Not All Businesses Need Influencers, Explains Business Influencer Jonathan Goodman (Full Q&A)

Can any business thrive without social media influencers in 2025? With 80 percent of companies investing in influencers — and a record projected spend of $9.3 billion — it may seem impossible to compete without hiring them.

But Jonathan Goodman, author of The Obvious Choice: Timeless Lessons on Success, Profit, and Finding Your Way, believes that too many brands excessively focus on winning the internet. It’s a surprising perspective from someone with 260,000 Instagram followers. He spoke with b. about how to build a successful marketing strategy without the influence of influencers.

b.: So you’re telling business owners to play in their own lanes? Not everyone has to be an influencer?

Goodman: How do you beat Michael Jordan? You sure as hell don’t play basketball. To me, it’s as simple as that.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to be an influencer, but you have to understand that the rewards, time horizons, rules of engagement, and odds of success are fundamentally different in that game compared to building a business.

The problem is we’re now conflating those two things. If you’re a marketer working for somebody else or you own your own business, you’re going to compete with people who are full-time entertainers. That’s their full-time job — it’s what they live and breathe. And you’re trying to fit this in on top of your everyday work? Of course you’re going to get your ass handed to you.

I’m not saying don’t use [social media] but look at it differently. What I say to people is twofold: Content can be used to build a network and to become the obvious choice — like with a podcast, for example — but the best use of content isn’t necessarily to generate attention. Rather, it’s to convert attention generated elsewhere.

Think of it like a savings account: You invest excess time and capital into it, hoping for long-term gains, but you don’t rely on immediate returns for short-term needs. That’s my recommendation. Yeah, you should be creating content, but do it while finding more efficient ways to feed your business today.

b.: What’s the biggest problem with modern digital marketing?

Goodman: You think back to the Mad Men era — I call it the golden era of marketing — and just how hard it was. If you wanted to make a sale, you had to acquire a list, write up a letter or an advertisement, pay to have it sent, get people to cut out a response form, fill in their information, mail it back to you, collate the responses, see if the ad was successful, figure out where you could find similar lists, and continue testing back and forth over many, many months. It was really hard — and really expensive — but, as a result, you were kind of forced to be good.

With the internet making everything so much easier for us, we get worse and worse if we’re not careful. Every time you decide that you want to use technology to make your life easier, you actually have to consider the trade-off in how it’s potentially downgrading your natural operating system. Like, what are you not getting better at as a result of you using this technology? 

If you have access to [some new technology], so does everybody else. There’s no advantage. Warren Buffett once said that if everybody’s at a parade and one person stands on their tiptoes to get a better view, what happens next is everybody stands on their tiptoes and then nobody’s view is better — but everybody’s legs hurt.

That’s the “parade problem” we’re all dealing with today. We’re all working harder and creating more, and unless we really go out of our way, we’re not forced to be as good as we used to be. As a result, it’s just a race to the bottom where no one is really breaking through.

b.: Which metrics of success do you feel are being inflated as more important than they actually are?

Goodman: I don’t think that the question is whether they’re important or not important. The book is about identifying the different games that you can choose to play today, figuring out the rules, and playing the hell out of that game.

Likes can be very important if your goal is to become famous on the internet. But if your goal is to build a business, it’s not that important of a metric to track. It can lead you the wrong way, because it’s easy to get likes — but likes don’t necessarily correspond with dollars.

What’s good for your ego is often bad for your wallet. I can put up a post any given day on my Instagram and it’s going to get 10,000-plus likes, but those are not the posts that generate inbound inquiries for our business.

Bar Ape, a seasonal gelato shop in Toronto, measures their social media success like this: When they announce a new flavor, how many people flood into their shop? And how quickly do they sell out of it?

So what are the metrics you’re tracking, and how much do they actually correspond to tangible business outcomes? Likes and engagement might have something to do with that, but they certainly don’t tell the whole story.

b.: Some say word-of-mouth marketing has consistently stayed No. 1 over time. Would you agree?

Goodman: Over 90 percent of sales still happen through (mostly offline) word of mouth. Here’s the example that I give to people: Look around wherever you are right now. “What do I have?” I’ve got a phone, pens, a water bottle, headphones, whatever. How did I end up buying all these things? My dad told me about the headphones, and that pen just happened to be on the floor. Take a look around at everything you’ve bought. Did social media or blog content influence any of those purchases? Do you even know if the companies behind these items have social media accounts? Or their top selling points? We often have no idea.

Then think about the service professionals that you hire: your financial adviser, accountant, life coach, massage therapist, whatever. Did you hire them as a result of content? Maybe one of them? Is that where it started though? Or was the content more of a nurturance-type thing when you were already interested?

Someone you know passed it along to you. That’s how we’ve always made purchases. And as we trust what we see online less, I’d argue we’re actually going to make even more decisions this way.

b.: What’s one way your mindset has changed since starting the book?

Goodman: The single hardest chapter for me to write was called “Optimistic Ignorance,” and it’s probably my favorite chapter in the book.

What that taught me was just how important it is to … resist the urge to become what I call pessimistically over-informed. When you know too much about something, you know all the reasons why it can’t work. You know everybody else doing that thing, like, “Oh, they’re so far ahead of me.”

Optimistic ignorance works like this: Let’s say it’s pitch-black outside, and you’re driving on a highway. You know that there are twists and turns, and you’ve got about 100 miles to go. Your high beams are on, and you can see about 100 meters in front of you. But every 100 meters that you drive lights up the next 100 meters, and then the next.

The idea is to appreciate that, in this day and age, the next step is always “figure-out-able.” You can always take a step back and iterate on what you’re doing … because it allows you to build something unique and a little different, instead of just another copycat business that’s never going to break through the invisible wall everyone else is up against.

This article first appeared in the b. Newsletter. Subscribe now!