You might have heard the rule that you need to put equal time into promoting and marketing your work as you do creating it.

Unless some incredible stroke of luck befalls you, no matter how good your work, podcast, book, or business is, you must be the one to exert the time and effort of getting it in front of the people it was created to help.

Like many creators, you might agree to this rule but not understand what effective marketing actually looks like, where you should be focusing your time and energy in promoting you work, and how you should best go about building authentic relationships and an audience around what you create.

You might have dabbled in promoting your work across a dozen different social media platforms, maybe guested on some podcasts, and even experimented with paid advertising, but never been able to see that effort translate into more podcast downloads, more blog page views, or more sales of your offer.

If you believe in your work and the content or offer you’ve created, you might come to the conclusion that your messaging or social media strategy is off, that if you could afford to spend thousands of dollars on ad experts, copywriters, and social media marketing managers your offer would surely take off.

While it might be true that your messaging is off, your copywriting is poor, and you have no idea what you’re doing when it comes to paid advertising, before committing to spend your way to success (which probably won’t happen), you must first address the root of your marketing and ask yourself:

“Is my work really good enough?”

Assessing Your Offer

Too many people create something they’re in love with and assume that everyone else around them will see just as much value in it as they do.

They get it in front of ten, fifty, maybe a hundred people who should be interested in it, and when they’re met with muted response, assume that these people just don’t understand it yet, or that it’s a numbers game, and they simply must get their work in front of a greater pool of people.

Here’s the thing.

If you’ve presented your product, service, podcast, book, or offer of any other kind to ten people who you felt were the ideal target audience for that offer and not one had more than a passing interest in it, that’s a major problem.

If you’ve got your offer in front of a hundred people with the same result, you can be 99.9% certain, that no, your work is not, in fact, good enough.

Work that is at the level it truly needs to be at gets people talking about it without your prompt. They share it with friends who might benefit from it as well, they take the initiative of posting about it on social media.

Work that is good enough will spread on its own if you give it enough time, and marketing should only serve to accelerate the spread of a product or idea that is already proven to be worth your chosen audience talking about.

If you don’t have an offer worth talking about yet, that’s ok, it’s part of the process.

The products, services, and creations that are talked about most were engineered, sculpted and honed into what they are now based on constant feedback and iteration.

Your work should be no different.

If you’ve created something that’s not worth talking about, you’re on the right track. You’ve completed the initial brain dump, which can often be the hardest part.

If you believe in your offer, now is the time to experiment, tweak, cut away, add on, and constantly be asking for feedback from a core group of people for whom your work is intended to serve.

It can be scary asking for honest feedback from a small group of people. Marketing to the anonymous masses can be a way to shield yourself from the emotional labour involved with looking someone in the eye, presenting your creation, and being told that nope, sorry, I don’t see anything special here.

But if you’re going to build something that spreads, something that impacts and maybe even changes people, the only way is to find those first ten people and create something that is worth them talking about.

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Want to hear more about building an audience around work that matters? I think you might enjoy these reads!

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