13 Years of Marketing: Lessons from Alex Hormozi’s Experience Adapted for the Saudi Market

Saudi Arabia is in one of the fastest economic and cultural transformations in the world. New brands are born every day—from cafes in Riyadh and clinics in Jeddah, to tech startups in Al-Khobar and tourism experiences across the Kingdom.

But in a crowded Saudi market, most businesses don’t fail because the product is bad.
They fail because the marketing system is weak.

This blog translates 13 years of marketing experience—built from growing and selling multiple companies—into 13 clear lessons you can apply directly in the Saudi market. Whether you run an agency, a gym, a clinic, an e-commerce brand, or a B2B company, these principles will help you get more customers, increase profit, and scale with confidence.

1. Start With Low Prices or Even Free (To Build Trust and Flow)

In a market built on relationships and reputation like Saudi Arabia, it’s much easier to raise prices over time than to lower them later.

When you’re starting:

• Offer your service at a low price or even free to a small group.
• Focus on creating flow: more people using your service, more feedback, more testimonials, more word of mouth.
• Think of it as marketing cost, not lost revenue.

For example:

• A fitness coach in Riyadh can offer 12 weeks of coaching in exchange for a charity donation.
• A marketing agency can do a free pilot campaign for a Saudi SME in return for a case study and full access to the results.
• A software startup can give 3–6 months free to early adopters in exchange for detailed feedback and a testimonial.

Once you have 10–20 success stories, raise your prices by 20% every few clients until the higher price starts to hurt your conversion rate.

Mantra for the Saudi market:
Create flow → Monetize the flow → Then add friction (higher prices, stricter filters).

2. Use the “More – Better – New” Framework to Scale

Most businesses in the Saudi market want new ideas, new platforms, new campaigns.
But in the beginning, the answer is almost always: more.

• More = more calls, more messages, more content, more offers, more follow-ups.
• Better = improve what already works (headlines, scripts, pages, offers).
• New = new products, new channels, new audiences.

The order matters:

1. Start with MORE.
   You probably need 10–100x the volume you’re doing now—more reels, more outreach, more offers, more tests.
2. Then move to BETTER.
   Once you have flow (people seeing, clicking, calling), optimize:
   • Improve your hook
   • Refine your landing page
   • Tighten your sales script
     Focus on what gives a bigger return than simply “doing one more unit of work.”
3. Only then try NEW.
   New channels (TikTok, Snapchat, Google Ads, OOH, events) are expensive in learning cost. Don’t jump to “new” until:
   • You can’t do more on your main channel.
   • You’ve optimized that channel to a reasonable level.

For most Saudi businesses, the fastest path to 1M SAR+ per year is:

One product → One ideal customer → One channel… until you hit seven figures consistently.

Then add an upsell or second offer to move toward eight figures.

3. Obsess Over the First 5 Seconds: How to Do “Better.”

In a world of Reels, TikTok, and short attention spans, the hook is everything.

Your ad, your reel, your landing page, your email subject line must answer quickly:

• Who is this for?
• Why should I care?
• What problem are you solving?

Practical tips for the Saudi market:

• Write 30–50 hook ideas for every major campaign.
• Spend most of your creative time on the first 5 seconds or first line.
• Speak simply. Imagine you’re explaining your offer to a busy friend:
  • Clear beats clever.
  • Short beats long.
  • Direct beats decorated.

Examples:

• “Are you a Saudi dentist tired of empty appointment slots?”
• “A simple system for restaurant owners in Riyadh to fill tables on weekdays.”
• “How we added 100,000 SAR/month to a local clinic without discounting.”

You can improve your results by 100–300% just by upgrading the front end (hooks, headlines, packaging), while back-end tweaks often move the needle by 5–10%.

