When you decided to get into business for yourself some years ago, maybe you wanted to be the head of your own marketing agency. Your entrepreneurial spirit was strong, and so were your ideas, which never seemed to run out. You were fearless, motivated, clear on your vision.
But something happened on the way to the top. You lost that fire in your belly; sales trickled in; your team grew unmotivated and lethargic; infrastructure crumbled and what was once your dream turned into a nightmare. Before you knew it, you were out of a job, and your business shuttered.
As devastating as this sounds, it’s quite common. Graveyards are littered with companies unable to endure a full year of business. Your mistake wasn’t that you ran a bad company or made terrible business decisions. Your mistake was that you didn’t build your tribe first.
Your tribe is your audience, the people you’re attempting to reach with your messaging, product, or service. Instead of engaging with your audience and building off their feedback, you put your product first and hoped that a segment of the population found your offer attractive. Unfortunately, they didn’t, and now you’re back to square one. It happens. Don’t beat yourself up over it.
Now, you get a redo. But what should you do differently? Create a better logo? Craft a company culture that attracts top-shelf clients? Hire a fractional CMO to build a foolproof marketing plan? The answer: create content.
You don’t have to be a savant to understand the importance of content in today’s digital economy. You already understand it’s a significant cornerstone of successful businesses. What you don’t understand is how to create content that resonates with your tribe, so they buy your offer when it hits the market. And that’s okay.
The best way to create content that resonates with your audience is to begin creating. Whether it’s a podcast, blog, YouTube series, Facebook Group, or a combination of several types of media, just start. Your priority in creating content should be to get the proverbial pen to paper.
When you create content, you’re doing more than engaging in (current marketing buzzword) “inbound marketinginbound marketing”–you’re shaping your voice. As you continue to create, your voice will become stronger, louder, and your tribe will notice.
Don’t do what other entrepreneurs do, and spend all your time reading and studying all the content marketing strategies out there in the ether. Sure, Joe Pulizzi’s “Content Inc.” model is great and will certainly work if you work it, but at the end of the day, Joe Pulizzi isn’t going to write your blog–you are.
Don’t even fret about what to create. Pick one thing that aligns with your values and business ideas and start.
The secret sauce is in consistent effort. It’s through the constant pressure of creating something every day that you’ll find the content you’re excited to make and that resonates deeply with your audience.
But it’s only through constant pressure that these revelations will come to light. Don’t expect to find your voice and tribe by crafting one 500-word blog every other month.
Constant creation means writing or creating something for at least one hour every day. If that means waking up early or staying up late, so be it. It was you who chose entrepreneurship, remember?
So get started. Break out the writing utensils, DSLR camera, or audio recording equipment and press record. Of course, you could do the opposite: lob a product into the market and hope someone responds. Just remember where that got you last time.
