The Calm Before the Storm

For a lot of CEOs, the best marketing is fireworks. It’s big, it’s bold. Think Super Bowl ad or viral video. They wanna see their name out there. The truth is the most effective marketing, especially for B2B, comes upfront before that. The steady state preparatory work that you do to condition your market for that big exclamation point that you want to invest in.

Awareness

For awareness. Rather than just going cold with a big product announcement, an expensive product announcement at your annual conference for your industry, or getting an ad in the Wall Street Journal. You need to first do the work to build your reputation in your space with thought leadership. Get the word out on your insights. Your expertise. It could be a blog, it could be a podcast. There’s a lot of different ways to do that. That takes steady discipline work over time, and that’s gonna pay off when it comes time to make that big announcement because the people that you want to know you, know who you are and what you do, and they will listen to that, that news that you have to offer.

Outreach

Likewise, when it comes to reaching out to prospects and trying to build your customer base, if you start a cold call, these days, that’s gonna get you almost nowhere. So rather than send that big email blast, you wanna start first by identifying the exact kind of clients that you can help and make connections with them first, make relationships with them. Some of that thought leadership is a way to do that, before you have a transactional conversation. That will open the door for you when it comes time to invest in that outreach.

Growth

And likewise, with your existing customers, you may have a huge annual customer event, user group event, something like that. That’s great. That alone won’t be as valuable as the week to week relationship and experience that your customers have with your product and with your team.

So what it comes down to is, sure, you can have a big bang, but it’s gonna be a bigger bang if you do the quiet, thankless work upfront to set it up for success.