How to Create Awareness

If you’re using an owned media channel as your primary form of marketing, the success of your business is predicated on pulling more people into your orbit.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to change what you do, or how you do it, to attract more people.

Because the problem isn’t actually with your material.

Your material is the mechanism by which you share your thinking - your perspective on a problem, how you would approach it, and the reason why you use that approach.

Not to say you shouldn’t look for opportunities to improve, but if you’re not making any assumptions - if you’re addressing a real problem that your ideal customer actually has in a way that genuinely helps them - your material is already good.

The real issue is awareness.

If you publish material to a website, it has a home - but posting more to that website won’t help people find what you produce.

If you distribute that material on, or repurpose it for, a social media platform, you’re adding a discoverability vector, but it’s a fairly limited one - people aren’t likely to see that material unless they are already connected with or follow you.

If you give a talk based on your material at a relevant event (or partner with a relevant organization to create your own), you’re adding another discoverability vector - one that will have a larger impact, given that the audience will mostly be made up of people who don’t know you.

The more avenues through which you can be discovered, the easier it will be for you to be found.

And when people are curious about what you’ve shared, and come to your website, they’ll be able to see all of the thinking you’ve done around their problems, understand that you’re a credible authority, and want to learn more.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking “I’d have more subscribers if I did X” or “I’d grow a bigger following if my material was Y”, but remember: you’re not optimizing for growth.

You’re optimizing for your ideal customer - a customer who values how you communicate, your framing of their problems, and the examples you use.

Don’t make yourself hard to find.