George Kao skips flashy visuals because they train shallow engagement. He uses text-heavy posts and captions instead, keeping his marketing mellow so people are actually ready for his paid courses, not just scrolling past.
I don't mind being boring. I don't try to use visual things to attract you, to make you watch my videos. Because, and this is counter to what most marketers teach, most marketers teach that you should use visual interruptions and wonderful looking things to attract people to watch and keep watching your videos, right? You know, really savvy editing to get to, to get and keep their attention. And I don't do that because I would rather have people be trained to engage more thoughtfully with my content. Let's think about this here. If you use attention getting tactics, right, Videos with very good editing to like so that the, the most person who gets bored the quickest will. No, not get bored at all. If you do things like that one, one, it takes a ton of time and effort, okay? But secondly, you are training your audience to be more and more shallow in how they relate to you, to engage with you. You're getting more and more shallow engagement with you. And by doing that, let me ask you this. When people finally use your products or services, don't they need to do something to transform themselves? Don't they need more thoughtful engagement? So in other words, your products and services require more thoughtful engagement than even your free content. That's true. With my stuff. When you buy my courses, you got to get to work, right? When you join my programs, you got to be ready to transform yourself with my guidance and, you know, help and all that. But it's thoughtful engagement and that's the kind of relationship I want with my audience. I don't want people who just go, oh, George posts pretty images, attractive images, like, like, like, like, like. And what happens is I'm training them to engage in that kind of shallow way. So for example, if you look on my Facebook business page, right, I don't use any images. I use writings and I use videos and that's it. Now the only time I use images, if I'm changing my cover image because I'm selling a new course or I post a Facebook event for my new course if there's an image. But those are the only times that's like once a month. The rest of the month it's just words and it's videos, both formats. Reading and watching videos requires thoughtful engagement. It's not a drive by like, right? Without. So if, if you. And then this applies to Instagram too. Notice on my Instagram, Instagram forces us to, to do either videos like this or to post images, right? We can't just do writings. But if you notice on my Instagram images, they are not just pretty pictures. Right. To try to get your attention and then make you read my Instagram images are some message and the message usually is cryptic enough where you have to actually read the caption to know what's going on. Right? So it's like a cryptic message and you have to read the caption to like thoughtfully engage with it. So you might say, well, George, what's wrong with posting pretty images or attractive images to get people's attention so that they might engage. Here's what's wrong with it. Here's the problem with it. There's technical marketing problem with it. Which is the more pretty or attractive images you put up, the larger of an audience you're going to have that are drive by likers. Okay, Drive by likers. And so in a larger audience like that, therefore your ideal audience, the people who actually want to do your work and transform with you will be a smaller and smaller percentage. Even though the audience might be growing, it's a smaller and smaller percentage of, of the total audience, which are a lot of shallow likers. I'm not saying those are shallow people. I'm saying that you've trained them to engage with you in a shallow way. It's, it's, it's your doing. It's not that they're shallow people. It just, you're training them to be more shallow in how they relate to you. Right? So then therefore your ideal audience, it gets smaller and smaller percentage because of the total audience keeps growing. So when you finally post something real, something that, that you want them to engage with, you wanted, you want them to buy something to engage with you, you're going to have to use hype. You're going to, you're going to have to again, make something really, really exciting for them to buy anything. Do you see? Which then creates the temptation to lie in our marketing. Which is why if you notice, when I sell things, right, When I sell things, it's very mellow. It doesn't, I don't use any hype. Oh, you're going to get these results. You're going to, you're going to make six figures. You're going to be able to buy an island or whatever. No, I just say, hey, if you want to learn xyz, that's what this course has been designed to teach xyz. That's it. I'm not promising results. Nothing. And I get plenty of sales because I've now created. And these might be the same people. When I say shallow engagement and thoughtful engagement, they might be the same people like you might be engaging with me thoughtfully, but you might be engaging shallowly with other people who just post pretty images. Oh, that's easy to like easy. So I hope this helps. I want you to think about this, and it will if you have been posting pretty images right to, you know, to attract people. And hopefully they'll be it's going to take some time to transition them to more thoughtful way of engaging with you. So I hope this is helpful and food for thought, and I hope it helps you to create more and truer transformation for your clients as you go forward. All right. Take care.
