One of the most impactful marketing concepts that I know and teach is this one: Your community is always a subset.
While originally geared towards explaining influencer marketing, it actually should be used to better understand our entire approach to digital marketing and help equip us with a growth mindset.
Key Highlights
[02:57] Community As A Subset of Your Potential
[03:27] Examples of Having Community As Subset of Your Potential
[06:59] Go Outside Your Current Community
[08:37] Learning Items from Launching My Second Digital Product
[09:54] Building A Bigger, Organic Community
[10:27] The ROI of Organic
[12:35] Get Your People On Your Email List!
[13:16] Keep Everything in Balance
Notable Quotes
Your community is always a subset is something that I talked about in the age of influence. It's a concept that I think really illustrates the value of influencer marketing.
They have a huge community. But it's always a subset of its potential. And when you work with influencers, you come in with a voice of trust that introduces you to this audience that trusts and respects the person talking about the brand, which is the influencer.
In order to grow your business, yes, you can tap into your current customers and try to upsell them. But for many companies, you can only get so far, and growth goals usually mean that they exceed those. So what this means is you got to go outside of your current community. And it's more than just influencer marketing.
No matter how big my community is, my community is always as a subset as well as to who else is out there.
You begin to see this not only funnel approach of bringing people into your community, but also the fact that you need multiple touches in order to at the end of the day, build like no interest and close the deal.
No matter how much we're creating Instagram reels or Tik Tok videos or blog posts, or whatever social media we do. We should not be happy with the community we build knowing that it's always a subset even for bigger brands, building that organic community is part of what we do. But we also equally have to go outside of that to always be building a bigger community.
We need to keep it all it's the Yin Yang, right, we need to keep it all in balance. And we can't be complacent with one of the three because we need to do all the three. But we always need to be building those multiple touches, knowing that at the end of the day, that is going to be what's going to convert.
The most impactful thing that I can teach you to help you improve your marketing across digital content, influencers, social media, all comes down to one thing to understand that your community is always a subset. What does that mean? What impact did it have for you once you understand it? Let's talk all about it on this next episode of The your digital marketing coach, podcast. Digital social media content influencer marketing, blogging, podcasting, blogging, tick talking LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, SEO, SEM, PPC, email marketing, who there's a lot to cover, whether you're a marketing professional entrepreneur, or business owner, you need someone you can rely on for expert advice. Good thing you've got Neil, on your side, because Neal Schaffer is your your digital digital marketing marketing coach, helping you grow your business with digital first marketing one episode at a time. This is your digital marketing coach. And this is Neal Schaffer. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here, your digital marketing coach, and welcome to episode number 296. We're almost there at the end of the year, and I am fulfilling my promise of publishing a consistent 50 episodes a year to get to episode number 300. When we start things up again in 2023. So as you know, I've been quite busy the last several weeks, there was a lot of business travel, a lot of speaking, I got COVID. And then I launched my second digital product, my first digital product be my digital first mastermind, a group coaching community, we're always looking for new members, you can go to Neal schaffer.com/membership, if you're interested in nap, but my second product is a digital course that is taught live in a group they call it cohort based learning, I launched a class on how to create an influencer marketing strategy in a week on the Maven platform. In fact, if you go to my site, Neal schaffer.com, there is a menu item that says courses. And if you click on that, it will take you to the landing page and you can sign up for the waiting list for my next cohort based class. And yes, I am going to be doing it again on influencer marketing strategy. I've had very positive feedback from my students. And I will be launching a new cohort as well, I have a few topics in mind. If there's something that you would like to learn, please reach out to me, Neil Neal schaffer.com, or tag me on the socials DM me, I would love to hear from you, and how I can help you with your goals in 2023. So your community is always a subset is something that I talked about in the age of influence. And it's something that if you've seen me speak on influencer marketing. It's a concept that I think really illustrates the value of influencer marketing. But it was really promoting and launching this digital course teaching influencer marketing strategy that made me realize how impactful it is across really all of digital and social. So in an influencer marketing perspective, imagine that I am onstage talking and I show you this slide. And the slide is a overlap of two circles. One circle is charting Amalia, who maybe some of you have heard of extreme Tiktok influencer, but now she's on Disney and like everywhere, but you know, a full on, you know, nobody who turns celebrity in less than pretty much a year. And on the right hand side, there's Dunkin Donuts. So at the time of writing, the age of influence, this was a little bit early on, I used another example I use the example of like hertz run a car. And if you look at the number of fans they have on Facebook versus people that are interested in rental cars, through the Facebook ad manager, or if you do a search for the fans of Starbucks, but then you look at the number of people that have an interest in coffee and the Facebook Ads Manager, you will know that not everybody converts into becoming a fan and of course into becoming