Yes, 100%. You want people to really be able to deep dive into what you do, what your expertise is, your knowledge, your wisdom, your skills. And you can do that through content. And it's such a powerful way for people to get to know you. And the whole idea of everything that we're talking about is basically to pre sell your services. It's basically for people to choose you over someone else. Mmm, that's good. And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.
And I'm your host Brett Dyser. And as always, please subscribe to this podcast on all your favorite podcasting apps. But this week we're talking about influencer marketing and content marketing. It's like the best friends of each other because they really go hand in hand for the most part. But with me I have Ann and she has a vast experience of knowledge and expertise and brings value to well, my audience.
And hopefully you listening to will have a great experience or feedback or advice from her. She also gives a lot of strategies, tactics, principles around business growth, success, high level authority, marketing and sales. But welcome to the show and thank. You so much Brad. It's a pleasure to be here. Always happy to share. Yes, the first question is all. My guest is are you a coffee or tea drinker? Oh, coffee all the way. Black. Do you have a specific like brood you like light, medium, dark?
Or is it just whatever's in my cup is good enough? Whatever's in my cup. But I actually don't like real strong. I am picky about that. So express. Those are a little much for me. I can drink them, I just don't care for them as much. So I'm boring in the fact that yeah, I like basic coffee. You like the healthiest of coffee because usually black only is the least calories and no sugar.
Not that I don't like the creamers in it that you can buy or lattes or things like that, I just prefer black to for that reason, the calories. Yeah. So fair enough. But I gave a brief summary of your expertise. Can you give our listeners a little bit more about what you do? Sure. So I really work with people that are in their business ready to grow and scale. They want to really level up everything they're doing. So they want to get better clients, more premium clients.
They want to get bigger sales, bigger deals. But they also want to be seen as somewhat an influence or an expert and an authority in their market. So that could be professional service, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, CEO's of businesses, coaches, consultants, speakers, authors. Really people that are in the expert entrepreneur space. Gotcha.
And so influencer marketing, it's been a thing for, I would say about a decade, maybe a little bit longer, but it's been a thing for a while, and it's important for businesses to do it. So how do you find the perfect influencer? Because that's the hardest part, is like, finding somebody that's going to kind of align with you, that actually likes your product and not just going, you should buy this product. I may never buy. I never use it, but you should buy it.
Yeah, I really believe that you should be the influencer and a lot of people. So when we talk about influencer marketing, a lot of people are thinking about going out there and getting the Kardashians right to build their brand. But I actually teach a very different side of it, and that is become the influencer in your niche, in your market. So it's about, a lot of people don't realize you can be a micro influencer in your niche. So what is it you are trying to sell?
And when you establish your brand as an influential brand in the market, that's where the big opportunities come. Because let's face it, unless you are a Mark Cuban, it's often hard to get to influencers and have them do your marketing for you. I teach a very different side of it, and that is you become the influencer in your brand and in your market. Fair enough. You also avoid a lot of the controversies that come with influencers, too, with being yourself.
Obviously, you can make your own controversies, but you avoid some of the dumb mistakes that the younger influencers might actually do. Yes, because here's the thing. Either you build your brand or somebody will build it for you. And you want to have control over that and what it looks like. And when you think about positioning in the market, positioning is the outside perception people have when they see you, when they come across you, when they get to know you.
And so that is the most powerful foundational piece before people market their business. And a lot of people don't get this. It's like building a house on sand. If you don't have strong positioning in the market, I always like to say if there's, if there are two people that are trying to get the same client or trying to get make sale, who are you more likely to buy from?
The person that looks like they're doing big things, they're credible, they're trustworthy, they have the influence in the market or the person that's unknown, unseen, nobody really knows about them, who are you more likely to buy from. We know people are visual. We also know that they want to buy from brands and people that they trust and have the credibility.
And a great way to get people to look at this is when you see someone in the front of the room, on the stage, do they have instant credibility with you? And the answer for most people is yes. That's how you should be building the foundation in your business. All right, so, yeah, with the solid foundation of influencer marketing, isn't it just about like content as well?
Because you have to share something with people usually, because mostly we're all online nowadays, and sharing your expertise is through LinkedIn or TikTok or whatever. So is that part of the foundation or the building blocks of becoming your own micro influencer? Yes, 100%. You want people to really be able to deep dive into what you do, what your expertise is, your knowledge, your wisdom, your skills. And you can do that through content.
And it's such a powerful way for people to get to know you. And the whole idea of everything that we're talking about is basically to pre sell your services. It's basically for people to choose you over someone else that is maybe offering the same type of service. And so when you do this in the right way, you are really pre selling yourself.
