Business Growth Architect Show

Ep #170: Zack Zeller: Is Your Marketing Repelling Your Ideal Client?

• Beate Chelette • Episode 170

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Think more content equals more clients? Think again. Zack Zeller explains why slowing down and creating thoughtful, soulful content is the real key to business growth. 🎧 Watch now to learn how less can lead to more.


Marketing the “right” way you’ve been taught? It might be why clients ghost you.

That’s the bold premise Zack Zeller brings to the table in this episode of Business Growth Architect Show. With a career that spans over a decade in direct response marketing—and experience working alongside industry titans—Zack has seen how even the smartest strategies can fall flat if they don’t reflect one important thing: your uniqueness.

In a world flooded with copycat content and AI-generated everything, Zack offers a much-needed reset. Today’s buyer is more skeptical and better informed than ever, and “perfect” marketing often leads them straight to your competitors. Why? Because when we lean too heavily on formulas and funnels, we lose the very thing that builds trust—our voice, our story, our realness.

Zack explains his signature approach, which flips the traditional sales funnel on its head. Instead of trying to convert cold leads on a sales call, he helps his clients package their message into a 50–70 page book that acts as both authority builder and lead generator. Don’t think about it like writing a bestseller—but on crafting a powerful narrative that lets prospective clients see your process, your values, and your vision, so by the time they get to a sales call with you, they’re already 80% sold.

From empathy maps and email sequences to the smart use of AI tools, Zack explains how great content isn’ about volume—but about intention. And how, with the right foundation, you can turn a single book or podcast episode into months of content that continues to drive sales long after it’s published.

His message is clear: less is better—and better is better.

🎯 Listen the full episode now and then head to https://thisshouldntwork.com/ to get Zack’s Free Guide: How to Sell High-Ticket Offers Without Sales Calls On Instagram. It’s time to stop chasing leads and start creating content that sells while you sleep.


Resources Mentioned: 

Free Guide | LinkedIn | Instagram | Fully Booked

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Zack Zeller:

Hi. This is Zack Zeller, author of "Fully Booked" and founder of ZZ Media, and on my episode of the Business Growth Architect Show, I will share how books are for buyers and content is for browsers, and how you can use this to make soulful content that gets you better buyers to grow your business with head on over and listen to the full episode right now. And

BEATE CHELETTE:

hello, fabulous person. Beate Chelette here.I am the host of the Business Growth Architect Show, and I want to welcome you to today's episode where we discuss how to navigate strategy and spirituality to achieve time and financial freedom, truly successful people have learned how to master both a clear intention and a strategy to execute that in a spiritual practice that will help them to stay in alignment and on purpose. Please enjoy the show and listen to what our guest today has to say about this very topic. Welcome back your host, Beate Chelette here with Zack Zeller from ZZ Media, and today we are talking about content creation utilizing AI tools and sort of really diving into what you can do to get your message out concise, quickly and consistently, which I think is the most important thing, Zack, I'm so excited for you to be here. Welcome to the show.

Zack Zeller:

Thank you so much. I'm super excited to be here as well. Zach, for

BEATE CHELETTE:

somebody who has never heard about you or does not know who you are, tell us who you are and what do you solve for your clients,

Zack Zeller:

absolutely. So I'm a full stack marketer, I work with a lot of service providers to pour gasoline on their on the fire with really good marketing and messaging to help them go from overlooked in the marketplace to really fully booked. So

BEATE CHELETTE:

what does that mean? So most people, most business owners, they love what they do. They're impact driven, they're service providers. They're getting their stuff out, but they don't know how to find enough clients, and they don't know how to find enough good clients. If I come to you and I tell you, this is the problem I have, I'm amazing. I'm really good at what I do. At least I think I am, and I get great results from my clients, but I don't have enough clients. Where do we start? Yeah,

