Marketing Mojo: How investing in this platform can grow your business

Imagine a perfect world where Facebook gives you complete control.

A platform like that would be priceless for any business. You would be able to keep in touch with your community, gather information to inform decisions and have ready access to new leads.

(Photo: gustavofrazao / iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images)

Of course, this is never going to happen with Facebook, but it can on another platform.

Wildly successful companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Apple became who they are by investing in their platforms and growing it. Your business can do this, too.

Own your audience relationships

Platforms are places where companies engage with their audiences and conduct business. The key is ownership, and the one platform that gives every business this control is email.

Most businesses give up on social media because they work so hard to get results, only to have them taken away by an algorithm change. How can your business expect to win when it is renting rather than owning audience relationships?

If you watch the TV show, “Shark Tank,” you know the sharks seldom invest in retail startups because they are transaction-based. Unless that business also has an online presence with subscriber relationships, there’s no way to grow the audience.

As the sharks like to say, “For this reason, I’m out.”

Be the best resource to grow your audience

Growing an audience is not as easy as it once was, but it’s possible. You have to figure out how to be the best match for your ideal clients, giving them what they cannot get anywhere else.

At Landscape Digital Institute, we help our clients build their audiences from a base of current customers. We start with their goals, which may be encouraging referrals and growing subscribers who later become customers.

Then, we develop a strategy for achieving those goals. To keep an audience engaged, we have to offer them unique value that makes their lives better. It may take up to six months to find the sweet spot, but once we do, we go all-in on that content.

You may know that content that humanizes you and your business works exceptionally well. This includes interesting discoveries and your recommendations based on personal experience.

We are all human beings who want to live a better life, stay safe and healthy and secure our financial future. If you have expertise in these areas, you have something to offer.

This is your platform, and it gets better with continued use. How you use email should not be the same as any other business. You have to tailor it to your community and realize it will evolve.

Your platform challenge is essentially the same as Spotify, Netflix and Amazon. You have to consistently deliver exceptional value that exceeds the price of the subscription. That price is a combination of several things, with the most important being attention.

When your business has a platform relationship mindset, it will become second nature to earn the attention of your audience.

Owning that attention makes everything possible.