What is Authority Marketing? An Overall Guide!
By Sam Nguyen
Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada
As a business owner, have you ever wondered what makes people purchase your products and services, or differentiates you from rivals of the same field? The premise of authority marketing derives directly from that question, and authority marketing itself is the answer: “I know more about my products and business than my competitors do.” In other words, that means you have established yourself as “authority” and made yourself known to your potential clients.
However, in fact, authority marketing is more than just that. It takes a whole process to make you “authority” enough to do marketing without the help of “bragging” elements and dominate your targeted market. In this article, we will drive through the concept of authority marketing and figure out how to establish your business as an authority in your industry.
Authority marketing definition
Authority Marketing is a process in which an individual or an organization is positioned as an expert in his industry or marketplace and can influence others’ behaviors. Authority takes a whole process to achieve with deliberate intention. Also, you need to implement your plan to provide the most effective return on investment, which means focusing your efforts on your business’s prime radius, ensuring you are known in that radius’s media channels. And make sure your name rings the first bell to your prospects and gain their trust over the competition.
The “7 pillars” in authority marketing
There are actually several ways to achieve effective authority marketing. According to Adam Witty, CEO of Advantage Media Point, there are 7 pillars in which your business needs to be solidly present to make yourself a known entity.
Branding
Adam said: “Building brand isn’t just about building your company’s brand but also your personal brand”. Therefore, you’ll need to create a personal brand that is recognizable and consistent enough to get your name across the media. Make sure to make your brand omnipresent to engage the audience more effectively.
Content marketing
Content marketing means creating publications or published posts that contain the value that your target audience is looking for. Content appears in various forms, not just the delivery of words. It can be a newsletter, a video, a blog post, a podcast, a webinar, a workshop, and so on. When you provide valuable information or knowledge to your audience, you will elevate your value to the expert level, which will make people trust you and keep engaging with you.
Referral marketing
Referral marketing is getting your target audience to compliment and recommend your value to others. To achieve this level of authority, your delivered value or content must be practical, inclusive, and able to solve a specific problem. The more referrals you get, the more your authority is extended.
Lead generation
It’s much easier to generate leads when you’re recognized as an authority. You can tell people what they need, and they’ll believe you. You can apply this to accelerate the sales process as when people are interested in your delivered value; they’ll be more likely to trust what you promote and may even want to do business with you.
Read more:
How to Create a Winning Lead Generation System
Top 15 Lead Generation Companies
PR and media
PR and media involve your appearance on TV, blogs, social media, blogs, magazines, or newspapers. Authority lies in here: People may not believe what you say, but they will believe what the media has to tell. There’s a strong mindset that when a person appears on these public media platforms, such as TV, newspapers, or magazines, he or she might be expert enough to be guested on the show.
Speaking
Your authority will be extremely powerful when you use storytelling to achieve it. Speaking is the best method to leverage your authority position and generate leads. When you share your passions, stories, or basically just thoughts with a large group of people in a conference or webinar, you will reach and influence a much wider audience. And if your speech is professional enough, you will get admiration from people who might be your potential audience.
Events
Events are an ideal option to get your idea and value through the audience directly. Events can be anything, from conferences, webinars, workshops to customer meetings, or appreciation events, where you invite your audience to bring over their relatives or friends to spend time with you. Remember, always be there for them, and let them follow you. Events like these are precious opportunities to build more loyalty and get exposed to more audiences.
Who needs authority marketing
As mentioned above, as long as you’re an expert in a specific field, and the majority of your income is generated from your expertise, you will need authority marketing. Especially to those using their voice or words to lead the community, authority marketing is the key to elevate your value to a whole new level of authenticity. Or in other words, authority marketing is about focusing on people and personal brands other than businesses.
The advantages of authority marketing
Free or low cost
The cost of authority marketing is more like a trade-off: you may not need to pay much, but instead, you’ll have to devote an excessive amount of time and effort to get your material broadcasted. Publishing and promoting your content are offered many free options these days: you can add a post on your blog or LinkedIn, then use popular yet free social media platforms to get your content through the audience.
