Hey, my friend, AG, here wanted to have a quick chat with you today about something that I see going on inside the marketing world and the business World At Large, which is causing a lot of people a whole lot of undue stress and headache, and it's leading and guiding people in a really bad direction. That is not only going to hurt them now, but it's going to hurt them long term as well, and possibly run them right out of town and completely out of business, which is not good for anybody. So here's what prompted me to make this video yesterday. I was having a chat with a client in with a friend, and we were talking about different marketing strategies, tactics and all of the different campaigns, and how to structure things and principles and all of the stuff that I absolutely love geeking out on. And he brought up something that one of his clients had actually used in bought into, which was a very expensive group coaching program, teaching a certain style, or certain strategy, or or tactic, and call it a hack in the marketing world. Now, first off, I have nothing against people trying to push the envelope and try new and innovative marketing strategies and tools and pushing the boundaries of software and performance and Tech and all of that stuff. I think it's fantastic.
However, I only like it when it's built on solid marketing foundations and solid marketing strategy, because what ended up happening is this incredibly expensive group program, which is thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars. Well, it worked for some people for a short period of time, and then it just stopped working like completely. And here's why you see the way that any of these kind of new shiny object marketing hacks and tricks and all that are rolled out and launched and introduced to the market is to capitalize on some kind of loophole or backdoor, or algorithm hack, or tweak, or trick, or something like that that by its own nature, is only going to be around for a very short period of time, which means that by the time that you create the training and the programs on the structure and the messages and all of that for this program, and you start rolling it out to the world well, because it was based on just a temporary or transient type of hack Thing. By the time it gets rolled out, it's automatically going to be start to becoming irrelevant really, really quickly. This is why a lot of the things that used to work a couple years ago, well, they don't work today. It's not that the strategies don't work, it's that the platforms that they were built on and built for don't work. An example here to give you a little bit of context without throwing shade or pointing the finger at anybody. Years and years ago, Facebook used to be almost like a Oakley organic platform. They encouraged you to build up a massive business page. You would sort of build up all of these fans and followers and likes for your page. You would get a ton of reach, which meant you could do all of your marketing organically through your business page. And so a number of very smart people started creating some great Facebook marketing courses around doing this.
But then Facebook started to roll out their Facebook advertising platform and almost overnight. They kind of turned off the switch on organic reach, which meant that all of these strategies and all these programs became almost immediately irrelevant, and they had to Pivot and adjusting. Well, start focusing more on Facebook ads. Well, sure enough, this work for a period of time in a number of very smart people got in on creating trainings and courses and programs on teaching someone how to use Facebook ads again, absolutely phenomenal. But then what ended up happening is, well, the rules kind of changed again, and people who had built their entire businesses around Facebook ads, especially in certain kinds of markets, were immediately blacklisted and just completely wiped off the platform form. So let's take the next step in the evolution. And people started coming up with again, kind of a quasi personal organic / advertising business page strategy, kind of looped everything together.
Driving people to your personal messenger may be sending them off site and back, and things got a little bit confusing. And that worked really well for a while. Until, again, the algorithms changed, and they started limiting how many interactions you could have with someone, the rules around messaging and how often someone is able to respond, and how often you are able to send Aster promotional emails via messenger and things like that. And then let's forward it even more. And then we start taking a look at Facebook groups and group marketing through free groups and pay groups and all the things like that. And of course, the rules change, and some courses adapt, and some evolve and others stay stuck, which means less and less people start getting results because they're focused again on the tactics first, rather than the underlying strategy,which I'll cover in just a second. But first there's two more things that you really need to know in order to, I guess, arm yourself guard yourself against potential marketing tweaks or hacks or tricks to try to get around the system. The first of which is the simple fact that if something is really effective and it really works well, well more people are going to copy it. They're going to funnel Hackett. They're going to reverse engineer the process, they're going to do it themselves. Sometimes they do it ethically, and they change around some of the words and change the message and change who they're targeting. And it comes off like, kind of a different version of it. Other times they just copy and paste and directly violate all kinds of legal. And and that's on them. The point is, the more people are doing something while the more people are going to be exposed to it, and the less effective it's going to be over time. And this leads me to my next point, which is that there is a very real and very significant difference between what the experts and the Professionals in the guru's are doing at the elite level, and what they're telling everybody else to do.
