Connector Marketing
Author: Pouya Eti
In this part, we will talk about a fascinating marketing strategy, which is called connector marketing. Nowadays, more and more companies choose this type of marketing because people tend to trust the opinion of influencers and professionals, idols, and public figures. In this section, we will dig deep into this exciting sphere, which will help many agencies and product owners do long-term and efficient marketing.
Who is the connector?
First of all, let’s understand what connector marketing is, who is a connector, and what is its difference from traditional online marketing.
In well-known traditional online marketing, the company has one way to reach its customers on online platforms: making social media publications and putting paid ads, which are way more expensive than the connector marketing we will discuss.
Connector marketing is a type of marketing that helps you connect with your target audience through key opinion leaders – so-called influencers. Why do we call them connectors? Because apart from influencers, there can be public figures, writers, specialists, forum admins, and other opinion leaders who connect a product owner or a business to potential customers. These are individuals with a large number of followers on top social media and other platforms, including Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube.
So how does this connector marketing work? You need to find a connector (Instagram influencer, Facebook page owner, forum, etc.) and convince them to talk about your product. Along the course, we will discuss more details about the strategies of finding and choosing the right connector, convincing them, and the rewards we need to give them for their effort.
As I mentioned in the introduction part, this type of marketing is long term, not simply because it is based on an authentic opinion of a trusted influencer, but also because it takes time to establish a relationship with these connectors, unlike traditional marketing advertisements on online platforms or television.
This much for this lesson, let’s go forward to the next one to explore more in this exciting marketing strategy.
Finding Connectors
In this video, we are going to find out how we can find these connectors.
First and foremost, you must know who your potential customers are.
Let’s discuss my case: I sell online marketing courses. Who buys these courses usually? People who are interested in marketing, Social media, people who want to make money online, and many others. I know who my potential customers (PC) are.
When you know this, you need to figure out where they hang out. Are your potential clients spending most of their time on Pinterest or Instagram, or maybe YouTube or Facebook, blogs, or forums? What kind of blogs are they reading? What kind of shows are they watching?
Case study: Many film companies, before the premiere of their new movies, organize interviews in late-night shows with top actors of their films who tell about the new movie, share their backstage emotions, speak about the characters, explain the moral of the film, etc. They do connector marketing. They do shows to pitch their products to their audience.
You need to know where your PC is.
The next step is to write keywords, find platforms where they hang out, and reach out to them.
For example, let’s discuss Instagram. I want to sell business courses on IG. I go to the search section and use keywords connected to my topic to find my PC. I write “marketing”, “SMM”, “social media”, “business online”, and other similar keywords. And I am going to follow the pages that IG suggests according to my keywords: their followers are my potential customers.
The same is YouTube: you need to search the keywords “marketing,” “marketing lessons”, “marketing tutorials”, etc. Youtube will show me many channels with similar content. I need to pick channels with 100K, 200K, and more subscribers and subscribe to them. This will allow not only to have all the up-to-date information but also to find my potential clients.
On Facebook, you can find groups. Even many years ago, when I didn’t know about this strategy, I was searching for more than 100 FB groups/connectors and was posting there about my products. Each of these pages may have 20K, 50K, 100K members. Not all of them are active, but you will find thousands of potential clients there.
Many connectors are looking for someone like you to provide them with great content and materials to talk about in their forums, blogs, FB pages, YouTube channels, etc. That is because they want to deliver value to their clients and enlarge their audience by getting more subscribers. So if you provide them with something valuable (quality information, useful product, new openings, deep researches, cool videos), they will be happy to use your information and promote you in their pages or groups.
And finally, do not forget Google, which will help you find necessary forums, blogs, and groups when you use the right keywords.
Now what you need to do in this phase is to stop and think deeply about your topics. Go to each of these platforms and find at least five connectors. Research their pages, see if they have real access to your potential customers, and understand where your PC is.
This will be a good base for the next steps that you are going to do.
In the next lesson, we will talk about how we can create and rearrange this list.
Create The List
Welcome to the next lesson. We are talking about how to create that list and how to rearrange it.
In the previous lesson, we talked about how to find connectors. Next step is keeping track of each of them. For this, we need to create a list with the full information about them.
We may open a google sheet because it’s simple and easy to use, it is free, and it is online to use anytime and anywhere with your Google account. You need to organize your data in columns – the column of name and surname/name of the company, link to their website, LinkedIn page, Forum, country, specificities. You need to do the same with different platforms – YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
There are two more important factors you need to pay attention to.
