How Long Form Content Turns Cold Leads Into Buyers Who Feel Safe Enough to Purchase

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I’m going to be talking to you about a concept called consumption is key.

There’s a big problem right now that a majority of businesses selling into sophisticated markets are facing. Consumers are having a hard time pulling the trigger on simple conversion mechanisms.

VSL call funnels are fantastic but if you’re not using strategies like the hammer them strategy as an example to dramatically amplify the quantity of content and the amount of time that that user that just booked a call is consuming prior to the call, same thing with webinars.

Although webinars in themselves are huge 90 minute to sometimes upwards to 3 hours framing tactics where you’re getting a lot of consumption from the user, you can dramatically increase the conversion rate of a webinar if you get the consumption rate pre-webinar to be excessively higher.

After you’re running a Hydra lead form campaign on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok as examples where you’re getting somebody to fill out a basic lead form, an instant form depending on the platform and the vocabulary, you then having a high probability to convert that lead in a short sales cycle time frame again really comes down to the consumption rate of those individuals that you are trying to sell to.

We’ve seen it again and again and again mainly in highly sophisticated markets where the users have been overly sold to.

They’ve already bought stuff. They’ve been let down by the people they have bought stuff from and haven’t gotten the results. So now they’re jaded and skeptical.

They’re in these like states where they just get offered stuff that could potentially solve this problem so often that their trust is just in the floor. It’s so low that they don’t really have a probability to convert until you get them into the mental state of this is my guy.

Whether I can see the inside of the product, whether I’ve gotten the results or not, their content’s been so good and talked directly to my problems and already helped me that this is my guy. I’m happy to give this person money because I feel confident enough based on the content, the amount of content I consumed that I’m going to get what I need out of this offer.

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All we talk about around here is hitting million dollar months. It’s what every piece of content is dedicated to. We’ve helped 40 different businesses and growing hit million dollar months over the last decade. We take all the lessons from those businesses, hand them down to you.

Why Sophisticated Markets Need More Than Just Short Form Content to Convert Cold Traffic

I’m talking to a lot of the sales teams that we work with, internal sales teams, sales agencies. The pattern is simple, evident, prevalent and just common at this point.

When you’re selling into highly sophisticated markets there has to be a change in strategy.

It’s not even necessarily a change in the conversion mechanism. Like it’s not like you have to change from a call funnel to a webinar to a Hydra to a DM strategy. Sure conversion mechanisms can definitely make a difference.

But what we found again and again and again is the salespeople consistently saying look, when people show up watching content they’re like layup deals. They have a much higher probability to convert. They’re easier to close.

When I first started hearing this a few years ago I don’t know, I kind of thought it was an issue with the salesperson. I thought oh well these salespeople aren’t good and that’s why they’re not closing the other leads is because they’re just awful at sales.

That didn’t work for me. I tried to attack it from that angle and solve the problem that way. I’ve talked about this around here before, it just didn’t work when I approached the problem from that perspective.

What I had to do is I had to shift the perspective to okay if it was my fault and I could do something about it what would I do to try to solve the problem to turn all salespeople into cashiers?

That’s where a little over a year ago I originated that hammer them strategy which we’ve talked about on the channel many times over. We have several pieces of content going through it, how it works, pro tips about it, little tactics associated with it, caveats, nuances, all that fun stuff.

The hammer them started to solve the problem. The hammer them started to achieve the effectiveness and get the result that we were after which was we saw an uptick, a pretty dramatic uptick in the quantity of salespeople that would give profoundly more positive feedback on lead quality on the people that they were talking to coming through like better framed, more warmed up.

We essentially were trying to replicate the organic sales process via paid ads with the hammer them strategy.

We mainly did the hammer them strategy with short form content, a lot of like sub 90 second real optimized videos. All vertical, 30 to 50 pieces of these content.

The effectiveness of the hammer them is not to be undermined. I just wanted to increase its effectiveness that much more.

Why It Takes Six Long Form Videos to Make Someone Feel Safe Enough to Buy Your Offer

So what I did is I modified it slightly. I’ve recently been testing adding in very long form content.

So I had a mastermind for the Inner Circle which we do every quarter and I had everybody in the room stand up if they had bought something from me because of YouTube. About half the room stands up.

I do a simple exercise. I say okay guys we’re going to do a simple thing here. I’m going to just go one content piece at a time. As soon as you’ve crossed the threshold sit down.

