Getting Noticed is Not Enough

I talk to a lot of CEOs with a growth problem. They are focused on either bringing more leads in the door or closing more customers. And that conversation inevitably gets to awareness at some point. How do we get our prospects to know we exist? How do we stop being the best kept secret in the market? And I wanna share some thoughts about how to get noticed and how to avoid making a mistake with how you get noticed. It’s really important. It’s a mistake that a lot of CEOs make.

Relevance
Awareness starts with relevance. To stand out, to get noticed by your prospects. You need to be sharing something that matters to them, right? And there’s a lot of work you can do to understand what are the pain issues that your prospects have and find that that alignment with what you do and that pain, and this actually isn’t trivial.

Another problem that happens a lot is that awareness fails because they may have a great solution that can help that client, but those companies talk about what they do rather than how it helps the client. So that’s one way you avoid being relevant, even if you have a relevant solution. But more important than that is what happens next.

Deceptive Relevance
If you prioritize getting their attention so much that you create clickbait, if you will, for your story. You make your story interesting to them artificially. You are manipulating them to pay attention to you.

That is tempting because it’s easy, right? It’s a way to turn up the volume and to get that reaction that maybe you can’t get the other way. I strongly advise you not to do this, because what happens is you’ve lost before you’ve begun. They are paying attention to you for something that is not who you are or is not the value you provide, or is not the important thing that you led them to believe you are talking about. I’m not talking just about tactically titles of emails, although that’s part of it. I’m talking about your overall value prop for your business. You wanna make sure that you don’t make things up or look for a fad kind of a topic or what’s in the news today, or react to your competitors in an artificial way.

True Relevance
Success comes when you base your relevance on the truth of your value. So to do that, you need to take a step back and be clear on what is your true value for those prospects. And then even if it’s harder, you work on communicating that truth to them, and that is relevant to their pain. I got this thought from a Seth Godin post where he talks about stories and the power of stories being related to two dimensions, relevance or interest and truth. And that idea absolutely transfers to you and your business and your value prop.

B2B Clarity
So take the time to look at your message to the market and find the truth of it. Amplify that with the value, the relevance for your prospects. And while it might take a little more work, it’s gonna pay off in the long term with customers that stay with you and continued scale and growth.