I made up a new marketing term: Audience Drafting
"Our biggest problem is no one knows about us" This is often the thing I hear most with a lot of the early stage start-ups I work with.
It's hard. There are so many companies out in the world today, every day it feels like a new start-up pops up. And traditional audience building through content, community, and social takes time.
So can you actually shortcut awareness? The answer is yes if you don't focus on building an audience of your own. Instead - you draft off of others.
I don't know anything about bike racing - except from what I learned watching "Breaking Away" as a kid. In one scene, the main character Dave is riding his bike behind a semi-truck, and manages to travel at 50+ miles per hour.
The concept in racing is called drafting. When you draft like this in a race, by tucking in close behind another rider, you expend less energy and go even faster, with up to 27% less wind resistance.
Audience Drafting works in a very similar way. You want to tap into the audiences others have built to get more out of your efforts. So how do you do it?
Well there are a lot of ways, but here are 3 of the more effective approaches.
1) Podcasts - Getting on podcasts is a great way to build awareness. Go find the top 50 podcasts in your industry, pick a topic that would be interesting to their audiences and then go outbound. Pitch yourself as a guest. The three keys to this approach:
The pitch has to be personalized
The topic needs to be interesting for their audience
Share some proof as to why you are qualified to talk about this topic
2) Others Linkedin Commenters - Not every connection on Linkedin is equal. You need to identify folks who are interested in the topic you talk about - let's pick growth marketing as an example. Here is the breakdown of the play:
Find a popular posts about growth marketing - like this one.
Use a script to scrape and connect with all 830 commenters.
You now have an audience of 830 active people who have already identified themselves as interested in a topic you will be talking about.
3) Permissionless Co-Marketing - This concept is simple. Simply mention popular people organically in your blog posts, social posts, podcasts etc. It gets your name in front of popular influencers in your space and if they engage or share you are tapping into their audience now as well. I never knew this concept had a name until I heard Amanda Natividad coin the phrase earlier this year. See what I did there?