Does the online space feel like a bombardment of advice instead of light to your path?
Do you feel like a bandwagonist, jumping from pillar to post taking actions from someone else’s playbook without any results?
That’s because you’re a vendor trying to play in an influencer’s game. So today, I’m addressing the difference between influencers and vendors (more specifically small service businesses) with clarity on a particular problem to help local founders (as it relates to taking advice in the online space) get unstuck. Because in case no one told you, you’re stuck!
THE VALUE OF THE MIDDLEMAN
When you’re the middleman, your sponsorships, partnerships and endorsements deals are built on the size of your fanbase.
-TED speaker Dean Seddon
Notice he didn’t say target market. That’s because there is a difference between these two groups of people.
Target market implies ‘this is your purchasing public’ while
Fanbase implies ‘there’s an attachment to a person’.
Although founders and influencers build personal brands for connection, the approach and reasons are dissimilar.
One is leveraging their brand’s voice for relationship, trust and authority while
The other is leveraging personality for reach.
In a world where more and more local brands are finding it “cheaper” to shirk the responsibility of learning the specific needs and interests of their target market, influencer marketing presents a unique opportunity and by extension, an answer to their problem.
In other words when you’re an influencer, companies pay you to bridge the gap between their products or services and their target market — this is your turf, helping big box brands get in front more eyeballs.
Which is why you…
Build your fanbase first (emphasis on first), then decide what to sell to them
Sell your fanbase to brands who align with the things you talk about
Encourage learning how to leverage social platforms to get speaking gigs, sponsorships, partnerships and endorsements deals
And even do free work
But..
WHEN THERE IS NO MIDDLEMAN
Meaning, you (the real value/ the business) work directly with your target market, the approach to your services look and feel different.
For small service businesses that means…
You determine what you’re selling with just 3 clients, sometimes even less:
I did it for Cru Nonpareil when the brand only had 1 client and 184 followers on Instagram.
Niching to you is about the problem you solve, who needs that specific service and the talking points that supports your voice.
I helped TRBM find their voice and double down on the deeper goal they were trying to accomplish with their website.
Speaking engagements are earned:
In 2020 I was invited by Regus Trinidad and Tobago to speak on Brand Positioning. The thing to note is my business was never created with the goal to get a speaking engagements. I decided to work for myself as a means of survival and I decided to focus more on the quality of my work because in one sense, I was already working with people in this way and wanted to find a way to be more valuable to them.
And you don’t do free work:
Why work needs to be on the house if there are no mind-battles in someone’s mind about the value of your services? People who believe it’s absurd to be paid straight out the gate have 1 of 2 problems. They’re either insecure about their value or they need to find clients willing to pay them straight out the gate. Just ask Cru Nonpareil!
THE PITFALL OF THE LOCAL INFLUENCER CURSE
I want to make a not so obvious point that it’s not a good look to your expertise when you throw experience and thinking out the window to instead have chatGPT analyze a problem for you and come up with a solution for your client. Local influencers encourage this without realizing the adverse effect it has on their claim to specializing.
The cherry on top this cake is that they market their “solutions” to everyone (except the companies who hire them) and THIS IS WHERE THE WEB OF CONFUSION OCCURS. Here is where you find the causality cases — business owners 1–2 years in business fighting up to monetize a platform or busy chasing sponsorships or endorsements deals without even knowing themselves as a business or a brand.
Do you spend money on Google ads each month to get customers?
Is one of your challenges figuring out how to get your target market to trust your creative direction?
Is giving a desk tour or talking about your content creation tools part of your content strategy?
If these aren’t your problems, why are you attempting their strategies?
A key element to an influencers authority is having a very broad audience but for vendors this is the pitfall of being in it. An unpopular opinion is that outside of what they need to say to the eyeballs these big-box brands are trying to do business with, the target market of local influencers aren’t interested in what they have to say. Which is probably why you feel like you’re taking advice from a whack playbook: they need to speak to someone, right?
Local influencers don’t work with their target market in the same way small service businesses do.
And when you consider the circumstances from this angle, as a 1–3 man show you get to understand and appreciate how special it is to have a system in place that fosters an intimate knowledge of the people you work with because in the end, it’s what you know and experienced — your results working with your ideal clients the prospect values.
I touched on that point here
In conclusion, none of this is to dissuade you from being an influencer in Trinidad (although I’ll caution you to be mindful of The Influencer Bubble) but to rather highlight the differences between influencers and vendors so you can better align yourself with the right advice to get the results you’re looking for.
Listen to the gist of the article here:
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