wreaks havoc when it comes to marketing because you are so knowledgeable about your topic that you assume all these things. You assume that your prospect knows what you know. So what I found was there are all these different things we can do in marketing, like social media platforms, SEO, upsells, and sales countdown timers. But if our customers or prospects don’t have the required beliefs, then nothing else matters. Then, the goal becomes to establish these beliefs. You do that through your marketing content. That becomes the job of your marketing to instill the beliefs required for the prospect to fully value your product.

So, let’s dig deeper into the principles of the book and why our listener really needs to read it. What will be the outcome, and what are some tangible benefits for this listener or viewer?

I’m speaking to the listener now. You might think about some of the, I don’t want to say, the bad questions that your prospect asked, but you might say that they ask bad questions. You might say they ask even dumb questions. But the point is that people don’t know; your prospects don’t know what’s important. And so you don’t want to assume anything. So what do you want to do? The question we ask in the book is, what does my customer need to believe in order to buy another way? You might ask what they need to know. So my option, my product is the only logical choice for them. So, when you ask that question, it has this magical effect where it starts to surface all these assumptions. What needs to be true? Well, they need to believe this. 

You probably heard this Peter Drucker quote, Stephan, which states that the goal of marketing is to make selling unnecessary. So, I connected those dots and said, “Oh, well, that’s what he’s talking about really where if your prospect really does believe all these things”. We can go into an example in a minute if you want, and we’re on the same page about everything; well, then, when I make my offer finally and say, “Here’s what the price is,” it’s really a no-brainer for them. What you find is that if you don’t do that, if they’re not on the same page as you, and they don’t have those required beliefs, then when you go to make that offer, you hit that resistance that we so often hit. It’s no surprise that even when you throw them a coupon, it still doesn’t work as well as you expected. Because if they still don’t know how to properly value what you do, it doesn’t matter how many discounts you give. And the people you do get from the discounts, how good a long-term customer are they going to be, right?

The more you speak, the more you figure out your thoughts and learn what works and doesn’t.

So you address certain beliefs that must be instilled or aligned with to circumvent the need for discounts and freebies, free shipping, and all that sort of stuff. People will pay for value, but they must believe in it. What are some of these beliefs that we need to instill? And where are our typical business owners getting it wrong?

Yeah, good question. One big area of belief is not around your product but your approach to solving the problem, the thing that you do. So, one hack or template you can use for this is “____ is important”. For example, my co-author and our mutual friend Tiago Forte is a productivity expert, and he sells a course called Building a Second Brain that is all about note-taking.

Yeah. And a great book of  the same title, which I really enjoyed. And he was a past guest on this podcast.

He’s awesome. We did a lot of fantastic work together. This was the big thing. When I came on board as his behind-the-scenes guy, I saw what he was doing because I’m a nerd, and I’m in the productivity space. I took his course before even working together. I took his course just as a fan and as someone who wanted to learn from him. But I’ve always had this knack for being able to make complicated things simple.

I saw how he was explaining things and was only explaining things to super nerds like me.That’s why he was hitting the ceiling; he sort of exhausted that warm audience around him. So you’ll get some people who like, just like you, or already have those required beliefs. But if you want to expand and go into colder markets, it takes this education-based content. The type of education I’m talking about is education that builds these belief sets that are required to buy. So, for him, he was taking a lot of things for granted, a big one being that to go back to our template, notes are important. 

If we're not on the same page as our prospects, when we make an offer, we encounter resistance. Share on X

He can’t assume that people think that note-taking is really important. Most people don’t like thinking about note-taking. They think about school, and it’s like, “It’s not a good thing.” Right? It’s not a winning message to say, “Hey, go take a bunch of notes.” So, he had to instill those beliefs, and that’s what we started doing through his marketing content, telling stories and using data and research, studies and demonstration, and all. 

There are a lot of different forms of proof. We go into more of them in the book. But once we started doing that, people started saying, “Oh, okay, I really see how notes can help me.” You have to answer objections, too, right? So there’s going to be objections like, “Well, how long does it take to take a note on a podcast?” And we would show, “Well, actually, it doesn’t take much time at all. Shorter than you think.”

Right. So you clear all those objections, and that’s really what this belief-building process is about. You can think about it as a more sophisticated form of objection handling. Now we make our offer. Now, there’s not that resistance to buying his course because who’s going to buy a course on note-taking if they don’t even think notes are important?

Makes sense, yeah. So why is note-taking important? I’m just curious about your take on that.

