Do The Simple Things Before Investing Money In Advertising

Advertising adds fuel to a fire, but rarely is it enough to start one.

Most entrepreneurs want to see their businesses grow. To achieve this, they need to deliver great value and spread their message.

The former is obvious and easily attainable. But the latter seems to be too complex for most.

A suggestion we often get is to produce eye-catching content and advertise. Yet that’s a wrong combination for most starting companies.

Primarily as almost everyone’s trying to do this.

Publishing thousands of pictures and hundreds of videos every minute. Causing channels to become saturated with not distinguishable content. Pushing entrepreneurs to spend their scarce resources on boosting that.

All while no one has really started to care about the main product yet.

So, what to do to still reach the potential customers?

Start with the simple things and build up from there.

Initially focus on understanding your business and the customers' profile. Next, set up your online profile to make it possible for people to find you. Then go to your potential buyers — don’t wait for them to find you.

Again, this doesn’t mean starting to post and advertise any type of content. Instead, it involves old school marketing, aka interacting with real people.

Search for public discussions, study their problems and genuinely help them.

For example, seek for relevant Facebook groups and Quora questions. Or scan posts with corresponding hashtags on any other social media channels.

Looking for those cases where you could add notable value. This way showing sincere interest in helping to solve the problems. Without expecting anything in return, right now.

If any of this proves to be effective then perhaps recycle it as shareable content. So the value would reach more people dealing with a similar matter.

Because people don’t care about you unless you’re already famous. Even then, they only follow you when they find you to be valuable to them — providing assistance or entertainment.

That said, marketing in the early days is only about offering real value. Everything else, like cheap deals or new offers, are nice extras in the future. But to create a loyal customer base, we need to start from developing the initial relationship built on real value added.

Once the fire is already there, advertise to grow it bigger. But not vice versa!

If you loved any of this and want some more, then let me know what you’d like me to write about via my Newsletter, Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook.