One glorious afternoon, I was hiking deep into the San Bernardino Mountains to my favorite trout stream. The sun was shining through the trees just before it dropped out of sight. Dusk is the best time to hook hungry rainbows and brookies.

As I marched toward the stream, I started thinking about how marketing is exactly like fly fishing. The most important thing in fly fishing is having the right fly to present. Just like with marketing, you need the right message. The stream could be filled with fish, but if you put a golf ball on your hook, it’s guaranteed you’ll catch nothing.

The next most important thing is a stream with fish in it. You could have the perfect fly, but if there are no trout, it won’t do you much good. Just as with marketing, you can have an amazing offer, but if the advertising stream you are using does not have customers, it won’t do you much good either.

Now, one of the biggest challenges for fly fishers happens to be the exact same challenge marketers face. The well-known streams are fished dry. And when you give in and give the stream one more try, there are so many anglers you can’t even cast your line. Same with marketing. Social media and Google Ads — once the go-to channels for marketers, like famous trout streams — are becoming more saturated every day.

But that doesn’t mean there are no great places to fish (or market). This little Southern California stream I’m hiking to is filled with fish. Part of the reason why is because you need to hike five miles in heavy brush to get there. Of the anglers that know about this stream, few are willing to make the trek.

On top of that, the only way to find trout streams like this one is to explore. You need to look at maps and find streams that are barely marked and hike into a bunch of them to find out which ones are magic. You also need a high tolerance for failure because most of them aren’t magic.

If the trout stream is in a blog post, or people are talking about it, then it’s already too late. Same with the great places to market. Most of the ones you read about in blogs and hear about from other marketers are overcrowded and expensive. But to find the good ones, you need to try the craziest places, messaging in hand, to find out which ones are magic. And like my trout stream five miles deep in the mountains, few organizations are willing to make the effort.

I’ll never tell you where my trout stream is, but I will share some great places to market. Try thinking outside the box. Instead of Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads, try places like Quora, local business directories, Reddit (ads are super cheap) and review websites like Capterra, G2 and GoodFirms. Of course, we keep the best ones for our customers.

Good luck! Or, as seasoned anglers like to say to one another, “tight lines!”

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