a customer either. So the Charlie Dimatteo Dunkin Donuts one is interesting when I present on it. When I created the slide, I believe that Charlie had 30 million followers on Instagram and Dunkin Donuts had like 2 million. And Charlie was very fond of drinking a Dunkin Donuts drink. So Dunkin thought why not collaborate and name a drink after Charlie, which Charlie will promote and I'm sure there's other financial incentives involved. But this is class sic influencer marketing. Basically, Dunkin Donuts is saying, Look, we have a big audience, Charlie has a bigger audience. So normally with influencer marketing, you're targeting, collaborating with people that are bigger than you. But we also know that there is an overlap, we're sure between the two audiences. But there's also this other fan base that she already has probably doesn't really like know, and trust, Dunkin Donuts. So by collaborating, she is going to expose this to a new audience, there might be a five 10% overlap 20% overlap, but 7080 90% is going to be a brand new audience. This is understanding that your community Dunkin Donuts is huge. They have a huge community. But it's always a subset of its potential. And when you work with influencers, you come in with a voice of trust that introduces you to this audience that trusts and respects the person talking about the brand, which is the influencer. Now, there's another example that I like to use when I talk to real estate agents. So you're a real estate agent, and you have 500 friends, in a city of 50,000 adult residents, 50,000 adults that might become your next buyer or seller. So of the 500 people that you know, that's quite a network, by the way, there's still 45,500 other people that you don't know, who are the people amongst those 45,500? Or that could be within your five, who are the people that can introduce you to those other 45,500 people, right? Who are the people we can collaborate? Are they small businesses in the community? Are they people in government, nonprofit, local business owners, you know, I could go, you know, online influencers, we can go on and on, and it's going to be a case by case. But the fact of the matter is, now if you're getting enough business for your current network, that's awesome. But I know a very few businesses or entities that do not want to grow their business. And in order to grow your business, yes, you can tap into your current customers and try to upsell them. But for many companies, you can only get so far, and growth goals usually mean that they exceed those. So what this means is you got to go outside of your current community. And it's more than just influencer marketing. I was reminded of this, of this course that I created, and I promoted for the Maven platform. And I have, obviously a huge community on social media on my mailing list. But it was actually the webinar that I did. And I limited the webinar to 100 seats, because I really wanted people to join live. And I really wanted them to understand that this is an exclusive opportunity. And it sold out with them. It wasn't for sale, but it got full within 24 hours. So that spoke to the audience I had, what I didn't realize was all the customers that I got for the course actually registered and or attended the webinar. Out of all the other people that I knew and other advertising was like face book gods that I did, at the end of the day, that's what it came down to the people that were able to understand the webinar was happening within the first 24 hours to register. were mainly from my list. And in fact, when I asked my students who influences you, how did you get to know the influencer, it's often they are repeatedly seen their content. It could be in social media, where they're, you know, always engaging with their content. And therefore, that influences content always comes up in the feed. Or it could be that you go to a website, you opt in to a lead magnet, and then you repeatedly get emails. But here's the thing, few data points here, or I guess a few learning items here. Number one is no matter how big my community is, my community is always as a subset as well as to who else is out there. If I want to get more people to take this class. Now, people in my community may have wanted to take the class, maybe the timing wasn't right, maybe the pricing wasn't right. There's a lot of different variables there. But if I want to expand this, I got to drink my own medicine, I got to get outside of my own community. Now I could do influencer marketing. I could also do paid media, right. And that is another way or with the community that I already have, I can go deeper with them. I can offer them more events. Like why don't I do a free webinar every day to be able to build multiple touches with more people, my community. So you begin to see this not only funnel approach of bringing people into your community, but also the fact that you need multiple touches in order to at the end of the day, build like no interest and close the deal. So no matter how much we're creating Instagram reels or Tik Tok videos or blog posts, or whatever social media we do. We should not be happy with the community we build knowing that it's always a subset Eve For bigger brands, building that organic community is part of what we do. But we also equally have to go outside of that to always be building a bigger community. You have organic, you have influencer, and you're paid. And at the end of the day, any company that I work with, I promote all three, the organic is interesting. It builds like no interest, it doesn't get much visibility in the feeds yet, it's something you have to do. But on the flip side, the more influence your organic channels carry, the easier it is to work with influencers. And actually, because you have the ability to now retarget more people, your paid media comes down, per person as well. Right. So that's where the ROI of organic is, it may not directly close the business, but it aids in everything else you do. And I had stayed away from paid media for a while. But this was a reminder that I too, need to be consistently getting new people into my community. I've done some other things, I realized that of all the traffic that I've gotten from all my SEO efforts, how do I better convert people? So you know, pop up optimization, all the different ways