First, track how many subscribers/potential customers each connector has and keep track of them to make your potential clients. For example, the connector on IG with this name has 1M followers. These 1M people are your potential clients, so you need to reach them.
The next important thing is placing them in the right category – paid or free connectors. Look at the connectors’ pages and see if you can reach them and convince them to make paid or free promotions for you. There are many connectors that have a lot of your potential clients in their group, and they agree to do an ad on their pages. Some of them will ask a specific amount of money. Others, mostly public figures, usually don’t ask for money to make an advertisement, but you need to give them other rewards. We will talk about it later.
So you need to create this list, write the names of your connectors, links to their profiles (and other information, if required), then you need to write the number of their followers/members/subscribers and figure out if they are paid connectors for you or free connectors.
After creating the list of 20, 30, 40, or more potential clients, you need to rearrange it. To do so, first of all, you need to sort your data by paid and free; then each section needs to be sorted by the number of their followers.
Engagement
Now we need to contact and convince them to promote our products or services for their subscribers and followers.
Day 1-14:
According to all relationship rules, if I want to ask a stranger’s a favor, I never do it on the second day of our meeting. I need to take time, gain their trust, construct that relationship, and then ask something from them.
If you find your connector and immediately ask them to do something for you, it will not work.
Usually, you don’t have this problem with paid connectors: you research and pick an optimal platform for your paid ad, contact them, ask for a price list, and the conditions for promoting you on their platform.
For example, some Instagram pages don’t have any face; they don’t have any specific knowledge about a topic; they upload many particular posts daily to increase the engagement. They aim to gain money from the paid ads.
Things are a bit different for “free” connectors that we are talking about. They have a massive impact on marketing and on their subscribers. They are not just creating general stuff; they are professionals at their topics; they have a face; they have a name; they are public figures and influencers.
Whenever you see my IG, you can see my face, my name, my product, and my specialization. It’s clear that I have a business and many followers, which may be your potential customers.
Russel Brunson says that one of his connectors was Anthony Robbins. If you ask Tony how much money he asks for posting something about you, he will never react to your question. But if you build a relationship, you will have access to those precious customers for the business that he has.
The specific connectors that we are talking about may also be the product testers on YouTube. You have definitely seen many videos of them. They just buy some products, test them, post videos of review weekly. These are the people that have a specific auditorium and can be useful for your marketing.
From day 1-14, the main thing you have to do is to engage with them.
You must make sure they know your name.
You do not contact these people/public figures and introduce yourself and ask for help. You need to engage with them. Research them, see what they like, how they live, talk about important things for them. Talk about them. Start a conversation about them. Comment their posts: but don’t spam. Just be interested in them, be consistent in engaging. Don’t hurry and don’t try to do it all in 1 day. If you want to do it fast, it’s not going to work. Speak with them, try to chat with them, become friends. Speak about what they are doing, and this will grab their attention. Make sure they remember your name, your face.
All this process needs to take at least 14 days. Depending on your business type, this timeline can be different, but the most important thing is not to hurry.
Contact connectors
In this lesson, we will talk about the second two-week period of engaging our connectors.
Day 15-30:
As we said earlier, during the first two weeks, you need to find the connectors, follow them, research about them, connect them, and make sure they remember you. The next two weeks, from day 15-30, are the time to start a conversation.
Let’s talk about some crucial dos and don’ts you need to follow to have a successful conversation.
Things you shouldn’t do:
- Do not send them templates messages. People can recognize when others send them pre-written standard messages that they probably sent to 50 more people. So they will never get back to you and will never respond to your letter. Build your unique relationship with each and every connector.
- Do not talk about yourself. It’s very much like dating them. When you go on a date, you don’t talk about yourself all the time. If you want to connect with a person, talk about things that are interesting to them, and learn from them. If you do research and know that this specific person likes books, do not talk about food. Talk about their interests. In case they are responsive, they become interested in you and ask questions about you, then, no problem, talk about yourself. But if they don’t ask, do not talk about yourself.
- Do not ask favors yet. We will talk about the right time to ask for a favor. But for the second couple of weeks, do not ask them anything.
- Do not overestimate and overpraise them. People usually understand when someone is flattering them, and they don’t like bootlickers because they know that the aim is to peel off something from them.