Well, that’s a good question. So, you need to tie it to the end goal. Because no one really wants to take notes. So, you have to have a mutual understanding of what the person is looking for. So for him, he has a lot of creatives in his audience. So, people produce a lot of content, music, art, and things like that. And so what we had to show was that notes can serve that end goal.

So it’s not really about the notes. It’s about what the notes can do for you. So, again, that comes back to proving that through this educational content.

Right. Does it matter what kind of format the educational-based content takes? Does it need to be video, written, or short? What do you think here is really the most effective?

I recommend separating the message from the medium, at least at first. So, think about what this core message is and what these core beliefs are. I recommend experimenting with those different mediums. Maybe it’s all of the above, right? We see that a lot. But typically, there’s one that works better for your audience. His people tend to be, even though he’s doing pretty well on YouTube now, but when he got started, it tended to be readers. I mean, he was writing. That’s how I discovered him; he was from long forum blog posts. 

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So you can look at what people are more prone to. Also, look at what you’re good at. If I were helping a famous fiction author launch an online business, like, Stephen King, I wouldn’t say, “Hey, you should do a webinar.” I’d be like, “You’re Stephen King. You should probably write some emails.”

Right? Okay, so how did Tiago Forte become a co-author with you? Because he’s right there on the front cover of the book. As with Tiago Forte, what did he do, and how did that come about?

Before I met him, I had been doing consulting for about six or seven years. Something special about that guy. I love Tiago. We’re friends now. He attended my wedding, and we just really clicked. He has such a classy approach to marketing, business, and life in general. That’s when I first started to get more well-known. I kind of came out from behind the scenes, and he was like, he’s also very transparent. 

If you know Tiago, he shares every number in his business on Twitter. So he’s also like, “Hey, here’s my marketing guy, Billy.” So, we started to produce more content together. Over the course of a few years, we had a lot of success, and we had said a lot about marketing. You know how it is. The more you speak, the more you figure out your thoughts and what works and what doesn’t. I said to him, “Hey, we’ve done a lot of great stuff together, and we’ve said a lot about marketing. We have a book here.”

You need to get these foundations in place if you’re going to reach and help as many people as possible with your great product or service.

So I said, “Hey, I’ll lead the project. If you could chip in a few chapters, and you’re such a great case study for these principles, then I think that would make a really engaging book.” And that’s what we wound up with. I just got the hard copy or the paperback in the mail. It’s awesome. We’re really proud of it.

Oh, that’s cool. So this is going to be released on June 7, is that right?

Correct.

What are some of the things that you have applied from your own marketing principles in terms of the book launch that you think our listener will be interested in hearing, like different tactics and strategies?

Yeah, great question. So, I’m always trying to put my teachings into practice. So, I’m thinking about what my customers already believe or what about my audience. What do they already believe, and what do they need to believe? So, along with launching the book, I’m talking about a lot of these things that they have tried before when it comes to marketing. So, if you look at the emails I’m sending out now, I’m talking about all these different marketing tactics that are out there. I’m talking about this problem of marketing overwhelmed by all the software solutions that are out there and really making a case for going back to these core principles and saying; it’s not just because I believe in this stuff. I do believe in it, but I truly believe that the highest ROI thing that you can do is focus on these principles. When you get this right, all those other things that you’re doing will work better.

I believe that people who have good products may not be marketing professionals or want to become professional marketers, but you need to get these foundations in place if you’re going to reach as many people and help as many people as you can with your great product or service.

Yeah. You said earlier, or maybe it was prior to our recording, that these principles are timeless versus some principles they are obsolete so quickly because things change with technology, AI, and with the amount of overwhelm and banner blindness, ad fatigue sort of thing, that people just will be blind to it after a period of time. So, what are some examples of timeless versus ephemeral principles in marketing?

In a marketing message, you need to get into an agreement before you move on to anything else.

So, I got into copywriting, right? So I had to sell these beer brewing courses, and I said, “Okay, well, it looks like the words are the big needle mover here. I can try all these different plugins on WordPress, but if I just rewrite a headline, then I can double my sales, and that’s less overhead to just rewrite something than go through all the software.” So, I got into copywriting, and what I discovered was that even a lot of copywriters don’t know what they’re doing. I don’t mean they’re not having success. They don’t know the skill set that they’re employing. At the end of the day, I realized that what they were doing was argumentation. And this goes back all the way 2000 years ago to Aristotle.

