When you post something on SNS with your personal account the engagement and reach are way higher than with your company profile, same size or not. You don’t want to force your product down your customer’s throat, you want to provide value and so forth. That much should be obvious — yet even the largest corporations regularly ignore this. Example: A big bank.
Their LinkedIn page has millions of followers. Their videos are very high quality (studio, high resolution, editing) and are pushed by thousands upon thousands of dollars in paid advertising and a pool of approx. 10,000 employees on top of that.
4 likes, 1 share for an advertisement in February 2019.
(Let that sink in for a minute)
Of course, they have changed their strategy and now their videos have ~35,000 views, thousands of likes and a few shares on average. Considering the resources involved this can hardly qualify as viral good marketing performance.
Quality Reach?
When you take a look at who comments, likes, shares and reads their content one thing becomes imminent. Exits. Lot’s of them.
Even the few that felt like sharing couldn’t be bothered to watch the video to the end; read the article from top to bottom. It goes to show that even some of the biggest corporations aren’t always deploying the right or really any strategies.
Let’s just pay a lot for ‘high-quality videos’ publish it on our SNSand that’s marketing, right? Doesn’t that sound like someone from high school that just googled marketing, a few companies to use as examples and then had to decide how to spend a $100,000 budget on advertising? Anyone that ever ran online ads knows just how far $100 can go.
Resourcefulness
To put things into perspective, let’s look at an example. A $60 tech ad I recently ran reached ~70,000 people of which 10% clicked on a link to sign-up for a service.
Notice the 0.01 per link click (rounded, even after converting from euros into dollars it is still 0.01)
The industry average CPA? $55.21. The performance was 5521 times higher than the industry standard.
The video was made entirely with free/low-cost stock footage. It wasn’t pushy or sell’ ish and simply an enjoyable video to watch. That was really all there was to it. Of course, there was quite some testing. Multiple platforms like LinkedIn or Youtube, a few different videos and graphics — none of which was hard or complicated to do and often didn’t cost more than a few dollars to test-run.
Empathy
If you don’t have a story, a connection or even just something that is fun, why would people want to look at your ad? Buy your product? Follow your page or any of that? How many Channels, Pages and Newsletters do people sign up for to then later ignore them or click on Spam because they are too lazy to unsubscribe?
Forget marketing. Ad or not, you are creating content. This can not be underestimated. Design, Timing, lots of things can be considered, many people hired, but in the end, you simply want to deliver value.
Resourcefulness in itself has become increasingly scarce.
Personally, I can’t wait for the market to crash. People act as if they can just keep acting the way they do. There have been many recessions on a regular basis and this will not change in the future. If you are not a genuine company or entrepreneur this will absolutely wreck you. If your product is valuable, your team strong and you know what you are doing things will be bad, but if any of those is lacking you and your company is over.
If there is an MVP — it’s crappy
We live in a time of entrepreneurship hype and new technologies such as Blockchain and Cryptocurrency are gaining momentum fast. This doesn’t just apply to investors as ICOs have shown. No due diligence and integrity = everybody loses.
Recap
Basically, many companies are simply not innovative. They create what already exists without even making it better. Then they put a big fraction of their time and resources into creating pitch decks, attending seed round events and reaching out to investors.
But what are the investor’s thoughts?
When you are finally ready to launch: how do you pitch it? And do you really want investment money for your tech startup? Create a prototype, put int he work, hire people as they become necessary. You don’t want any investor’s money, you want their experience and guidance. That’s really all there is to it. Let’s dive deeper!
I get to go to many events and meetings. The purpose of most of them is for information exchange, networking or pitching your idea/startup to investors. (I.e. the majority of current tech summits and funding events.)
Many apply, some get selected and then a group is arranged for investors looking for viable investment targets and entrepreneurs looking for investors.
A venture entrepreneur would begin by explaining his startup, displaying his MVP, showing his pitch deck and so forth. Investors listen to him/her and decide if they want to support the idea or not. A very simple, efficient way of doing things, and it all happens very fast. Because when the most exciting companies start fundraising, they usually become oversubscribed very fast” (1)
When you think of venture investments, you might think high-level financial know-how and superior business sense are essential requisites. But investors have absolutely no interest in tedious details; what matters is whether the business is viable or not. They don’t want to see the 347th blockchain start-up solving nothing, the 2384th face recognition camera security something venture and so on. And to top it all off, forty percent of ‘AI startups’ in Europe don’t actually use AI (2)
Most businesses, not even just startups, are far from viable. After talking to hundreds of high-profile investors I noticed patterns. They all told me the same!
“Virtually all businesses I encounter are failing because they simply don’t have any real value in the marketplace. No prototype. No invention. Just another (and another) deck aimed towards gullible investors.”
And how many end up making it and receiving support from e.g. venture capital funds?
It’s the same for marketing. It’s the same for employing.
Deliver.
