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Three Ways To Market Like A Thought Leader

This article is more than 2 years old.

Attention is our most precious and rarest commodity if we want to attract high-paying clients.

The competition for the hearts, minds, and eyeballs of prospects grows ever more intense. Nobody knows precisely how many people have entered the independent thought leader/expert industry, but we do know each year brings a bigger crop of combatants to what Jonah Sachs famously calls “the story wars.” 

“The story wars are being waged all around us,” writes Sachs in his book, Winning the Story Wars. “These are the battles fought by companies, brands, causes, public figures, and individuals to be heard above the unprecedented noise of the post-broadcast, social-media-dominated era. Today, most brand messages and mass appeals for causes are drowned out before they even reach us.”

What does this mean for those who want to attract clients as a thought leader/expert?

“In short, it’s this: you can do all the marketing, sales training, and SEO-optimizing you want, but unless the story (the main idea or offer of help) at the heart of your small business is compelling, all your other activities constitute merely the opportunity to bore, confuse or annoy more people,” says social media contrarian Ellen Melko Moore of Supertight Social Selling.

Melko Moore, formerly a faculty member at the University of Denver, is a social selling expert who specializes in LinkedIn, and has worked with hundreds of service-minded entrepreneurs to create compelling and powerful brands through remarkable content.

Thought leaders are people who write and speak about a subject and are quoted by others. You cannot declare yourself a thought leader—you have to earn it. Here are several ways Melko Moore advises wannabe thought leaders to improve their brands:

Feature Results. “Nothing sells quite as well as a tasty result,” says Melko Moore. “Measurable results are a great story that should always be an important part of the story of a brand. For example, if you’re a CEO coach who helped your CEO client sell his business for $70 million (instead of the $15 million he was told by market analysts that he could expect to receive) that’s a story that will get locked and loaded in your prospect’s minds. It’s concrete, memorable, and proves that talking to Steve Brody (the CEO coach in question) would be a darn good idea.”

Be Specific. “One of the fastest ways to change your story on LInkedIn is to choose a very specific target audience and design your profile, outreach and content to educate that particular audience,” says Melko Moore. “Let’s say that you own a digital marketing agency working with women-owned businesses. Sharpen your focus on LinkedIn to position yourself as the digital marketing agency for women-owned law firms. Pursue this focus with consistency and discover you’ve quickly gone to the front of the line in this category.”

Think Tighter. Melko Moore believes small business owners and solopreneurs who want to market as a thought leader are absolutely aware that a tighter target audience is a great idea, but most are extremely reluctant to make that change. They’re too concerned about who they might be “ruling out.” She says it’s time to give more thought to who you’re “ruling in.” 

“In the last three years, we’ve been using LinkedIn to test target audiences and messaging, and the results have been dynamic,” says Melko Moore. “Many successful small business leaders will admit they’re not getting huge results from their LinkedIn activity, so they’re more willing to use the platform to test a potential position, without having to change their entire digital footprint until they see those improved results.”

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