This morning I woke up and received a promotional email from a guru that said something like: If you don't have a successful YouTube channel, your business is doomed to fail. And the truth is that it made me angry, because I have a different vision. I have a hypothesis that this morning I want to share with you.
I have the idea that a successful content strategy (paid or organic equally), is not necessarily related to a successful business strategy. Let's say that sometimes it is, but in many cases it is not.
My logic is simple: if having a successful content marketing strategy were synonymous with success, all influencers would be great entrepreneurs, and all great entrepreneurs would be influencers, and that in my experience is simply false.
In fact, there are many people with very successful businesses who not only don't have successful content marketing strategies using social media, but have no online presence at all.
What happened then with the theory of "if you're not doing well on YouTube you're not doing well in business"?
So I drew this matrix, which rather than explaining the phenomenon, aims to map out a comprehensible way to identify four types of businesses, and to what extent being more loaded towards one of the extremes means getting closer to the ideal of business success.
The first thing we have to do is honestly define whether you find yourself on the right side or the left side of the matrix. That is, whether your business is or is not successful.
And since many could have subjective opinions about business success, for all practical purposes of this exercise we're going to use the same rubric for everyone.
There are 5 questions you need to ask yourself:
- Do you have a replicable lead generation system with which you have consistent and predictable prospecting results with which throughout the year you have qualified prospects that match your "ideal customer" image?
- Do you have an education system about your product (or marketing) that consistently and constantly allows you to show your prospects a plausible competitive advantage so that your prospects can clearly see why your alternative is the best on the market?
- Do you have a sales system through which you serve your prospects at the first moment of contact and follow-up with which you are closing most of your prospects following exactly the same process?
- Do you have a customer service and quality system that allows you to deliver exactly the same product or service always in a consistent manner and that your customers are satisfied to the level of giving you referrals?
- Do you have a product strategy with a value ladder that allows you to ascend or repeat with your customers frequently so that a single customer means multiple business opportunities throughout the year?
If the answer to all of these questions is yes, Congratulations! We can confidently say that your business is on the left side, the side of the light, and that your business is successful.
Now, the next step is to define whether your business is successful on social media. This is much easier to define, we're going to do it with just one question:
Do you have at least one social channel (YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc...) where you have a larger community than your competitors and your engagement level exceeds that of your competitors?
If the answer is yes, Congratulations! you're on the upper side of the matrix.
As a result of this brief exercise you should confidently place yourself in one of the 4 quadrants.
As I have said, my position is that success on social media does not mean business success, and vice versa
In fact, I don't only think they are not related things, but the idea that we need to be successful on social media hurts many businesses.
That's why I want to share with you a free invitation to participate in a Masterclass where we will discuss the topic. The date is still tentative, but if you're interested in participating you can start registering at this link.