You don’t really find customers for your product; they find you.
But.
“In order to be found, you have to be findable.”
Austin Kleon
And being discoverable isn’t turning up on the web & shouting louder: here’s a superior product. Buy now.
We’re all experienced this type of push marketing.
Where businesses flood social networks and inboxes talking about themselves and their products with:
→ Feature-focused press releases
→ Noisy product launches
→ Self-promotional newsletters
→ Aggressive homepages
Screaming: buy, buy, buy, now, now, now.
It’s no surprise why most people don’t respond. They don’t know who you are since you aren’t in their networks.
Here are 3 ways to be discovered inside your audience networks.
1. Adding personalities to the business.
Making our marketing more human only happens when actual humans are visible and accessible to an audience.
Get creators, engineers, and makers of your products to engage (asking questions and answering some), daily with the audiences that you wish to serve. Not only in networks you control. But spaces outside your control.
Example: The marketing folks at Databox.
2. Build sharing into the routine.
Marketing is the generous act of helping others become who they seek to become.
Seth Godin.
Generously share ideas, experiences, and knowledge with everyone in the community you wish to serve. They don’t have to be immediate customers. They very well could, eventually.
According to Andre Chepron’s explanation of being valuable and serving:
“Our job as sense-makers starts by thinking deeply, asking smart questions, then synthesizing and abstracting knowledge, making it accessible to the right people — the people attracted to us, who seek and need what we have.”
Examples: Ahrefs and Refine Labs
3. Create content for amplifiers.
Your content audience should be different from your sales audience.
We lose the chance to position ourselves as a useful resource for individuals who haven’t yet realized they need a solution by solely creating content for those who have.
Instead, you should create content that will appeal to and engage an audience that your potential customers will respect and trust.
In his audience research blog, Rand Fishkin explains this:
“If you want to earn amplification, the kind you’ll need to build a true content flywheel, you need to appeal to an audience that has both the ability to amplify and channels on which to spread the word.”
Example: Intercom