Now, this is happening for a number of different reasons, and not all of them are shady or unethical or things like that. The reality is that someone that's up at this level, well, what they're doing right now is probably completely irrelevant for somebody who's just getting started, or in their second and third year of business. But the second thing is more of a subconscious thing that not a lot of people are willing to admit. And that is, again, well, they know that the more people use the exact same strategies and messaging and hooks and angles, and all of that, the less effective it becomes, which is why those people at that top level well, really unlikely to divulge all of their secrets to everyone all the time. I guess there's a fourth point to here is probably the most important of them all, which is that even if they were to divulge all of their secrets and what they're doing right now, well, it's almost irrelevant because what's working for them? Well, you know, work for you. And in fact, what's working for them now may not be what works for them next week, or what they were doing a year ago, or anything like that. It constantly evolves. It constantly changes, and you need to as well. So anyway, Bring It full circle. Right back to the beginning, chatting with my friend, we're going over one of his clients who enrolled into an incredibly expensive group coaching program, teaching a very outdated and no longer effective tactic and not getting any results, just like everybody else. I'm not getting results in that program as well. So what is the answer? What's the solution? What should they do? Well, the first thing you need to understand is that there's a difference between somebody who is a good marketer and somebody who's a good business person, and somebody who is a good person in general.
So when you're looking for someone to follow, make sure that they fall into all of those three different camps. After all, a lot of these programs are built by some kind of sketchy people with some sketchy ethics selling sketchy material, not all of them, and certainly way less than we ever saw before. In fact, when I first got started in this game a decade ago, who was it was full of some sketchy stuff. But now thanks to social proof and word-of-mouth and laws. Well, things have cleaned up pretty good, but it still is very much buyer beware. So make sure that you pick your expert carefully. The next thing is, never choose a marketing hack or trick, or tactic, or tool, or anything like that without first building it on a really solid marketing Foundation, essentially lining up what your business does. What's your business model, who you serve? Who's your target market, your ideal client, Avatar, what are their problems means and frustrations, and what are the messages that you're going to use to communicate your value to them? And then where is your target market present and active online? And when you line all of these things up a little bit tongue-tied there, when you line all of these things up well, it's going to paint a pretty clear picture of what you should be doing, more importantly, what you should not be doing. And this going to save you a ton of time and money and headache and stress and wasted energy and all of that stuff. And that's why my friend chasing these marketing hacks, or tricks, or flavored Azure or shiny objects, or kind of these one-off things that bolt onto the scene. And everybody goes after, and then they fizzle out and just disappear. It's never a good idea. Start with strategy, start with your Market, start with the fundamental principles and proven basics of of marketing, understand those Master those and then then, and only then start looking at hacks. All right before we wrap up, though. Let me give you something that I know will work for you, regardless of what business or Market or industry you're in simply because it's not new. It's not shiny, it's not sexy. And that is actually let me give you a couple things.
The first of which is email marketing talked about this a lot more recently than I ever have before. Reason is it's just too effective to ignore. In fact, there's very few clients or students or businesses that I work with, where we can't go in and add or optimize an existing email marketing strategy to significantly and dramatically improve their profitability and revenue. So why does he male work? Well, it's because it's boring and basic, and it's been here forever, and it's going to be here for a long time in the future. People check it all the time. It's part of our everyday life. And when you know how to craft a truly compelling and irresistible and high-converting email, well, you've got a ton of power. The second thing that I am absolutely confident is not going away anytime soon, because it's not a social media platform. It's not a hack or an algorithm treat week or anything like that. It's simply the way that you deliver your message. And that is video basically next to being face-to-face or person-to-person video just gives you a ton of communication power, and also a bit of associated Authority as well, when you're the person on the screen which can all and only help you with your business. And with your positioning in the marketplace. All right, I'm kind of on a roll here. So let me give you one more. We'll wrap this whole thing up. And that third and I guess we'll say, final piece, at least for now would be a marketing funnel. Now, when I'm talking about a marketing funnel, I'm not talking about clickfunnels, which is software or leadpages, which is software or unbalanced, which is software. Those are just tools for the job. What I'm talking about is mapping out the customer Journey step after step after step. What are you going to do to introduce yourself? How are you going to guide them through a process and build that know, like and Trust Factor through email and through video and through social media, and maybe even through some of the hacks, as long as they are like a bit of salt on the overall meal and not the entire meal itself? And the reason that I can say that these Concepts and these tools, whether we're talking about email or video, or a marketing funnel, why these work and why these aren't hacks is because they're based on simple principles.