So if you’ve only watched one piece to convert into one of my offers and officially give me money and say this is my guy I’m buying from him, sit down.

Like literally one person out of half the room sits down.

I was like all right two pieces, same concept. You watch two pieces, you said this is my guy, again you then bought, sit down if that’s you. Two people sit down.

So now we got three people out of like 60 that have sat down.

We get all the way up to about six before about half of those people that were standing sit down.

So the lesson was really simple. On average in this particular case it took six pieces of content. These were long form, not like short pieces.

I asked them too. I was like look guys, my average consumption on YouTube is around like 5 to 8 minutes as an example. Are you guys watching for that amount of time or did you like binge these full pieces?

Every one of these buyers in the room was very consistent with this answer. They said no, no, I like binged your content. When I’m consuming I watch like six pieces. I watched the six pieces in full.

They all gave similar feedback. We allowed them to talk one at a time and they all said very similar things.

Simply put, I watched all the pieces. You spoke directly to my problems. You literally helped make me money and get me results prior to me even buying.

I couldn’t believe that you were putting this level of game out for free. It just felt like you were the first person ever that came along and actually talked to me at a high level and gave me like real things that I could do.

I love your way of communicating. Essentially what they kept saying is look, I got to know you before buying. I like your teaching and the style of what you’re communicating about. You educated me, it helped me get results before I even gave you money.

Ultimately it just made me feel comfortable enough to make a transaction with you. They felt safe.

Here’s the thing. Short form is great for answers and for framing. That’s what I found.

Long form, and this might be a weird word to use here so I’m going to make sure you guys understand it, is great for safety in decision making. Research from Edelman Trust Barometer confirms that consumers are 48% more likely to trust brands that regularly publish long-form content, demonstrating that depth and transparency build real-world credibility beyond simple awareness. 

Additionally, long-form content achieves better search rankings and attracts more backlinks due to its comprehensive topic coverage, making it essential for both trust-building and discoverability.

That’s the key here. Safety in decision making.

There’s a lot of these salespeople that we spoke with and they would say look, it’s not that the leads aren’t qualified. Like if anything the leads are qualified.

With the hammer them strategy like they do come through aware, they just don’t come through educated enough yet.

So what ends up happening on the sales calls is they end up having to essentially take the sales conversations and turn it into like an education time.

I’m like how long are these calls happening on average? Average salesperson saying things like oh I mean some of these calls are like 30 minutes to upwards of an hour long. 

Research from the 2024 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report shows that 73% of decision-makers now say an organization’s thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing capabilities than traditional marketing materials. 

This demonstrates why educational long-form content dramatically reduces the need for extended sales education calls—buyers arrive already trusting the expertise demonstrated through the content.

Again when they don’t show up already educated that call then turns into an education call.

That’s the key that I want you to understand that I’m really trying to emphasize. If you walk away with anything from this content that’s it right there.

If the education and the framing is not done before the call happens or before the webinar happens or before whatever it is that the conversion mechanism is happens, that becomes the education window instead of the sales window.

Why Businesses Get Forced Into Running Webinars When Call Funnels Stop Working Without Content

A lot of businesses like they kind of are forced to use webinars. They’re forced to use challenge funnels. They’re forced to do these things that in all honesty they don’t really want to do.

Here’s the issue. We work with busy rich people for a living. We know their habits in and out. We know their preferences in and out. We know what they want to do and what they don’t want to do.

What they don’t want to do is be like super involved in the business doing a high frequency of live events. They want to be hands off enjoying their life, running their businesses, figuring out ways to make more money and maximize revenue.

What they don’t want to do as crazy as it sounds is just again be on live all day long multiple times a week doing like all day long challenge funnels or multi-hour challenge funnels or once a week or twice a week webinars.

There’s willingness to do it if they literally fail with everything else and they have to do it. But again that’s not the preference of these people.

The preference is I would love to get a call funnel to work. I would love to get something that’s like a simpler conversion mechanism to work that doesn’t involve me having to go live several times within a month for hours on end at a time.

So again from that perspective you could to be fair instead of creating like a sophisticated content marketing strategy where you leverage like propaganda campaigns and framing content and like good long form content that’s like genuinely valuable, if you don’t want to commit to that or you don’t have that, you’re going to be forced into these again preferences that you might not have.

