Having a great idea that could eventually become a product or business is the first step, but far from the only determinant of success. The places and ways that you market your product or company can play an even bigger role in whether or not you find success.

People think that the way to build the biggest audience is to put yourself in as many places as possible. While that may get you the most amount of eyes on what you’re selling, it likely isn’t getting the right kind of eyes.

Each social platform has a key demographic of users and a specific type of engagement that suits each best. Understanding each of these factors can help a company get an idea of where to put your focus.

However you cant just blindly throw advertising at most customers. They will feel taken advantage of and that the company doesn’t care about them as people and instead sees them as future sales.

Gary Vaynerchuk, who is one of the most influential people when it comes to social media and marketing has a strategy for marketing that he calls “Jab, Jab, Hook.” The idea is to build relationships and rapport with your customer base before trying to sell them something. Once you have that relationship built, people will be more receptive to what you’re trying to sell them because they feel like you care about them and not just selling to them.

We have had to really think through what kind of social platforms best fit the start-up that we are trying to build. A site like LinkedIn would seem like an appropriate place to advertise, but we would see them as a direct competitor and it wouldn’t make much sense to try to use an established site to sway individuals to our new product.