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What’s your backstory?
I’ve built a social media marketing business that has generated multiple eight figures in client revenue. Yet I am not a marketer. In fact, I cannot stand the majority of people who identify as marketers with the “laptop lifestyle,” taking pictures in front of their supercars as if that has anything to do with their ability to serve their clients.
As a 24-year-old former Division-1 football player, I have only picked up marketing as a skill in the last three years. A tumultuous time period during my late teens launched me into a crash course on who I truly was at my core. My identity as an athlete had been stripped away, and I was left trying to figure out who I was and what my new role in the world was since my football skills were no longer what I would be known for.
I spent the next two years interviewing over 850 people about life, love, fear, what keeps them up at night, and a slew of other topics related to they way they viewed themselves and related to the world around them. I interviewed a vast variety of people, from family and friends to doctors, lawyers, and world leaders. I even interviewed three death row inmates and conducted 65 end-of-life interviews with individuals who had terminal illnesses and would not live more than three more months.
The results of these interviews combined with my own introspection gave me an incredible perspective on human behavior as a whole, which is the number one reason I have been able to produce over $36 million in revenue for my clients using Facebook and Instagram advertising. Most “marketers” focus on numbers and metrics to inform them as to how they appeal to clients, but I’ve found that focusing on people and understanding what they believe to be true about themselves and the world around them will serve you farbetter than only running the traditional marketing campaigns that you are “supposed” to run.
You can learn all of the tactics in the world, and you will still come to realize that unless you can connect with people’s core needs, you will never create longevity with a marketing campaign. You will forever be
a slave to the “algorithm,” chasing those ever-expanding nuances of what true success as a marketer looks like.
Having this personal connection will make the process of building out incredible cold audiences with engaging copy almost thoughtless. People will feel like you are speaking directly to them –because youare; you understand who they are, and you know exactly who you serve and why your offer will be life-changing for them. It becomes a no-brainer for them to click and ultimately purchase from you.
Take it from a guy who has produced the multiple eight-figure results (with an average 9x ROI) and has never taken a marketing course or cracked open a marketing book: Marketing is about human connection and making people feel understood no matter what the “marketing gurus” are trying to sell you with their 10-step courses or super marketing secrets. The method I employ has produced better results than those of 99% of people in the market, and nothing you can learn in a course or eBook will teach you the real way to get there.
‘Can you tell me the story of your prior successes, challenges, and major responsibilities?’
The biggest challenge I’ve run into when marketing clients is learning how to remove my own biases and interests when marketing different products or services. I had to learn along the way that the desired result had nothing to do with what I wanted to see or what images or videos would compel me to purchase; the only thing that mattered was the way the client needed to be spoken to and what they would find visually appealing. I had to completely remove my own thoughts from the equation and focus solely on the client’s needs and the customer’s problem points.
‘Can you tell me about a time when you almost gave up, how you felt about that, and what you did instead of giving up?’
Truthfully, I’ve never almost given up. But I certainly have been frustrated. I’ve mostly found myself frustrated by the information currently available to those learning how to market on social media; most marketing trainings are too broad and too general to truly help someone without loads of experience navigate this landscape. There is simply too much nuance associated with each client. and nothing beyond learning how to serve each client according to his or her unique needs will help someone begin to run the high-figure campaigns they seek to run.
No guidebook or video walkthrough can adequately tackle the topics that drive a truly great marketing engine for our clients, and way too often people get so caught up in the act of learning a new system that they never get to the point of implementing a profitable, long-term strategy. We become slaves to the algorithm or distracted by a new tactic that seems to be working for one specific person. The honest truth that most people have not yet discovered is that what worked for someone else may not necessarily
work for you, and the shifts you need to make likey have more to do with the approach to the problem (strategy) than with a new feature or campaign setup you learned this week (tactics.)
Learn about people and the way they operate in whatever niche you occupy; they know (and will show you) their needs much more clearly than that “eComm/real estate/local biz marketing expert” whose course you’re about to purchase. Put your debit card back in your pocket, and learn how to treat people as if you are marketing to real people instead of numbers on a screen…because you are!
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