James Patrick is an award winning photographer, best selling author, entrepreneur coach, podcast host and public speaker based in Phoenix, AZ. He is the founder of Get Published LIVE, an annual conference guiding entrepreneurs to leverage the power of media features to grow their business.

There were six words that completely changed everything in the growth of my business.

At the forefront of my career, I was attempting to grow my freelance photography business while working a full-time job in corporate America. By a stroke of luck (or fate), one of my many bosses took an interest in seeing my passion project become a reality. It just so happened that this individual was a mastermind of marketing, sales, and business development.

He popped his head into my office one day to offer some passing advice on how I could aggressively grow and scale my side hustle. I quickly grabbed a notepad to feverishly record any advice he could impart upon me. However, he only said six words. “Be seen. Be heard. Be read.”

Reactive vs. proactive marketing

Ultimately, there are two modalities of marketing: Reactive and proactive. Reactive marketing is responding to customer inquiries or actions after they have already shown an interest in your product or service. Your website, Instagram, and word of mouth referrals are all reactive. You set up nets and hope that at some point you score a catch. It’s nearly impossible to predict, scale, or sustain leads when you’re relying on reactive marketing.

And this is where proactive marketing enters the picture. Proactive marketing is the practice of actively seeking out and engaging with potential customers before they express interest in your product or service. This means that instead of waiting for prospective clients to find you, you go to where they already are. It operates under the understanding that traffic is not created, but tapped into.

How to start proactive marketing

We begin by learning where our audience already congregates—that is where we must be present. However, simply being in the same room is not enough. It is essential that we are part of their conversations, meet their needs, and add value.

For example, while most photographers would join networking groups and trade organizations composed only of other photographers (not unimportant, to be fair), I sought out the groups that my prospective clients were involved in. I got involved in these groups, sat on boards, and presented. I was seen, heard, and read.

It wasn’t long before I was leaving my corporate job to work my photography career full-time. When I niched my market to the health and fitness space, the approach was the same. Where are my prospective clients already gathering? What events, what conferences, what groups? I showed up at the events, I spoke at the conferences, I wrote and photographed for the magazines. Seen, heard, read.

Showing up and building trust

For two decades, I have leveraged the power of proactive marketing and the reason it works is far simpler than you may initially think. Reversing roles, consider how we as consumers prefer to source and hire. We choose to work with those we trust and have an established rapport with. These are the people who have integrated themselves into our community and have shown up to provide value before we ever decided to invest in them.

This is how we as entrepreneurs must operate. We must invest into our prospective clients before we ever expect or ask them to invest in us. Doing this builds our network of leads, creating more inbound funnels into our business.