Having to do webinars and challenges funnels and these long conversion mechanisms where the education happens over 90 minutes or 3 hours at a time.

I want to be extremely clear. I love when my clients commit to that. Those work really well. We are huge fans of that. Most of our clients they are willing to do that kind of stuff especially the ones that get upwards of a million plus a month.

They’re more than happy to do those things but again they just don’t prefer to do it. At the same time they’re doing that on the back end what they’re trying to do is get the other funnels that aren’t as time intensive on them to work.

So look rather than making this content into something where I’m going to sit here and tell you like yeah dude you need to be doing webinars, you need to be doing challenges, you should be to be clear, but regardless let’s talk about this call funnel and let’s try to get this call funnel to work for you.

How the Venus Fly Trap Two Point Zero Uses Long Form Content Sequences Before Direct Response Ads

Let me give you some really pro tips that we’re finding and testing actively literally right now that we’re seeing great results with across our client base.

I’m going to relate it to long form content consumption and how we strategically work it in.

First things first, in my Inner Circle right now I just released an ad strategy called the Venus Fly Trap 2.0. The Venus Fly Trap 2.0 is a redone version of my original content ad strategy.

As a matter of fact I have an entire piece on this for free doing a really good job explaining what the Venus Fly Trap is, how it works, when it’s effective to use and what the original version of the strategy is.

The Venus Fly Trap 2.0 I have modified it rather significantly but I kept the same name because I did the same thing with a three step content sequence prior to showing my direct response ads.

With that three step content sequence rather than using short form I picked content strategically that I would sequence. Rather than using a single piece we would pick upwards of five to sometimes even 10 pieces per step.

Target a specific threshold for the person to consume prior to unlocking the second, third and then the fourth step which would be direct response.

We’ve seen a very, very effective difference in results so far from doing this.

Now I’m not going to sit here and talk about this in full detail right now because this is a strategy that in real time we’re using on our clients and we’re tweaking and we’re testing.

On top of that I’ve rolled it out to my Inner Circle members who always get the first dibs on whatever it is that I’m talking about and testing. They help me tweak and test it and fine tune it a little bit.

Then from there I roll it out to my Master Internet Marketing students. Then after that I generally will talk openly about it in more surface level ways to be fair on platforms like this.

Simply put to still put you on some tremendous game here, here’s some of the initial findings.

When we get the consumption rate of long form highly valuable content to happen in a threshold of about an hour, that’s really all it takes is about 1 hour worth of content, and when we push people to consume prior to the conversations happening we get a dramatically higher conversion rate as a result of that set of thinking. 

Research confirms that businesses with content marketing strategies have nearly 6 times higher conversion rates than those without, and 58% of consumers say they trust brands more when content is educational rather than promotional. This validates why strategic content consumption before sales calls dramatically increases close rates—the education happens through content, not during the call.

Now here’s the issue. There’ll always be people that will not want to consume that content and will prefer to leverage your salespeople for an education. That’s what they’re going to do. There’s always going to be a percentage of people.

What I’m talking about here does not accomplish getting 100% of people to come into a call and treat it like a sales call like they should.

You’re still going to always have a percentage of people. Ideally it becomes a small minority. Ideally you get it to about sub 25% of people come onto a sales conversation and say hey I have all these questions and they treat it again like an education framing call rather than a sales conversation.

Your salespeople are still going to have to be equipped to know how to sell to that specific demographic. But again let me put you on some game.

How to Structure Short Form and Long Form Content Before and After Sales Calls to Increase Conversions

First of all you can run a few different strategies here. We’ve been testing all of these.

If we do start off with just the standard direct response ads and that’s where it all begins is with the direct response and we just run it straight to whatever our conversion mechanism is. You could have it be a call funnel, you could have it be whatever. In this example we are going to have it be a call funnel but again this could be like a webinar, this could be DM strategies, this could really be anything.

The person takes the action, in this case book a call. We’ve talked about this before where in this specific window what we’re going to make sure that we do here is we are going to add a step where we have this supplement campaign.

This is like the framing window. This is where the education should happen.

If we do treat it like that, again this is our like framing education window. This specific step is where we’re injecting the short form hammer them strategy because again still has a ton of effectiveness and is doing an incredible job at getting the outcomes that we wanted to.

So again we have the short form hammer them but we also have the long form hammer them.

With the long form hammer them this is a separate campaign. I want to make that clear. So this short form and this long form campaign are in separate campaigns but they’re both remarketing towards that exact same audience of people who booked a call.

That’s the audience type for that specific step.

Depending on the scale that you’re operating at, we’ve talked about this before in the other hammer them content, you’re going to have to make sure that you increase the size of the audience to have at least 100 people that are able to get targeted there.

If you don’t have at least 100 people every 72 hours that are coming through your call funnels because you’re just not at that scale yet, add in people who are within like a month as an example of your sales process that haven’t bought yet.

Juice it up to at least 100 people is the moral of the story. But make sure you pick audiences that are high quality and deserve to get remarketed by this content where their probability of converting as a result of that consumption of that content increases as a result of getting hit by that content.

Then again after that we then obviously have the call and ideally the close.

Now here’s my point with the short form content. It makes people aware. It answers their questions but this is the difference.

This is one specific quote I actually wrote it down so you guys could hear it. This is one of my buddies who runs this sales organization and he says what kills the sale is them coming to the call for education.

So the short form is intended with the hammer them to answer a ton of their questions but they’re like buying questions. That’s the key difference.

The long form content is not like just in depth questions about your program. The long form content, remember what I talked about, it’s intended to create safety in decision making. That’s what you’re trying to do.

What Makes Long Form Content Create Safety in Decision Making Instead of Just Answering Questions

As an example of this literally use my channel, go look at my content because my content creates revenue.

Yeah they get 1 to 4,000 views at the time I’m writing this. At this exact moment I’m sub 10,000 subscribers.

But here’s the thing. All these pieces you see are dramatically like very high impact creating a lot of positive influence on the mindset of buyers coming through our sales cycles.

People are showing up saying again like I watched on average six of your long form pieces before I felt safe enough to make the decision to come and buy whatever this high ticket thing is that you’re selling.

That’s what I want you to understand. All my content is not like some framing about my products. They’re all just highly valuable.

I’m legitimately trying to make you money and help you out. Put you on game and like put you into a better position where you can go out there and get results from consuming my content.

I’m trying in real time to essentially bribe you with so much unbelievable value. Even though I’m holding back to be fair a tremendous amount of what I could tell you, I’m still trying to put you on as much game as I can for free without you spending a dime to literally make you go out there and say dude what this guy’s talking about has made us money, is working.

I like his communication style. I like the guy. The consistency of like again every piece being good is making me feel safe enough to like go and buy something from this guy.

Because guess what? People like you sitting here right now, you’ve already bought stuff like what I have to offer and you’ve been let down by it.

That’s the thing that I have to help you overcome. I have to put you into a mental position through these pieces where you’re like dude this is my guy. I feel confident enough to pull the trigger on this like multi thousand dollar a month offer that this guy’s got or this multi thousand dollar course.

You’ve already bought courses. You’ve already bought masterminds. You’ve already bought agency services but you and I both know those guys have let you down. As a result of that you take that trauma out on me.

So again with the long form content what we’re trying to do is not sit there and just talk about our offers and again like the very specific sales related questions that people have about our offers.

It’s very like top of funnel content that you want to be creating. It’s very like can you give enough value for free? Can you truly put people on enough game?

I always say this. I go by the 90/10 rule. I put you guys on 10% of the things that I know and I withhold 90% of it for my paid products.

When I say that, some people it’s so unbelievable that that can be true because you don’t hear people talking about the stuff that I’m talking about. You don’t get this level of game for free.

Because it’s so beyond the regular copy and paste personal brand stuff you hear from people who are just all recycling different perspectives from watching somebody else’s stuff and trying to give their little take on it.

You get a guy that comes along that spends millions of dollars a month on ad spend and literally puts you on game to very high level things that you can go and do and make money as a result of that.

You see how refreshing that can be?

What’s the version of that for your niche? What’s the version of that for your offer? Like what does your long form content have to become or what it is right now if it does check that box?

Then how are you going to strategically distribute that and at what stages of your sales process are you going to distribute that?

Because to me what we’ve done is we just take all of our clients long form content, we either tell them what to shoot or we take what they’ve already got that works and we just work it in at key points in the sales process that make a big difference.

How to Use Long Form Content After Sales Calls to Close Deals That Did Not Close on First Call

I’ll give you another example where we work it in just to put you on a lot of game.

Here’s the other spot that we put it, right between the call and the close happening.

