Last weekend, I caught up with one of my former colleagues over lunch before we finished our holiday shopping. With us both having backgrounds in journalism, we got to talking about how important it is to have the right personality to form relationships and conduct interviews in the field. Not everyone is cut out for the job, as it requires a high level of socialization.
Our conversation brought to mind something I heard while working at the Encore360 office the week prior: Marketing is a people-first business just like journalism is a people-first career. When your audience thinks of your brand, they should think of you.
With the right marketing, you can become an industry leader and someone people seek out at tradeshows and other industry events. But in order to accomplish this, you must be comfortable connecting with new people in the industry to build your social network.
Your brand’s authority and reach depend on it.
Trust Over Reach
The realization that effective marketing relies on human connection should change how success metrics are measured.
Any content marketer knows there is a major difference between metrics and building rapport. As a brand, your ultimate goal is to establish credibility and authority, and that often happens through relationship building with industry experts who will support and share your content.
The most successful brands don’t go viral then drop off – they continue to resurface, sharing content rooted in industry knowledge and perspectives that challenge assumptions. That perspective should be yours as a brand representative.
In a world where marketers are pressured to measure clicks and impressions on their posts, this can be easy to forget. While tracking engagement is important, making an impact is infinitely more valuable.
People approaching you about your brand or your latest blog post is much more impactful than a roundup of social media metrics. In marketing, the biggest win is for your audience to say “I read something from your brand about X and shared it in my company meeting the other day.”
When people find your content authoritative enough to share with their audience and professional network, you’ll get more views and impressions from the people you actually want to reach.
You Are Your Brand
Think about it. When you check in at a tradeshow or other industry event, your nametag often has two things written on it: your name and the company you’re representing. As a result, anyone you meet will automatically associate you with your brand. It helps to showcase your content in the professional conversations you have in the field.
You have a leg up on the competition if you bring your content with you to industry events in print – think magazines and one-pagers – or if it’s easily accessible online. That way, when you strike up a conversation on the tradeshow floor and someone asks what you do, you can promote your brand while having tangible examples of what it does for the industry.
Even better, if you already have a regular posting cadence and a weekly newsletter send, you can encourage them to subscribe to your website or follow you on social media. If you don’t have a regular content schedule yet, consider creating one sooner rather than later.
Just like relationship building helps you establish brand authority, so does having a routine posting cadence. As we say in The Media Mindset, authority is the result of patterns. It’s built slowly, earned honestly, and powered by repetition.
Once your connections know when to look for your newsletter or social media posts, you become more relevant to them. When they watch for your content, they’re really watching for you and your brand to appear in their inbox and LinkedIn feed. That’s effective people-first content marketing.
Embody Your Brand
Getting your industry connections to subscribe to your content is only half the battle. Now, you must be consistent and authoritative in every article you publish to keep their trust. You can test this by making sure your content hits our five authority signals:
- Depth: Does this post go beyond the obvious?
- Originality: Are you saying something only you can say?
- Utility: Can your reader do something with this right away?
- Citability: Are any statements reusable or quote-worthy?
- Consistency: Is your content aligned with your brand voice?
All five of these content signals apply to in-person interactions. If your written content comes across as useful, deep, and original, make sure that transfers to your conversations at tradeshows and during interviews.
Successful content marketers know that authenticity and authoritativeness go hand in hand. These two qualities are essential to forming a strong industry presence and professional relationships that are built on trust.