No spams disclaimed
Doing authority marketing does not just stay at reaching and engaging your audience. The level has advanced to the understanding of what your prospects are having in mind. With authority marketing, it’s all about the solutions to your target audience’s existing problems and goals. The information you provide must be useful and practical enough to thoroughly address issues rather than interruptive and, sometimes, irrelevant pop-ups or spams. In other words, authority marketing helps minimize annoying spam interruption issues.
Generate leads and leverage opportunities
One significant advantage of doing authority marketing is that the method helps engage a long-term reach, not just the temporary one. Let’s take an evident example: You promote your products through an advertising campaign. It might succeed, but you cannot use the same advertisement for a lifetime. In contrast, platforms like blogs or YouTube will keep your content alive forever. Even if your content was produced some years ago, the search engines would still acknowledge it. And the longer your content exists, the more value and credibility it will get overtime.
Imagine how rewarding it can be when a short period of time investment can help you generate leads from various sources. For example, you spend a devoted hour to create a blog/social media post, a beautiful slideshow, a one-page long content for a podcast or video, and then post this media product on multiple platforms. With just one hour of authority devotion, you can reach and solve your audience’s problems across platforms and bring them many worthwhile values, which opens a way for several other leverage opportunities.
Gain long-term trust
The trust-centric characteristic is one of the biggest benefits of authority marketing that makes the method outperforms others. When a person is aware of your brand, that’s half of the success. But it’s up to you to convert him into a loyal audience or to slip the in-front-of-your-eyes opportunity out of your hand. This is when authority marketing comes in optimal. When you get a person to sign up or follow you on a certain platform, he or she will be more likely to keep engaging when finding you valuable - in this case, it’s the information, wisdom, or expertise that you share.
However, a prospect may not engage right away after just one exposure. It takes an enduring process where you have to produce repeated quality content to get them continuously exposed, and that’s the premise for future lifetime engagement and loyalty.
Some authority marketing tactics to effectively promote your business
Focus on content creation
Content is the key element in authority marketing. Since your target audience is having a problem, they will come to you for solutions. Therefore, it’s essential to have good content with helpful and practical guidelines. As an authority marketer, you should know what content to prioritize and how to create content that satisfies the market’s demands, then build executing plans that best fit the current situation or trend.
Utilize social media
A successful authority marketing strategy means being able to effectively manage your web presence and improvise your digital identity. In this case, use social media. Social media might not be the sole platform for authority, but it is one of the most optimal channels to engage more reach. Under proper implementation, you can find the right community or groups of audiences who will likely respond to your content or messages to target them with specificity.
However, keep in mind that each platform requires different operation techniques and offers different features. The results might fail your expectations if you don’t take enough time to learn them all concretely to apply in building authority. Manual social media management might be a bit tiring and complicated, so you should consider using free social media management tools instead to minimize costs but still achieve the effectiveness.
Broaden networks in the industry
Since spams or any interruptive approaches are highly restricted in building authority, real-life engagement, or reach is more preferred to verify your business’s credibility. This real-life engagement can be “accumulated” through your appearance as an expert to your peers of the same industry.
Think about joining a community or forum where your industry peers congregate, for example, being active on Twitter chats, commenting your opinions on industry-relevant blogs, or answering specialized questions on Quora. For offline methods, you can consider giving talks in conferences or public speaking on TED if authorized. Whatever methods you choose, make sure to add your own values to the discussion to open more partnering and networking opportunities.
Present yourself on the media
One way to leave your strong influence on the public is to get your motivational story throughout the media coverages. But it’s not always easy to break into publications with positive coverage guaranteed at every appearance.
To certify the quality, write for publications yourself. Since it’s your story, you’re supposed to understand it most thoroughly, so the owner should best describe it.
Final words
If you want to be that popular person who people are willing to give money to, you need to bring them some certain values and prove your authority. As the leader in your industry, you will need to position yourself and your business as an expert in the community or marketplace to gain customer trust to increase your marketing and selling power.
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