Page 89 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com
P. 89
CHAPTER SIX
Borrowing Trust
“Trust is the glue of life.”
– Stephen Covey
Before we move on to the next element of the BADASS journey and discover
the role of the Heroic Brand in content transmission, let’s cover one more
important aspect of Alpha Audience development. If you’re in a situation where
you need marketing traction quickly and you don’t have the time it takes to build
an Alpha Audience, can you borrow one?
Influence marketing—a plan to find ways for trusted online personalities and
experts to become advocates who spread your content—is real, and it’s
important. As traditional methods of reaching a mass audience dry up or become
too competitive, connecting to a “borrowed” audience has become a mainstream
marketing strategy.
This is a marvelous, inspiring period of history when you can shed the
traditional burdens of authority and build true influence on the web through your
own merits. On the web, nobody cares where you went to college or how much
money you have. The color of your skin or your body mass index don’t keep you
from connecting to people on your own terms. Your ability to walk or run or
even speak doesn’t matter because you can publish.
The halls of online influence aren’t on Wall Street or Downing Street or
Madison Avenue any longer. It’s in a café in Berlin. It’s in a college classroom
in Wisconsin. It’s in my office in a little lake-side village in Tennessee where
I’m writing this book. It could even be in the chair you’re sitting in right now, as
long as you have a connected device and an Internet connection!
Companies are learning to identify and tap into the conversations of the new
cool kids on the block—the elite few who not only create content, but ignite it.
Like any trend that gets popular quickly, influence marketing is getting
stretched and deformed to the point where it’s hardly recognizable as a
legitimate marketing channel any more. I could fill another book with best and
