How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen

You’ve got the skills, the service, maybe even a killer website, but how do you actually get people to notice? In a world flooded with content and AI-generated everything, standing out feels harder than ever. So, what do you do? In this episode of Action Antidote, we’re joined by Reed Hansen, Chief Growth Officer at Market Surge, to break it all down. From finding your true audience to navigating tech overwhelm (hello, AI everything), Reed shares practical tips on marketing smarter, not louder. He also drops insights on how to stay human in your message, even as the internet gets noisier by the minute. If you’re running a business, building a brand, or just trying to get traction in a crowded world, this one's for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Get Your Business Noticed Without Losing Yourself in the Noise with Reed Hansen Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting a business noticed, and this conversation may even get into this broader concept of getting noticed in general, because anyone that starts a business, your product could be amazing but you would need to actually get that product noticed. But, increasingly, in the traditional job market, we’re also seeing people need to find a way to get noticed, in the sense of every single job you apply for online now has 700 or whatever resumes, all kind of pointing in and it’s just a pretty crowded world out there in general with the internet having kind of connected everything with everything, everyone with everyone, and we’ll talk a little bit about whether or not AI tools have the potential to change that. But here to talk about just what you need to do to get your business noticed, I would like to invite my guest, Reed Hansen, the chief growth officer of MarketSurge and owner. --- Thank you. I’m really glad to be here. Oh, thank you for coming on. And so, I’m envisioning a situation a lot of people have where, okay, you’ve developed a product or a service, let’s just say someone just decides to go freelance because they got laid off or their job didn’t really work out well, it wasn’t what they wanted to do and someone just has a skill, say, you’re even like a graphic designer or something like that and this is a great skill set for a freelance option. So, if someone’s doing something along those lines, what do they need to be thinking about as far as, “Okay, I have this great skill set but now I need to get customers. Now, I need to get people to buy it,” essentially? Yeah, no, that’s a great question, and I think really the essential question is you’re going into business for yourself. Obviously, you will have a certain set of skills from previous experience and attributes and talents but you want to be super hyper-focused on the needs of the customers you want to work with. And that is tricky because you want to understand both where are they located? Where are they found? Where is their attention focused on? And we talk about social media platforms. Is your audience more of a Facebook audience or more of a Discord or Reddit audience? And you need to understand those things and put yourself in the shoe, because you are not your customer. You don’t just instinctively have all the same interests and likes as your customer. You have to understand where they are and that’s the first thing. Where are they? And then you want to think about what do they need, what do they value. Some roles might be a little easier, like if you are an expert plumber, you kind of know what is needed and what they need, but if you come in as a creative, you have a wide, broad range of things that you need to tailor your offering. An example, the plumber, right? I mean, your customer is a homeowner who had some sort of plumbing problem happen to their home. That’s just great, like 100 percent clear example. I think it’s well established what those kinds of needs are, but I think a lot of us get into businesses that could work across a wide variety of different use cases and we need to decide which of those use cases we want to work on. It’s like you don’t start by saying, like, “I really like to blog and, therefore, I’m gonna sell blogs,” or, “I’m going to sell writing.” That’s just not enough. You have to make it more tailored and actually understand a group or a cluster of customers to take that to market. And what goes into the understanding of the customers? Because a lot of people have traditionally talked about customers as in, okay, your customers tend to be upper middle class, age 35 to 50 something like that, right? But that’s not really a deep understanding of someone. I think what you’re talking about is understanding the customer’s needs, their pain points, what they’re going through when they’re going to see your service, and why they’re going to want to buy your service. Right, exactly. And so if you have previous experience in this role, it’s helpful to understand the people that you’ve worked with previously, and you want to look at motivations. You want to look at what are their needs.Share on X And even I think people might do the surface level of what are their needs and kind of cherry pick like, well, they need photographs, and I’m a photographer, so that’s what they need. It’s like, no, no, you need to go one or two more levels deep. Why do they need photographs? Do they see a visual medium is really important to preserving their memories and relationship with family? Do they have family that’s far away? Do they like to send out Christmas cards or holiday cards? Understanding what drives that need is really important. Say they really want to preserve the memories of their family. Okay, well, what’s important about their family to them? Is this an activity to create closeness or is this something –– do they just like wearing nice clothes or is this –– think about the depth to that and know the other products that might be part of this scenario as well, like, oh, they’re shopping for new clothes, or they really like to spend a lot around the holidays or –– like knowing the timing and all those things will affect what you go to market with. And is there a possibility of going too deep? Certainly, yeah, because you can definitely go too deep and be too focused on too small of a group. I like to use the customer persona approach and create usually it’s like a one page sheet and you’ve described your customer demographically, age, maybe gender, but also some like range of like incomes and kind of housing or maybe family status and maybe even occupation. But then you add little snippets of like frames of like if they were speaking their thoughts out loud, what would be some bullet points you jot out? And you can even give this person a name. You can create multiple of these personas, but that helps you identify your approach to messaging, any of the content you create or the platforms you focus on, are they primarily looking at the mobile website or the desktop website, and understanding those things through your persona. Yeah. And how often do those things change? Because platforms seem to always be really fluid and I have some ideas about who’s on what platforms, but it seems like that’s something that like every year could be different. Yeah, and I agree. I think yearly is a good –– that’s a good exercise to revisit your ideal customer profiles or personas every year, and maybe even more often, as our technology landscape has changed and big events happen, like the COVID shutdowns and that disruption, things like that can really affect buying processes for people and decision making. So, I’d say revisit it when there are major events that affect your ideal customers and annually. Yeah, and I can’t speak to anyone listening any of your specific businesses but I know one kind of big event that’s happening right now that I think everyone is thinking about is AI and how AI is unfolding and how it has a potential to transform, I guess, everything about how businesses get themselves noticed. I’m following this closely because I use a lot of AI tools for the work I do, but also I’ve just become aware that it’s a disruptor, it could replace things that I do, it could help accelerate things that I do, but also that it’s like changing at a logarithmic pace, like it seems to be even accelerating the rate of change within the AI world. And it’s a little intimidating because it’s hard to stay on top of all of it and I think, unlike some of the previous big leaps forward in technology, it’s like really cheap for consumers and businesses to use. At first, there was high barriers to entry with like phones or personal computers or things like that. It required some setup. But with AI, people that just try it, you can kind of take off right from when you start with ChatGPT. All of a sudden, you’re really using it and getting a lot of value out of it. So many factors kind of combine that make it concerning, and, of course, we’ve all seen the horror movies, the Terminators, the Matrix movies, and we fear this major cultural collapse or societal disruption. Doesn’t seem to have happened yet but I think it’s something to be attentive to. Yeah. How attentive? I mean, because we’re thinking about, obviously, how AI has potential to disrupt industries, and when I think about historic disruptions, I think of disruptions that just kind of changed the way we do things. So, for example, the car kind of put the horse and buggy business out because it changed how we get around but it wasn’t a catastrophe, unless someone had invested their entire life savings in a blacksmith shop or something like that, kind of became a different way in which we get around. So how much should we be paying attention to AI as a potential disrupter on that level of how it might