Swipe Files - 📂 If you build it, they will NOT come

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Today's newsletter is proudly supported by The Juice 🙌

You're gonna love this... The Juice is essentially Spotify for marketing & sales content. If you're anything like me and you can't get enough blog posts, podcasts, case studies, videos, and ebooks on marketing, look no further.

I'm partnering with them to aggregate all Swipe Files content to concurrently live on The Juice platform, and if you're creating content for your company, you should too. I have three(ish) words for you: built-in distribution.

And if you're a marketing nerd like me, go create a free account and start exploring their already massive library to take your marketing game to the next level.

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The days of "if you build it, they will come" are long gone.

You can't spin up an HTML website with a payment form, post to Twitter, and expect for it to be smooth sailing to recurring revenue riches anymore.

Every day, hundreds of new products launch across the internet on Product Hunt, Betalist, and TechCrunch with their sights set on growing into cash-generating machines. But the vast majority go unseen, unused, abandoned, or shut down.

It's never been easier to build a software product with the tools and information available today, but it's also never been harder to find, acquire, and retain customers.

Here are 3 reasons you need to be intentional about marketing:

1. Changing perception, behavior, and beliefs takes hard work

Most products are not trivial. In other words, especially for B2B software, making a decision to pay money to use your software takes a lot of thought. A lot more thought than buying a movie ticket, candy bar, or even a car.

Software has the unique challenge of having to change someone's mind, instead of just fulfilling a pre-existing perception, behavior, or belief that was already there.

Software usually presents a new way of doing things.

Instead of using a spreadsheet, use our software. Instead of hiring an intern, use our software. Instead of using a different software, use our software. Instead of doing things X way, do things Y way.

And that all takes marketing. You have to influence the way someone seeing things. Convince them. Show them a new way. Create a new belief about how something should or shouldn't work.

2. Selling a product requires trust

The world is at an all-time high in skepticism. Thanks to bad actors — fake news, pyramid schemes, over-promised products, and gimmicks — and also due to the sheer volume of advertising in our day to day — through games, TV, social media, really everything digital — people have a right to skeptical.

So the difference isn't in having the most attention-grabbing marketing or in the most marketing overall, it's in the marketing before the marketing. It's about each and every interaction and encounter with you. It's about slowly and gradually building trust.

So that at the right moment, at the right place, with the right offer, you can cash in on that trust.

Business is built on relationships. And right now the most scarce resource is trust.

3. Time is finite

Sure, you've built a great product and maybe you're getting a few customers a month. But at that rate, how long will it take you to get to your goals?

We're all on a deadline. Each of us are only allotted so much time on this earth, we only have so much time to work, and we all have somewhere we're going.

For some, you're trying to reach a certain revenue milestone so you can survive off of it. For others, you have an investment to return. For others, you want to eventually sell. And for others, you'd like to eventually replace yourself in the business.

Without marketing, you're at the mercy of someone else — to discover you, take the time to learn about you, contact you, use your product. You have to wait for customers to come to you, which isn't even guaranteed.

With marketing, you determine your own fate — to get discovered, to teach others about you, to contact them, to make an offer. You go to the customers.

Think of marketing like the gas pedal — the faster you get somewhere, the better. Why stay in idle?

—Corey

p.s. did you see that I launched my new course, Marketing Like A Media Company? Would love for you to check it out →​

Thanks again to our featured sponsors:

1. ​Agorapulse: “The Zappos of social media management platforms” helps you plan, schedule, and report on your social presence.
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3. ​The Juice: “Spotify for marketing & sales content” to discover blogs, podcasts, and videos to help you grow your business.
4. ​42/Agency: My #1 recommended demand generation agency for SaaS to help you drive demos and signups.
5. ​Supermetrics: Get all your marketing data into your reporting tool of choice. Push data from 70+ integrations into Google Data Studio, Sheets, and more.

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