Zack Zeller:

the biggest assumption that I see is with social media and in unlimited appetite for content, online business owners feel all of this pressure to put out so much content, and so they think more content means more eyeballs, means more sales. But really, that's a flawed assumption, because really what happens is better content, when you go slower, when you create more thoughtful content, then you can get better customers and grow your business a lot more easily, because it's not about getting a million customers, it's about working with 100 really targeted customers. That's the

BEATE CHELETTE:

opposite of what Alex Hermozi says and Grand Cardone. They say, Take as much stuff as you have, just go in the studio, change your shirt every board, four messages, and just record for a whole day and put like 100 videos out there. Have a staff of 20, a budget of a million, and just get it all out a month, and you were telling me it's a lie.

Zack Zeller:

Well, so I have to confess, because before I started ZZ Media, I was working with an online education brand with another type of Alex Hermozi is Jason Capital, and we were teaching people how to write, copy, close, sales and speak, and we had that whole machine set up. We had a quarter of a million dollars a month going out for a production team and all the people to track and run that system and build that tech. We had six posts a day going out on Instagram, tik, Tok, like everything. And to be fair, we were doing a lot of high volume sales, making 300 to$400,000 a month at our peak. The problem is that we didn't have a really strong business. We just had really strong front end acquisition, meaning, out of the 300 to 400 people we would work with over that first month for $1,000 on getting whatever result, we only had. About 1% of those people go into the back end, and so our business became dependent on that high volume content strategy, which doesn't last forever, because it's so it's so fickle to have your business rely on going viral and being a thought leader in that way, where you're getting reach and connecting superficially with people, but it's not building that long term customer value that comes from a lot of qualifying, deep connection, and I view it as useful, like tactical value coming from your content. Well,

BEATE CHELETTE:

I think that what you just said is really powerful. I call it the churn, because the churn of bringing people into the pipeline and then keeping that pipeline running and running and running and running. Now I'm going to divorce myself from this idea of this internet marketing. But how do I start with an actual strategy? Like, how do I how do I begin? So I I'm a service provider, I'm a coach, I'm consultant. I have, I have a clear idea. But what do I build? Like, how do I get started?

Zack Zeller:

Yeah, the biggest thing I see blocking people is focusing much more on transactions over relationships. And so what that looks like is, if you're looking at a lot of the bro marketing, sales, sales, sales side of things, it's very

BEATE CHELETTE:

Oh my god. That is so good. It is totally bro marketing, lots of cash, airplanes, toys, fast cars, girls, tequila,

Zack Zeller:

exactly. And it's and it's so focused on the manipulation side of marketing, of here's what to say, here's the right funnel, the right lead source, and everything is very superficial, so it solves one problem, but it builds around your business, and it doesn't actually build your business. So focusing on the relationship side really changes the way you think, and I view this just really straightforward with your customer lifetime value. So instead of focusing on, how can I sell the biggest, highest cost thing up front, it's, how can I create a customer journey where everyone that I work with in my business can become worth 20,000$100,000 or whatever that number is, over the course of working together over time, I

BEATE CHELETTE:

like this a lot more. So what's the what's the shift in my head that I need to do to actually embrace this? Yes,

Zack Zeller:

the biggest thing, and I see this all the time, it's that copy won't fix a lot of the marketing or sales problems you have. It needs to be focused on an actual marketing strategy. So this was taught to me as you walk into a room and you sit on a chair, you unless you're sitting on some sketchy chairs, you're not worried about if the chair will hold your weight, if it'll fall back, if you know anything, Ban will happen from sitting on the chair. We really take that for granted, because the chair has a set structure to it, but most people don't have their marketing set up that way. They kind of do marketing by the seat of their pants, where, if they need a client, they'll do some outreach really hard for a week or two, or they'll post some content and do a launch and work until midnight three days of the week to just get some stuff out and drive more sales into the business. But that's not a long term strategy. That's what you can do to get cash in today. And in fact, when you focus on doing those cash injection strategies too often, it keeps you almost addicted or dependent on that way of thinking and that way of operating in your business.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Why do people not know this? I mean, if what you're selling is so compelling and clear, it's like building a relationship, right? You are not looking to, when you go out in the world, to have 50 girlfriends or boyfriends, most people looking to find their one partner. So the concept is a clear concept. It's got to be the right person, the right relationship. Yes, what goes wrong that we forgot that the right relationship? What we also need in business. What happened?

