Build Assets not Followers

Uncertainty is perhaps the best word that can define the present day world. When everything appears to go fine, lo and behold, there comes a speed bump that alters your pace of doing things. If you’re into tech and social media, you can’t agree more to this fact as every now and then, the social media giants tend to come up with policy and algorithm changes in the pretext of better user-friendliness.

Though this is key, as marketers, it is indeed a pain to abruptly suspend a working marketing strategy and come up with a new one to completely fall in line with a more recent algorithm change. Google and Facebook have always spewed updates that completely leave your marketing strategy rattled.

So, what can you possibly do to cocoon yourself from the changes and keep reaching out to your audience and followers? With the market increasingly flooded with cut-throat competition, how can you survive using the simplest of strategies?

Simple!

You need to work on building assets rather than focusing on engaging your followers. They are called assets for a reason. You can come up with a million dollar campaign that could revolutionize social media, but the instance a platform alters its algorithm, you end up being anonymous – a nobody!

So, starting this month, focus on building a solid asset to your brand. By assets we mean anything that you build outside a third-party platform. Asset is your email list you’ve been compiling since the start of your blog, it’s the countless e-books or free resources that you came up with for your circle of people as a free download; it’s the podcast or the video that you just recorded; it’s a book that you published; it’s anything that directly reflects your brand without any intervening medium.

Assets are something that you possess – nobody can claim shares. There’re no algorithm or policy changes involved and it is you who is directly responsible for your assets. When you focus on building more of them, you not only gain authority over what you do but get followers or circle of contacts that directly associate with you and your work. They are the ones who would pay attention to what you do.

We’re not claiming you should pause all your social media campaigns and instantly work on building assets. No! All we’re trying to convey is work simultaneously on building them because, hey, you never know what the people at the tech companies are discussing about right now! It’s an uncertain world you see.