~~An Introduction to Introductions: Rian Lanigan and Dublin Social Selling, or How to Create a Prospecting Engine~~
Rian provides a formula for harnessing brand awareness through social media presence and activity. He works with his father, Paul Lanigan, in Dublin and they both share a commitment to excellence and success, but Rian joins us today to offer tactical suggestions and approaches to finding success in organizational prospecting. Rian creates content and builds awareness by sharing and pushing them out.
On YouTube you can find Sandler Training Ireland (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF7yeZmy0n9BCLpX8Jb8d-Q) and they upload videos every Tuesday. Rian focuses on capturing attention with titles that compel and bring in excitement, he’s gone from an average to 30-50 views to somewhere in the 30-40 thousand views.
Rian wanted to build a big picture of prospecting then offer six tactics which can lead to success on social prospecting. For Rian, growth-hacking is not an optimized approach, unless your social media turns over into profit, then it’s a wasted effort. It’s important to build engagement and engage the right sort of individuals who investigate and look at your content. While viewership may be good for the ego, you’ve got to take care of the money at the end of the day as well. Rian is a 24 year old guru who speaks a different language when it comes to social selling and builds a context to understand where you might find success in your engagement.
Any reason we have to brand ourselves is the desire to build revenue. For Rian, the first and foremost important thing is to find where your audience is. Focus on not spreading yourself too thin by using too many social media platforms. Rian used LinkedIn to find C level executives because that’s where he found his audience. It’s harder to change someone’s habits and patterns and much easier to simply meet them where they are. Most networks, like LinkedIn, want to keep you there. So, they’ll help you out if you help them out and keep people on the site. One hand washes the other and they both get clean.
~~ The Conceptual: How a Prospecting Engine Functions, and the Strategies for its Success, or DO IT!~~
The first tactic is called List of Legends. You start with 0 followers and it’s hard to look at people leading the rush to success if you don’t have a lot of followers, but you should give yourself a boost. If you can get a person with a huge number of followers to share your content, then your following will grow. You need to build a list of something like Top Twelve Sales Authors on LinkedIn. Include yourself on that list and see if any of the people who make your list end up sharing your list. This allows overnight for your following to surge. These blogs are liable to go viral and grow your lists. Finding heavy hitters and piggy-backing on their success. It doesn’t take a lot of time to determine who these leaders are, just a small amount of research.
You create the blog and post it, and hope that someone on the list reposts it so you can tap into their database. This strokes their ego and helps gaining the attention of the heavy hitters that you’re looking for.
The second strategy is Doggie Treats. You post content on your social platforms and entice people with a title and a bit of the content and then if people want more they need to comment or respond in order to get the full material. An example of this would be using industry white papers or articles you’ve written and then parse them down to a paraphrased of some of the material and offer the full material if someone reaches out. When somebody says yes or asks for more, you’ll like their comment and type: sent. Then you’ll send them the article in an in-mail message. You’ll build a lot of new connections as you build and spread your content.
The third strategy is Cross-Dressing. After you’ve sent the information, after you follow-up with someone, then you offer a different way to engage in their content. P.S. You might want to engage us on Facebook or Youtube. This request will typically show about a 30% return on use. Another great use of cross-dressing is where you provide descriptions and use these areas to build out upcoming events or reasons to engage with your services. You build in a variety of call of actions so that the audience that taps in is offered a multiplicity of ways to connect effectively. These sort of cross-dressed activities allow access to a wide variety of content.
The fourth strategy is Double-Dipping. You can take the things that you do and post and promote it, or you can take three or four uses out of it. Think about a podcast. You could turn this into a blog and promote it a week after you promote your podcast. You can take one or two powerful questions asked and turn it into a blog post and push them out via your company blog and give a little promo on your various channels that promote downloads even more. As long as you’re doing the work, you should build it into multiple platforms.
Number five is Look At Me! It refers to titles. All strategies in social marketing are great, but powerless without a compelling title. What captures your attention as you browse is an engaging title and without a powerful title you’ll lose 86% of your audience and you have 2.7 seconds to capture your audience’s attention. The key with titles is intrigue and emotion and to avoid intellectual presentation of information. We need our titles to be emotional, not intellectual.
Number six is Guest-Blogging and Guest-Podcasts. This allows you to borrow an audience while providing value. If you can look at the people in your industry or area who have an audience that are listening and engaging their material; if you build out your content and offer it those leaders in your area or community then you provide value to their audience and help them out. Their audience now becomes aware of who you are and allows for you to build your following through their connections. You might message for a referral to try and build the bridge to this person and explain to them what your passionate about and include an intriguing question that drives value. Without that, the next best way might be to provide a context and example of the types of blogs and materials that you produce.
~~ The Technical: Applications for your Prospecting Engine, or Move from Not Committed to Actively Reaping Rewards~~
Rian walks us through an example of his technical application. When we post content we don’t post just any bit of it. We look six, twelve, eight weeks out and determine what we want to sell out in the future and build the marketing from week 1 to week 6 toward selling the engagement that we’ve created in the future. If people comment about the doggie treats related then we know they’re interested in the topic that we’re building. So, we might look for people in the field similar to the content and ask them to help us run a boot camp related to the material that they’re interested in.
This boot camp is a way to introduce what we do to a broader audience. This is an intro into what we do in our industry. Whatever mechanism you use, you might be spotlighting it. A lot of people probably use webinars to promote their product or service, when people sign up for these webinars we can develop an understanding of the interest they have in what we do and we can work them into a place where they might want to crash a clash or work with is. If we can drive people toward webinars then it builds us a list of people who are interested and who are grounded enough to either engage more of our content, or build a way to move for a topic in the future. This allows us to ask, “I see you’re interested in this, is it worth a chat further about?”
It doesn’t have to be in your company, it can be an expert in your industry. Whatever webinar you build you’ll be engaging with the audience that you want to have. Whoever joins this webinar has an interest in the topic of the webinar and we can build material and engagements for that specific group in the future and we can cold-call or reach out to the individuals that we want to further work with. If we leverage what we create, take advantage of what we do, then prospect and engage with the people who show interest we’ll net a productive return on investment.
The core of success is to be strategic and look narrowly at the audience. You have to focus in on who you’re trying to target and go straight for the no, so that you’re only dealing with yeses. Another powerful tool is facebook, and putting ads on facebook is powerful because its cheap to target he specific audience that you want. You can build out the specifics of the types of individuals that you’re looking for, and the type of things they’re following. This ability to run ads to grow your profile organically then it’s the most powerful tool to build a following that draws in useful individuals. There are tons of ways on facebook to target people and use the data to your advantage. Such as a spreadsheet that allows you to contact individuals who are interested in who you are and what you do. Ten bucks behind a facebook campaign can bring you seventy-five leads to sign up to a webinar. If you post regularly on facebook and you see a post that’s performing well, then double-down on it and boost the post while targeting the correct audience. Being very specific and targeting your audience and limiting your spending is a valuable way to make the most out of your social prospecting engine and build a machine that works for you 24/7.
