Seth Godin’s Advice For Marketing Your New Business

Photo by Andreea Avramescu on Unsplash

Marketing and getting customers are some of the biggest challenges new businesses face. In a Semrush survey, the respondents said these were their top 3 marketing challenges:

1. Lack of time and resources
2. Small marketing budget
3. Lack of clear strategy

This advice from Seth Godin will help you solve each of those challenges. I’m going to share a clear strategy that doesn’t require an absurd amount of time or money.

Define your goal

Since we’re marketing a new business, your goal isn’t to reach the entire world. That might be Nike or Apple’s goal, but it shouldn’t be yours.

Let’s start with 100 people.

You can build a successful business with 100 customers. Reach 100 people that are interested in buying what you’re selling, you’re on the right track. 5+ billion people have access to the internet, so you only need 0.00000002% of those 5 billon people to buy your thing.

Now, you need to define who those people are. You can’t find your 100 people unless you know what they look like.

You need to define what these people are struggling with, what they value, what problem they want to solve, and how they want to solve it.

In the podcast episode I listened to, Seth’s example business is a Paris tour guide service. Paris attracts ~30,000,000 tourists every year. We need to narrow that down closer to our 100 person target.

Let’s define our target:

American families traveling to Paris for the first time with young children.

That group is still more than 100 people, but it’s more defined than tourists or anyone traveling to Paris.

Another specific target would be people traveling to Paris on a business trip. Again, more than 100 people, but still well-defined.

Create something exceptionally valuable

Once you’ve defined your target, your next step is to create a lead magnet — sort of.

Most people create incredibly ineffective lead magnets.