The world of Inbound

Not too long ago I indulged myself in Seth Godin's content. I knew he was one of the greatest minds in marketing but I had never really looked into him and boy when I say it made me look at marketing in an entirely different light, it did.

I'll use myself as a case study in this post. When I did start my first business I knew very little about marketing and the details that go into it and to be honest I never really bothered much about it. However I came across Gary Vee's content which at the time was emphasizing on how there was never a better time to run Instagram ads. This triggered a light bulb and I sure as hell followed his advice and I must say running Instagram ads was a cheap affair at the time.

You have no idea how proud I was of myself for running this particular ad and I began to fantasize about all the new clients who were going to find me and buy from me. This however was not the case .

Yes I did I get thousands of likes on that particular post but this had no impact on my sales.

"Maybe I should pump in more money into my ads?" I thought to myself.

This still did not align with what I termed as a key performance indicator. So by this time I was actually getting frustrated because all the marketing experts were preaching ads. I decided to step up my game and make my ads more appealing and including the necessary call to actions. Eventually I realized that running ads was not particularly doing much for me and the ROI was the bare minimum.

Why was this happening? Well the thing is millions of people are trying to get seen by an audience on the internet. Millions of ads are running every other day and you are fighting with these other businesses to get the attention of internet users. This makes it rather difficult to cut through the noise most especially if you are trying to be a memorable brand.

So here I am running out of money to fuel into my advertising . What was I to do next? Call it a guardian angel or the tiny voice that made me think to myself , "maybe you should be authentic and actually add value." Prior to that I would just sell and expect people to buy . However I changed my approach entirely . I began asking my audience what their challenges were and addressing them, I stopped trying to be like every other person and found my unique selling point. Eventually I began building a brand , a community that I loved interacting with every other day and my sales , interactions and follower base massively increased. This only happened when I changed my mindset from "how will this benefit me ?" to "How much value can I add."

What I am trying to say here is , marketing a product or service should be about problem solving and the rest will follow because even according to universal law :

"You must give in order to receive."

Take a look at your own brands , whether business or personal and ask yourselves this one question.

"Am I passionate enough about what I am presenting to the world , in a way that I can exert myself fully in serving and adding value to others?"

Besties lets go out into the world and make a difference.