George Kao describes a seven-figure marketer who went bankrupt pushing aggressive paid ads without building trust first. Instead, use small ad spend to amplify your best content, grow a warm audience, then announce products gently with one or two posts. Trust makes marketing easier.
I want to tell you a quick story that I think has some lessons to apply for all of us who are working on growing our business. So there is a seven figure marketer that I heard of and I know most of us here are not seven figure businesses, but bear with me, there's a lesson here. So the seven figure marketer recently declared bankruptcy. And by the way, I'm not trying to pinpoint that one person because this is actually a common experience that I hear about, not necessarily bankruptcy, but this kind of failure. So the seven figure figure marketer, they declare bankruptcy because she was running lots of ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, which by the way, I do as well, and I recommend this as well. And then she just was getting a lot of leads through ads and it didn't work. You know, and the advertiser, as the advertising costs went up, her business wasn't sustainable and she had, and even the advertising agency couldn't figure it out. So what's the lesson for you and me who are not, you know, seven figure businesses? So the lesson is this advertising, which by the way, I hope you're doing, if you take your business seriously, no matter if you're at zero right now, if you're at zero, if you're, you're making a dollar a month or whatever, if you take your business seriously, you're going to run some ads, you don't have to spend a lot of money. Start with $30 a month. 3, 0. Most of you can do that. Okay, yeah, if you take your business seriously, run ads. Okay, but what should the ads be for? Let me explain. Ads are not to just like promote your Instagram page or your service or whatever. I don't think that's the best strategy. I think ads are for nurturing your warm audience or building a larger warm audience who then naturally will want to look at more of your content and more of your offerings. That's how I run ads. I spend way more than 30amonth running ads. But most of my money running ads is just to serve you with content like this without selling anything. You know, go to my, wherever you want to go, my Instagram page, my YouTube channel, my Facebook page, or wherever. Most of my content doesn't sell anything, right? And yet I take the best of that content, not non selling content. And I use advertising dollars to get it out to more people who could benefit. Some of them, many of them perhaps may never buy from me, but I find it to be a fulfilling thing to do, to be serving the world with my best ideas and My best presence. And obviously some of them decide to follow and buy. And it makes it all worthwhile. It makes it all worthwhile. So back to the story of this person who declared bankruptcy. She was just expecting that somehow advertising could save her business. Just if I reach enough people, then enough people will buy from me, et cetera. But the problem is that she never built a true fan base, a warm enough audience that really trusted her and really cared about her business. And that's what I keep all of my videos or you know, most, many of them are trying to help you to do. To try and inspire you to say no. To have a truly fulfilling and sustainable business means that you have a true fan base that actually cares about not just the content you deliver. They benefit from that, but they care about like your well being even. They care about your journey, they care about your business. Okay, so this is what ads are for. You like get, you spend a little bit of money, even just $30 a month, taking your best content and putting in front of people who look like your ideal audience based on, you know, your, your website visitors or based on your email list or whatever. And, and then, so, so then from the ads, oh, and one more thing, I'll say she was marketing very aggressively like she wants. She's like, okay, she heard that, oh, if I want people to buy, I have to talk about my product or service many, many times in front of them, kind of like almost wear them out and then they will finally buy. You notice when I announce something, notice how gentle, gently I announce a product or service. I only usually make one post about it and I send usually one email, sometimes two emails. Compared to my peers who send three, five, eight, ten emails about something they're launching, I send one, maybe two. And one of the common objections to this is George, I've heard from my people, some of them told me, oh, I didn't hear about your launch, I didn't hear about the offer, that's why I didn't buy. Well, they're not telling you. Some of them are just telling you that to make an excuse. Sorry, that's the truth. But some, but even if they're genuinely honest that they didn't see it, that's why they didn't buy it. I'll tell you why that's a good thing. A lot of you actually don't see my, my, my launches, my I launch thing after thing and you have no idea. And then one day you hear that I have something. You're like, geor, how come I didn't know about that. And guess what happens afterwards? Next time I launch something, you're more likely to lean in. This is the power of authentic marketing and gentle launches or gentle announcements. You give your audience the free will of leaning in themselves, realizing that, oh, they don't want to miss your next launch. This is not fomo. This is not fear of missing out. You're not trying to stoke that, but you're just gently announcing it, making sure most of your audience sees it like maybe once, maybe twice. Knowing that even, even, even if you're, if you try that once or twice, still a bunch of people won't have seen it. And that's okay. That's the trade off, a good trade off for being a gentle announcer. Because if, as a gentle announcer and authentic marketer, right, your marketing gets easier over the years because people trust you more and more. I've seen that in my marketing. My business and marketing has just gotten easier and easier over the years. Whereas I see some of my peers in my industry and they just have to keep working hard. They have to keep being aggressive and pushy their entire lives. It just never gets easier. Whereas mine has gotten easier. Because why I have real trust with my people because I don't push. I don't push at them. Sometimes they miss my launches and that's fine. The few who see it, the relative few, or the relative percentage who see it, gets me enough business, and I'm happy about that. Now there's more about, you know, making sure your product is aligned with what people want. That's a separate issue, but I'm just talking about making sure people see it, but not too much. You want people to lean in with their own free will. So I hope this is interesting, at the very least for how to think about marketing as a way to bless people with ads with your content and then occasionally announce something again gently. So I hope this is helpful and thank you so much for being here and joining me for this.
