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This week’s newsletter was inspired by one of my daily “Under the Hood” videos, which you can find on YouTube or LinkedIn.
It’s really a story about pursuing a marketing strategy based on social media, slash automation, slash influencer stuff. I watched a car wreck on LinkedIn last week. Someone I know just suffered some consequences because of this pursuit of scaling through marketing tech.
Here’s what happens, right? You decide you’re going to scale your marketing efforts as a professional advisor, or quite frankly, just about any small business. You decide you’re going to scale, and you’re going to use social media and marketing technology so you don’t have to create the relationship until after they’ve told you they want to buy from you, which, by the way, is fine, right? If that’s what you want to do, that’s what you want to do.
The challenge is that stuff is generally an enterprise business solution. And so all the people selling you that bullshit are people who are copying what enterprise businesses do: this concept of scaling your marketing. If you’re a small business, you need to scale differently than a large business. Because, unless you’re moving from small to medium, right, especially if you’re a professional service provider, you don’t have the budget and means to do it. And I don’t care what all the influencers say.
So here’s what happened: Somebody on this person’s team went ahead and copied another person’s post on a big social media platform. People noticed and called them out on it. And then the first reaction, which is almost always a mistake, especially when you’re thinking digitally and technologically as opposed to relationally (Can I Borrow Your Car?), the first response was to kind of sneer and say, “Hey, you guys don’t understand, this is actually an advanced social media technique.”
And you know what? It doesn’t matter. Maybe that’s an advanced social media technique, but it’s also theft, right? It’s just plain stealing. The concept being, that it was somebody else’s post that was copied and then presented as an original post.
You can use whatever term you want, but if you don’t say, “Hey, this post was done by somebody else, and we really liked it,” you’re copying what they did. So the first response was to sneer and try to explain it away, which, of course, made it worse, because it told you everything you needed to know about how authentic this person was.
Then came the apology, and I noticed it came after the original writer of the post started making publicity off of it, saying, “Well, this is great, I’m going to get tons of views because now everybody knows you copied my stuff.” Then you had an apology.
Why am I talking about this? Number one: the people who say referrals don’t scale are the ones who are in bondage to technology: dependent upon outsourcing stuff.
At the end of the day, referrals do scale, but they only scale if you understand that it’s about disciple-making. If you try to do referrals like an evangelist, meaning you’re going to ask every person you meet to buy, and you’re going to beg everyone you meet to refer…you’re going to get evangelist results, which is usually a lot of activity, brief bursts, and then you burn out.
Versus disciple-making, which is the OG process, right? That’s how Christianity is still around, given that Christianity still works despite an inefficient, non-algorithm-driven media channel, a.k.a. human beings, right? It does scale…it scales if you have the right strategy.
Disciple-making is relationship-first, deep; then you get a multi-generational effect, maybe over a couple thousand years.
Back to it: live by the sword, die by the sword. The challenge is this: if you’re building your marketing strategy on ground you don’t own, that generally means you have to invest more money and more time in things you don’t own. It’s like remodeling a house you rent. Seems kind of foolish if you think about it. You can do it, I mean it’s not immoral, but it’s kind of foolish, right? You’re not really investing in something for real.
Caveat, though: if you do that whole social media marketing thing well, you are going to get more referrals. If you do it well, if you’re authentic, if you tell the truth, if you’re not a thief. You’re going to end up getting more referrals, but they’re going to be organic, and you won’t be able to predict them.
Instead, here’s how I live by the sword, die by the sword.
I live by deep relationships. I also die by them, meaning I’m willing to not have all the dopamine and excitement and distractions that come from all the incredible social media crap and all the tech. There’s a part of me that really wants to hire one of these email marketing experts and spend a thousand dollars a month and get a bunch of appointments.
But guess what? I wouldn’t own that process. I would not own it. I’d be renting it, and I don’t want to do that. I want to own as much as I can: the success, the security of my future for my family and for my business. So we’re going to live and die by relationships. We’re going to sell after that, and we’re going to do the strategic work necessary.
If you’ve read this long: A) thanks, I appreciate it. B) If it has any interest to you, let’s talk. Let’s talk like real human beings. Let’s break this dopamine social media thing, and let’s talk live. Half an hour, free, to anyone who isn’t a bot.
So how do we do this? Be real, be you, and be authentic.
Related: AI Isn’t Replacing Advisors. It’s Exposing Pricing.