George Kao (speaker) addresses discomfort with sales/marketing funnels, arguing that motive matters: prioritize genuinely serving and educating your audience over using hyped funnel formulas. He recommends designing a curriculum of free/paid content to help an audience transform, learning from failures, and charging only for what you can’t freely give.
Hi, this is George Cowan. In this video I want to talk with you about marketing funnels and marketing motives. Now before I get started, I'm going to show you my sweet dog Buddy and I'm training him to wait for the pine cone even after I throw it. Buddy, wait. He's training his eyes on the pine cone now and waiting for me to give him the signal. Buddy, go. Alright, let's see how long it takes him to get it. Oh, he probably found it right away. So I got a question over email from a newsletter subscriber who asked about marketing funnels and he says that he was feeling really uncomfortable with using them and it's not good for his audience and is there a better way of doing it? And I also saw this discussion happen in an online group and I wanted to address that in the next few minutes and I hope you find this helpful to clarify your own marketing strategies. And Buddy there has already found the pine cone. He's such a good boy, just waiting for me. Okay, so here's the bottom. Let me start with the bottom line. It comes down to your marketing motives, okay? Are you first and foremost trying to get people to buy from you or are you first and foremost trying to help them as much as you can, even if they don't buy from you, knowing that some of them will buy from you if you come from a heart and truly help them? So there is a misconception that a lot of people have which is, oh George, I was sold on this formula for creating marketing funnels that's supposed to work like gangbusters. It's got to work. If I just get people to opt into my ebook over email first and then send them a three video series that gets them, that really sells them on my services. This, this has got to work, right? And this is what the big lie is in marketing is that if you use this formula, it's going to work. Unfortunately, people selling that formula use a lot of hype to say that this is going to work for everybody or for most people who buy this when the reality and I've been in the industry for seven years full time doing this kind of thing and using marketing funnels myself in my early years. It does not work for most businesses for many variety of reasons. It's not just the formula itself. Sometimes the offer hasn't been optimized, sometimes the audience hasn't been clarified. There's lots of reasons why the formula doesn't work. Now here's the reality of business actually is that most marketing campaigns fail Most business ventures fail. I mean, think about the Silicon Valley. The smartest venture capital investors in the world, they regularly have 90% of their venture capital investments fail, 90% of startups fail. Why is that? These are the smartest people you know in the world and the most risk taking, smartest, you know, most plugged into market research, etc. The reality is that there are so many reasons why businesses fail, right? And so if you're willing to keep going past failure and learn from your failures, you will eventually succeed if you set your eyes on that goal and keep going. Now, if business and marketing campaigns are so uncertain, why not come from a place of service instead of trying to get people to buy from you? Because if you come from a place of service and genuinely help people, number one, you will actually get to know what your audience needs. If you genuinely come from a heart of service and inquiry to say, how can I help them the best? Okay, and let me try this. Does this help them the best? Number two is even if this particular campaign fails, which, as you know, chances are, the only way you succeed is to keep learning from your failures and keep trying another campaign. And even if this campaign fails, you will have served people, you will have learned. Does that make sense? So instead of a marketing funnel, I invite you to think in terms of a curriculum, that you're designing a curriculum to educate your ideal audience into a particular transformation. And you are giving away as much of your curriculum as you can within your healthy boundaries, whatever you're needing, maybe you already have another source of income. Then give away as much as you can right now. While you are experimenting with what truly helps your ideal audience, what parts of your methods really, really work? Now, if you need to make money, then give away as much as you can and then charge for whatever you can't bear to give away. All right? And if you come from a heart of service and get to know your ideal audience and what they truly need, you will eventually make enough money. So with that, Buddy has been so patient, waiting for me to throw the pine cone again. So I'm going to sign off for now. I hope this is helpful. I'm always open to your comments and your questions, and until the next video, I wish you well.