Zack Zeller:

Yeah, the truth is how Warren Buffett described it. Because I think Jeff Bezos was talking to Warren Buffett about this, and was saying, Warren Buffett is infinitely richer than a lot of these other people, and just said, How come more people don't just do what you do? And the answer was, because people don't want to get rich slow. And that's how I think about these differences in marketing, because it's very seductive to say you don't have to build a relationship and consistently post and work on your offers and give a good product or service and do all of the things that will work with you that will build your business over time. Because it's a lot more seductive to say, hey, here's this Facebook ad loophole, or here's 30 days of Tiktok content, or this offer that's working for me, that you could just copy and throw into your business, but it just creates, again, this very superficial business that you have that doesn't compound or not scale in terms of allowing you to handle more capacity infinitely, but scales goodwill, where you're able to point to a book that you wrote five years ago to close a client that just heard of you today or share I'm sure you do this or have seen this a lot, where someone can ask you a question. You say, Hey, I've actually talked about this in depth in a podcast. You share that with them, they come back to you a week later saying they've binge watched 20 hours of your podcast content. How can I work with you that kind of conversation? But that doesn't happen if you're continuously looking for the quickest way to make money this month.

BEATE CHELETTE:

You know, this is so simple, it's almost it's almost too easy to to talk about. But I think you're absolutely correct. It is the allure of saying I don't have to work hard, I don't have to be consistent. So now let's switch gears here a little bit. So let's say I'm listening to this. I'm now taking a deep breath, and I'm going finally somebody is telling me something I believe in less is more, better is better. How do I now develop this actual strategy? Like, do I write a book? Am I going to do a podcast? Am I going to start blogging? Am I going on sub stack? By the way, I love sub stack. Am I going to do Facebook ads with just a little bit am I going to do tick tock, Instagram, LinkedIn? Am I going to take a LinkedIn? CRM, what the heck do I do now? Because all these modalities are still out there yelling at me that they want to be serviced. Yes,

Zack Zeller:

yeah. And part of that is starting by taking a deep, a deep breath and limiting yourself. And it's going, it's one of the most, I guess, relaxing business activities I've ever done, where I gave myself permission to just say, this year, all I'm going to do is three things, like, I'm going to write emails, I'm going to focus on LinkedIn, and I'm going to write a new Book. And even if I do two out of those three things, it's a win for the year, and I can joyfully say no to everything else and just focus on getting really good on those three things. And even those three things may even be too much, but I gotta add a little bit of variety and and a little bit of that just for to make it interesting for myself. Because once you really can add those constraints, you can go very deep, and that's where you stand out. Because if you're rushing to write a newsletter and post it on sub stack and then go on LinkedIn and Instagram, and you're in a mastermind community, and you're fulfilling for clients or working with a team or something else, you're gonna be flitting from one task to the next task to the next task, and it's going to drive you crazy, because when you're doing one task, you're going to just be thinking about getting it done. And when you're done with that task, you're you're going to be thinking about, Oh man, I wish I could have spent that time to improve it or do it well. Or even worse, you're going to have things breaking down or not being as. Only does you want them to be I like to say there's this trend of fast copy, which is almost like fast fashion, where people will write posts a lot of the time using AI or other swipes or templates. And I've seen that you can write copy fast, but it has a much shorter Half Life. Meaning, if you look at something like a LinkedIn post to convert someone, you can write a post in maybe 30 minutes or an hour. That does really well to get a bunch of inbound leads, but it loses effectiveness over time, versus if you take the premise of that post and develop it into a blog post or a book, something with more substance and depth that can continue to get you clients for a much longer period of Time. Are

BEATE CHELETTE:

you saying that it's not just 140 characters. So what, what I'm hearing right now is that I can actually write a long form, post a real article, even though I'm told that people don't read and there aren't enough time for anything. So what's the truth in all of this?