And so that comes through content, that comes from being featured in the media, that comes from even things like being a guest on podcast, hosting your own show, getting on stages. I call all of these high impact marketing strategies because they're all going to build credibility and trust. But it's also social proof. What is social proof? It's other people singing your praises. It's testimonials from people that you're working with, clients who have bought your services and worked with you.
All of those become part of the foundation of what I like to call your expert and influence system. A lot of people think of marketing as go out there and pitch people and try to get people to buy. That's the short game of marketing. That's to get the now buyers and the revenue generating marketing. But you've got the other side, which is the long game. That's building that powerful brand, building that powerful positioning. So if someone googles you, what are they going to find?
What are they going to see? And are they going to see exactly what you want them to see? Great content. That is SEO richest, keyword rich, that can all help build that up. But you should be taking up the first two or three pages on Google with everything that you do. And if you're not doing that. You have a weak brand, so you've got to build that up. And through the SEO, would that be just like credible backlinks and content at the same time? Because backlinks are still a thing.
Yeah, that would be more your website. But when I talk about SEO, I'm talking about even on your content. So for example, if someone is searching something that you do, are the keywords, is your content optimized? So that will come up in a search. Or if you're doing a podcast, for example, and someone searches your name, is it going to show podcasts? You've been on podcasts, you're doing all of those things. Build that powerful content platform.
But the reason that, again, that's so important, and I just can't stress it enough is it really influences more buyers. It pre sells people. When people book a call with me, they say, I already know, I want to work with you. I just want to know what that looks like. And that means your marketing is doing the heavy lifting for you. And that's really what we're talking about here. So how would they get started with creating that content?
Maybe, yes, I want to be the influencer, or maybe the businesses wants one of their employees to be the spokesperson. How do they get started with it? Would they basically sit down and be like, how do we do this? Do we do blogs? Do we do videos, do we do shorts, do we do podcasts? Because you can't do all of it at once. You really have to fine tune and focus, right? So one of the first things that I do with my clients is I make sure that they are well positioned on LinkedIn.
We dial in their LinkedIn platform for the people that they want, for what they want to be known, for what it is they are offering. LinkedIn is a great place to start because it is a search engine. And if you're trying to build influence in a market, LinkedIn is a business platform.
It is one of the most robust places to build that influence because high level CEO's, are there millionaires, are there nonprofits, are there professionals, are there basically anyone that has any kind of a business or influence they are going to have LinkedIn. And LinkedIn will come up at the top of a Google search. So that is the first place to start is build that robust LinkedIn profile. It can almost serve as a mini website.
And just a lot of the features that LinkedIn offers from the newsletter to the newsletter, can be keyword rich that can get pushed out. It's the same thing, really, as almost building a blog. They have live events, they have audio event features. You can connect with your audience there. There are so many different ways to use LinkedIn. You can do live shows and then you can use that content and repurpose it across channels. And these are all strategies that I teach my clients.
But we start with LinkedIn. Everything that we do, even if they don't have a website, maybe they're newer to their industry and they're just really starting to elevate that brand and they have not yet even built their website. LinkedIn can serve as a mini website. So even if people aren't going to be on LinkedIn, maybe it's not their perfect place. They should still optimize that. Because if you think about Facebook, feed goes away and posts go away and things go away, right?
And so you have to do a lot of searching. But on LinkedIn you have places where you can pin things, where you can feature things, you can feature lead magnets, you can add links, you can, you can have a powerful banner. There's so many ways to utilize all of your education. Is there your back history is there, there's no other platform that offers that. So it literally lets people know all about you before they even engage with you. And that's just really powerful.
So everyone should be starting there. Got you with that. Should you start with the newsletter first? Should you try to build that first? Or should you start with just an article or some type of thing? Because newsletters are gray, but we all get a ton of them. I get a lot of those. You should join my newsletter. And I'm like, what? Yeah. So what should you start with it first? Yeah, so I think, first of all, you need to optimize your profile. You've got to get that set up right.
And then if you're looking for the different features, this really depends on your audience. So there isn't a right or wrong answer here. It's really going to depend on how your ideal clients would consume content. Some people love to read. Some people love video, some people will watch live streams. So it's, this is part of working with a strategist or having a great strategy is to really know, okay, what is the right avenue for me? Because there's not a one size fits all it really.
If you're going after high level CEO's, for example, there are certain ways they're going to come to you. And if you're going after coaches, there's a different way they're going to come to you. So you really need to understand who your people are, but how do they, how will you most resonate with them? But I do love the LinkedIn newsletter feature, and the reason for that is because LinkedIn loves their newsletters and it basically has replaced the article.
