Making your mark in any industry can feel like reliving your first day at a new school. You don’t know anybody, the work is a little confusing and it’s hard to pluck up the courage to forge new relationships, either with fellow pupils or your peers.
With the business landscape changing so rapidly and being more saturated with competition, influencers and potential clients than ever before, doing the equivalent in your industry has become just as intimidating. This time however, the confusing work has become the process of business acquisition and spreading your influence, while the pupils and peers have become “the right people” you need to make contact with.
So who exactly are the right people?
In any industry, the two main groups of people you should primarily be forging relationships with are customers and industry contacts/influencers. Think of these as the popular kids of your school days, whose attention was always the most golden.
Both groups can help you strengthen your reputation and drive revenue, but first you need to spread your influence enough for them to notice you rather than shrink into a corner by the proverbial school gates.
To help you do just that, here’s a roundup of the seven best ways to, in my experience, achieve these goals. Being a marketer obviously means that some of these are digital marketing specific, but there are plenty of universal ones too. So let’s get started!
Give advice on American Express Open Forum
American Express Open Forum is a little known (or at least little discussed) platform where business owners and marketers can ask for and share advice. It’s a great B2B platform for marketers to offer free expertise to business owners who are struggling with a particular aspect of running their business.
If you head to the ‘Explore Topics’ tab, you’ll find the marketing area and, within that tab, the subareas Advertising & PR, Branding, Online Marketing, Sales, SEO and Social Media. Simply choose one of these and scroll through the questions to find one posed by a business owner aka. potential client! Answer their question well and with advice that differs from the standard guidance provided by everyone else, and you’ll be on this person’s radar.
One of the best things about this platform is that you must have a LinkedIn account to become a member, so your professional information will automatically be pulled into your profile and provide these potential leads with more information about you, your skills and your trustworthiness.
Don’t neglect the chance to ‘Share Insight’ either. A couple of weeks ago I shared this blog post by my colleague Anthony, and received an email from Open Forum’s Community Manager asking whether she could feature the advice on the homepage! As of yet it hasn’t appeared, but it’ll be a great bit of exposure when it does.
Keep an eye on Triberr
As the name suggests, the UK Marketing Network is, unfortunately, UK specific. However, there is a US alternative that comes recommended by the SteamFeed gang – Triberr.
While similar to the UK Marketing Network, Triberr appeals to a much wider group of industries by covering a broader range of topics. If you click the ‘Browse by Category’ button on the homepage you’ll find that from content marketing and social media, to DIY and crafts or real estate, there’s a topic for every kind of business owner to get involved with.
Industry professionals are the primary users of this site, posting tips, tricks and advice to establish their expertise. However, this doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to attract potential leads – you never know who’ll be reading what you post!
Answers on Quora
Quora is full of people asking questions on every topic you could think of, from dinosaurs to motivation!
If you know the kind of questions your target audience is asking (usually determined using Google suggest and keyword research), then type them into Quora and answer the ones that appear. If you want to carry out a general search however, start typing a subject area into the search bar and you’ll be met with a selection of Quora’s own suggestions.
Monitor Your Target Audience & Influencers on Twitter
Twitter isn’t all about spats and slander; it’s a really useful platform where spreading your influence and making contact with the right people is concerned. That’s purely because such a wide range of people use the social network. Consumers use it as a kind of search engine to gather advice and ask users which particular product or service they should use, while industry leaders use it to push out their content and retweet useful updates from others.
My advice for business owners diving into the world of Twitter is to curate a set of lists – one to monitor the tweets of industry users you’d like to develop a relationship with, and another to monitor mentions of your keywords and phrases.
With the former list you can pick out any updates you can retweet or reply to, thereby getting yourself noticed by these people and creating a conversation. This in turn leads to the relationship that gets your updates retweeted by them, or even nets you a guest posting opportunity on this person’s blog. With the latter list, you can identify any users who are asking questions related to your product or service and jump in to help them. Just don’t come on too strong with a direct sales pitch, offer them a straight up piece of advice instead.
To get all 7 Simple Ways To Spread Your Influence Online and Make Contact With The Right People by SteamFeed’s Charlotte Varela click HERE.
