We’ve been taught to trust Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and other digital giants as “essential” parts of any marketing strategy. But this trust quietly normalizes irrational spending, replaces real sales with dashboards and vanity metrics, and masks growing incompetence behind big budgets and noise. This article dissects how that dynamic works, why high-ticket markets suffer especially strongly, and why auditing the true cost of each sale can reveal that alternative, less glamorous channels often outperform the platforms everyone trusts by default.

It sounds banal: trust is a crucial component of any relationship, both personal and professional. Deals are concluded not only because their structure contains profit or some other pragmatic benefit, but also because there is a necessary credit of trust.

Paid promotion of your business online through digital channels is, in essence, a bet on trust. You pay to use a tool you perceive as reliable, but this trust only makes spending easier; it does not protect you from irrational use of your budget.

And here the nature of the process becomes interesting. Think back to how it all started. At first you were told: “If your business isn’t on the internet, your business will soon cease to exist.” That’s how the first websites were sold. Then came search engine optimization tools and the associated paid and free methods of promotion. Later, all of this was reborn inside digital ecosystems of social platforms uniting billions of people.

It is hard not to trust Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, X and other platforms of similar scale. Especially when for many years you’ve been told that this is an “essential” part of your basic marketing strategy. Those who managed to accumulate an audience before users themselves became the product now monetize that capital. Everyone else found themselves in a situation where you must first invest significant resources before you even get the opportunity to use your own audience as a sales channel.

Yes, at all times there have been talented people who managed to break through “from the bottom”, without budgets, thanks to incredible persistence and years of work. But that is a hard road.

If you are “simply doing business”, not chasing fame, and you just need a working sales tool, you are unlikely to devote years to turning your public profile into an autonomous selling machine. Even though many do exactly that.

If you sell a mass-market product, this approach can be justified. But if you sell something available to a tiny number of people, your social capital becomes nothing more than a business card of recognizability — a way to secure an initial credit of trust:

“Fine, at least I’ve heard of you; you won’t take my money and disappear — that would be professional and reputational suicide for you.”

Yet such stories still happen even today, though more as a side-effect of the sheer scale of the environment.

The same logic extends from people to companies. When Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, X and others tell you that you will “approximately” get some result in exchange for your money, you don’t question the fact of collaboration. Your doubts live in a different area entirely: content, targeting, timing, budget size.

And the most striking part: even when expenses don’t pay off (and in the segment of ultra-expensive products they usually do not pay off), neither you nor your leadership are inclined to blame the platform itself. Criticism only touches:

the quality and meaning of your content,
targeting settings,
campaign timing,
total budget.

But not the platform. This is remarkable: the level of trust is so high that the result seems almost disconnected from the tool. And this opens a psychological, economic, and behavioral space for systematic, normalized spending.

For the platforms, this is an almost perfect scenario in its simplicity.

You spend $1,000 on ads. You get no result. You spend another $1,000. Then another. And another. This is how trust behaves in practice.

Trying to “beat the system” with only free placements, without having millions of followers, is naïve. At the same time, without paid promotion you simply cannot reach that tiny group of people who truly matter for your sales. You are forced to pay. The problem is that the fact of payment does not necessarily lead to the desired result — and at some point this should trigger your critical thinking. But there is no mass awakening. On the contrary, things only get worse.

The real result becomes more and more diluted. Instead of actual sales, you receive digital surrogates in the form of metrics and numbers on dashboards: impressions, clicks, views, subscribers. People seem to be fine with that. Either because they really do care about “public presence at any cost”, or because with sufficiently huge budgets across all fronts, something eventually starts to sell — albeit at a monstrous cost per result.

But where is the line of sufficiency? Who, and on what grounds, defines how much you need to spend before you get the first tangible deal?

Try to ask yourself honestly: what is easier to sell — a clearly defined limit, or the illusion of unlimited potential?

First option: you are told plainly — if you want to sell, for example, business jets, you must spend at least $90,000 per year, three years in a row. Rigid terms, clear boundaries, specific financial responsibility. Review our 36-month exclusive agreement option.

Second option: you use digital platforms where you set your own budget and duration, and the platform merely promises that you theoretically can sell your jet. There are no concrete time frames, no clear break-even threshold, no real expected range of cost until the first sale. There is only your trust in the platform’s brand and a few inspirational case studies: “someone did it.” Maybe that “someone” was even you.

And so you start spending “little by little”: a bit here, a bit there. Then more. Then you bring in a “platform expert” who claims to know the secret of the algorithms. Now you are paying both the platform and the platform guru, who enthusiastically buries fresh budgets in the same funnel. The platforms gladly absorb this money.

The choice of a platform automatically generates the idea of diversification:

“You can’t depend on one channel, each has its own strengths.”

Now you’re paying the guru, and three, four, five platforms at once, plus maintaining what you were already doing historically. Since you are inside a market where this is perceived as “normal”, you accept the rules of the game. This cements your tolerance towards irrational spending.

It is crucial to understand: everything described above applies primarily to high-ticket segments with seven- and eight-figure deals.

For the rest of the world, these platforms really do work. But you are in a different market.

The logic is simple:

the more blind trust and the stronger the feeling of “this is inevitable, everyone does it”,
the more easily spending becomes normalized and responsibility gets diluted,
the dilution of responsibility leads to carelessness,
and systemic carelessness, over time, turns into incompetence.

This particular type of incompetence is especially dangerous because, against the backdrop of large budgets and the noise they create, it camouflages itself.

The reality is that criticism and doubt are almost taboo if you have what these platforms are good at delivering: views, followers, likes. The fact that your real sales volume is comparable to — or even lower than — that of someone who spends less but more precisely, often doesn’t count as an argument.

There are people who are genuinely professional at what they do, and only those who truly need them know about them. These people spend their money on promotion within their narrow segment, not on lighting up the entire planet. Their audience is often not covered by social networks in full. And if it is, then to reach them you must also touch millions of irrelevant people along the way.

What you effectively get is a strange and very expensive hedge: you are building a personal brand using marketing expenses that were initially meant to promote the product. So, you’re moving toward becoming well known among those who can afford what you’re selling.

The worldview has flipped:

once upon a time, people appeared in newspapers because they were already famous;

now they pay to appear in media in order to become famous.

The normalization of this logic is embedded everywhere. There is no point in “fighting the system”. But if you look at it organically, success in sales remains the only real demonstration of professional skill.

It’s important to see the distinction:

— yes, you can be very successful at accumulating views and followers;

— but if your annual volume of real deals stays the same or declines, what practical value does that media weight have?

And if you have neither audience nor sales (which happens far more often than people admit)? What do you do at the moment you realize this outcome? In most cases, you go and spend more. After all, “it worked for someone”.

The core idea of this text is simple and uncomfortable.

When you trust something solely because it has been normalized and is widely used, you open the door to irrational spending. Meanwhile, there are solutions where:

there is no instant effect of “trust by default”,
there are clear financial boundaries, time frames, and obligations,
the cost of a real result is calculable.

And these solutions often work better. Yet people carry their money to the places where trust arises automatically — even when experience shows that it doesn’t work — and do not carry money to where there is strict economic logic and proven results, simply because there is no instant halo of the brand. Learn more.

Now try to calculate how much of your expense structure is actually the cost of trust — the premium you pay every time you use digital platforms to promote your product. Do you really need that financial load in such volume?

With high probability, you don’t even know how much it truly costs you to acquire a single client — including all the preliminary investments, both time and money. Your current “success” is the cumulative result of all your spending. And that is a big number.

But amid all this, there remains one clear, tangible reference point — the moment of an actual sale. If you make it a rule to audit all your expenses up to the final result, converting everything into money, you will at some point discover that our company’s services, in terms of real outcome, cost significantly less than the total of your scattered spending on “trusted” platforms.

So if your motivation is to grow actual sales rather than engage in populism and self-promotion among people who will never become your clients, then reconsider your pattern of issuing credit of trust. Conduct your own due diligence, ask the uncomfortable questions, push the calculations to the end.

And then take responsibility for your choice of tool — and let’s move in the direction of real deals, not towards ever more expensive digital illusions.

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