How To Promote Yourself In A Sales-Sensitive World
The world is saturated by advertisements and marketing campaigns.
Social media and the internet have made it very easy for marketers to pay and put their ads right in front of whomever they want around the world. This can be overwhelming on both sides of the business fence.
For entrepreneurs, it has become increasingly difficult to simply show the world that they exist and then, harder still, that they have something to offer of any value.
With so many marketing campaigns running all of the time, we are so desensitized to advertising that we can make well conditioned, snap judgments toward how the ad is being presented or if the presenter is being too salesy.
Advice for entrepreneurs on how to get noticed is surprisingly simple: reel it back to who you are and be authentic.
What does this mean? Let's break it down.
An article in The Muse presents an interview with Dawn Perry of Real Simple magazine. Perry shared these six suggestions for how to be authentic while also enjoying the process of self-promotion:
- Be natural
- Love your website / brand
- Go off the grid
- Show some of your real life (transparency)
- Openness to organic inquiries
- Remember the details
Numbers 3, 4, and 6 refer to the balance you must strike between the content you create for work and the time you spend away from work, even though a lot of people's ads show snippets of their real lives.
Entrepreneurs must most importantly determine how they want to demonstrate suggestions 1, 2, and 5.
What does natural mean to you?
What does it look like when you are being natural?
What does it feel like for you?
Authenticity is all about the absence of a mask. Those who spend time wearing some kind of facade that things are different or better than they actually are (or, in marketing, that something holds more value than it actually does), the false veneer unravels at some point 100% of the time. It cannot be maintained because too much energy goes into preserving it.
In business, the unraveling of that inauthenticity can have career-ending consequences.
What do you really want people to know and see in your videos?
What kind of honesty do you want to convey?
Another thing about authenticity is that it gives space to be proud of and trust your business.
Honesty conveys value and shows why your business exists in the first place. If you are not proud of what you do, why are you trying to promote it?
If you are not comfortable with who you are and what you are promoting, you must take a look at yourself first before ever publishing something online. No one wants their time wasted, especially these days.
Just relax and be yourself.