Smooth Sailing On The Entrepreneur(ship)

If you’re a growth hacker or small business entrepreneur the name of the game is to make yourself look bigger than you actually are. It’s smooth sailing on top with lots of paddling underneath kind of ride.

Even if you haven’t racked up a lot of successes yet, you want to project the image that you have deals in the pipeline and that it’s all on its way.

It’s having a champagne taste on a beer budget.

What I’ve found is that Facebook is the ideal place for you to build this personal brand for yourself and your business. On Facebook you’re able to get the reach and be seen by anyone you want for a dollar a day.  
My company has spent over a billion dollars on Facebook ads and we learned that even if you don’t have a massive brand or lots of credibility, people will respond to you if your content is compelling to them.


 
What we’ve pioneered is a concept we call the “Topic Wheel.”

It’s tied to your public figure personal page as well as your company brand page, your website, your email, LinkedIn, and even your chatbot account.

If you can tie all these assets together in the right way it gives off the appearance that you really have your bases covered.

This triggers a flux of inbound marketing. The best measure of how your growth hacking strategies are doing is by asking yourself “are people coming to you to get involved with your business?”

One of the things we do is highlight my relationship with one of my favorite clients, the world champion Golden State Warriors. We have them on our website, giving video testimonials in our ads, and blog articles about them on key marketing websites.

We do this in part because it’s authoritative, and our industry agrees.

If you want to get your brand out to high authority places you need to earn the trust of high authority people.  
This needs to be done in a way that communicates the value you’re providing to them.

If you can make them look good to their peers then you’re going to be their new best friends and secret weapon.

As you refine your unique value proposition to the market you can then systematize your process and sell your step by step guide to how you do it along with case studies of the work you’ve done.

You’d think this is giving away the recipe to your special sauce but it actually has the opposite effect. Often times it’s further validation to your clients, competitors, and overall industry that you’re an in-demand specialist that they need to work with.  

The Structure Of The Topic Wheel

What I’m selling:
On the inside of the wheel is your core content, the work that’s about you and only you.

My Expertise:
The next layer outside of that it’s the content you’ve created with other people.

Tangential Audiences:
From there you want to figure out how to position your content in a way that will influence the people tangential to your target audience.

This is how your authority positioning is transferred to your customers. I call it my inception model.

 

Action Steps

  1. Get all your online and social media assets in alignment around the same message.
  2. Create content about what you’re selling, and your core business.
  3. Collaborate on content that conveys your expertise and partners with other authority figures in your industry.
  4. Position your content to become influential with the communities that your core audience respects the most.

 

Result You Will Achieve

Content, collaboration, and leveraging authorities to trigger inbound marketing gains.

Mentor: Dennis Yu

Chief Technology Officer of BlitzMetrics, a digital marketing company which partners with schools to train young adults.

 
This article is based on an EHQ interview with the mentor.