A Huge Mistake That’s Costing You Money

Things are without question rarely as they seem. So here's what that means as marketers. It's very, very easy for us to make assumptions about our prospects based on our own personal experience or what we observe in our immediate. Day-to-day life. However, a lot of times those assumptions are completely wrong.
And a lot of times those incorrect assumptions cost us a lot of money in lost sales. I'll give you a very specific example and I'll show you how to fix this problem if you might be having it. So a few weeks ago, I got a direct message over social media from a young man who wanted to sell business consulting.
To the younger market. That is the market of people between 18 and 25, who were interested in business. And in his message to me, he was telling me that he was very passionate about doing this and that he had had success. And he was in fact, Very young and that he wanted to help other people in his age group experience what he had experienced.
And then he went on to say that his challenge was that. And I quote nobody, his age, age was really interested in business and success. Now I didn't ask him why he believed this because I made the assumption that I knew already. I'm still going to pretend that I knew already, by the way, here's my assumption.
My assumption is that no one in his immediate peer group. I was actually interested in it. And my assumption was that nothing he saw in his own media experience, meaning nothing he saw in his own social media feeds nothing he saw on the television programs that he watched, or the podcast that he listened to would give any indication.
That people in his age group were interested in entrepreneurship and success. So because of that, he drew the conclusion that nobody in my age group is really interested in this type of thing. And this is a very common experience that happens to us all. We believe that what we personally see and experience is indicative of what's going on in the entire world.
When in fact it's not, especially because of the way that social media operates. I see this with marketers a lot who don't realize how much they actually know. About marketing in comparison to the rest of the world. So if you're listening to this, you probably are interested in marketing stuff and you probably therefore have a social media experience where your social media feeds are filled with content that is about marketing.
That could be the result of two things. Number one, you follow people who publish a lot of content about marketing. The second thing that could cause that result would be that the social media algorithms are saying, Hey, this person's really interested in marketing stuff. Let's show them a lot of it. So they'll continue using our platform.
It's also likely that if you're a quote unquote marketing person, that many of your peers and associates are also interested in marketing because of this, it's almost like you're experiencing life in a bubble. In that particular regard, much of the content you see is about marketing. It's using marketing terminology, much of the conversations that you have are about marketing and they're using marketing terminology.
And it can cause someone's mind to make the assumption that. Everybody in the world, knows all about this marketing and marketing terminology stuff. When in fact that's not true at all, we have just either deliberately or by chance created a little bit of a bubble that we live in. So let's take this back to the direct message I got from this young guy.
So he was lamenting how no one in his age group was interested. In marketing and in business and in success. So I decided to see if that was true. And one of the wonderful things about social media and the internet in general is that you can really find out what's going on in the world within seconds.
So here's what I did. I logged into my Facebook ads account and acted as if I were going to set up an ad to target people between the ages of 18 and 25 years old that were interested in business marketing, entrepreneurship, or small business. And I've made that a worldwide. Targeting preference. And the amount of people who met that criteria was staggering.
It was in the double digit millions. , I also set the criteria that they needed to be English speaking. So to clarify. There were double digit millions, something like 12 million people on the planet between the ages of 18 and 25. According to Facebook whose interests were entrepreneurship, marketing, advertising, and a few other very obvious keywords.
Then I decided to take it a step further and I wanted to see how many people were likely to actually be in that age group and doing some sort of business related activity. So I figured the best way to determine that would be to filter that audience down and see how many of those people, or also. The administrators have a Facebook business page with my logic, being that if you're an administrator of a Facebook business page, you're probably really interested in business and you're probably actually doing something.
So I narrowed the audience down and it turned out that globally. There were 3.6 million people that met that criteria that is between the ages of 18 and 25 that had all of those business interests. And we're also the administrators of a Facebook business page in the United States alone. There were 400,000.
However, this person that messaged me was unaware of that. Not because they're ignorant, not because they're incapable of determining anything, but because they were basing the world. On their immediate surroundings and their own personal experience. I'll tell you this, the world is a very, very big place.
And according to research, literally, More than half of the world's living population uses social media with the largest platforms being Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. So what you want to really find out what's going on in your marketplace? Use some of the tools that are readily available to you for free on those platforms to do a little bit of research, what you find might surprise you, but just remember the map is not necessarily the territory.
Things are not always, as they seem. I hope this helps you and I hope it might  broaden your vision in terms of what's out there and what is available to you. And I hope you have a great day. Take it easy.