A lot of copywriters don’t even know that this is the field of rhetoric. It’s the field of argumentation. It’s about making claims and backing them up with proof. So I’m going back to these old books and learning about, for example, The Trivium. I recommend everyone read that book and study it. It’s about rhetoric, grammar, and logic. So these are timeless principles and even this idea of belief building. You’ll hear marketers are great at coming up with fancy terms for things and acting like they’re brand new.

So, you’ll hear this term like the chain of beliefs. We talk about that in the book. My friend Rich Sheffren, I believe, was the first to coin that term, the chain of beliefs. But all it really is is logical reasoning. That’s really all it is. I mean, Stephan, if we use an example here, I have this glass in my hand. So if I put this on the table, and let’s say I’m talking with you, right? And I say, “Okay, Stephan, we agree that there’s one glass on the table.” Like, it’d be really strange if you were like, “No, there’s two glasses there.” Let’s pretend you and I were launching a business. How far would we get in that business if we couldn’t agree on how many glasses were sitting on the table? It seems like that’s a very self-evident example because when it comes to numbers, that’s the most self-evident thing. How could I prove to you that there’s one glass on the table? The only thing I could say is, “Well, there just is.” There’s no proof I could provide. So that seems like a kind of silly example because numbers are so self-evident to us humans. But when you apply to something like your marketing message, you need to get that agreement.

You need to both say, “There’s only one glass on the table.” Whatever that topic is, if it’s note-taking, notes are important; you need to get that agreement before you move on to anything else. That idea of logical reasoning goes back to the dawn of human consciousness.

Yeah. By the way, Rich Sheffren was a guest on this podcast back in 2020, and he also mentioned Tiago Forte and Building a Second Brain Course in his interview.

Yeah.

Such a small world.

The four of us, we gotta get together, have a beer and talk about this stuff. We all think similarly.

Yeah. Awesome. So what would be the ephemeral principle that you’re tired of hearing about, like, especially in the age of AI, something that is not going to be valid or useful, let’s say, in a year’s time?

Well, you see it, too, because you start to spot these patterns over time. Jumping from platform to platform, from shiny object to shiny object. TikTok is the thing, Snapchat, Threads or Clubhouse. Right? I’m talking about some ones that have kind of passed on. Now, that’s just not the answer. And the key is to put those things in perspective. There are a lot of very serious marketers, and do they rely on one platform ever? No.

Long-form content works because they’re making an argument, establishing beliefs, and getting the reader on the same page as them.

Or even just one format, right? Even short-form video is the thing. Micro-posts, email newsletters, Twitter, or X are the things. The money’s on the list. Everything keeps shifting. And so you chase after one thing, and then the new thing comes, and what you’re doing is obsolete.

Exactly. Yeah. I love they brought that up. Think about TikTok. They keep expanding the duration of those videos, and they’re like, “Oh, man, maybe this long-form content thing does work.” That’s a huge one. I’ve seen it, too. It is like long-form content is dead.

It’s like, “Are you crazy?” The reason why long-form content works, by the way, now, if you’re listening to this, the reason why it works, again, it’s easy to be dismissive of, say, those long sales letters, but you got to know why they’re long. I already gave you the answers. It’s because they’re making an argument, establishing these beliefs, and getting the reader on the same page as them. And look, it depends on what you’re selling, but if you’re selling something that’s a more complicated product or a higher price point, you can’t sell it like you sell a roll of toilet paper where all you got to do is cross out the price and put a discount on it. It takes an argument, verbiage, and copy. So that’s why long-form content works. Now, it has to also be interesting.

But if you can have someone stick through long-form content, whether it’s a long-form sales letter or video sales letter or webinar, whatever it is, sit through an hour of that and keep them engaged and instilling these beliefs. There’s nothing more powerful than that. And they’ll buy what you’re selling.

Yeah. Now, are you working on different kinds of auxiliary add-ons to your book, let’s say worksheets or planner guides, downloadable tools, templates, or anything like that, to further add value and get email addresses for your book purchasers?

Yes, we do have some of that. Yeah, we don’t have some. When Tiago and I talked about this, we wanted to get these ideas out there. I know that’s not what you’re supposed to do. Especially as a marketer, I’m supposed to have the whole funnel mapped out, but we really do want to get those ideas out there and let serendipity happen, too, Everyone needs marketing, right? 