Zack Zeller:

Yeah, the truth, which is really tough, is that there's a pendulum to it, so there's gonna be a point where the market really loves high ticket, done for you, high touch offers. And that's the zeitgeist. And this kind of changes every three to six years, then there's going to be a time where people are just burnt out of spending 50,$20,000 on these big courses. They lose all of this trust, and people just start buying low ticket offers to build that trust back up. What it really comes down to isn't the perfect funnel or the perfect strategy. It's really laying the foundation of knowing who you're talking to. Because low ticket products can fail. High ticket products can fail. The thing that I've seen build the most success is knowing your audience so well that you can express what you do as this siren call, this big idea that can cut through a lot of the other noise in the marketplace and speak directly to Your audience

BEATE CHELETTE:

so that they fascinating. I want to dive into this a little bit, because I think this is the, this is the very critical message right now. I have this theory, and I talked about this extensively on the show. I think there's been a mass activation of leaders that have been called to help the leaders of tomorrow create the future. I mean, if I turn on my TV now, look what's out there. It is a freaking screaming mess while people are breaking stuff. Internet Marketing is not really working so well anymore. So where are we looking we have to look into the future. We want to create because everybody else is so so busy either breaking down or or trying to recover what was once worked, and we know it isn't. So we need to look in a completely different way. Now, if you come and tell me Zack that I have to be super deliberate about it and actually have a sense for it and build a connection to my community, which I think is the key word here, that I can share with them, what is going on. I'm gonna give an example to our audience. So I lost my house, I lost my office, I lost my podcast studio, I lost my car, I lost everything in the fire. The choice is, am I recreating what once was, which I really kind of can't or am I going to say, if I have no constraints, what can I create in the future? So the latter is the more appealing version for me, but I don't know what that's like. So following what you just said, can I then go to my audience and say I have no clue how this is going to come to fruition, but here's what I'm thinking, Can I do them?

Zack Zeller:

Yeah, that's that's how I operate a lot of the time. Because so here's the funny thing of working in marketing, there's half of it where you basically have imaginary friends, so you're sitting in a board room or on a zoom Call now, and you're having these hypothetical conversations with other business owners about we have this avatar. We think he'll respond to this. We think that this is his pain point, and here's how we'll structure everything that's that feels productive. If that feels like you're doing everything a good marketer should do, but paper, yeah, on paper, but the other half of it is putting it out there and seeing what people actually respond to. And the interesting thing is that the more you get stuck in your head, the more out of touch you are with the actual market, because it it doesn't reflect reality. If you do everything right with marketing, a lot of the time you set your audience up to buy from your competition, meaning you've talked about problems solutions, the different you've shared testimonials, you've overcome objections, and basically gotten them all the way down the sales process where they're ready to buy, but then they can just google more about the solution or more about the problem, or find someone on YouTube, or think of someone else, and they're completely out of your funnel or your buying process. The thing that makes people buy today, more than ever, is your uniqueness. Oh,

BEATE CHELETTE:

wow. So you basically just told me that if I follow the old internet marketing principles, I'm actually teaching them to go and look for it somewhere else.