you can opt into my lead magnets and to join my email list? I need to create more avenues, more effective avenues for people to do that. So I've been working on that as well. Website Traffic is great. But if it doesn't convert into anything, yes, it builds like no interest. Yes, you can retarget. But I know that there's more that I could do there. So I mentioned this to you. Because a lot of the people that I talk to are so focused on the organic side that they miss out on the influencer and the paid side. And if you're not ready for influencer marketing, that's fine. I get it. It's a very, very different way of marketing that either you you get it you want to invest in or you don't the paid media, something that I think everyone gets, right. But we really need all of it. And not only do we need all of it, you people are not going to see an ad and immediately buy it comes down to like no interest right now. Yeah, time limited. You can only find this here. It's normally nine $999. Today, only $99 or $9. I mean, maybe right? There might be extreme cases, but it still comes down to that like no interest. And in order to build that like no interest, you need that content. And you need to be really good at email marketing, you need to really get people to like know and trust you from wherever they find you. It might be from evergreen content, from blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, or it might be they just happen to see you on social media, for whatever reason, and they followed you. But at the end of the day, you need to get people on your website, you need to get people on your email list. And the webinar actually was a very, very good reminder for me that that was a very, very effective way. Now, as I said, most of the people who came to the webinar were from my list, but I also did some social media postings organic. And I know that I got people from that as well. So at the end of the day, you need to do it all. It's many people call it omni channel. But I want you to remember as we head into 2023, and you've heard a number of podcast episodes, the recent one, episode number 2095 was all about this very, very budget minded approach to influencer marketing. But we need to keep it all it's the Yin Yang, right, we need to keep it all in balance. And we can't be complacent with one of the three because we need to do all the three. But we always need to be building those multiple touches, knowing that at the end of the day, that is going to be what's going to convert. And if you haven't been doing paid media recently, paid media that leads to a lead magnet is if you're in paid media lead into a product, obviously. But leading to a lead magnet is another way of potentially inexpensively getting that conversion to the email list where you can once again build that like no interest. So at the end of the day, you need all of it. It's why I shifted from being a social media marketer to a digital marketer, when promoting the age of influence in a locked down world. Because you really need to be doing all of this. If you're just on social, if you're just on one platform, you might do well there but you miss out on all this opportunity out there. In addition to the website, and the SEO, and the ability to build multiple touches where you control the algorithm, ie your own email marketing, automation, your own sequences and what have you. So just remember that your community is always a subset. It takes effort to build like no interest outside of that community. But it is effort that is well worth the investment. There are many ways to go about it. Right. But I think the elements that are necessary are all those different things I talked about. It comes down to Search Social email, the search being the podcast, the YouTube, the blog, many days, it just might be tick tock or Pinterest as well. But then you got the social where you also can build that like no interest, but we got to get people on to the email list, but we're in control and And we can be the really the masters of our own destiny. So I hope that that concept provided you the impact that I hope it would I hope it inspires you, it's definitely been a reminder for me that I need to do more that I need to expand more. And like any other company that has a great product that everybody should be interested in excited in, we should all feel that way about our products, our services, and therefore with confidence, we should always be trying to reach out of our own comfort zone, which is our own community. And every day, find different ways to tap in to that subset. Or I should say the superset we are the subset our community is a subset tap into the superset of people that should know about us and they don't, let's make the effort to do that. Let's make 2023 a year of growth, strategically leveraging digital marketing and as your digital marketing coach, I will be by your side, hopefully providing you positive ROI. With each and every one of these episodes that you listen to. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer thanking you for being a loyal subscriber. If you're just joining for the first time, make sure you hit that subscribe button. Every other episode I have a expert guest on I got some great experts that are coming on in the very near future, including a doctor who has 3 million Tik Tok followers, you're going to love his story, I think you're really going to be inspired. Anyway, I'm excited as always, and I can't wait to see what 2023 brings. I want to remind you to keep your eye on the goal, especially as one woke up season. And always be an option and be an option not just for your community. But for that super set of people that don't know you. Right, be that option. And once again, I thank you. We'll see you in the next episode. This is your digital marketing coach Neal Schaffer signing off. You've been listening to your digital marketing coach, questions, comments, requests, links, go to podcast dot Neal schaffer.com. Get the show notes to this and 200 plus podcast episodes, and Neal schaffer.com to tap into the 400 Plus blog posts that Neil has published to support your business. While you're there, check out Neil's Digital First group coaching membership community if you or your business needs a little helping hand. See you next time on your digital marketing coach.