As I’ve talked about these topics, I’ve heard from people from all walks of life that I would have never expected. We have teachers and professors who are using these concepts in their classrooms, which is a great example. You think about things that students always say, like, “Okay, hypotenuse.” When are we going to use that? And the teacher’s like, “Well, just trust me.” It’s like, no, maybe the teacher should employ this belief-building strategy and show the student why it is important, like instilling the belief that this is important. 

But to answer your question, we’ll have some worksheets, cheat sheets, and things like that. Ultimately, this is really the underpinning. I was talking about the Five Lightbulbs earlier. I was going to write the Five Lightbulbs book, and I was like, “Actually, no, we need to write this book first because this is the underlying philosophy behind that.” That said, this is not simple marketing for smart people.

It’s not an implementation book; it’s more of a philosophy book. However, if you want to make this stuff easy, the easy button is the Five Lightbulbs into which these principles from this book are baked.

Can we walk through each of the Five Lightbulbs and maybe give some case examples of each being used?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m a very visual thinker. So, I hired an illustrator who, you know very well, Stephan, to bring this idea to life. We created a whole world. There are characters: a bear, and an owl. So go to fivelightbulbs.com if you want to see those illustrations by our friend Matt, but I’ll walk through them. 

So, the Five Lightbulbs. 

Lightbulb 1 represents your customer’s status quo. This is a place they don’t want to be anymore, where they’re having a problem. 

Lightbulb 2 represents other things they’ve tried before. So, other solutions, such as those of your competitors, might even be doing nothing. 

Lightbulb 3 represents your unique approach. And so this is the most interesting one. This isn’t your product, but it’s your approach. And we found that if you make a strong argument for your approach, you more easily sell your product, which is represented by Lightbulb four.

Lightbulb 4 is your product, or actually, what we call it is your offer because it includes your product, but it’s also everything that goes along with that, like any bonuses or guarantees, pricing terms, and things like that. So the customer has success with your offer, hopefully. 

They achieve the benefits of that, which is represented by Lightbulb 5, which is the customer’s new life. So that’s where they have a win from your product, are happy, refer other people and keep buying from you. 

So, those are the Five Lightbulbs.

Right. So, let’s go through an example. If you want to use Tiago as an example or somebody else, it doesn’t matter, but how do you apply? How does, in this case, the example that you’re going to give? How does this transform their marketing?

So it’s really a language, and it’s been really cool to see, especially companies and teams like marketing agencies adopt this because we hear things like, “Oh, man, that’s a great Lightbulb 1 headline,” or “we need a Lightbulb 3 emails.” That wasn’t my intention when I used this language, but I started to hear that it was actually Ryan Deiss, our mutual friend. I was working with him and his team, and they were saying that his head of growth was like, “Ryan, we need a Lightbulb 3 email.” I was like, “Oh, that makes a lot of sense,” especially when you have a team. It really streamlines the organization. Now, we have these people speaking this language, and you can test a Lightbulb 1 headline versus a Lightbulb 3 headline. So, a Lightbulb 1 headline for Tiago will be something around the problem. 

So, one of the first things I did with him was rewrite the headline for his sales page. At first, it was just the name of his course, which was Building A Second Brain. I might not get this exactly right, but are you consuming tons of information and feeling like it’s not leading to anything valuable in your life?

I’m sure that’s not relatable to anybody listening. 

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I really struck a nerve. And people were like, “Oh, yeah,” like, I’m listening to all these podcasts, like Stephan’s, but am I getting the results from it? You know, investing a lot of time in this. So that’s it for him. We typically find that you have to test the Lightbulbs, and what we typically find is that there’s one Lightbulb for you that will just resonate more than all the other ones. 

For Tiago, it happened to be that Lightbulb 1. So once we saw that, we doubled down on that and started putting out a ton of Lightbulb 1 content, and people really felt seen and heard, and that made them much more open to hearing the rest of his Lightbulbs, including his course offering.

Right. So, where does Tiago incorporate other Lightbulbs besides Lightbulb 1 into its marketing?

All throughout his marketing material. Yeah. So what we do and what he’s done is create what we call a messaging map. So, what we do for clients is create a messaging map that contains your core messaging. So, I distinguish that from copywriting? There’s a distinction between messaging and copywriting. Core messaging is more like a brand manual. But instead of your visual identity, like logos and fonts and everything, it’s that core persuasive language you need, including all the beliefs that are needed.

Core messaging is more like a brand manual.

