Advice for Startups from Gary Vaynerchuk at SXSW 2017

Gary Vee is the man who gives advice straight and doesn’t sugarcoat it. He did a live Q&A with the audience at SXSW Interactive 2017. A dozen or so people sprinted to the microphone as soon as he got on stage.

Gary is known for his Daily Vee streams where he’ll share stories, give advice, and even commonly calls up members of his audience to answer their questions live.

One of the first questions was from a founder of Austin-based IVitamin Therapy, IV hydration therapy (which I’m sure we all could have used at one point during SXSW). His question was:

“What’s the best way to get our message out there and create our brand?”

It’s a question that every business asks, and even more important for startups, where every penny needs to be pinched for maximum value.

Gary answered:

“There’s three ways to communicate with the world… you can write content, you can do audio content or you can do video content…

When you’re David and you’re playing against Goliath, you have to do David tactics, and our little David slingshot with a rock right now is Facebook ads”

And it makes sense… Everything your company puts out in one form or another is content. Your tweets, your website, and the email blasts you send are content. Content is text, image, and video. It’s media. The perception of your content is your brand.

I’ll add that you should test and diversify your content to tailor it to your specific audience. Video is great for grabbing attention and the social platforms are promoting it. Though it can also be hard for your followers to search through purely video content (transcriptions help).

In other broadcasts, I’ve heard Gary asked if there’s such a thing as too much content? His response was a straight “no”… because social networks live on content and the more content you post, the more people you’ll reach. Note that each platform and algorithm have their own intricacies.

He continued on to say that once you’re creating content, the best way to reach your audience right now for the price is through Facebook ads… and he highlights video ads. Gary predicts that in a couple years from now that today’s Facebook ads will be going at multiples of today’s price. Today is a good value to advertise.

The precision of Facebook advertising available today is incredible compared to traditional means. You can narrow down the audience through location, demographic and socio-economic variables. That can be city, gender, income level, and interests. Plus you can take existing audiences and let Facebook find “look-a-like” customers.

And finally a few other tidbits from Gary that we jotted down…

• Consumer Virtual Reality is further away than we think.
• Influencer marketing: trade your services for influencer shoutouts.
• Most businesses are in a commodity market… differentiate on brand.
• People who care less about what others think about them are more successful. “If you spend more time doing, rather than dwelling… you’ll be successful.”
• Try lots of different things… don’t worry about what doesn’t work because what doesn’t work gets forgotten anyways.

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