03 Feb Spreading Your Brand Messages To The Right Audience

According to Michael Schein, an expert in hype, marketing, and mischief-making and the owner of MicroFame Media Marketing Firm, the business world’s biggest names have only one thing in common. What is that? The fact that they spread their messages to the audience groups that matter.

In his highly revered book, titled “The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World’s Greatest Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers,” Schein revealed several valuable insights on attracting the right type of attention and unlocking the relevant tools on your journey to create a highly successful brand. You can check out the book on Amazon.

Schein’s marketing firm has worked with the biggest clients in the industry, including Citrix, LinkedIn, and eBay, amongst others. Here are some useful tips from this marketing guru on getting more attention for your brand.

Be ready to fight.

When it comes to marketing, the norm used to be to avoid going head-to-head with the big players in the industry. But what actually works, in reality, is the opposite. If you want your brand to grow impressively, be ready to create antagonistic situations with the big wigs.

However, while at it, it is important not to confuse these fights with trolls. This is not the same as insulting the looks, attitude, or other inconsequential aspects of your competitors. Instead, take on their ideas and challenge them.

The target should be the idea and not the person or company behind it. For instance, you can search for a point of view most people find acceptable, but which is wrong in reality. This is what Drew Houston did and led to the invention of Dropbox. Before then, everyone used to believe hard drives and attachments were all we need to remove the limitation of file storage and exchange.

However, Houston believed in a different premise. Rather than attaching documents or having them backed up on hard drives, why not create a magic folder that is easily accessible from anywhere in the world without any form of backup? This idea sparked fresh interests from people, and Dropbox came to life.

Yours is not to convert customers.

You often want to include that all-important call to action somewhere in your email or website content to get your audience to do something.

But do you really need to do that? No!

According to Schein, we are doing too much with calls to action. Rather than expend energy on CTAs, you should develop something that keeps your audience on their toes.

This is exactly what Apple does day-in-day-out. The “less-is-more” approach, as seen in their design and technology, is also present in their marketing. For instance, when a new Apple product launches, the company never implores anyone to make a purchase.

What they do instead is to give consumers a single image of a user interacting with the newly launched product. Alternatively, they provide a single word to awake the anticipation in the targeted consumers.

Create a closed society.

By “closed society,” we mean having influential people in the industry in your corner. This may include Joe Rogan or Oprah, depending on your audience.

While you may not have access to these mega influencers, you can make do with micro-influencers. They are everywhere, but you can find them easily on social media. Having a chain of micro-influencers in your own network can do the trick. These people talking about your product strategically creates hype around who you are and what you do.

Start by meeting new people and doing favors for them. From there, you build connections with people who can hire you in the future. If you want to get close to leaders, your focus should be when they share something personal.

For instance, rather than engage their social media posts on business, you can wait until they post something about their hobby, which in fact, might be what you like to do too. Connections created through these opportunities tend to last longer because they are not built on individual gains.

Another way to gain access to these leaders is to use those assets that are cheap to you but expensive for other people. This may be your skill or expertise – offer such skills for free or at reduced rates, just to get access to bigger connections.

When you explore these avenues, the ultimate goal is to get access to as many secret societies as possible, which may be too expensive for you if not for your relationships with these leaders.

If you integrate these hacks into your marketing efforts, you can rest assured of your brand getting heard and known by the right audience. More insights into creating awareness around your brand can be found in Schein’s top-rated book on marketing.