Once we have that, we can distribute it downstream to all these marketing assets, like your emails, sales pages, etc. So, Tiago and his team are incorporating these different light bulbs into all those marketing assets. And again, it takes testing. So, I recommend experimenting with different Lightbulbs. And if you do that, you’re going to fill in a lot of gaps that you have, but also find some winners for you as well that you can really double down on.

All right, so let’s take Lightbulb 3 as a different Lightbulb. So it’s quite clear that Tiago, from what you’re saying, favors the Lightbulb 1 in terms of marketing. So he wants to really get the customer status quo dialed in. The visitor, the prospect, kind of feeling the pain of, this is where I’m at. Dig in, really turn the screw, or whatever the analogy is, but you can’t just operate off of one Lightbulb alone. So there’s going to be, let’s say, Lightbulb 3. The approach, maybe he has on his website, case studies or some before and afters, whatever, which covers Lightbulb 1, but also covers Lightbulb 3 and even probably Lightbulb 5, the new and improved life that the customer, the reader of the book, or the online course taker has after implementing. So what would be an example of either, say, Lightbulb 3 or Lightbulb 5 being applied to Tiago’s IP?

So, Lightbulb 3 would be his method of note-taking. It’s interesting because this stuff is not a snapshot. In time, the market evolves. Although it was Lightbulb 1 for him when we first started working together a few years ago, that’s evolved. The market has evolved. He was very early on the second brain scene, but now he has a lot of competitors and other people talking about note-taking. You have all these tools now, like Obsidian, Roam and Apple Notes, Notion and all these things.

I studied these old copywriters, as you know, and one of my favorites is Eugene Schwartz. He talked about this in his book Breakthrough Advertising, where he noticed that when the market becomes more saturated, like Tiagos market is becoming, the messaging has to shift, and it has to shift from the promise to how the promise is achieved. Another way of saying that in Five Lightbulb terms is a shift from Lightbulb 5 or it could be a Lightbulb 1, too. They’re kind of two sides of the same coin, right? Like moving away from pain towards pleasure. So, the messaging needs to shift from Lightbulb 5 to how the promise is achieved, which is Lightbulb 3 . So now, because Tiago has all these competitors out there, he can’t just make this promise of, “Hey, make more from all these podcasts that you listen to.”

He has to say, “No, use the second brain method in order to do it.” So his Lightbulb 3 headlines are going to be around his methodology. And you see this with what he’s doing. His second book has a Lightbulb 3 on the COVID. His second book is called The Para Method. It’s a way of organizing your folders. Just that word method. That’s a  Lightbulb 3-word method, blueprint, formula, whatever. So that’s where he has to, by necessity, put a lot of his messaging effort into.

Got it. By the way, speaking of headlines, you mentioned Eugene Schwartz, who was amazing. The only job of a headline, according to Eugene Schwartz, was to get the reader to keep reading. That simplifies your job as a copywriter or an advertiser when writing ad copy. Just get them to keep reading. Don’t get them off track or bored or otherwise disinterested. So, yeah, I love that.

What you said about Eugene Schwartz’s advice, the headline is to get them to read. The goal of the headline is to get them to read the next line, and then the goal of that line is to get them to read the next line and the next line and the next line, which goes back to what we were saying about why long-form content is so effective. Because if you get them to read all those lines, then you’re in a very good position to make the sale.

Yeah, they are invested by that point. Now, you mentioned Ryan Deiss earlier, and he was a guest on this podcast. Brilliant guy. So, l would love to hear some examples of Ryan Deiss and digital marketers applying the Five Lightbulbs; your methodology, ideas and systems in their marketing because they’re really, really switched on. Tiago is a great example, too. I think it’ll be an interesting kind of juxtaposition to share some examples of Ryan and his team using your method.

The only job of a headline is to get the reader to keep reading. – Eugene Schwartz

Ryan’s awesome. I’ve gotten to know him pretty well over the past few years. He’s been a great mentor, and we actually connected around when I was developing the Five Lightbulbs, so he helped inform that framework, and I’m very grateful for that. Then, used it himself. We used it more on the scalable side of things than the digital marketer side of things, although they’re using it there as well. So Scalable, his newer brand, and sort of the people who have graduated from digital marketing and like, now the marketing is working, and now they have so many customers that they need to get the operations in place, they need to scale their business. 

So, we use the Five Lightbulbs for that business because there’s a lot of education that needs to go on for these business owners who are looking to scale their business largely around this idea of getting out of your business and not just working on it. 

