Marketing is all about getting your brand in front of your target audience. There’s only one thing that’s better: getting your brand in front of trusted influencers; professionals, who are in charge of finding brands like yours for your target audience.
Market to the influencers of your target audience
Case in point: Most of the companies I work for have a web designer, a blogger or a social media guru, whom they employ to create and maintain their online properties. Many times they have long term relationships with my target audience. This trust often earns them the right to recommend a photographer or a video producer and almost always, they don’t have someone in mind.
In larger companies those gatekeepers are either in-house marketing departments or advertising agencies, however many midsize and almost all small businesses work very differently. Many times there is another small business or a freelancer, who is hired to develop their online assets. More importantly he or she is trusted to recommend visual content creators.
Two problems with that strategy
“Ok” you say “marketing to influencers sounds nice and all, but how do you find them and isn’t reaching out to them one by one gonna take an awfully long time?” Of course you’re right. If you were to start looking for web developers, bloggers and social media marketeers one at a time or even if you were to create an email campaign or social media ad blitz, it would take you forever, which is a time frame I’m not too comfortable working in when I’m looking for new leads. More importantly you don’t know the experience level of who you’d find and they wouldn’t know anything about you.
Make influencers come to you
Wouldn’t it be cool, if you could spend two or three days immersed in 700+ local influencers, who on top of that are told by an international brand they trust, that you are the expert? What if we’d throw in 60 industry heavy experts, who would be your peers for the weekend? In my book that sounds like a much more favorable proposition now, don’t you agree? So what is this magical place, that draws these influencers whom your target market trusts and relies on?
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Speak at an conference, that influencers flock to
It would do me little good to speak at a conference that deals with the medical device industry or one that focuses on financing in Asia, but one like WordCamp –a international conference- where people who use WordPress for their websites congregate to learn and network, sounds like a match made in heaven. Out of the 60 speakers only one of them is talking about video:
What you need to be willing to do, in order to become the expert to the influencers
There’s no free lunch, but if you’re willing to put in a little bit of time and effort there is a powerful marketing hack right at your fingertips. Think about it, you get introduced as an expert in your field, but someone with a proven track record of picking influencers – validated by an international brand and hundreds of attendees.
I’m not saying that you need to speak at the next WordCamp in your city, but find a conference, a trade show, … that caters to people who are trusted by your target market. I get found and referred by website developers for photography and video a lot.
You do have to give a killer talk – especially if you want to be invited back next year. You will have to set aside the weekend to spend time with your influencers, but that’s kind of the point. Anything additional you can give away at the conference to make them look like heroes is icing on the cake.
I will be spending Saturday – the day before my talk offering to create free 30 sec – 1 min intro videos to any attendee. They can interview each other, they can talk with a sponsor, they can create a short video that introduces their blog, vidcast, podcast, ect. Time well spend? You betcha …
This Marketing Hack is valuable, because …
Speaking as an expert, at an internationally recognized conference – how can this not help? I haven’t even mentioned the SEO benefits – especially if your talking to a technologically savvy crowd – you can imagine the social media impact in addition to the real-world networking to local experts, that are influencers in your target market, who can recommend and promote your brand, because they were introduced to you as the expert in this field.
The result:
