The 3 Responsibilities of Marketing

What does this mean? It means we can’t sell bullsh*t that people don’t need or want.

It means we can’t “hack” our business around the traditional online marketing metrics (LTV, CPA, AOV, etc.).

I’ve worked in brands before, and owned brands before, where the definition of good vs. bad was this: did we make more than we spent?

This is basically true, from a primal, juvenile, unsophisticated level. But it is far from complete. I’m going into some sophisticated ideas here but stay with me…

Let’s say you spend $100 on ads → That $100 gets you 1 customer who spends $110 → Wow, you just made a $10 profit to ACQUIRE a customer → Then, that customer buys something else, a $10k package → WOW, you just made $10,100 and the “COST” was -$100

This is great! Except…

If the transference of money doesn’t bolster (improve) your reputation, then you’re actually losing money. Because they will buy from you, and then they’ll talk about you.

The talk won’t be positive… and you’ll have to spend twice as much money the next round to offset the negative reputation.

This happens over and over, spiraling into a dangerous place where you cannot spend enough money to fix the damage done to your reputation. When you’re set up this way, your numbers become progressively worse, even as your marketing gets better.

Our marketing is incentivized the opposite way. I’d rather spend more, but create a raving fan — then they’ll talk about us. If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’ve talked about us.

Why? Because our sh**t is good…*

So we will front-load the cost of advertising to secure loyalty & “buy in,” and then everything gets cheaper later because we’re working WITH the flow of opinion, rather than against.

*There is nothing worse than trying to get too much for too little. Don’t follow the bullsh**t in the market right now — they’ll have you trying to get 20x, 30x, 50x returns on your advertising and while this is possible, in most cases it isn’t sustainable unless you have a moat.

Moats secure future income — more on this a little later…

We can tackle this by segmenting an audience into two categories:

Intent present Intent not present

When you are looking for someone to mow your lawn, and you go to google.com — you have “intent.” You’re literally there because you’re trying to find a solution to your problem.

We incentivize revenue that comes from content higher than revenue that comes from paid advertising.

At one of our founders’ old companies (they don’t own it anymore, it’s one of the brands they exited in 2022) they spent ~$400k to $ 600k per month on paid advertising (YouTube and Facebook mostly). The brand was a cash cow.

But… the thing about ads is this: if you turn them off, your business turns off.

He’s now on the board of a company that installs solar, they’re expanding into several different markets at the same time because the demand is huge.

How are they getting leads? Door-to-door sales reps.

My wife owns a salon and when she needs more clients, we buy names & addresses and send out direct mail, offering free cuts and products. It works.

Another agency I own a third of, has checklists in their onboarding that ask, “Do you know anyone who would benefit from this service? Please put their number below.” It works.

There are a million ways to build “outbound” advertising systems and they can all work. What I want with this brand is a healthy mix of outbound + inbound.

By the way, let’s squash this: for us, “in-bound” does not mean they saw an ad, clicked a link and then booked an appointment. That’s still paid advertising. With paid advertising, we are still invading space and showing up to them regard-less of their intent.

By inbound I mean the following:

They were searching for something They found our content Downloaded some educational asset We got their information as a result of their search

We will spend money on ads, just to send someone to a blog post like this… if they read the content, like the content, they will likely subscribe to the content – which means they will come back again and again.

My plan for the book I recently released was this: make a post about it. Then send an email about it.

Then I’ll stop… and see what the market says. If the market sells it for me, I will know it’s good enough. If they do not, I will rewrite it.

Once it’s validated, we can turn on advertising. Notice how everything for us comes through this filter of “is it good enough to create a fan?”

You need to start transitioning away from “acquisition” to retention & multiplication.

If you have a LEGITIMATE offering that people must have, you will find your advertising costs going down and your profits going UP.

There are only two types of income that are relevant to a business:

• Current income (collected & deposited “now,” this month)
• Future income (not-yet-collected but easily harvested income for later)

Future income is about brand. Future income is about raving fans. Future income is about a consistent pipeline of VALUE being created and distributed now, next month, and the month after.

Right now, for instance, this firm (Wealthy Consultant) is approximately ~3 months out for content.

That means we have content that’s either been written or recorded and isn’t slated for release until ~September.

We will work up to 6 months, and each piece of content / value offers an opportunity for someone to take the next step in working with us. This content sometimes pushes to things like one of our paid products.

Sometimes it pushes to things like a video training or breakdown. Sometimes it pushes to a book or a product purchase. That means, at least for the next 90 days, there will be prospects seeing content and converting into customers.

Then, once you’re a customer, you can easily take the next step once sufficiently convinced in order to become a client. And you moved a little closer.

Then once you’re a client, your business becomes resilient, MRR is bolted in, we start tracking with and for you — and you go from client to long term client (which resembles more of a partner than a client).

My commitment to our market is this: I will always pay you more than you pay me. If you spend $27 on a newsletter, I’ll send you more than $27 of value and convertible IP — way more than $27.

If you send $20,000 to become a client, we’ll send you more than $20,000 in services, ideas, support, etc.

If you send $60,000 to work with us at a higher level, longer term, we’ll send you at least 5x that in terms of quality of life, quality of thinking, organizational design, etc. If you send me $150,000 to work for a year 1:1, I’ll send you so much value you’ll end up trying to send me equity. This is future income.

The dominant commitment is this: you can’t out-give us. We’ll keep sending it back. That secures a long term future pipeline of income. We will never stop solving our clients’ problems with & for them. The more future value we are able to create, the more secure our position becomes.

It “looks” like we’ve built this brand quickly. After all, we’re less than a year old at the time of this writing, and doing many millions a year in sales with assets sprouting up all over the place. What you will see in the coming months & years is a tremendous focus on future income.

One of our greatest “moats” is our brand reputation — and we guard it fiercely by delivering quality intelligence — consistently.

Anyways, hope this helps you.

– The Wealthy Consultant

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