I like how Ryan pushed this by floating above your business, and he’s a great example of this. I think he’s scaling, like, six different businesses right now and still has time for a life and his family and all that. So there’s a lot of education that needs to go along with that. We use the Five Lightbulbs to produce that education-based marketing.

Awesome. So I know back in the day when you were pretty early on in developing this framework, you and I had a call, and you walked me through the application of the Five Llightbulbs in my business. Do you remember that?

Oh, yeah. 

So what pops for you? What do you recall about that process, and how did you apply it to me and my marketing?

Yeah, well, some of the details have vanished from my mind by now, but I do remember one thing that you obviously have going for you, which is your experience doing this. I remember that that was a big thing that we were leveraging. You can look back, and this is a key thing when you have experience in your field, you can look back and connect those dots for people and say, “Okay, well, this is what I tried before, and this is what I did.” You’re kind of like a mad scientist. I would say stuff in your workshop, figuring things out, experimenting, and that stuff is valuable. You know, people say that your customers and prospects don’t want to know how the sausage is made. But I just don’t think that’s true. And I think that’s pretty self-evident because Lightbulb 3 describes how the sausage is made. Right.

Like I was saying with Tiago, regarding his approach to note-taking, he needs to emphasize that because he can’t just make the same promise as everyone else. It’s like, why do we have so many winning ad creatives with Lightbulb 3 on them? Or, you know, as Eugene Schwartz would call it, a unique mechanism. Same thing for you. So I remember going through the way that the criteria by which people buy SEO and having essentially a checklist with you, it’s like, “look for this, look for this, look for this for you.” We were coaching people on being a better buyer of SEO and exposing that process. People are going to say,” Oh, well, there’s this mad scientist. There’s a method to his madness. I’m going with him.”

Right? Yeah, it’s awesome stuff. So we met back in, I think, 2018 or something like that. Does that sound about right?

17 or 18, something like that, yeah,

Yeah. And you were at least at the time involved in the M.E.T.A.L. Mastermind. I don’t remember exactly how we met if it was one of the M.E.T.A.L. members introducing us to each other. Do you remember?

I think it was through M.E.T.A.L. I remember you speaking at one of the events, and I think that was it. I think I came up and spoke to you after.

Awesome. So, what kind of masterminds are you active in these days, if any? Are you still in M.E.T.A.L.? Are you still active there, or what are you?

I left LA. I stayed in Southern California. I liked the weather.  LA was a little bit crazy for me. So I’m down in San Diego now. So there’s still a good marketing scene down here. So I go to meetups around here. I know it’s not really known for that startup scene, but there’s a cool startup scene that’s growing in San Diego. 

Yeah, I still go to marketing events from time to time. Ryan Deiss has his marketing mastermind. That’s the main one that I’m in.

When you have experience in your field, you can look back and connect those dots with people.

Okay, so you’re in Scalable, then?

I’m in the M3 Mastermind. The marketers’ mastermind.

So what’s the difference between Scalable? Like, he has the War Room Mastermind. Is that still going or has that been replaced?

No, they don’t have that anymore. So they have M3. It’s a lot of marketing agencies and independent marketers like me. I work with marketing agencies, and then Scalable is more business owners looking to scale.

Got it. Okay. What’s the best thing that you’ve gotten out of being in Ryan’s M3 Mastermind?

Oh, man. Just so many different perspectives. Like people who are just experts in topics that I am not an expert in and people who have just been. There are so many opinions online and especially from people; I think, especially now in the age of AI, there’s so much curation, right? It’s so easy to crank out content, but you don’t really know what the experience is of these people if they’ve actually done it before. So I really recommend everyone get in a room where you are not the smartest person to repeat that old adage. And I am far from the smartest person in that room, especially in these areas where I don’t have as much experience. So that’s been a huge benefit of being in that mastermind.

Cool. So I’ve been doing this podcast for eight years, and I’m just curious to hear what pops up for you as far as ideas to uplevel the podcast from a marketing and reach perspective, using the Five Lightbulbs and using your principles in your book, Simple Marketing For Smart People. So what pops for you?

Yeah, that’s a fun question. Well, one of the things we teach in the book is identifying people’s existing beliefs. So one thing that you might do is think about it. Because you’ve been doing it for a little while now, you probably have this warm audience of people who are pretty much on the same page as you and know what you know or at least I believe in what you believe in. You don’t need to do as much convincing. You might try going to a different market. It might be a certain vertical, perhaps, where they don’t quite have those beliefs and come out with some education-based marketing material that can instill those beliefs and sort of like, you know, you pull them into your inner circle and that could be a cool exercise and also just get you a whole lot more people and people that you hadn’t had before.

