What’s up Fish Fans! My name is Marcus. You’re watching Marketing Madness, the Blue Fish vlog! Our goal is to address common questions that business owners may have about marketing, sales, and business.

This week we are going to talk about obscurity. By definition, obscurity means the state of being unknown, inconspicuous or unimportant.

Here at Blue Fish, we often say that the number one difficulty facing businesses is obscurity. After all, no one can make a purchase from you if they do not know that you exist. We have some tips on how you can overcome obscurity and move that sales needle?

One of the ways you can combat obscurity is Brand Awareness marketing. In simple terms this is the Super Bowl commercial that gets seen by 100 million people. Getting your brand or product in front of as many people as possible increases the likelihood that you will find the person that wants or needs it.

We are always looking for ways to increase exposure for our clients. If you look at some of today’s great content creators like social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk, or Youtube star Casey Neistat. What do they all have in common? Video. Regardless of the level of production, they are all putting out video.

It used to be that you needed a team of people and all kinds of connections in order to reach an audience. Take Casey for example. Casey is a team of one. He shoots and edits all of his own videos. I just checked and his last video was viewed by almost 2 Million people and he has close to 9 million subscribers. Even though Gary’s audience tends to be spread out across all of the social networks, his last video on Youtube had almost 40k views and he has over 1 million subscribers. Those numbers are staggering!

But you aren’t Casey, and you aren’t Gary, so how do you make this applicable to your situation? Well, it can be as easy as pulling out your smartphone and pressing record. If you have a bigger budget, you can certainly look at other options, but if it is as simple as recording yourself using the phone in your pocket then you have no excuses.

I know that isn’t going to stop most of you from making up reasons why you can’t do this. You’ll tell yourself things like "I hate the sound of my voice," or "I don't look good on camera." and I am here to say, I am one of you. I don't particularly care to watch myself on camera or listen to the podcast that we do because of those reasons.

The other excuse that we hear a lot is “I don't have a lot of time”. That is the silliest of them all. Here at Blue Fish we are just as busy working as any of you, but each week we make the time to produce content. At one point I added up the hours spent and we were spending somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 man hours per week just generating content for Blue Fish.

I want to give a shout out to one of my buddies, Luke Denton. He started putting out a vlog twice a week. He did not want to get mired down in this project though so he limited himself to shooting and editing the videos on his phone. The response he is getting on his videos is great!

Just set some parameters and stick with it. The key is to put out content and experiment. If you are looking for a great place to start I would suggest Instagram stories. There's no editing, and your viewers aren't expecting a fully polished video.

Well, that’s a wrap for this week! I want to thank you for checking in. Make sure to hit that like button. And if you have any questions or comments leave them down below. If you want to talk about how Blue Fish can help you grow your business just send us a message and we’ll get the conversation started!