Small Business Owners: People want to hear from you – but hate seeing your ads

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Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner? Relax. People actually want to hear from you. They just HATE seeing your ads. Research shows time and time again that they think there’s too many, they’re too intrusive, and all the tracking is downright creepy. It’s not for no reason that Facebook appears to be constantly answering questions in one privacy investigation after another. Sure, some of the breacher were due to their third party app developers, but nobody can deny they probably know more about you than you like to care about. Anonymized data or not, meaning they cannot link the profile they have of you to your name, the data is still being captured. And when the data is there, someone, at some point, will find a use for it. Whether you like it or not.

Now the real question is whether you, as a small business owner, want to associate yourself with those practices. Sure, marketers tell us “ads are the future”, and as long as your pockets are deep enough there might be a partial truth in there somewhere. Call me naive, but I enjoy hearing from the people I like to follow. I want to receive their emails and updates. And if they have something to sell, as long as it aligns with my goals, I’m likely to make the purchase. No creepy tracking or “retargeting” required. Actually, if I do see ads from a site I visited show up elsewhere across the web (creepy), that business loses points and personally, I’m less likely to buy from them. Have you ever been to one of those furniture stores where you just cannot shake the annoying commission-paid salesmen who simply won’t let you browse the store in peace? Car dealerships are notorious for this too. But once you know this, you can have some fun with it.

I run my businesses following this “attraction marketing” approach. Other than statistics, the fact that you’re reading this post right now is not being tracked for the purpose of spamming you with an ad for one of my entrepreneur courses later. (If you want to sign up, the link is below.) Building a business the right way may sometimes take a little longer than mass-blasting ads into the interwebs. But at least I’m not “creepy”. Time to revisit your marketing approach?

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P.S. Questions, comments, compliments? Text me: 604-210-8668. I’d love to hear from you.

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