Engage Before You Pitch

Recently, I sat down with two different clients, two days apart, in two completely different practices. One is building her Facebook page pretty much from scratch. The other has been posting on LinkedIn for a while but wasn't seeing much come of it. And yet I gave them almost the exact same homework.

Engage before you pitch. That's the whole idea. Comment on other people's stuff, genuinely, with nothing to sell.

The mistake that's easy to fall into

When business feels slow, the instinct is to promote your business harder. Announce the offer. Share the testimonial. Explain, again, why people should hire you.

I get it. It feels productive. It feels like marketing.

But here's what I keep seeing, over and over, in coaching call after coaching call: the business owners getting traction aren't the ones promoting their business the hardest. They're the ones who show up in other people's spaces first, and consistently, with zero agenda attached.

One client of mine is a therapist who just claimed her Facebook business page. Before we ever touched her own content, we spent our session on something else entirely: liking and commenting on the pages of other local businesses, referral partners, and people in her network. Genuinely engaging, not dropping a "check out my services!" in someone else's comment section (please, never do that).

A few days later, I was on a call with another client, also a therapist, who's been trying to build her presence on LinkedIn. Her homework wasn't "write another post." It was to comment on a colleague's post congratulating her on a new position. That's it. A real comment, from a real person, about something that had nothing to do with booking a client.

Two different sessions. Two different weeks' worth of struggle. Same fix.

Why this actually works

You've heard of know, like, and trust. It gets thrown around so much it can start to sound like a buzzword, but it's stuck around this long for a reason: it's true, and it's sequential. People don't trust you before they like you, and they don't like you before they know you exist.

Commenting on someone else's content, with no pitch attached, is how you become a familiar name before you're ever a sales pitch. It's the digital version of showing up to the same networking group every month and actually remembering people's names and what they told you last time, instead of just handing out your business card and disappearing.

And it costs you almost nothing. Five or ten minutes a day of genuinely engaging with the people and pages already in your world will do more for your visibility than another perfectly polished post that no one was primed to see.

What it looks like to engage before you pitch, day to day

This isn't a campaign. It's not something you do for two weeks and then abandon (we've all done that with a content calendar, myself included). It's a habit, and a small one.

Here's what I coach my clients to actually do:

• Pick five to ten accounts that matter: past clients, referral partners, colleagues, local businesses you'd genuinely like to support.

• Spend five to ten minutes a day liking and commenting on their posts. Real comments, not "Great post!" Say what you actually noticed or thought.

• Never, not once, turn that comment into a pitch. Not even a soft one.

• Keep doing it whether or not you're posting your own content that day.

That's the whole strategy. It is not fancy, and it is not going to show up in an algorithm update or a trending hashtag. It's just showing up, being a real person, over and over, until the people in your world start to recognize your name before they ever need what you sell.

The moral of the story

Marketing doesn't always mean promoting your business harder. Sometimes it means putting your attention on everyone else first, and trusting that the relationship will do the work the pitch never could.

If you've been stuck wondering why your posts aren't landing, I'd start here before you touch your content calendar again. Go comment on five people's posts today. Genuinely. See what happens.

And if you'd rather have someone in your corner for the parts of your marketing that keep slipping, that's exactly what I'm here for. Book a free discovery call with me, and let's talk about what your marketing could look like with some support behind it.

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If your marketing could use a fresh set of eyes, let's grab some time for a discovery call.

Tracey Lee Davis is the founder of ZingPop Social Media and an email marketing manager and social media coach for women in service-based businesses. A Constant Contact Certified Partner since 2015, she helps small business owners feel confident, capable, and seen online. zingpopsocial.com