Partnership Prospecting

Promoting your brand is pretty straightforward, right? You monitor, shape and interact with customers in order to increase awareness for you or your company. However, how do you take this to the next level? Well, you could launch a multi-million dollar campaign OR you could embark on something I like to call "Off-site Optimization". The concept that guides most of this thinking? Helping others and helping yourself is better then just helping yourself.

What's the first step?

• Outside Promotion. Promote your brand but not directly from your website. Why? Helping others can end up being more beneficial then helping yourself. How do you do this? Brand monitoring.

After alerts are set up you can promote from within and outside of all campaigns. How do you do this?

• Back Channels - Contact the author of the article via phone, email or smoke signal. Just get in contact with the person.
• Utilize Forward/Open Channels - No response? Twitter, commenting on their blog, or promoting the article on a social bookmarking site can all grab the author's attention.
• Establish a Conversation - Once you have the ear of the author: Start talking and not just about their article. Get to know them, their personality and writing style. Then file.

So you've identified a brand mention or review in a blog or article. What's the next step? Reach out to the author or company behind the post. Here are the three options/paths I would recommend using:

1. Ask for Link back to your site - Simple request: Just suggest adding a hyperlink to the existing mention or trying to establish a backlink exchange.
2. Create a social bookmarking promotion around their content or highlight their article on your blog. Want to engender yourself to a content publisher? Promote, promote, promote. If you drive enough traffic to the publisher's site they will absolutely get into contact with you.
3. Establish a conversation and open a dialogue with the author. This establishes a new relationship and another person to work with. (And also another potential branding platform.)

Essentially, this is inbound marketing using outbound marketing techniques. Not exactly orthodox for social media, but it forges relationships in a new and exciting way. I like to call this process "Partnership Prospecting" because you aren't trying to sell but you are trying to establish a network of partners.

Once your social campaign begins hitting on all cylinders the outbound work will significantly drop off. Brand building becomes the priority and thus not as much direct marketing is needed. You've built your network and a lot of the reaching out will be coming from other sources trying to help you because of all the goodwill you have engendered.

tagged as blog networking, brand building, Marketing, offsite optimization, partnership prospecting, social bookmarking networking, social connections