So they have an article feature and they have a newsletter feature. And the reason the newsletter is more powerful is LinkedIn is pushing those out. So it is a feature that they're pushing out. I think the first week that I created my very first newsletter, and this has been the same for my clients, I got a couple of thousand of subscribers, and my clients have experienced the same thing because LinkedIn is showing it to people. So it has actually more reach and more power than an article.
And so these are some of the little nuances that people don't realize, and they're important to know that you're doing the right things that are going to get you the most impact for the least amount of effort. So I don't, I hope that answered your question, but the newsletter is more powerful than the articles, and they can basically be the same thing. It's just one LinkedIn pushes and one they don't. Got you. Yeah, I mean, you didn't answer my question.
And then the other thing about LinkedIn is that they have the new, like, advice thing where they AI, ask questions in the community. Does it, is that another way of building out that influencer part about it? And is it worth your time? Yeah. That can help you become a top voice on LinkedIn if you have the time to do that. That's a fairly new feature. So sometimes I will do that, sometimes I don't. It is very, it's time consuming to do that with all of those things.
Now, let's face it, organic marketing is time consuming. That's what you're spending your time doing. But personally, I feel like there's more powerful things that you can do on LinkedIn. I am a big believer in live streaming on, on LinkedIn, running live stream videos. And the reason for that is I practically get a call every time I do. I get someone to book on my calendar every time I do because of the content that I'm sharing.
But then I can take that content, I can repurpose it across all channels, and I can get a lot more reach. So for me, I feel like there's more powerful ways to leverage your time. The LinkedIn top voice is great. It gives you that little badge. But I don't think that would be necessarily a deciding factor for someone to hire you over somebody else or vice versa. I think there's other ways that you can establish your brand and your authority.
And let's say someone else wants to establish it, maybe they want to do on X or Twitter. Besides LinkedIn, is there a better way or better social platform for it, depending on your industry? Or is LinkedIn, like one thing you should, like, really focus on for a business? For a business? Yeah. If you're in business, you should be on LinkedIn, period. If you're looking, if you're looking for people in business, I should say, or you're looking for professionals, you should be on LinkedIn.
It is the number one business platform. That doesn't mean you don't need to be other places, but it goes back to where is your audience? Where are your ideal people? You have to be where they are. But even, like I said, even if Instagram is going to be where you're going to hang out and play, and that's where your people are, you should still have a LinkedIn profile that's robust and built out. Do you have to spend a lot of time there? No, you don't.
If your people aren't there, you don't have to spend a lot of time there. But it does build your digital platform and it does build your digital footprint and it does come up at the top of the search engine. So why would you not want to utilize that resource? Yeah, it makes sense for that, especially since LinkedIn is the number one business platform for social media. It's the only real business one for social media. It is the only business platform.
Yes. Yeah. And so reaching out to people, maybe you've grown a little bit. I get a ton of podcast producers, all those people, and I always ignore them. So what are some tips and tricks to not do that? Because I get annoyed and I instantly know when you're trying to just hard sell me and when you're not. And I'd never, I never talk to the hard sells. I just basically ignore them. Yeah. Here's the thing. They're not coming at you with the right message.
If they, if you are a podcaster and you're helping people with podcasts and they're pitching you podcasts, hello. You didn't do your research, you didn't do your homework, and it's not relevant to you. But people think that people don't respond to that. And here's what I'll tell you, especially if you're working with higher level clients, like I teach my clients to work with, they like direct, but it has to be relevant and it can't be pitchy. It has to be direct, with value.
And so again, you've got to know how will your people respond and what is the best way to reach them and get to them. So the only reason that's annoying to you is because it's not something you want or need. But if somebody came in and they said, I see you do podcasting, how would you like to get 100 new clients? And again, this is just, you know, I'm just making this up, but how would you like to get 100 new clients for your podcast? Because I have.
I'm getting out of the podcast industry, and I want to actually give those people to someone else. Would you do a call with them? Yeah, I would. But actually never gotten. Of course not. I can give you this many clients. Of course not. I can give you this many clients, but it's gonna cost you. And I'm like, I'm out. But that's my point. People don't approach it in the right way. They just. They just don't.
But if somebody came at you with the right message, with value, they were giving you something, would you have the same response? No. The reason people are back up and they're like, oh, no, get out of my inbox is because of the way people approach it.
So if they came with value and they came with a real offer that was relevant to what you would be interested in, you would say, yes, I bought services from people coming into my inbox because they happened to hit me at the right time when I was looking for something, and they came at me with the right approach. And so I would say, yeah, you know what it's worth, let's just have a conversation and see if this is, if this would be a fit. But most people just aren't doing that.