Not every call is going to be a one call close. So we create two separate buckets of content that are both short and long form that hit people before the call occurs and that hit people after the call occurs but before the sale happens.

If somebody one call closes they’ll never see that second batch of content. It’s only the people who get on the call that don’t close that we’ll follow up with with that second batch of content.

So we assume, remember what I said, remember that quote, what kills the sale is them coming to the call for education.

Assumptively if they came to the call and didn’t buy we presume that they don’t feel safe enough yet and we also presume that they used the call for education.

If that’s the case we just treat it like they need a ton more education and they need a lot more of those questions.

The short form answers all the short form stuff is like the sales related questions, objections, expectations. It’s a lot of like buying based information.

The long form is like the framing education make them feel safe in their decision making type content. Let them know that you’re the guy or girl for them.

That’s my point. That’s the intention of this content.

Don’t sleep on long form content.

Why Spending Six Dollars to Get Someone to Watch Twelve Hours of Content Makes Economic Sense

Just to give you some perspective here’s one key that I want to make sure I mention.

For a 1 hour and 55 minute piece of content it takes $1.17 to get somebody to watch 95% of an hour and 55 minute long piece. Think of that.

So to be clear that piece on the front end looks like it has 6 million views so social proof is insane. But in reality there is tens of thousands of people that have gotten to the end of that piece for $1.17 a piece.

Now you ask yourself, well how many $1.17 am I willing to spend? As an example if it takes six pieces of content we’re looking at about $6 and some random amount of change.

Are you willing to spend six bucks per person to get them to consume what would that be, almost 12 hours of content in that example for an hour and 55 minute long piece?

We get people just like you right now that’ll come through programs like our Inner Circle offer where we do the twice a month one on one calls, weekly group calls, quarterly masterminds in the group chat full of rich people trying to get richer, which by the way we’re raising the price on soon.

A lot of people join into that offer from places just like where you’re at right now. I get a lot of people that come through that funnel and they say well listen I watched this one piece where you talked about million dollar month and then from there I went and watched this content you did on like pixel conditioning or I watch this hammer strategy.

Feels like it’d solve a lot of the problems I have right now. Matter of fact I tried some of it, it worked really well for us, it got me the money that I needed to come and again purchase from you.

It’s like treat it like the casino logic where if you go to a casino with $1,000 and you gamble that $1,000 and you made $2,000, you walked in with $1,000, now you’ve got $2,000. You can put the $1,000 you walked in with in your pocket and now you’re gambling with what’s called house money.

That other $1,000 you have left now out of the $2,000 you just made is a free $1,000.

That’s the goal of my content. I want to help you make that house money to come and spend with us so I can put you on to the really high levels of game that we have inside of my programs for you like Master Internet Marketing, the Inner Circle or even my consulting or agency services.

How to Work Long Form Content Into Your Current Sales Process to Dramatically Increase Conversion Rates

My point is guys, content is cheap to distribute. It costs dollars to get somebody to watch those five to six different pieces of content all the way to the end.

I simply prompt you with this today. How and where are you going to work in that content to your current advertising processes to dramatically increase the effectiveness and the conversion rates of whatever current conversion mechanism you’re using?

If the call funnels aren’t working for you, if you think your offer is not working for you, if you think your whatever you’re running traffic to isn’t working for you, really just ask yourself for the people that you have sold, for the people that you have had the best conversations with, do you have the same pattern where the people who do buy consistently say dude I just watched a lot of your content before I purchased?

If that’s the case and you don’t have an absolutely elite Navy SEAL Team Six level sales team, if you don’t have that level of sales skills in your organization you’re not going to be able to take cold traffic, run them through a call funnel or a webinar or a challenge funnel or DM strategies, hand them off to your sales team and just close them.

You have to have a really good sales team to get that to work.

For a majority of businesses out there from what we’ve seen working with them they just don’t have those.

If that’s the case look there’s kind of two things you got to do right? You either got to build a team of elite salespeople or you got to go out of your way to get this content worked into your strategy in order to increase the effectiveness of it dramatically and get those conversions that otherwise right now are technically qualified people showing up that just aren’t willing to give you money because they’ve been let down by too many other people.

Most business owners waste years figuring out what actually works. In my Master Internet Marketing program, I compress that learning curve into 7 weeks, covering copywriting, funnels, ads, and more. If you’re ready to invest $5k and get serious about your skills, apply here.

Go get richer.

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