When we're studying the engagement marketing strategy, one of the things that came up is people that are start-ups or they own a small business, they're saying look, I don't have millions to spend like Old Spice and Cadbury Chocolates. I mean, what could I do as a small business owner with limited money and limited resources to maximize my impact, and that's a real fair question. And so what I want to do is to give you four ideas of what you could do, but the key thing to think about is in this course, we started with developing your professional persona. And part of what we're doing is we're identifying influencers and we're trying to build a relationship with the influencers, eventually to sell a blog, if you will, to them, but the key is, it's going to be the same sort of process. Essentially, you have a market out there that is really starved for information. And you want to get them good stuff. You want them to come to you. You think about how you're going to build your personal persona. It's going to be the same way you'd want to do your business as a start up. So I've got four ideas for you to consider. The first one is think filter and focus. One of the things is that you don't have time to develop a lot of your own content. You don't have the money to do it. So think about developing thought leadership using influencers and experts. If you can do it, and many people do, you can have a blog and you can have guest bloggers. You could interview them with an audio interview or a podcast. Or maybe even invite them to a meet-up. In other words, you don't have to be the sole source of inspiration and knowledge. Why don't you find the best people, and ask them to talk to your audience, that are your customers and your prospects, as a way of doing it? You can certainly do it in print. But think about audios and podcasts and meet-ups and blogs as in other ways to do it. Another thing that works really well is when you do invest your time and resources, go for maximum impact. For example, if you're a security company or a privacy company, the FBI versus Apple controversy that's going on now gives you ample ways to begin to tell people what your position is on those sorts of issues. And so if you're going to invest, try to get something that's going to have maximum bang for the buck in your particular target market. Invest in major topics or what I call sudden issues that come up, which gives you the really strong impact in the market that you want to develop, and keep an eye out for it. Again, a lot of these come up fairly quickly. But if they do, and it works for you, and you can make a good investment and do something really interesting and neat, that's going to be a great way to do it. So, invest for maximum impact. Next, use influencers. One of the things that a lot of companies do is, and I do to myself, is I get guest bloggers, and by doing that, they bring their audience to you and they get a little bit more exposure out there. You know, and you also give of something like thought leadership articles, things that really position them well, they're looking for places to put it. And so, becoming open to that and maybe even approach them to say hey, I'd like to do something with you and what can we do to make that all happen? The final thing is, think about the social pyramid and multi-use. One of the things that kind of drives me nuts with startups and small business is they'll invest a lot of their time and resource to write an article, and then they stop there, they put it out on your website and they're done. First off, think marketing and just like you're going to be doing with your blog, you ought to be going out and testing messages and sending it out with the hash tags that the groups use on twitter, use the key words, send it out to the influencers to get maximum impact. But never do just one media type. In other words, if you write an article, then do what we recommended in the courses and then go through and put it out as an audio, and put it out as a video. Go out and put bullet points out on a slideshare. And go the maximum way to get as much exposure as you can. You use your Bentley lease to analyze and link up things. And the key is your video and your audio should be very short and the bullet points, but it should all point back to your print article and to your website. And think about doing that. Also as you're doing it, think about having a registration page where people love your blog, for example. Most of them, like WordPress, has a free thing where you could actually have the people put in their email address and now you're developing lists of people. Think how you could do more with less. There's a lot of free things that are out there to make it work. Also get all the cheap media you can. For example, a lot of people go out and put things on YouTube, but they don't go out to Vimeo, and for $199, you can get a pretty big Vimeo system, which you give you a lot of ways to put out video. And so, think about how you might do it, and think about where they at in the social pyramid. If they're on things like, you know, we chat things, chat up there. Talk about it. Tell them what you're doing. Figure out all the ways you can get to your target market effectively. Use the social tools we've given you to identify hashtags and key words. When you put up a video, put up the right key words so you get maximum SEO. And so what you want to do is to think smart and build stuff out that really help you go big and appear much bigger than you are. But because you know how to do give to get and filtered focus, it allows you to build your business quickly and really work well. And one other thing, one of the books that I use in my class is The Lean Startup. I would recommend if you can to get that, it's by Eric Ries, R-I-E-S. The neat part about The Lean Startup is he talks about it in terms of a-b split testing and how you pivot fast if things aren't working the way you want to. So it gives you another way of thinking about how you startup and I like the fact that he starts with understand the market, which is just the way we do it here in this class as well. And then go from there. So anyway, think about these four tips. And, you know, go out there and try to do it with as minimum amount of investment as you can for maximum impact. You can do it.
