A Tale Of Blatantly Obvious Marketing Tactics [BLOG] [VIDEO] [PODCAST]
The internet is an amazing place. Scary. A little twisted in some...OK, a lot of places... but the wealth of information there is unparalleled to anything we have ever seen in human history.
Now, I think I am a pretty smart guy most of the time. But sometimes the blatantly obvious just smacks me upside the head, like, “Why didn’t you do that sooner?” Or, “Duh! Of course you can find what you are looking for there!”
The other day was one of those days.
So as a part of my training with Edge Studios, I’ve taken their Marketing 101 class which went into how to prospect for clients and roles. Now, I have a background in sales and marketing, and I was pretty good at it...at least I thought I was. The Dunning-Kruger Effect would say otherwise.
OK, that probably requires some explanation. Here’s Monty Python’s John Cleese to explain it:
"The problem with people like this is that they are so stupid, they have no idea how stupid they are. [According to the Dunning-Kreuger Effect] ...in order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place, which means — and this is terribly funny — that if you are absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills you need to know that you are absolutely no good at it."John Cleese
So, maybe I wasn’t as good as I thought I was. More on that in another post.
Anyway, I do know how to sell and how to prospect, and one of the tips from the class was to find casting directors and reach out them and to follow them on Twitter and other social media sites.
Well on this fateful morning, I started this process as many do: with a Google search. And that got me...the world. It was just too much. Each site that came up had within it hundreds of casting directors listed. And that was even if the site had the information I needed. There were plenty that were total crap. Such is the internet. It was, to say the least, overwhelming.
Being the smart guy that I was, I decided to change tactics. I moved on to LinkedIn and searched for people with “casting director” in their job title. This still got me a lot of results, pages upon pages, upon pages, but at least now I had names, and when you click on their contact info, it gives you a website (if they have one) and their Twitter handle (if they are on that platform). I started to fall down that hole and stopped myself at harvesting information only from the first page. I’ll make it a weekly thing to get more information rather than try to get it all at once. I have time.
[OK, side note...if you don’t have LinkedIn Premium, which I don’t, LinkedIn puts a limit on those searches. After a certain point, it will only return the top 3 results. So, there is definitely a drawback to this tactic.]
Now this was where I got to the mind blowing part. Listen, I know this may not be mind-blowing for you, and that’s fine. It was mind blowing for me, and as this is a blog about the journey I’m on, warts and all, I feel no shame in admitting when I was blindsided by the blatantly obvious.
When you are looking at someone’s profile on Twitter, Twitter makes recommendations for other, similar people to follow. And when I looked up casting directors, low and behold, Twitter recommended other casting directors and casting agencies.
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. I’ve used the feature, I’m active on Twitter, and I’m not new to social. I used to teach social media marketing to small business owners. I founded the Social Media Stars Awards in Philadelphia. But, for some odd reason beyond my comprehension, this simple thing, this basic feature of one of the most popular social sites in the freaking world didn’t occur to me to use.
Well, the key is to learn, right?
So what am I going to do with this? First, I’m going to stalk...I mean follow these casting directors and agencies on Twitter. That’s the easy part.
Then I’m going to set up a list for myself on Twitter for all of these directors. (I’ll post a demo video of how to do this later for the folks who would like to know how to do this.) This will make it easier to do the next step, which is…
Interacting and listening. Rather than scroll through my entire feed, I can take a few minutes each day and look just at the casting directors using my list. If I see something interesting that they post, I can interact.
This way they can see me for a little while before I eventually reach out to them with my demos.
And because it will be several months from now before I will have my professional demos, I can take my time and hopefully start to build a relationship with them. That way it’s not just me coming out of the woodwork and asking them for something. It’s making them people first, which too often gets lost in the sales process.
We’re too quick to ask people what they can do for us...give me a job, give me likes on social, give me attention, gimme gimme gimme. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be shy about asking for the sale. We absolutely need to build value first.
So I’m going to take this time to put them first. To see what I can do for them. How can I help them achieve their goals? (I’m absolutely stealing a page out of Todd Cohen’s playbook: end every interaction with someone by asking, “What can I do to help you?” You should be following him.)
And because it will be some time before I have those demos, I can also take my time to build up my spreadsheet of people I would like to eventually reach out to. And, hopefully, there will be a relationship, albeit a thin one based on some social media interaction, which means they may be more likely to read my message.
Now, I know I’m not doing anything revelatory or ground-breaking. And I know I’m definitely not the only one doing this. Can I do it better than some? Maybe. Probably. But, if it’s one thing I have learned over my varied career, it’s not always about hitting home runs, or about having these paradigm-shifting revelations. It’s about hitting singles. Consistently. It’s about my On Base Percentage. It’s about doing a lot of little things right, consistently.
And that’s the plan.
So, on that note: how can I help you? Reach out to me on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever platform we’ve found each other on, and let me know. Seriously. If there’s something I can do to help,. I’d like to.