They're spamming people. I love to get people to raise their hand, and then I I can go in and have a conversation with them. And this is why I love LinkedIn events. When you do LinkedIn events or LinkedIn lives, I am just using LinkedIn as an example. This could work on any platform. I want to set it up so that the right people will raise their hand and say they're interested.
Once they do that, once they say, I want to attend this event, I'm interested in this, or they comment, I can then move that conversation to the inbox in a very real way that is going to be relevant to them because they raise their hand. I didn't push anything on them. So a lot of people just don't use LinkedIn, right. So it doesn't go anywhere for them. But I can help people get LinkedIn leads, and I'm just using LinkedIn again in a week or less.
Just by doing the right things on the platform and getting people to raise their hand for what they want, it. Seems like it's like a soft sell to then your inbox would be the hard sell. So you're inviting people or you're asking people to go into their inbox to do more of the hard sells, but you've already made that initial, like, contact, and they've already said, yes, I want to do this. Mostly what I get is either AI generated.
Hey, I can I see that you have videos and they're not doing very well. And I'm like, great, I appreciate that. Yeah, I just started this, so, yeah, I'm not expecting, like, amazing numbers right now. It's called a slow burn for a reason, and I understand it's a slow burn. Yeah. So don't tell me. Yeah. Showing up and criticizing people is not going to really attract them or influence them to you for sure. Again, you've got to have the right message, the right strategy, the right way to do things.
And look, everything, whether it's your newsletter, whether it's your content, whether it's your live streaming or your audio events or whatever you're doing, that's the top of the funnel. There's a whole nother level underneath that top of the funnel. And this is the part that people completely mess up, they want to do. The top of the funnel is, let's spam the heck out of people. Now, full transparency.
I worked with a lot of those agencies when I first got on LinkedIn, and I let them, I believed that they knew what they were doing. And so it, to me, it hurt my brand. It actually was, it was a big no no. And I learned the hard way, I just burned that money. It never went anywhere. And so when agencies are out there pitching you that they're going to do your LinkedIn stuff, it typically doesn't work for most people. They're just going to burn up money.
And the only people making money are the agencies pitching that you need to learn how to market on. And I know we're talking specifically about LinkedIn, but you need to learn how to market yourself on LinkedIn to get it working. And then you can hire people to help rinse and repeat the process. And that is where LinkedIn will work the best for you. But most people don't do that. They want a shortcut it's like going to the top of the ladder without stepping on the rums, right?
You're going to fall down, you're going to, you're going to fail. So you've got to go through the process. Okay, what's going to work for my ideal people? What is the strategy that I need to have in place and then how can I make this work? And then you create a system with that and that is how you will get it to work. But it's not just LinkedIn, it's any platform, it's any platform that you're on. Create, get it working and create a system.
Know how people buy, know what they want, know how to speak to them, know how to influence them. We're talking about building influence here, building credibility and trust, and you don't do that with the ways that you described. And so moving on to even talking about AI because that is the other piece of the puzzle. And unfortunately, we're running into interesting times with AI influencers and just AI generating content. What is your take on either one of those?
Because it's eventually going to happen even more frequently. I use AI to help me automate a lot of the things that I do because one person, I need extra assistants that are AI to help me do a lot more things than me spending a lot of time on all those things. Yeah, I love AI, but again, there's a right and wrong way to use it. And I use AI in my business and I love it. And there's so many ways that I use it with my clients and teach them how to use it, but it's about doing it in the right way.
The one thing that I do not believe AI is going to replace is the human element. Look, AI is not going to be on here talking to you, having an emotional conversation or a real conversation. That's not going to happen. AI is not going to take the place of me, be it having 40 plus years of experience in building businesses, helping people with exactly what they need. Because if you don't know what to ask, chat GPT you're not going to get the right answer.
So if you don't know what you don't know, you're not going to get the right answer. It's, everything's at a very high level. But if you're, say, working with a coach and they can guide you and say no, this would not be the right path, this would be a better fit, they'll know that, AI won't. So AI is, it's great. It's a great tool, but that is how it should be used and that's how it should be thought of.
And it will replace a lot of things that people do in automation and it will simplify things and make things faster, but you still have to use it in the right way or it will crash and burn as well. You would say to your clients, yes, AI can draft your message, but fine tune it to be you or it. Needs to be your voice. Yes, it needs to be your voice. It has to resonate with your ideal people. It has to be something that you can back up.