4. LTV to CAC: The Metric That Runs Your Marketing

If you want to scale in the Saudi market—especially with paid ads—you must understand one ratio:

LTV : CAC
Lifetime Value : Customer Acquisition Cost

• LTV = the total gross profit you make from a customer over time.
• CAC = everything you spend to get that customer (ads, sales, tools).

Rule of thumb:

• Aim for at least 3:1 LTV to CAC.
• The best businesses hit 10:1 to 30:1 or more before they scale aggressively.

One powerful tactic:
Design your offer so that you recover your CAC within the first 30 days (upfront fee, setup, or first package). After that, the relationship is mostly profit.

In the Saudi market where word of mouth is strong and contracts are often long-term, a high LTV gives you the power to outbid competitors on ads and dominate attention.

5. A Simple Ad Creation System You Can Use Today

Great ads are not random. They follow a process:

1. Collect data every day.
   • Save hooks, angles, and creatives you see on Instagram, Snapchat, X, YouTube.
   • Create a simple “swipe file.”
2. Review your past winners.
   • Which of your posts, emails, or campaigns did best last year?
   • What was the angle? What was the promise? What was the story?
3. Write 50 hooks.
   • 80% (40 hooks): proven angles with new words or visuals.
   • 20% (10 hooks): new creative experiments.
4. Build the ad:
   • Strong hook
   • 3–5 supporting points (story, proof, education)
   • Clear call to action (book a call, visit the site, DM “INFO”)
5. Use the “kaleidoscope” approach:
   When you find a winner, don’t celebrate—multiply it:
   • Change background / outfit / setting
   • Re-record with small differences
   • Add different captions, lengths, or formats
   • Use it across platforms with small tweaks

In the Saudi market, where content fatigue is high, one winning ad can be turned into 20–30 variations to extend its life.

6. Understand the Only Four Types of Promotion

Every type of marketing you do falls into one of four buckets:

1. Warm outreach: 1:1 to people who already know you
   (existing clients, WhatsApp lists, personal network)
2. Cold outreach: 1:1 to strangers
   (LinkedIn DMs, emails, messages to prospects)
3. Content: 1:Many to people who follow you
   (Instagram posts/reels, YouTube, newsletter)
4. Paid ads: 1:Many to strangers
   (Meta, Google, Snapchat, TikTok, outdoor)

If your business in Saudi is under 3M SAR/year:

Block the first 4 hours of your workday for promotion only:
outreach, content, or ads—not admin.

Most businesses stay small not because of product quality, but because no one is promoting consistently.

7. Use Clickable Titles—but Back Them Up With Truth

Saudi customers are increasingly skeptical. They’ve seen big promises and weak delivery.

So yes, you need strong, clickable titles and claims—but they must be:

• Tracked
• Repeatable
• Provable

Great claims follow this structure:

X% of people achieved Y result in Z time under these conditions.

Example:

• “82% of our clients added at least 100,000 SAR in annual profit in 6 months, without discounting, using our 3-step retention system.”

Track everything:

• Lead volume
• Show-up rates
• Close rates
• Revenue per client
• Retention

In many cases, just measuring performance starts to improve it.

8. Say What Only You Can Say

Instead of generic “how to” content that anyone can copy, focus on:

“How I…”
– your real experiences, your experiments, your failures, your wins.

Examples for the Saudi market:

• “How I helped a Riyadh clinic add 350,000 SAR in annual revenue without discounting.”
• “How we turned a struggling café into a destination spot using three simple offers.”
• “How one local founder used niche content to attract investors.”

Also:

• Show, don’t just tell.
  • Play a real sales call (with permission).
  • Demo your software on real Saudi data.
  • Show before/after dashboards, spaces, or results.

Your goal is to increase the perceived likelihood of success in your prospect’s mind.

9. Go Narrower Before You Go Bigger

In a market as large and diverse as Saudi Arabia, you don’t need “everyone.”
You need the right few.

Use the 80/20 rule:

• Identify the top 20% of your clients who bring 80% of the profit.
• Ask:
  • What industry are they in?
  • Where are they located?
  • What size are they?
  • What do they care about most?
• Then design your marketing to speak only to them.

