How and why you need to identify your top 20 brand influencers … real quick. Like now!

I call today’s idea the how to become besties with your brand’s influencers hack. It’s inspired by my recent interview with Stu Gregor, the creator of Four Pillars Gin.

Every business (including yours) has a group of people who have the ability to exponentially increase its customer base. Us marketing wankers call them brand influencers! They have the attention and respect of people that you’d love to get in front of, and often in quantities that you’d kill for.

For my podcast business, having The Small Business Big Marketing Show available in-flight on Virgin Australia was a game changer. For my speaking business, ensuring that key personnel from speaker bureaus know about my keynote and emceeing skills (or lack thereof) means that I get plenty of conference work. And having my blog posts appear on small business association websites like The Small Business Institute has increased my website traffic by multiples.

But partnerships like these don’t just happen. They require upfront work and ongoing nurturing.

So, here’s my 3-steps to becoming besties with your brand’s influencers:

1. Make a list of 20 people and / or businesses that you’d love to have talk glowingly about your business.
2. For each one on that list, get crystal clear on what it is you’d like them to do for you … and just as (if not more) importantly, get clear on what you can do for them.
3. Send each one a personalised, handwritten note of introduction, together with your product. If you’re service provider, then this could be a voucher to try your services.

Pro-Tip: Follow each one up. Don’t just send and forget hoping that everyone will call you with gushing thank-yous. The money is in the follow-up.

That’s my 3-steps to becoming besties with your brand’s influencers.

To help you bring this low-cost marketing idea to life, here’s some tips on How to reach out to influencers so they can’t say no

As always, you’ll find more marketing inspiration in my popular marketing text The Boomerang Effect.

So, what have you got to lose?

WHYGTL