A short YouTube talk by George Kao advising creators and small-business owners to pick one marketing method or platform they enjoy and can get good at, rather than trying to be present on every channel. He recommends modest experimentation to discover which approach fits, then doubling down consistently on that single method to build an audience and a sustainable business.
When you're learning marketing and you follow various experts, you're going to have one expert who says, you've got to do video. Another expert might say, you've got to start a podcast. And then the third expert says, no, no, you've got to get consistent in your writing, have a consistent blog, write a book, etc. And yet another expert shows you their Instagram following and says, no, you got to change, be on Instagram, do images, and then Pinterest and Flickr, et cetera, et cetera. And another expert says, you've got to do telesummits. You gotta host a telesummit with 20 speakers and build your list, email list that way. So are you supposed to do all of that? No. Unless you yourself are a marketing expert. You might want to test out all these different ways. But if you're not a marketing expert, if you're just trying to build your own brand and you're trying to build a business, my advice to you is to find the marketing method that you really want to become great at, that you enjoy to some extent, and double down on that. Because any one marketing method can build you a thriving business. You don't have to do it all. You don't even have to do multiple things. If you just want to use YouTube, great, just use YouTube to build your brand. If you just want to use Facebook, great, just use that. You don't have to be everywhere, okay? Don't listen to the marketing experts that say you got to do everything because they themselves have to do everything because they themselves are a marketing expert. They have to know a little bit of everything. Just like I know a little bit of all these different platforms, but you don't have to be on all the platforms that I'm on, okay? Unless you're a marketing expert yourself and you teach this stuff. I mean, even me, I'm not fully consistent on all these different platforms. One example is Instagram. I've never enjoyed and been good at sharing images, so I made a decision to not really be on Instagram. Well, I'm okay on video and so I do. Maybe twice a month I'll upload like a one minute video onto Instagram. Sometimes it goes longer than a month before I do it. Podcasting, I used to have a podcast, 2014. I tried that out, decided I didn't really want to keep that up. So I don't have a podcast anymore. That's okay, right? So find the one marketing method. You may have to do a little bit of experimentation and testing and if you're not sure what to test and what to try out, observe the experts that you respect, that you appreciate. Look at your friends and colleagues and what kind of marketing they're doing. Find out if they enjoy it and try it out yourself if you're curious. I always tell my clients, listen. Any marketing method and strategy that you're intrigued by is probably worth testing. And that's really the key. There is no one marketing strategy that works for everybody. Don't listen to any expert that says you must follow this XYZ marketing strategy formula to get you all the clients. That's because they themselves got good at that and that's why they're good at that. But really, even if you did nothing online and you did all of your marketing offline, going to networking events or just going door to door or meeting people at the park and talking with them, I mean really, any one channel, if you got good at that, could build you a full time thriving business. But you've got to get good at it. That's the key. And if you're doing, if you're trying to do 10 different things, you're not going to get good at any one of those 10, which is going to take you a long, long time and so that it'll take you a long, long time to build a business that works. So find that one marketing method that you want to become great at, that one platform. You don't have to be on Facebook, YouTube, Medium, Instagram, on and on and on. You could just be on one of those, become really great at it, and get all the presence and the business that you need. So figure out what that one is, try out different ones and then just double down and get consistent. And you will see that your audience can be built that way and your business can be built that way as well.