Zack Zeller:

Yeah. And this, this was a problem that I had, that I just realized within the past year or two, because I was trained for the past 11 years as a very like a direct response copywriter, working with brands like Agora Financial and like learning from them, and learning and working with big marketers like Jordan Belford and Jay Shetty and a lot of these people. And when I started my own business, I thought it was going to be a slam dunk of just Yeah, because you knew everything, yeah. But that's not the case, because with your marketing as a business owner, expert, it's almost like you can see the maze from the top down, you know, the whole path, even if, even if, take some time to trace it out, but your audience views it as they're going through it. So they don't know all of the fancy turns and twists and inside of the maze. They can just see it turn by turn. So I was going out as a copywriter into a marketplace where, during COVID, a lot of people jump, jumped into copywriting. AI tools made copywriting more abundant as well, and really ate up a lot of the low hanging fruit in the copy world, and that colors everyone's perceptive perception of this, because if I talk to a business owner and say, Hey, here's what I can do, they're thinking in their head, I can spend five minutes asking chat GPT for this, or there's someone I can pay in the Philippines to do this for $5 an Hour, when really, whether that's the case or not, it's all about their perception. And so now I stepped up my uniqueness and really focused on the full stack of how to not just create the copy, but how to use it as a strategy to grow your business, so that you're not tied up creating everything or managing a team or writing a million posts and building a hamster wheel that you need to run on every single day in order to get more clients and more sales. But it's something where you can have it compound and build over time. I love

BEATE CHELETTE:

this so much. I think this is very aligned with what I see. To be honest with you, is to say that you know my gifts always been, that I see this in people before they see this for themselves. So now I want to hear from you, because that's you developed the systems. I want you to talk about this system that you developed with a copy and the email pieces, would you share a little bit about that on how you help your clients to kind of now get this all figured out?

Zack Zeller:

Yeah. So the biggest thing I work with my clients on is having basically customers come to them sold 80% of the way to work with them. And what we do is, instead of my clients having to be on sales calls all the time, where they are a good week is if they have three to five calls a day, which is exhausting, but they don't. If they don't have that, then they're not getting leads and getting money and and all of that stuff. And a lot of people think that hiring a sales team is a good idea, until you realize that someone needs to manage that sales team and keep them on track and executing well, which is a whole other can of worms. So,

BEATE CHELETTE:

plus, yeah. Execution, plus the delivery plus the fulfillment.

Zack Zeller:

Yes. So the way that I like to view it is, what if we take the sales conversation and front load it, and that becomes your marketing. So your book becomes your unique idea, which is the title and the headline, the unique idea of the problem that you solve. And then the book is filled with how you do that on a high level concept with different stories from customers, different IPs and the your all your traffic funnels through that book. So the the goal is, by reading your book, which is going to be usually 50 to 70 pages short book, people can understand how you get people results, and it builds a lot of trust, but because they've spent so much time going through your signature process and understanding your point of view, you've built a lot of uniqueness. And so what are you going to do? Read a book from the author themselves, seeing their whole process, and then work with someone who is just kind of a generic service provider on getting that done, even if the author of the book is a lot more expensive, there's a lot more trust, and there's a lot more status and goodwill, and all of that stuff built up, plus you've started the conversation by basically giving them a gift.

BEATE CHELETTE:

So now you have this book of like 50, 60, pages, which is a short, beneficial book. Now, what do I do with the content? So you help me it, and then I have this content, and then what happens now? So this

Zack Zeller:

is what I was talking about before, which is really powerful. You have a really wide foundation when you build a book, because a lot of thought goes in, not just organizing the book, but I call it smartening it down, so you're not dumbing it down and simplifying it, you're making it easier to understand and doing the work for the reader so they can spend More time experiencing and appreciating the insights you're sharing now that all this work has been done that makes writing posts or getting reach a lot simpler, because whatever one strategy you choose, and again, one strategy, you have really targeted, specific language behind it. So if you're running Facebook ads. You can tear apart the pieces of that book to talk about different different hooks, different angles, problems, solutions, buyer psychology to make those creatives that same work. Can create LinkedIn posts or Instagram posts, or create episodes of a podcast that you just talk about, and then on the back side of it, I like every book to have a reader magnet, which means when they go into the book, it's not just a dead end. It actually has ways for people to get onto your email list, to get onto calls with you. And I love putting people on an email list, because you have not just 100% control over the messaging that you send through that list, but you're able to get multiple touch points with people.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Yeah, I like this a lot. We work with 180 day content plans, and we map it out week by week by week, and then it has to tie in with what we're launching. And then we reverse engineer. So if we're launching our signature program, turn your talent into a business, then what do we need to talk about now that then creates these touch points, and I think to your point, it's not a 10 piece email sequence, which I also find extremely inefficient, but it is about starting a conversation and doing a webinar and pulling shorts out of that webinar, and then writing articles around this. And a lot of this can be utilized with AI tools. So you had said that you also know a lot about AI content creation with the right kind of tools. Do you want to talk about this for a minute before we wrap the interview up? Yeah,