Examples:

• Instead of “we do marketing for all businesses,”
  → “we help dental clinics in Riyadh grow profitably.”
• Instead of “we build software for SMEs,”
  → “we build booking systems for ladies’ salons in Saudi Arabia.”

Specialization leads to:

• Higher margins
• Faster sales cycles
• Clearer messaging
• Easier referrals

Better creates bigger.
Growth is the by-product of focus, not a goal by itself.

10. Use the Value Equation in Every Offer

Every Saudi customer—whether they’re booking a gym, a clinic, a hotel, or a consulting retainer—is asking four silent questions:

1. Dream Outcome:
   Will this help me get what I really want (or avoid what I fear)?
2. Perceived Likelihood of Achievement:
   Do I believe this will work for me?
3. Time Delay:
   How long will it take to see results?
4. Effort & Sacrifice:
   How hard will this be? How much will I have to change?

You increase perceived value by:

• Making the outcome clear and specific
• Adding proof (case studies, testimonials, live demos)
• Shortening the time to first result (quick wins)
• Reducing effort and sacrifice (done-for-you, templates, support)

Use comments, DMs, and customer questions as a content engine and as input to improve your offer. Every complaint or friction point is a roadmap to higher value.

11. Give Away the Secrets, Sell the Implementation

In the Saudi market, where trust and reputation are everything:

Make your free content better than other people’s paid content.

Explain your frameworks, your systems, your exact steps. Don’t hold back on “secrets.”

Why?

• 99% of people will never pay you anyway.
  But they will talk about you—and shape your reputation.
• The 1% who are a good fit will think:
  “If this is what they give for free, imagine working with them.”

Your paid offer is not “more information.”
Your paid offer is customization and implementation:

• Done-for-you execution
• Done-with-you coaching
• High-touch support
• Tools, templates, and personalization

For example:

• Free: full strategy video explaining your lead system
• Paid: your team builds and runs it for their business

12. All Advertising Works—If the Economics Work

If someone is making Facebook, Google, Snapchat, or TikTok work in Saudi, the platform is not the problem.

The questions are:

• Is your LTV high enough?
• Are you targeting the right awareness level?

Most businesses only market to the “Most Aware” segment: people who already know them, trust them, and are ready to buy.

To scale, you must learn to speak to:

• Unaware: don’t know they have a problem
• Problem Aware: know the pain, not the solution
• Solution Aware: know options exist, not yours
• Product Aware: know you exist, not why you’re best
• Most Aware: ready to buy

The colder the audience and the higher your price, the longer the runway you need:

• More content
• More touchpoints
• More proof
• More time

Ads fail when businesses underestimate this runway.

13. Repeat Yourself More Than You Think

You will get tired of your message long before the Saudi market even knows your name.

That’s normal.

The fundamentals of business, health, money, and relationships haven’t changed in thousands of years. What changes is:

• The story you use
• The format (reel, long-form, email, blog, talk)
• The context (sector, city, use case)

So:

• Recycle your core ideas in new stories and formats.
• Post old winning content again with fresh packaging.
• Turn the same concept into:
  • A reel
  • A YouTube video
  • A LinkedIn post
  • A newsletter
  • A keynote slide

Your audience is busy. Most of them didn’t see it the first time.

Final Thoughts: Building a Saudi Brand That Lasts

The Saudi market is full of opportunity, but also full of noise.

If you:

• Start with flow and trust
• Focus on one offer, one avatar, one channel
• Obsess over hooks, value, and LTV:CAC
• Specialize instead of trying to serve everyone
• Give away your best thinking for free and sell implementation
• And repeat your core message relentlessly

…you won’t just be “doing marketing.”
You’ll be building a real, scalable growth machine that can survive trends, platforms, and algorithms in Saudi Arabia’s new economy.