Okay, so let’s play this out a little bit. So, one of my clients is a law firm in Indianapolis, Yosha Law Firm. It’s Jay Abraham‘s cousin, and we’ve been knocking it out of the park for him and his firm. We have a case study episode on this podcast, Brandon Yosha episode. We have a case study published on both Netconcepts.com and on my Stephanspencer.com personal site. 

So, let’s say that I’m trying to reach more law firms through this podcast and my marketing in general. I’m not saying that I am. I’m just being hypothetical here. We could utilize that episode and the accompanying case study as the Trojan horse or as the starting point for their interest in the marketing speak podcast and netconcepts as an agency. So what would be an existing belief that they have that we want to shift to one of my beliefs and my tribe’s beliefs.

Okay, so these are for. These are law firms that you help?

Yeah, like I said, I have that one example law firm that we’re crushing for them. Let’s say I want to have more law firms as clients, but that’s not a typical market for me. I don’t have a bunch of law firm owners listening to this show. So.

So what are one or two big myths that these law firms have around marketing or believe around marketing?

Get in a room where you are not the smartest person to repeat that old adage.

Maybe it’s pay-to-play. Maybe you have to play dirty tricks in order to beat out your competitors, especially in the personal injury space. Like, there’s so much sketchy stuff happening in terms of the way that they’re link-building and other black hat tactics. Maybe they think they have to play those dirty tricks as well in order to compete.

Okay, got it. So, what are some of these dirty tricks? So, black hat tactics? Link building?.

So, there are different black hat tactics for SEO, such as buying links and doing essentially doorway pages or spammy keyword repetitious type pages. You’re trying to target a geographical area with a particular service or a particular type of issue, let’s say, slip and fall. And so it’s your area or a suburb of your area, and then slip and fall accidents and all these different permutations, and you create all these spammy pages that just kind of talk about that in a repetitious way. Just keyword stuffing. That’s another black hat tactic.

So what’s the play? Devil’s advocate? What if I’m like, “Okay, well, what’s the problem with that approach from a lawyer?”

Google will penalize you. Google will obliterate you from the search results.

And do they not realize that?

I think they would say that, “Well, I gotta play a little dirty and hopefully not get caught in order to compete; otherwise, I’m just going to be invisible in Google.”

Got it. Okay. I would go back even a step further. There probably are some people at that level of awareness. I would go back further, and it will be hard for you because you have the curse of knowledge and know SEO so well. But think about it: do they even know what SEO is? If I were to say SEO, you might ask yourself how many law firms would even know what that stands for? They might think about it: “Oh, well, people can search for me on Google.” That might be the extent of their knowledge of SEO. So, if you start talking SEO and backlinks, I imagine a very small percentage of lawyers know what a backlink is.

They’re probably the more sophisticated ones. So your larger potential, the larger market, and the extent of their SEO knowledge are probably, “Oh, yeah, people can search for me on Google.” So you need to dumb it down to that level and probably talk about the other ways that they’re getting clients. This is their light bulb, too, right? Like referrals, maybe they know pay-per-click buses, billboards, and benches. Yeah, things like that. I would talk at that level and lead with that kind of content before ever even getting into SEO.

So it’ll be an example of that. Billboards are actually going to kill your marketing. I don’t know. Please be kind of controversial or counterintuitive.

One way you can do it, too, is to even flip it around. You might even say how to crush it with billboards. You want to get your foot in the door, right? It might mean holding back a little bit and leading with something else. So, you might do something like, here’s how people are crushing it with billboards. And you’re like, “Okay, because they were.” If they think that billboards are it, you don’t want to try to change that belief right away. You want to play judo and go with the flow, you know? So you’re like, “Well, here’s how to crush it with billboards.”

Now you know how to crush it with billboards. But we found that there’s another way to get clients that actually gives you 10x the ROI that billboards give you. Do you want to hear about it?

Nice. 

And that might be the way that you then lead into SEO.

Yeah. Another alternative would be billboards plus Google, the one-two punch. Here’s how to maximize the opportunity.

Yes, exactly. You buy a lot of goodwill that way, too. 

And then you’re not people who are already spending a lot of money with billboards, like Morgan & Morgan, which you see everywhere, pretty much every freeway in America that you drive down. You see a Morgan & Morgan billboard. So you could target those people who are clearly already spending a lot of money on billboards with this pitch. I like it.