So yes, I love to use AI to even start an article or write some content, but I never just spit that out. I always go in, it's a start. It's just a start. I always go in and I make sure that my voice is built into that and I make sure that my brand is built into that and stories and things that I want people to know and see. So I think where people are, where it's getting a little bit crazy as people say, no, you can write a book in 15 minutes with AI.
I wouldn't care to read a book that AI wrote, would you? It wouldn't mean anything to me, no. I do business with people. I don't do business with machines and I think most people feel that way. So though AI can be a great resource and a great tool, and I do think we're seeing, we're going to see it's definitely disrupted marketing, but it can be in a good way. It can help in a good way.
But I think the people that are always looking to stay cutting edge and ahead and influence their market, they're the ones that are going to thrive with AI and the other people are going to go away. One of the things that I always am trying to help people do is stand out, be different and not compete with anything in their market. Be the person that people want to go to. Yeah, you're going to have to pick and choose which one you want to use.
There's Claude perpetrator, Plexity chat, GPT Gemini, even though Gemini has its issues gronk for if you're a Twitter premium user, you can actually use their own through the Twitter app or actually the Twitter website, maybe the app too. But anyways, so it's almost like you have to pick and choose as well. You have to figure out which one's going to work for you to utilize the AI.
Because I keep on hearing people say that eventually, it's nice to know right now, but eventually it's going to be a need to know expertise type of a thing. Oh, I think you'll stay cutting edge if, enough about AI. I was just having a conversation with a marketing agency owner yesterday, and I said, look, if you jump into this now and you become an AI marketing agency, you will stand out and you can get bigger deals.
Like, I know someone, a consultant that just closed a $250,000 deal consulting a company on AI, consulting, their marketing team. So this is what I mean by there's opportunity. Even though there's a disruption in the market, there's always new opportunities that open up. And this is what, a lot of times people don't think about or what they're not looking for those opportunities. They're just like, oh, my gosh, AI is taking our jobs.
AI is taking this, and we don't, we're not able to do this anymore. Instead of saying, okay, but where's the gap there? Where's still the need? Even though AI is here, where's the need in the market? Let me be the disruptor and let me go after that piece of the market. So it's, but you're always going to have that. You're always going to have the people that are influencing the market and the people that are going away. That's, I've been building businesses for 30 plus years.
It's been that way in every business I've ever built. There's always the people that rise up, the cream rises to the top, the people that are willing to do what other people won't. And there's the people that go away. Yep, we had printing press to the Internet, and the Internet was hugely disruptive because no one knew how to use it at the beginning, and everybody knows how to use it now. Exactly, exactly. But with that came more opportunity. Right.
I built a lot of businesses before the Internet, and I had to do things the old fashioned way. And when the Internet came on the scene, I had to learn this whole new skill set, how to use that and how to leverage that in my business. And when I didn't realize I'd be teaching it to people someday, but when I did, I was ahead of the curve. By taking the time and the interest to learn it and say, I'm going to do things differently, it put me ahead of the curve. Most people don't.
They're like, I, they rebuke it, or they're like, I don't want to learn something new. I don't want to learn AI. I don't want to. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. There's always disruptors in a market, always in business. And if you are, if you realize that's what it takes to stay in business for the long haul, that you don't have a choice, you have to learn these new things that are coming up. That's how you'll thrive in business. And not most people just survive in business.
They don't thrive, and it's because they won't do what other people, they're just not the leaders. You have to lead your business. You have to be the leader in the industry. And that's really what I try to help people do, is step into that leadership so they can be a micro influencer and they can be ahead of the curve and ahead of other people that are maybe doing the same thing or selling the same services. So people have heard this episode. They want to know where they can find you.
Learn more. So where can people find you online? You can google me, but you can find me on LinkedIn. If you're interested in anything that I've talked about, you can go to my website. You can do a little bit more research. Annelcarden.com is my website, and I have lots of free resources on there as well. My blog, my podcast, anything. My books are on there. There's testimonials. Building that credibility is all at the website. All right, any final thoughts for listeners?
No, I think I would say the one thing that I will say is always keep raising your own bar. Don't get complacent. Don't settle. There's always more opportunity, and there's always the next level for everyone. So are you stepping into it? All right. Thank you, Ann, for joining digital coffee marketing. Brilliant. Sharing knowledge on influencer marketing content and LinkedIn. Thank you. And thank you for listening.
As always, please subscribe to a digital coffee marketing brew on all your favorite podcasting apps. A five star review really does help. And join me next week as a talk to the great thought leader in the pr and marketing industry. All right, guys, stay safe. Get to understanding how you can be in a micro influencer in your business or personally. And see you next week. Later.