How Do You Spot a Fake Marketing Guru?

What's wrong with most marketing courses?

Most of the courses being sold out there are, in my honest opinion, taking the piss. Loads of our clients at s.media are people who run courses, and I question whether the content in those courses is actually worth the money. We're a YouTube ads agency, we work with influencers and brands, and I remember back in the Facebook era when people started promoting Facebook courses, there were always people running their own course with loads of modules and in-depth thought, who had frankly never actually worked for anybody.

If you're advertising a course and you're that good at getting results, why aren't you just running client accounts and too busy to sell a course at all? I've seen courses sold for hundreds of dollars that turn out to be a couple of videos and a PowerPoint presentation, with a massive upsell on the back end for one-to-one training. I've been in a course that cost ten thousand dollars about YouTube ads that missed many of the basics, the kind of things I'd teach someone working for me. I could take a Google Ads professional and teach them YouTube ads properly in a couple of weeks, and there are fundamental errors in a lot of these courses.

Why do corporates end up needing a proper course rather than just a retainer?

Because most retainer relationships teach a client just enough to think they've learned it all, when what they actually need is a structured course with somebody holding their hand through it. At s.media we've found that we'll often take a client on for three or four months, and they'll think they've learned everything there is to know, even though they're really just picking our brains, which is fine, that's what the retainer is for.

If a business wants to scale properly and put in decent foundations, it needs a course and somebody to guide it through that. We typically see corporates work with us for three or four months, and then management looks at the retainer and thinks that money could pay a couple of members of staff instead, so they go and hire someone who understands Google Ads. Having done over 20 years in Google Ads, I can tell you I'm still learning on a daily basis. The question is whether the people in your business are still learning too, whether they're being trained properly, and whether they have a mentor.

Why don't the existing courses actually help people scale?

Because they sell you something for several thousand pounds and then leave you to work through it alone, without ever really holding your hand or giving you real value. Some run mastermind groups where they bring people in to ask questions, but I see the same questions asked over and over, week in, week out: how do I scale my campaign, why isn't this working. People get frustrated because they're not getting any real skill.

I'm the one at the top of our business, and I'm the one who does the majority of the training in our course and the majority of the calls with clients, because I'm the one with the knowledge. If I've been in this business for 20 years and I'm still learning, I don't believe someone who's done a year in Google Ads and run some budget through YouTube ads has that same depth. I've spent millions, tens of millions, on behalf of clients and I'm still learning.

What's wrong with the advice coming from inside Google itself?

I don't think even Google fully understands YouTube ads at the level clients need, because most of the people who work there are salespeople, not practitioners. I had a call with our Google account manager yesterday and told him to stop calling me, because what he's doing is fundamentally just sales, trying to talk me through strategies designed to open a client's wallet. He's not at the front line dealing with a business's advertising on a daily basis, and doesn't understand that business's objectives or management.

Ninety nine percent of the people at Google are reading off a script. You can't really blame them, they haven't got 15 or 20 years of experience, and most of them haven't seen the ins and outs of specific industries. They're trying to apply a templated system to advertising across the board, and it fundamentally doesn't work. I can sit with somebody for an hour or two on their keywords and phrases and completely change their outlook on Google Ads.

What am I actually offering instead?

I'm putting together what I believe is the world's best YouTube ads course, dealing with structure, how to scale, individual keyword niches, and full of downloadable resources. It's designed so a corporate marketing department can buy one copy and let the whole team watch and learn, with calls available if they get stuck.

I had a client yesterday spending 20 to 25 cents per click in the US, and I can get his cost per click, or his cost per view, down under 5 cents just by using a manual bidding strategy and focusing on the right keywords. It's not complicated, but it opens people's eyes to how simple some of these changes are. If you search for YouTube ads courses you'll get the usual names trying to sell a five or ten thousand dollar course. What I'm trying to do is get people properly educated so they understand what to change, rather than just paying for access without the understanding behind it.

How can you get involved?

I'm looking for 10 beta testers before I launch the course properly. As I'm recording this, it's Friday the 18th of March 2022, and it's actually my wife's birthday, which is why I've decided to make this video now. I'll give those 10 people a 50 percent discount, and if you take the course and don't feel it's the world's best, I'll give you a refund. It's broken down into over 140 videos in bite sized, usable chunks, rather than the great big 40 minute or hour long lessons that even I would fall asleep in.

I'd rather offer a done for you service alongside the course, so that if you ever step away from working with us, you can take what you've learned with you. We often find clients work with us for three to six months, decide to bring things in-house, and then still come back with more questions about profiling an audience, keyword choices, topics, apps and placements. If you're one of the 10 people I'm looking for between now and next Friday the 25th of March, get in touch, and please don't buy courses that fundamentally aren't fit for purpose.