Assuming that you’re running ads to get leads…
And assuming that you’re running ads, say on FB or Twitter, via your business’s page or account…
Then let me share something obvious, but maybe very lucrative.
It comes from Dan Krenitsyn, who did growth at places like BuzzFeed, The Information, and The Telegraph, and who now leads strategy at the product, content, and operations team at Meta/Facebook. Dan says:
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This might not be relevant for everybody because I worked at more traditional media companies like The Information and Telegraph.
But we tapped into the idea that people follow people. They don’t follow media companies per se.
We started running pretty much all of our acquisition ads from writers’ personal Twitter accounts and Facebook accounts.
I don’t know if the platforms still allow you to do that. For a while, that basically reduced our CPLs by something like 80%.
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I don’t know either if the platforms still allow you to run ads like this. But the basic point stands:
It’s much easier and cheaper to get quality engagement if you sell yourself first, rather than if you sell a brand or a product first.
That’s not to say selling a brand or a product is not the right thing to do in certain situations.
But if you’re looking for organic growth, for cheaper paid growth, for easier sales, for an audience that will keep listening to you, even if you occasionally get lazy or falter in your message, then sell yourself first.
You might say it’s ironic I’m telling you to put yourself first in an email in which I say almost nothing about myself, share zero personal stories, and point to no status-building items from my own history.
Fair point. My only answer to that is what I already said above.
If you regularly put yourself first in your marketing — John Bejakovic daily newsletter, issue #1586 — then you can occasionally fail and it won’t matter. You can fail to tell people how great you are, and how important your message is, and that people should stay tuned because it’s only gonna to get better. And your audience will still read, listen, click, and maybe even sign up to your daily email newsletter.