The Word-of-mouth Death Trap And How To Avoid It

Brian Hood (0:00)

This is the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, episode 182

Welcome to the 6 Figure Creative Podcast, where our mission is to help you turn your creative passions into a stable, reliable income. If you're in audio, video, design, photography, or really any other creative field, and you just want to learn from other successful creatives, you're in the right place.

Welcome back to another episode of the 6 Figure Creative Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Hood, and I am not here with my big, bald, beautiful co-host, Chris Graham, today, because I just got back from my end-of-year retreat, and I was digging into my numbers, which is something I recommend any person do when they're... at least once a year, at least.

And dig into your numbers to kind of see what's going on under the hood, because so few of us actually take the time to dig into our numbers and see what sort of insights we can gain from that. And I did that at the end of the year, and I did a whole lot of other stuff, and I'm going to talk about it on a future episode or a YouTube video or something.

But I started digging into my analytics for both the podcast, for the YouTube channel, for our website. And I came across a couple of things that were interesting. The main thing being that we have way more downloads on the podcast than I do on YouTube videos. And let me tell you why that's important.

It's important because I put out separate videos on our YouTube channel every single week of content that is not discussed on this podcast. It is completely separate from this podcast. And what that means is, if you haven't found your way to our YouTube channel, you've missed out on that content. And so I wanted to take one episode for our podcast and just dedicate it to a couple of YouTube videos I've put out recently.

And so sorry if you've already found these videos, but this is for the rest of our listeners who haven't gotten over to the YouTube channel yet, because the content over there is just as valuable as the content here.

And a lot of it's still kind of longer form, 15, 20 minute videos that go deep into a subject.

And so there are two videos that I wanted to pull into this podcast, and you don't have to see them. So if you're doing the normal thing you do for podcasts, where you're on a walk or you're driving or you're running errands or doing something around the house, you don't have to stop and go watch the YouTube version of this. Actually, I don't even know what the YouTube version of this is gonna look like because people who watch this podcast on YouTube have probably already seen these videos. But this is for our listeners. You can still listen to these videos. So the first video I wanna highlight today is from a YouTube channel. I posted it back on November 18th of last year. And the whole premise of the video is something I call the word of mouth death trap.

And this is a really controversial one, but one that I still wholeheartedly stand behind because there's a perpetuated lie that word of mouth should be enough to sustain you as a freelancer.

And the reason I think this is a lie, and actually, I'm not even thinking, I wholeheartedly believe it, and I would actually really argue against anyone who doesn't believe this. The reason I think this is a lie is because the people who say this and the people who argue this are the ones who have made it as a freelancer, who all their work is coming from word of mouth. And the problem with that, as you're gonna find out from this video, is just merely that those people got to that point because they survived long enough for their word of mouth snowball to grow large enough to sustain them long term. That's not the case for those who failed and never made it because they didn't understand anything about marketing, about client acquisition, about any of this stuff. So this was gonna be the shorter of the two videos today. It's about 12 minute clip.

It's just pointing out a very fundamental thing that you have to understand. And so without further ado, here's the YouTube video called The Word of Mouth Death Trap.

Is word of mouth marketing enough?

If you're to go to any freelancer that you look up to, who's successful, who's making a lot of money, doing what you want to do, if they're in the position you wanna be in, nine times out of 10, they're gonna tell you that their number one source of clients is referrals, word of mouth. As a matter of fact, if you were to go ask a large group of freelancers what their number one source of clients is, it's word of mouth. As a matter of fact, I went and I polled four different Facebook groups in four different industries, in the photography industry, the music production industry, the videography, and then the graphic design industries. And all four Facebook group polls listed the number one source of clients is word of mouth. So when you see all of the successful freelancers around you saying that word of mouth is their number one source of clients, and you see all these Facebook group polls that are saying, our number one source of clients as a group is word of mouth, then your natural inclination is to say, I will focus on word of mouth. I will rely on word of mouth advertising as my sole source, or at least my main source of clients for my business. And if that is you, friend, I am going to put my flag in the ground right now and say, unfortunately, that is a recipe for disaster. If you are sitting there right now and watching this video and your calendar is not already booked up 100% full with your perfect ideal client, and you don't have a plan in place to fix that other than waiting on word of mouth clients to find you, then this video is for you. And in this video, I'm going to dispel the lie that is this toxic mindset of waiting for clients to find you and why that's a terrible idea for 99.9% of freelancers.