Your Small Business Isn’t For Everyone (...Why Going Viral Could Hurt Your Business Marketing)

Everyone wants to go viral.

But for artists and small businesses, going viral can actually hurt your marketing.

When your content reaches the wrong audience, it confuses the algorithm and makes it harder to reach the people who are most likely to buy from you.

Viral growth feels exciting, but targeted growth builds sustainable sales.

Here’s why your business isn’t meant for everyone, and why that’s a good thing...

One of the hardest mental shifts for artists and small business owners to make is this:

Your work is not for everyone.

And that’s not a failure… It’s the entire strategy.

Listen, it’s simply not possible for one product, service, product, novel, or song to deeply resonate with every single person on the planet. Emotional connection doesn’t work that way. People don’t support businesses simply because they exist, and they don’t buy art because of the technical skill involved in creating it. Nope. They open their wallets because that business or product makes them feel a certain way.

Before you can market effectively, you need to know who your work is for, because knowing who you’re talking to changes how you talk to them so that you can better appeal to them on an emotional level.

Your Target Audience Determines Your Brand

Remember the three V’s of Brand?

Values • Voice • Visuals

Your audience shapes all three.

A funeral home is never going to have a goofy, chaotic brand voice. They know they are speaking to people experiencing grief or planning end-of-life arrangements. The tone must communicate safety, care, and trust.

An eco-conscious cleaning company, on the other hand, understands that customers willing to pay more for environmentally friendly products likely also care a lot about ethics as a whole: sustainability, animal welfare, and human rights. For them, effective marketing emphasizes transparency and values.

In these examples, notice how neither business changed what they do.
They changed how they communicate it.

Knowing your target market helps you decide:

• what to say

• how to say it

• what tone to use

• what visuals to present

• what to emphasize

“But I Just Make Art…”

Maybe you draw cute illustrations. Maybe you make pottery. Maybe you crochet tiny frogs in nerdy sweaters. In these cases, you might feel like brand voice and brand values don’t really apply to you.

They actually do.

Hooboy do they ever!

Dude, you need to find your people. That’s what Brand does!

So, once you identify who your audience is, you can start noticing:

• what they like

• how they talk

• what humour they respond to

• what aesthetics they love

• what makes them feel understood

Then you can communicate in a way that feels natural to them. This shows up through your values, voice, and visuals… the three V’s of Brand!

The goal is to find the audience your work already resonates with and then communicate in a way that helps them recognize that your work is for them.

You don’t need to change yourself or your art to appeal to an audience.
You just need to clarify your message.

The Myth of Followers, Virality, and “The Algorithm”

If you spend any time online, you’ve seen it… Courses, workshops, and ads promising massive growth, huge followings, and viral success.

Some are legit helpful. And some are… mostly just enthusiastic about your credit card.

But here’s the unattractive truth about social media marketing:
Followers don’t equal customers.
And going viral doesn’t automatically lead to sales for small businesses.

Going viral once or twice rarely helps a small business in the long term. ACTUALLY, it can make your marketing more difficult.

...WHAT?

Does Going Viral Help Small Businesses?

Not usually.

While viral posts can bring attention, they often attract a broad audience that isn’t aligned with your product or values. This can confuse the platform’s algorithm and lower your long-term engagement.

For niche businesses, steady growth with the right audience is far more valuable than a temporary spike in views.

Targeting the Right Audience Helps the Algorithm

When you consistently create content that speaks to a specific group of people (appeal to their interests, humour, struggles, aesthetics, and values), two things happen:

1. Your audience feels seen and engages more.
   

2. The social media platform learns who likes your content.
   

Over time, the algorithm begins showing your posts to more people similar to those already engaging. You didn’t “hack the algorithm” or whatever… You trained it.

Why Going Viral Can Hurt Small Businesses

Here’s the part most of those social media marketing ads don’t talk about:
The algorithm is trying to categorize you.

Every time someone interacts with your content (likes, comments, saves, shares), the platform gathers information about who your content is for. Over time, your account builds a pattern.

In simple terms:
You are quietly training the platform on who to show your posts to.

When your content consistently reaches the right type of viewer, the platform gets better and better at finding similar people to show it to… and your marketing is going to get stronger.

Now imagine one of your posts suddenly goes viral. It gets shown to thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of random people. The keyword here is RANDOM. Most of these people are not your ideal customer.

To the algorithm, this looks like:
“Oh! Apparently, this content is for… everyone?”

And suddenly, your future posts get distributed to the wrong audience.

This ends up either giving you a bunch of comments from people who don’t understand you or complete silence because your content is being shown to people who don’t care. Either one is super frustrating to experience.

You might think the algorithm hates you because your engagement suddenly crazy dropped. But the algorithm doesn’t hate you, and it isn’t punishing you. It’s just confused because your audience targeting got scrambled.


So, for content creators paid by views, virality is excellent.

For niche artists and small businesses trying to build a loyal customer base?
Not always… heck, not even usually.

1,000 ideal customers are far more valuable to a small business than 100,000 random viral viewers.

Consistency Matters More Than Perfection

As a social media marketer, the word “consistency” is probably the most used in my vocabulary. But listen, platforms reward consistency.

You don’t have to post daily. You don’t have to post perfectly. But disappearing for long stretches resets the learning process. The platform stops understanding your posting pattern and stops prioritizing your content. And that’s just the robots! If you disappear, your actual human viewers also kind of just forget about you.

Consistency tells both your audience and the platform:

“This creator is active and worth showing to people.”

Consistency both in message and in schedule is what builds reach over time.

The Real Goal of Marketing Your Creative Business

The goal shouldn’t be virality and followers. Those things don’t pay your bills. Naw, the goal is to be recognizable to the right people.

When you know your target audience and communicate clearly with them:

• your messaging becomes easier

• engagement improves

• the algorithm works with you

• your audience grows more steadily

• and your sales become more predictable

The point is… You don’t need everyone’s attention. You just need your people.

Going viral isn’t the goal. Reaching the right people consistently is.

Final Thoughts & Quick Reality Check

I’m not here to sell you a fantasy version of social media marketing. While I do need to pay my bills, my eyes aren’t perpetually glued to your wallet… I want us all to win!

So when I give marketing advice, the caveat is that this best-case scenario.

Good strategy dramatically improves your odds, but it isn’t magic. You still need time, repetition, and a little bit of luck. Algorithms change. Trends shift. People are fickle. Sometimes a post you carefully planned flops while a casual one performs great. That’s just part of working in a human-driven space.

My job is to help you get your marketing ducks in a row so that when opportunity does show up, you’re positioned to benefit from it. So if you want help getting more targeted with your messaging, I’m here for you!