Why Perfection is Holding Back Your Business From Growing

I am Jasper and you are listening to Growth Journal, the podcast where I talk about everything I'm learning while I am growing my business. Welcome to this episode. This week, I am going to talk about something that I heard in a sales meeting recently. And it is something that a lot of business owners are struggling with, especially the ones who have been in business for years already. What I am talking about here is the type of content that you need to create for your business these days. As I said, it's mostly the people who have been in business for years already who seem to be struggling a little bit with this. And it's not that strange because back in the day, you just were posting an advertisement in the local newspaper or maybe the local radio station and that was it. That was how you did a commercial for your business, but obviously things have changed in the meantime.

So when I was recently mentioning to a new client how important it is to have great visual content for your business, they saw the light basically. They were like, "Hmm, wait a minute. Just recently we were talking to the web developer and they told us the same thing. And now you are saying that visual content is this important. I'm seeing a trend here." I'm like, "Yeah, no shit. There is a trend here."

So why has media become so more visual these days? Well, it's quite simple. People are seeing great content all the time. This basically already started with Instagram couple of years ago, and it's only accelerated from there. So if you look at the social media landscape today, which mostly exists out of TikTok, Instagram, maybe some Snapchat, and then of course we still have LinkedIn and Facebook, depending on the audience, they will be a bit heavier on one or the other platform. But I think we can definitely say that TikTok is one of the biggest platforms right now, one of the most important platforms, but it's also a great platform to experiment with your content. And the reason is that TikTok is based on what's called interest graph, whereas social media has always been based on the social graph.

For example, when you posted something on Instagram, the people who are following your accounts, they would see your content. But when you're posting something on TikTok now, this content will be pushed to anyone who's interested in the content that you are creating. It's the same thing for Instagram Reels right now. So they're basically copying TikTok. So makes sense I guess, but this is one of the great reasons why media has become so much more visual and why your business needs to do the same thing.

What is the most important when you are creating content for your business is that it does not need to be perfect, needs to be relatable. A lot of businesses are stuck with the idea that their content needs to be perfect. They need to hire a great agency to do their content, or they think that they need to hire a photographer or a videographer. But if you can create content that's relatable, it will actually perform better than when you have professionally created content. And this is especially true for TikTok. Let's say you own a pizza place. Instead of hiring a videographer to create a show reel of your pizza place, just pull out your phone and show people how you are making your pizza, how much effort that you're putting into the sourcing of the ingredients for your pizzas, and show them the process. Show them how the pizza's made with love. And this is something that will actually work better on social media quite often, than just a old-school show reel, let's say. And the most important part here is engagement and being in touch with your audience.

So if you are just starting out on TikTok and you just created your account, maybe hold off a little bit on creating content at first. Go to search and search for the topic that you want to create content about. And often this will be like your business. So let's take the pizza example, just search for pizza, #pizzaplace and see what content comes up. Try to learn. Look at these accounts, look at the content that they've created and see which content is performing better. Try to see a trend here. Like for TikTok, for example, a strong hook in the first three seconds is very important. So see what hooks other people and other businesses are using. So just search around your interests and take in the content that is available on TikTok.

Now, last but not least, let me talk about a couple of examples. Recently I did a paddleboard rental in Cape Cod. And for promoting this business, you could create some photos, maybe you could find some stock photography of people paddleboarding or just of the paddleboards themselves show area. But another interesting thing would be if you would actually create some short videos of people having fun on paddleboards, maybe if you're lucky, you can even create a video with a seal nearby near the paddleboards. Fun fact, when we were paddleboarding, all of a sudden my girlfriend was like, "Hey, Jasper, look behind you, look behind you." I was, of course, totally focused on not falling over into the water, but apparently there was a seal right behind me. So we were literally paddleboarding with the seals. How cool is that?

Another example would be if you're a coffee roaster. If you're a coffee roaster, you can post some photos of the packaging of your beans, but even more interesting would be if you actually showed the behind-the-scenes process. So just take out your iPhone again. And while you are roasting the beans, guide people through this process, tell them about how you source your beans. Maybe tell them about how the beans are grown, where they are from, how the farmers put love into growing the right beans. Guide through the entire process. And this is content that will touch people. This is content that will actually work. This is content that people find relatable.

For a fashion store, same thing. My parents back in the day had a fashion store, clothing store, and my father was also a amateur photographer. So every now and then, he would ask some friends to come over and we would do a little fashion show and he would make the photos. And these photos would be used for advertisements in local papers. So he was already working on the same example that I'm using right now, but now we would create some video content about this. So we would take our friends into the store. We would show the process of how we find the right clothes for them. And then we would show the clothes themselves when they're all dressed up. And this is how you can create great content for a fashion store as well. Maybe you can also talk about how you use some accessories to make your outfit even better, or you can talk about which colors match well with which types of skin. There are multiple things that you can talk about here. I'm not that educated anymore on fashion. I also really wasn't back in the day. I just asked for help, but anyway, but this is something... There is a lot of content to be created quite often for a business, other than just saying, "This is the product that I'm selling."

Now, as a call to action to end this episode, I want you to take out your iPhone and go record one short video for your business and post it. You will post it on TikTok and Instagram Reels. Or if already have one of those two, just post it on whatever you have, but it would be a good idea to at least explore TikTok as well if you're only active on Reels, which is the case for most people. And you just need to make sure that your content is genuine and then either entertaining or educational. And as for the entertaining part, it can also be inspiring as well.

But this is really the most important part. If you want to take it one step further, you can also try to think about the hook. Just imagine how people are scrolling through a feet of videos. And they're just seeing the first couple of seconds of your video, and they need to decide in those first seconds, if they want to watch your video or not. So make sure that those first seconds are really good, that they have a hook to give people this hunger for watching the rest of your video.

That brings us to the end of this episode. As always, thank you for listening to Growth Journal. If you enjoy our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts and be sure to come back next week for another episode.