Experts
Compared to the marketing ideas in the previous chapter, this will be considerably less “controversial”. The idea here is to market yourself as an expert within your niche, even if you may not have all of the knowledge & experience generally required to be seen as the expert.
Before we get into how you can become an expert, we need to look at how our societies identifies their experts. Generally speaking, the experts are either academic giants with their PHD’s & MBA’s or seasoned, well-travelled & obscenely rich founders & CEO’s of big companies. There’s also another field of supposed experts and they come in the form of best-selling authors; I mean – who is going to argue with someone that has sold millions of books on his topic of interest?
The difficult part here is convincing the Average Joe Public that you are indeed an expert and thus worthy of their attention. This is further complicated by the rules that we have inherited in our societies and we thus have to find a fine balance between playing by those rules, but also defying them in a Rockstar-like manner.
Becoming The Expert
Become a self-marketed expert means you need to show people that you have a great understanding of your niche and that you know how to profit (whether financially or otherwise) from that knowledge & experience. Your strategy is thus two-fold here:
#1 – You need to tell people about your knowledge & experiences by sharing those with them via a blog, self-publishing a book (can be downloadable e-books) and speaking at conferences. All of those mediums (especially publishing a book and speaking at conferences) will go a long way to establish an aura of expertise around your brand. People love insight into the way that successful people think and how they go about engineering that success; so provide value for them in sharing your experiences & knowledge, and you’re already closer to being an expert in their opinion.
#2 – The first step can only be successful if you have had some related & relative success in terms of the experiences and knowledges that you are sharing. It doesn’t matter how well you can communicate these facts in theory; people will only assign you credibility if you can prove to them that what you are saying actually works (i.e. you need to be practicing what you are preaching).
It’s important to note that in this regard there is only value & viability if you are marketing substance in this regard, as you are not going to become an expert based on superficial facts. Your audience will also be quick to realize any superficial information and I’d bet that this would lead to them quickly ignoring your future attempts at marketing your expertise.
Tipping Point: Recommendations
The tipping point for your expert branding, will come in the viral form of word of mouth: the more other people start talking about you and what you’re doing, the more credible your messages become.
Large parts of our societies are followers and they accept “facts” based on popular opinion. So if you can get a bunch of people honestly & objectively (i.e. this needs to be truthful and there’s no way to “buy” these opinions.) saying loads of positive stuff about you, then these followers are bound to believe the hype and “adopt” the idea that you must indeed be an expert. Afterwards, the viral pyramid comes into play and if your marketing messages have enough legs, you should find it snowballing as your expert brand just continues to grow.
This is made even more significant, when you get some kind words from influential people, as this just adds immense & exponential significance to that snowball effect. So make sure that your branding & marketing appeals to them and then ensure that they are actually exposed to those messages in their normal day-to-day activities (i.e. they’re probably not gonna go out and look for you).
