Please realize that understanding your consumer is the single most important thing you can do for yo

We still live in a world where marketing means sales and transactions; where your ad must convert not build relationships or brand. How many times do you see a facebook ad saying “buy our stuff” or “attend our event” and actually buy in? Do you REALLY buy their stuff on the first ad? For some reason the way we live our lives is not translating in how we market the businesses we’re trying to build.

Many of you who market have a scarcity mentality that if I put money into an ad, I must get sales from it, therefore I must close on the first piece of content that I put out. Its an expense mentality vs an invest mentality and if you don’t have a mind shift, you will lose in the long run.

Here’s how I suggest you invest in your ads to build brand and relationships. Remember, from a previous blog I said that sales and transactions are a bi-product from building relationships.

Find and create your target audience. Study and completely immerse yourself in their ecosystem and figure out what makes them tick. What are current needs and wants? THIS is what you will advertise NOT content about your business. Putting out content about your business to make a sale and transaction will come only after a relationship has been built. Once you’ve figure out and created your target audience and have reverse engineered their needs and wants, on facebook, start with a small budget and create micro content on a consistent basis. Provide valuable content to that audience on a daily basis. Be sure too not over spam them. The balance is delicate so you must test and experiment.

As a practical example, if you are a coffee shop near a college campus, don’t keep putting out ads about coffee and your business asking people to come to your restaurant. Figure out what makes college kids tick. If the semester is about to start, create a piece of content that headlines “We know college can be daunting, here’s how to prepare if you’re a rising freshman” that targets rising freshman who’s about to attend that college. Create content like this over and over again with that specific target audience. Again, start light and hit them with valua giving micro content and over time your brand will build a relationship with that audience and only then can you ask them to come to your restaurant.

It’s not always about you. Give back without expectations and you will set yourself up to win in the long term.