Things that you should do:
- Talk about them. Ask questions, get interested in knowing them deeply. People love talking about themselves and expressing themselves. In his book “How to Win Friends & Influence People,” Dale Carnegie talks about the interesting fact that people find someone the best interlocutor if he/she spends most of the time listening and agreeing with them.
- Talk about things that are important to them. This way, the person will understand that he/she is genuinely interesting to you and will find your conversation exciting.
- Make a normal conversation
- Stay in touch with them almost every day, ask simple questions, ask for advice. They are usually professionals in one or more spheres; ask for their professional opinion, and they will enjoy sharing their thought with you. Do not ask complicated and difficult questions; do not ask very personal questions; do not ask stupid questions, the answers of which you definitely know.
Once again, be patient; this process depends on your business and the connector. This may take longer or shorter, but patience and professionalism will help you get significant results.
Fan & Offer
this lecture, we are talking about day 31-60 of our connector engagement strategy.
Day 31-60:
The goal – make the connector your fan.
This step is simple but essential. You can only move on to this step when you build the relationship that we talked about in the previous lesson and when the connector gets interested in conversation with you.
If you are not there yet, don’t hurry with moving on; keep consistent until you make friends with your connector. As soon as you have a good conversation with him, all you need to do is talk about the product or service you have.
“I have written a book – would you like to have a look and let me know your opinion?”; “I have a course, I would like to see if you find it professional enough.”; “I have this product, could you tell me if you like it or not?”. You send them the product, the course, the book, the shoes, the gadget, or whatever it is. And they will test and give you their feedback. IMPORTANT: you can do this ONLY if your product is perfect. If it is not good, they will never talk about it. Your product needs to be so good, so that they have the desire to talk about and share their experience with others.
In this case, as we said earlier, you don’t reward them by cash because they are doing you a favor. Still, these people need to be rewarded.
One of the great ways to reward the connector is affiliate marketing. For example, you offer them a percentage of the company or sales share depending on the sales after their promotion. Or you offer them a fixed amount for every purchase made by their subscribers or followers.
Note: You need to talk about the offer only after they have tested your product.
For example, Russell Brunson talked about the offer after Tony Robins read his book. He offered him a percentage from every book he sells (suppose, that amount is 10$). Tony Robbins had about 3 million Facebook followers by that time. If he had sold some 100.000 copies of the book, he already got 1 million dollars from the deal. That was already very interesting for him.
After that, Russell Brunson asked if he could run ads with his funds on Tony Robbins’ page. That was interesting for Anthony because he got:
- Good reward from each sale
- High-quality product
- Good friendship
Conclusion: Your offer must include rewards.
I showed you an efficient way to do it, but the rest is up to you. Don’t ask me questions about all the strategies to offer your products to influencers. Meditate upon them, think of great offers that would be very interesting, acceptable, and beneficial for the connector, and they will indeed accept your offer with pleasure.
Why is this method very efficient? It gives you the possibility to reach millions of people almost with no charge. Yes, it costs some time, it costs you some value, percentage of your sales, but you get a much better result with a much lower investment than if you reached the same quantity of people by running ads. That is because followers like and trust these influencers, and their opinion and advice are valuable to your target audience.
Own Your List
In the previous lessons, we have talked about connector marketing, its essential components, and strategies.
The topic of this lesson is “on your list.” It is one of the most important things in marketing because if you don’t own a list of your potential and present clients, the rest doesn’t make any sense and value.
Whenever we use FB, Instagram, or other platforms, they usually don’t provide us with the most important information – users’ email. And not having the direct emails of our customers makes us dependant on these platforms.
So the main problem we need to solve is growing the email list of our potential customers.
As our theme is connector marketing, let us discuss the case when you talk to your connector and convince him to speak publicly about your product on a live, interview, podcast, or else how. First and foremost, you need to be prepared for it. “Prepared for what?” -Prepared to grab the most crucial thing for the growth of your business – your potential customer’s email.
That means that before setting an interview, a live, or a podcast with your influencer or connector, you need to prepare your website or landing page where you can direct them by offering a fantastic gift/reward in return for subscribing and leaving their emails.
Why is it so important? Because your main goal is establishing direct contact with your potential customer, with no intermediaries between you. If you fail to do this, you lose your precious connection with your client, and you stay all dependant on the connector, platform, forum, blog, etc.
This will help you fulfill your list and grow your business.