When was the last time you went on a shameless self-promotion binge? In this digital world, one of the very best ways to market your business, isn’t necessarily digital!
Too often, we get caught up in the idea that our digital marketing channels will take the reins. If we pump enough revenue back into our digital campaigns, that’s all we need to do in order to be successful. After all, really successful people never self-promote. It’s just boastful and not cool! Right?
Wrong! By telling people exactly what you do, you’ll have a serious impact on those who otherwise, wouldn’t get the opportunity to get to know your brand. By talking first-hand about your business, new and potential customers will get to know what you’re doing, and it’ll generate more leads and sales. It is that simple.
Even we’re guilty of making this mistake. For example, did you know that we offer our marketing and consultation services for FREE to non-profit organizations? It’s so strange. We speak several times a year at conferences, yet we rarely tell people about that side of our organization. The same applies to you, there’s nothing wrong with telling people what you do, what your company does, why are you great, and why you’re better than the competition.
Yes, that may seem self-promotional, perhaps even braggadocios but that’s okay. If you’re too humble to promote your own business, you’re not going to generate sales. While we are EXTREMELY biased toward digital marketing, you can’t just rely on SEO or email automation. You can’t even rely too heavily on Facebook marketing or YouTube content to spread the word about your business.
When you’re reliant on SEO to be your main source of traffic, what happen when Google changes its algorithm? Boom, there goes your traffic. Yes, there are ways to maintain your traffic over time and adapt to those algorithms, but still, why take that risk? Recently, even Facebook updated their algorithm and now, this source of traffic has decreased significantly for everyone on the platform!
For instance, let’s take a look at LittleThings. This is a platform that focused on “the power of positivity” in your social media feeds. Just last year, this “little” startup touted over 500 million video views per month and over 3 billion page views in 2017 with over 50 million unique visitors each month. They were quickly becoming one of the largest Lifestyle publishers online. And with a single Facebook algorithm change, LittleThings’ influencer and organic traffic (which was its most valuable traffic) was cut by more than 75%.
This Facebook update was supposed to prioritize content from friends and family over news publishers. But for marketers, no previous algorithm update ever came close to this level of decimation. In one fell swoop, one of the internet’s next greatest things was wiped out.
LittleThings CEO, Joe Speiser said he’s hoping to find some way to resurrect the brand in the future but in the meantime, the company is done.
Even within email marketing; when Gmail implemented their Social and Promotions tabs, the vast majority of your social and email marketing communications were effectively removed from the inbox, literally overnight. Of course, there are ways to get around this type of filtering but most email marketers have simply given in to the idea that they’ve been relegated to the dreaded “other inbox”.
Remember, there’s nothing wrong with telling people about your business. Now, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t invest VERY heavily in SEO & other forms of digital marketing, link building, infographics, creating amazing content and videos, etc. We’re simply saying that you should also be vocal about your business, as often as possible. Be shameless about what you do. Be proud, frank and fearless about what your company has to offer and how you do it better than the competition. Because you can bet your last penny that your competition is doing exactly the same thing!