Marketing Myths That Are Killing This Generation Of Businesses - The Right Approach to Grow Your Business

You can make blogs. You can tweet or post updates on social media regularly. You can post daily podcasts. You get even create a profile on LinkedIn. You can create endless YouTube videos. 

You can build an influential presence on Instagram and Snapchat and Pinterest. Then, fingers crossed, you hope that you build your own tribe of people that love you. 

Then you hope that your readers, followers, or subscribers, buy from you. It's called content-first marketing, and it rarely works. Sure, you may get tons of likes and reshares and may be useful to get loads of attention, but if it doesn't help you build a business, it isn't worth it.

There's a better way.

People have built multimillion-dollar companies with one or two pieces of content. Here is the key.

Instead of using the "content-first marketing" approach, you need to obsessively focus on a "problem-first" approach. 

Russ Ruffino, founder of Clients on Demand said "For months in 2013, all I did was: I tested the messaging relentlessly until everything clicked. When it did, my business went from $10,000 per month to $200,000 per month in just one month and has stayed there ever since. As a result of the problem-first focus and testing, our sales process is extremely simple. We drive traffic to a single piece of content through advertising on Facebook and Twitter, and then invite anyone who's interested in working with us to reach out to a strategy session over the phone to see if we're a mutual "fit" for working together. Nearly 95 percent of our clientele have never heard of us before clicking on that first ad, and they make their initial purchase within 48 hours of the first click."

None of this would be possible if he had followed the faulty assumptions of the content-first strategy.

False assumption No. 1: If you create content, people will consume it.

The amount of content we all collectively produce and publish every year is increasing in great numbers, yet our attention spans remain the same. 

It means that the average blog post, podcast, or video is going to get fewer and fewer views, which is terrible news for the average content creator. That is unless you create great content. 

Doing this successfully takes a huge amount of time, money, and energy. It could take a year or two before you start seeing a sizable audience (and that's only if you're sharing fantastic content on a regular basis). 

Chances are, you're either spending hours each week struggling to keep up with creating content (which the majority of marketers eventually hate doing) or you're outsourcing the content-related tasks and paying tremendously for it. 

Either way, you're spending a huge amount of time or money for results that may or may not come years down the road!

Before you create your content, you really need to think about this, "If people actually have a problem, they need a solution. Not content." They don't need a relationship with the creator to buy a product. 

For example, you can write a lot about health and fitness. You can have a lot of readers, and when you release a product, only a small fraction of them would purchase from you unless you've made a very close bond with each reader. 

And on the other hand, you could have a huge number of new visitors who would buy from you just because they actually need the product. This leads us to our second false assumption.

False assumption No. 2: If you build an audience, they will buy from you when you release a product.

Imagine scaling your audience for years before finally offering something to them, only to find out your sales aren't nearly what you'd expected. 

It happens a lot. Just because someone loves your content, it doesn't mean that the person needs your product, is able to afford it, or will choose your product over a better one.

You do not want to end up two years down the road, 100,000 tribe members later, with only a handful of sales. It's not worth your time or risk. You want to know if your sales funnel works right now!

A synthesis of 32 studies on trust and sales clearly shows that consumers would rather buy from a company that has the expertise and can solve their problem, than from one they like. A global study of 6,000 sales reps from 100 companies by the Sales Executive Council found that sales reps who focus on relationship building comprise only 7 percent of top sales performers.

So, just because someone likes you as a creator or influencer, it doesn't mean that they are definitely going to buy from you. 

Instead of building an audience of people who might have your problem in the future, you should attract the people who definitely have your problem RIGHT NOW.
And this also leads us to our next topic.

False assumption No. 3: Startups should put energy into turning browsers into buyers.

The content-first approach implies that startups should target browsers: people who do not want to purchase your product right now but may want to in the future.

A much more reliable approach is targeting buyers who know exactly what problem they're facing, feel the pain of it, and want a solution now.

If you treat buyers like browsers, they'll feel like you're wasting their time. They will not wait around until you release a solution for them, nor will they engage with your content. 

So that's a 100% loss of your time, money, effort, and you've lost the opportunity to covert the viewer into your actual buyer.

Instead of spending months (or years) trying to convert browsers into buyers, you should be laser-focused on buyers and give them what they want now. 

Focus on building your brand, improving your product, promoting it, and sharing it the world, Once they're satisfied with your product, you wouldn't even need to create content

False assumption No. 4: People won't buy unless you've invested a great deal of time in the relationship.

It is an ugly myth that you need to build a relationship with people over months to sell them a product, even a high-priced one. 

Research shows that 75 percent of online shoppers buy within one hour of being on the site, with 45 percent deciding to purchase in less than 15 minutes.

Bottom line: When we have a painful problem and are looking for a solution, we prefer to move fast. Put yourself in your audiences' shoes and invest into the right strategy. This is YOUR solution.

Seth Godin predicted that permission marketing would replace advertising. It hasn't.

The unofficial father of the content-first approach is Seth Godin. His 1999 best-selling book, Permission Marketing, predicted that advertising would be replaced by permission marketing:

"Rather than simply interrupting a television show with a commercial, or barging into the consumer's life with an unannounced phone call or letter, tomorrow's marketer will first try to gain the consumer's consent to participate in the selling process."

True to Godin's prediction, 16 years later, the entire world of social media is based on the idea of "following" others. However, the other half of Godin's prediction hasn't come true. And it won't.

Advertising is still the main way that businesses get customers, and it's becoming even more important. It's the main business model of many of the largest internet companies, including Google and Facebook.

Last year, Google made a little over $59 billion on advertising alone, accounting for 89.5 percent of the company's revenue. 

So think of it like this, the most successful companies have started out with this strategy:

1. Targeting a problem

2. Creating a solution/product.

3. Building the brand around the product.

4. Promoting/advertising.

5. Making Sales.

6. Maintaining a healthy relationship with actual buyers.

The point is that startups don't need to even a minute, building up permission before they start selling something. Content is an effective strategy for large companies in some very specific niches, with a proven product and large budgets. 

But for the resource-strapped entrepreneur, who has a lack of time, money, and man-power, it is just a sinkhole.

There is a much quicker, better path to your end goal. The problem-first approach

Instead of creating 50 videos, blog posts, and podcasts, why not create one phenomenal piece of content that speaks directly to the problem that your client has today, and let that one piece of content do the selling for you?

This the "problem-first" approach.

Rather than focusing on creating mountains of content, that your audience may not need, focus like a laser on what they do need: a solution to their problem.

Bottom line: Not only will you save precious time and money with the problem-first approach, but you'll also build a stronger buyer base. 

Instead of your followers being people that just "enjoy your content", you will have a targeted group the actually existing, exact problem who are committed to solving it, and who have been transformed by your product.

Take action instead of constantly just preparing to do it.

Ultimately, you need to ask yourself one question: "Is it a tribe that I'm trying to build or a business?" You can build all the tribe members you want, but if you aren't actively selling to them, you don't have a business. You have a following.

If you want to build a business, start with the problem first:

That's where your No. 1 focus needs to be. Do all these things now. Not a year from now after you've built your tribe. They probably will not have the same problems by then. Start focusing on selling your product. Focus on its quality and watch buyers increase. Right now.

People that have a serious-enough problem aren't looking to casually peruse your tribe-building content for eight months to get answers. 

If their problem is real and big enough, they want it fixed. If you give them great reading material but aren't fixing their big problem, they'll move on to someone who will.

They don't need endless pieces of content. They need solutions. Your solutions.