Don’t Wait For Them To Come, Go Find Them
The phrase “if you build it, they will come” has been thrown around in the business circles for years now. It’s adapted from a quote from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams starring Kevin Costner. His character hears a voice while walking through his cornfield which tells him, “If you build it, he will come.” He has a vision of a baseball field and builds it.
The quote has been adapted into a business motto and implies if you build something, people will buy it and use it for a variety of reasons. I have seen instances where this does work, especially brick and mortar businesses. But it doesn’t always hold true. A good friend in Grenada built a supermarket in what is considered a remote location. He thought since he was selling popular and essential products people would flock to him once he opened. That, unfortunately didn’t happen. However when they later opened in a crowded area, people were naturally interested and checked out their product.
Hence, as a business principle, “if you build it, they will come I think” can prove very misleading. Rather, if you build something that is of any value to anyone, it’s your job to go out and ensure people know about it whether that is through Facebook Advertising or using Influencers. Don’t wait for your clients to come, go out and find them wherever they are, namely where they are currently spending their time.
When my business partner and I started talking about IamGrenadian, we wanted to create a platform like Medium.com for Grenadians. We thought that if we build the platform then Grenadians would flock to it and use it to express themselves through the written word. Boy, were we wrong. We were trying to take people away from where they were spending their time. We wanted our audience to come to us instead of us going to them.
We quickly pivoted and started focusing on Facebook, where the majority of Grenadians were spending their time. Within a year our newly built Facebook page became one of the most engaging Grenadian communities on the platform, with over 12K fans. We also started getting lots of media attention, recognition and awards for it such as the OECS 30 under 30 award, featured in Share Magazine Toronto among others. Now that we had built a large and engaged following on a platform where these people already were, we could direct their attention to our website and email list. By then, they trusted us.
If we had insisted on trying to get them to come to us instead of us going to them, I don’t think we would have had the successes that we did. In the world of digital media and storytelling, I think this is a big mistake. One week ago, I was talking to someone with no prior social media following or influence who wanted to start blogging. My advice was to go ahead and start blogging, but instead of publishing content on the blog alone, you need to also post it on platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, The Huffington Post, etc. They worried about losing control of their content and contributing to the growth of a platform other than theirs. However, since they hadn’t yet found their audience, restricting their content to their personal platform largely meant that no one was going to see their post. On the other hand, the likes of Medium and LinkedIn have a built-in audience: people can see you, get interested in your content and decide they want to keep following you and your work. That’s how you start building. You don’t build and hope people will come. You build, find people where they are and engage with them until you have built up enough trust with them to get them to come to you.