Zack Zeller:

the biggest thing with the AI content creation is understanding how to direct it. When I use AI, I look at it as unskilled labor, where good labor? Yeah, because, because you'll ask it when I'm doing email marketing, I like to the simplest way I figured to do this is I'll create, typically, 30 to 40 page report on my target market, like my my avatar. Are like, here's the problems they're facing. I'm very keen on empathy maps for a lot of this, which, just in case, the empathy map focuses on what people see, what they hear, basically the everyday experiences of the problems that they have, which a lot of people miss out on their marketing, because no one cares about your solution until they know it's for them, and they cannot possibly know it's for them unless they have some sort of cue. So if I'm writing a book about how to hire a VA, that's the solution. But people are going to know about this based on always feeling hurried and harried and resistant to delegating or having too many meetings on their calendar. Those are going to be the top specific things. So I'll feed that into AI. I will also feed it a lot of formulas and templates, just to give it a little bit of a guide of what I like to see as an output. And then I like to feed it a lot of a podcast interview or a book, so that it understands your voice and your personality. And so the three things, just to summarize that, because I went on a little bit of a rant with the target market stuff, but you need to know who you're writing to, which is the target market, and feed that in. You need to know who you are as a unique business with a personality. And then you need to know what good copy looks like, and feed that in with examples for AI. And then when you do all of those, you get really good outputs.

BEATE CHELETTE:

You're absolutely right. Looking at AI as unskilled labor that you have to train is probably the best way to put it. What I'm taking away here Zack is that it's very aligned with what we talk about on The Growth Architect all the time, less is better, and better is better. You just got to get it out of your head that you even want to serve a million clients or even 1000 you want to if you got, let's say, 10 clients or $10,000 or 20 clients and $25,000 that's a good you know, that's a good start for most service providers that are doing this because they don't want to be in a corporate job where they give up their life, but they are where they want to have a life where the job provides them For this particular life that they're desiring. So we don't want to replace bad with worse, and so I find it's very refreshing on how you have shared this with our audience today. So for anybody who now wants to know, you can help them write the book or bring their message to market. Where do they go?

Zack Zeller:

I'm very active on LinkedIn with Zack Zeller on LinkedIn, and they could just reach out to me, directly to it, zack@zzellermedia.com I also have a little bit of a gift. So I have a free book called "Email Cash Flow," which talks about why posting ads and funnels are actually losing you sales and the three email system that fixes it. So if Writing a book is too much, I would say the bare bones strategy is continuing that conversation with your audience. And pretty much every business I talk to, they have the past 90 days of people that have gotten on a phone call or connected with them that hasn't bought and you could send them these emails. If three is too much, start with one a week, and it really does compound, bring in more sales, and start those conversations that lead to sales.

BEATE CHELETTE:

Wonderful. I love it. Thank you so much. Well, Zack, it's been great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, and that is it for us. For today, we'd appreciate if you share that link for this episode. Thank much until next time and GOODBYE. So appreciate you being here. Thank you so much for listening to the entire episode. Please subscribe to the podcast, give us a five star review a comment and share this episode with one more person so that you can help us help more people. Thank you again, until next time. Goodbye.

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Beate Chelette

Host
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Zack Zeller

Guest