It isn’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – Mark Twain

That’s a cool idea. Let me know if you go with it.

Okay. Well, I love this conversation. I don’t know. We’re running out of time here. It’s so practical to apply what you’re talking about in just the example we went through in the last few minutes. So, what would be a good next step for our listeners? Of course, they should buy your book, but in terms of applying some of the principles they learned in this episode today, what would be an example of something that they can do almost immediately? Maybe shut off this episode as soon as it’s finished? Grab a pen and paper or whip up something in Google Docs. What would they do next?

Going back to this idea of always, I’m always trying to find the biggest needle mover, the 80-20, the highest ROI thing, whatever you want to call it; I have found that that really comes from shining a light on your blind spots. When it comes to marketing, there’s no bigger blind spot than these assumptions that we have and things that we think our prospects know or believe but just aren’t true. My answer to that question then becomes, how can we remedy that? So, I would encourage your listeners to ask that question. I just asked you what one of the biggest myths they believe is. That’s a good place to start. 

Just speak to people in your market, and not so much speak, but listen. And you might say, “Hey, just walk me through the last time you purchased XYZ. Walk me through what that process looked like and your thought process, and they’re going to say all sorts of things.” You have to bite your tongue because you’re like, “That’s such a bad idea. Oh, you believe that? Oh, you didn’t do that, did you?” But then it’s a humbling experience because then you realize that you need to enter that conversation at that level before ever getting to the thing you want to talk about.

So, the biggest takeaway I can give people is to try to shine a light on those blind spots.

I love that. The idea of exposing those myths reminds me of a wonderful Mark Twain quote. It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

Yeah, that’s a good one, isn’t it?

Yes, it is. Great way to end this episode. So if our listeners, our viewers, are interested in learning more from you, they should go to Amazon and buy your book, obviously, which is hopefully, by the time this episode airs already; if not, pre-order it, and it’ll be out within a week or so. June 7: Simple Marketing For Smart People. What else can they do to learn from you? Do you have an online course? Do you offer one-on-one coaching and consulting or group coaching? How else can they give you money?

Yeah, so definitely check out the book. Check out the Five Lightbulbs Framework. Hop on my newsletter. I send out a weekly newsletter called Billy’s Monday Lightbulb, where I try to shine a light on these blind spots and give you these aha moments. Yeah, I do limited consulting these days. The big thing we’re doing is helping organizations, marketing teams, and agencies install the five light bulbs into their operations.

If that’s something that’s of interest, please reach out.

Yep. And your website, billybroas.com, is for that?

Yes.

Okay. Then, for the Five Lightbulbs, is it fivelightbulbs.com?

Yes.

All right. Awesome. Billy, it was a pleasure. You’re a scholar and a gentleman. Thank you for coming to the show. Listeners, please implement something that you’ve learned from this episode today. This is not passive edutainment. This is meant for you to take action and make the world better. 

We’ll catch you in the next episode. I’m your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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Your Checklist of Actions to Take

Identify any assumptions about my product, service, or what the customer already knows. Ask myself, “What does my customer need to believe in order to buy?”

Make a list of the biggest myths and assumptions my prospects have. Listen carefully during sales calls or customer interactions for statements that reveal misconceptions about my offering.

Build messaging maps with core persuasive language and create templates and frameworks for each message type.

Experiment with light bulb focus for each asset. For lead magnets, highlight the prospect’s problem. For webinars, demonstrate unique solutions and mechanisms. For sales pages, showcase the full offering details and success stories.

Demonstrate each required belief using case studies, data, and explanations. Include proof sources and evidence that relate to their experience.

Speak my prospect’s language before teaching them my expertise. Use their words and questions when first engaging to meet them where they are.

Focus on establishing the required beliefs before making my offer. Use light assets focused on each gap or need before selling.

Get comfortable with long-form, educational marketing content. Use visual examples, metaphors, and relatable scenarios.

Continuously test my messaging to find the “light bulb” that resonates most. Based on visitor feedback, keep finding and filling blind spots.

Create simple yet powerful marketing messages with Billy Broas at billybroas.com and subscribe to his newsletter, Billy’s Monday Lightbulb.

About Billy Broas

Billy Broas helps businesses create simple yet powerful marketing messages. He has been the brains behind the marketing of top entrepreneurs. Billy is the creator of the popular Five Lightbulbs® messaging framework and the author of the book, Simple Marketing for Smart People.