– Do you want your target audience to know how awesome your brand is? Of course you do, every brand wants that. One of the secrets to
getting that done is, to get third parties involved
in your marketing efforts. So who is a third party? A third party is just
somebody who is perceived by your target audience as
an outsider to your company. This is typically customers and clients, it could also be employees
in the right situation and it could also be influencers. So why does third party
involvement work for marketing? Well think about it.
When somebody perceived
as inside a company or inside a brand says
how awesome the brand is, what does that do? That brings out the cynic in all of us because we, I think as a human race, just assume that that person is trying to sell something to us. But when a third party talks about a brand and praises brand, it's usually received as welcome
insights into that brand. So how do you get started though? How do you start a program like this? The first thing is you have to identify your existing brand advocates. Those customers and those people who they're behind your
brand, they believe in you, they believe in your company,
they believe in the brand and they wanna help you. They wanna help your brand grow. So you put together a
marketing initiative for them, to help them help you. You tell them kind of what you need, don't get too pushy with it, but you tell them what
you need and you just ask for their help once in a while.
And that can be done
through email marketing, it can be done through social media, it can be done through good old fashioned picking up the phone and
calling them once in a while. Once you have that established, then your goal is gonna be to continue to add brand advocates to that process until you have a good amount of people out there talking
about your business. Then once you get that done, you can then start to look
at working with influencers. Now influencers are people
who probably have no idea about your brand, but what they've done is they've built up an online following of their own. So they have a engaged
audience on social media, on their blogs, and in their email lists, who are open to hearing
that influencers opinions on certain companies, certain
products and certain services. So you can then start to work
with influencers in that way to have them promote your business on their own social channels.
And we've found that that
actually works better for our clients than running
a lot of advertising. Advertising still has it's place, but third party involvement,
third party testimonials and working with influencers
actually works better than a lot of advertising campaigns will. There's one truth about marketing, marketing is constantly changing and it's going to continue to evolve. But one thing that hasn't
changed in a very long time, is that word-of-mouth
marketing is still pure gold when it comes to promoting a business and generating leads for that company. If you can get third parties
involved in promoting your company and promoting your brand, that is going to generate
word-of-mouth marketing and that will make almost all
of your marketing initiatives more successful and
you'll get more traction with pretty much any marketing
initiative you put out there..