The fastest and often cheapest way to reach out, obtain followers and jumpstart your own community is to ally yourself with people and organizations that address a very similar target group and who have already built a following.
It is about identifying so-called target group owners. In other words, those who have access to the intended target group and who also enjoy trust among their followers.
Example:
Let's say you're an aspiring golf instructor and you want to promote your brand and products digitally. A possible target group owner would be an online golf forum, an online golf magazine or a successful YouTube channel for golfers. All these platforms have a community that is relevant for you and your offer.
Through joint campaigns with the target group owner, you introduce yourself and your products to the target group owner's wide-reaching community.
For example, if the target group owner has a YouTube channel, a joint video can be produced. For example, an expert interview, a joint product presentation or product sponsorship.
Besides YouTube, you will also find audience owners among podcasters. Likewise, there will definitely be a large number of relevant influencers on social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram.
In addition, many online magazines in your industry will be happy to publish third-party articles (so-called guest articles). This means you can write a useful article for someone else's website/magazine and get free advertising.
With all these measures, the goal is always the same: you provide the target group owner with a valuable contribution and in return their community becomes aware of you.
Once you have found suitable target group owners on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, websites, blogs, you can contact them. Usually via email or direct message. However, in many cases you will not get a response from the audience owner. Why?
The person may already be having significant success and only replying to select messages. You can increase the likelihood of a response and cooperation by making yourself as attractive to that person as possible.
Valuable questions about this:
- Can I help the person to increase their income?
- Can I help the person to produce content and thereby indirectly simplify their job and life a little?
- Can I help the person solve a problem?
- Is there someone in my network who could be of value to this person?
- Do I have skills and expertise that will be useful to the targeted audience owner?
Content creators, such as podcasters, Instagram influencers, YouTubers and Co. live on constant content. It's their job to keep posting content that's interesting and relevant to their community. If you now have skills that are interesting for your community, you can suggest to the opinion leader and thus the owner of the channel to produce joint content.
With a podcast and YouTube channel, a joint episode can be produced. For a website or blog, you can suggest creating a so-called guest post (with a mention and link to your own website). In short, the goal must be to entice the target group owner to cooperate with you.
Concrete, Implementable Ways
Cooperation opportunities with an opinion leader who operates a website, blog or newsletter:
- Integrate your own advertising message into the opinion leader's newsletter
- Write a guest article that the opinion leader publishes on his portal
- Integrate your own advertising banners/promo banners on the opinion leader's website/blog
Cooperation with influencers on YouTube
- Use YouTube channels that have reach and ask if the video description can be adapted for existing, successful and thematically appropriate videos, and supplemented with a link to your own page. Either for a one-off payment or commission sharing.
- Produce video content together with YouTubers. For example, a joint interview, product presentation, etc.
- Paid sponsorship. YouTube channel inserts a product promotion in the next videos
The ways are unlimited. The important thing is to ask yourself the right questions:
Who do I want to reach and who already has access to my dream target group?
It doesn't take much to get off to a quick start, all you need is a well-performing cooperation and your starting shot would be a success.
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