Three Secrets to Get Your Brand Discovered

(Guess what, it’s not by posting content on Instagram)

You’ve spent weeks, months, or years trying to get your business to be “discovered” by the masses. Yet for some reason you are not the overnight success you hoped you would be. You are not even the slowly built success you hoped you wouldn’t be.

In fact, you may have built a business that is surviving but you are barely making it work and stretched on time, energy, and patience. Does that sound like about right?

The truth is you are stuck. You need help. You don’t know where to look. You don’t know the secrets to getting your business discovered.

This is what scares me. Most entrepreneurs have great intentions, and even great skills, but often miss the opportunities to grow their business because they don’t see the obvious answers that are often sitting right under their nose. And it’s not your fault.

We have all the information in the world right at our finger tips but it’s impossible to sift through to understand what you should do next.

No one has time to consider a million options. So the alternative is to try things that seem trendy. It happens all the time in marketing. We see other people seeming to kill it in a certain way and we want what they have. And of course there is some one ready to sell it to you, but for some reason it just doesn’t work for you.

So let me share with you the secrets that they don’t want you to know.

Three Secrets To Get Your Brand Discovered

1. If you build it they WON’T come
2. You DON’T need to have a consistent social media presence
3. You SHOULDN’T waste time creating content

What?!?! How does that help?(I can hear the blood pressure rising of the collective marketing world as I type this)

Simmer down! Here’s the context you need around why these secrets may be what you need to hear to get you back on the right path.

The truth is each business is unique and everyone is at a different stage in their journey. Unfortunately, most people will try to sell you on the same strategies regardless of where you are with your business.

If your business is already thriving, then this isn’t the advice for you… hence the title. If you’ve already been discovered, you wouldn’t need my advice. If you are already working consistently with a marketing or advertising agency, you are past the point of needing this advice.

But for the rest of you that have tried marketing and failed, you may need to reconsider your priorities. Let’s dive in.

If you build it they WON’T come

For some reason, as soon we entrepreneurs get a good business idea, we think the first thing on our list should be buying a .com domain, designing a logo, building a kick ass website, and printing our new “founder” business cards.

And 6 months later, we’re wondering why the checks aren’t rolling in.

Sorry to tell you, but your domain isn’t special, you logo is a dime a dozen, no one is going to visit your website, and your business cards are going straight into the trash.

Now why am I telling you this? Well, because you need to hear it. You don’t have the time, money, and energy to waste on tasks that don’t move your business forward, especially when the odds of your new business succeeding are slim to begin with.

The first thing any entrepreneur should do is sell, sell, sell.

You need to validate your idea and establish your product before you can call yourself a business. Get out there, talk to potential customers, gather leads, have conversations, and find out if there is a market for what you are selling that will sustain your business.

Now here’s the most important part of this first step…

After you’ve validated your product, get feedback on how to make it better, gather testimonials, build out your list of contacts, ask for referrals, and do anything you can to start to put yourself in front of as many customers as possible.

You DON’T need to have a consistent social media presence

Oh man, oh man, oh man, we all have fallen for this one.

We seem to think that all it takes to build a business these days is to grow a large group of fake followers on social media.

Or you think that you’ll get real followers by posting amazing photos consistently everyday while using great hashtags.

Very simply stated, followers are not the same as buyers. Yes that’s obvious. But the most common time waster on most entrepreneurs to-do list is social media posting. And then after months of posting pretty pictures, we haven’t seen any uptick in sales and are convinced that marketing doesn’t work for our business. I’m sorry but that’s not marketing, it’s a photo album that you dust off when the neighbors come over for a BBQ.

Social media will be a kick ass tool for you later down the road. But it’s not the first priority and you don’t have time to waste. Your time should be spent serving those first customers and building a relationship.

And then… yes and then… you need to take those customers and collect them into a group.

Let that sink in. You need to collect your customers into a group.

And you need to establish a way to communicate with them consistently outside of the purchase cycle. This could be an email list, a loyalty program, a fan base, an inner circle, a membership, a facebook group, a chat group, a meetup, a webinar, a conference call, an event, a forum, a mobile text list, or any other form of communication that you can control.

And that communication needs to be carefully created to speak to the group in a human way. You need to think of them as individuals and find ways to segment your communication based on their individual needs.

So many entrepreneurs skip this step completely. Or they expect that the website or social media will do the trick but it’s completely inadequate for the task. Some people get it half right. You either collected a group of people but have not figured out how to talk to them. Or you are talking to your customers but have not figured out a way to gather their information in a way that allows you to understand them and create community.

If you miss this step, you will be stuck. If you skimmed these paragraphs, you should go back and read them again!

If you haven’t established your lines of communication, you are sunk. There are so many tools out there to bring people together, and to communicate with them, you should have no excuses. And many of them offer you amazing data and reporting to let you know how effective your communication is and how to better craft your message.

You SHOULDN’T waste time creating content

This is probably my favorite secret. I love content. We all love content. Since we had eyes, ears, and mouths, we’ve relied on sight, sound and motion to communicate. Regardless of the format, it’s always writing, or audio, or video that we build our brands around.

I love content for a different reason than you love content, which is why I know you are wasting your time with it. I love content as a way for you and your business to find your voice, develop your perspective, craft your story, and position your business. But that’s all introspective.

You like content as some way to pull people into your business.

Guess what, no one’s reading your blog, watching your YouTube video, or listening to your podcast. Yes, over time, these things matter. But right now, it’s a huge waste of time.

And if you outsource content creation, it’s an even bigger waste of time and money, because it’s not authentic to your business.

So what’s the alternative?

For a business that hasn’t been discovered, your only goal is to build and borrow attention.

I like to call this creating brand platforms. You need to build something that puts your message in front of an audience, or you need to place your business in places that already have an audience.

Let’s break that down. Whether you build or borrow, first you need to understand your customer and where they put their attention. And then you need to provide an insane amount of value to get them to want to notice you. Unfortunately, you are competing for attention. So early on it’s better to borrow than to build.

Common places to borrow attention are literally anywhere that your customers gather. That could be industry conferences, trade shows, local events, established groups and clubs, networking groups, mixers, concerts, farmer’s markets, gyms, street fairs, co-working spaces, or any place where people physically or virtually gather.

Or you can work on getting into media that already have audiences. This could be getting on a local or niche media outlet for an interview, paying an influencer for a post, being reviewed by a writer/reporter in your industry, interacting in local forums or groups offline and online, or even paid ads.

Yes, targeted ads in the right vertical or niche can be very effective if the messaging is right. And it delivers audience much faster than organic content creation and social media.

Get your marketing priorities straight

The hardest thing in marketing is to figure out what’s next. There is always something else you can be adding to your program but knowing what to do first and how it helps your business is critical.

It’s really easy to find someone to help you with any marketing task, but if you start with a specialist, they are going to sell you what they know rather than what you need.

So spend the money to talk to a coach, or reach out to other businesses to understand what’s worked for them to iron out your priorities. Or just read this article again top-to-bottom and see what path makes sense for your particular business. The best part is that after you get a little bit of clarity upfront, you can easily outsource execution of marketing tasks one project at a time.

Marketing is much less daunting when you break it up into the pieces you need now vs. next.

Stop being tempted by all the shiny objects and build your business on the back of your reputation and outreach rather than on followers and posts.

And then you may just start to believe in marketing again. I hope you do because it’s worth it. And once you get past these steps, you can then tap into all the amazing tools that I just told you to avoid. But not yet!

For my entrepreneurs out there, if you want access to me directly and more advice on how to build brands that matter, check out my Facebook group, Brand Growth Community. Take a look!