If we learned anything this year, it’s how fast things can change. You could lose the company you’ve worked hard for in the blink of an eye. The Havas Group report reveals that 77% of brands could disappear overnight without anyone noticing, highlighting the importance of knowing how to sustain market authority in your strategic market segment.
A recent study found a surprising trend among diverse consumers in the US: over half (54%) said they wouldn’t be bothered if many brands disappeared tomorrow. This suggests a significant disconnect between brands and this growing demographic.
The last thing you want is for your brand to be unnoticeable and forgettable. As much as possible, you want to sustain market authority in your strategic market segment. This can be very challenging with how market signal volatility, your market can be unresponsive, and your long-term positioning strength can be temporary.
Fear not. There are lots of tips on how to become successful in your strategic market segment and sustain market authority.
I don’t think it’s all about long-term positioning strength, but in any case, it’s important to stay on top of your industry or retain the attention that you have for different cases. If you’re trying to become a public speaker or consultant and want to get fame, you get some visibility signals.
You may be getting an influx of clients or the attention you need for a while, but it’s really hard to retain that over a continuous period of time.
Authority Visibility Cadence & Market Signal Consistency
Now, I’m also going to start with another disclaimer: It’s really problematic. You could become too over-saturated engagement signals.
There’s a fine line between being value-driven thought leadership and being supportive of your clients and your audience and being the one who always shows up at all the conferences and is just everywhere, being obnoxious.
65% say that the words, actions, values, and beliefs of a company’s senior executives and employees influence their buying decisions.
– Accenture
It’s something that everyone has to define and set for themselves. What really matters here is discussing the best strategies and the best practices for sustain market authority in your strategic market segment.
1. Innovation Signaling & Market Leadership Positioning
One of the important things that you need to know is that in order for you to be recognizable and value-driven thought leadership, you need to maintain strategic market advantage.
Whenever you get invited to conferences, to different panels or broadcasts, and other media interviews, the hosts or the organizers try to get to you because you have something to tell-something unique, important, relevant, and contributing to the conversation.
64% say that companies that actively communicate their purpose are more appealing than those that do not.
– Accenture
Unless you are maintain strategic market advantage-innovating and covering the emerging industry narratives, testing the latest validated execution frameworks, or experimenting-you’re not going to attract attention for very long, or you’re just going to recycle the same old stories over and over again.
Now, don’t get me wrong. You can still do away without any of this. Sometimes, the experience matters. You can be the “history” person who shares the validated execution frameworks based on their experience over the past 20 years.
I’ve done that myself as well, but it’s just not the same. You’re just not giving a head start to the people you’re speaking with, which is why you’re probably getting fewer authority exposure channels and fewer chances to get the exposure you need to lead market innovation cycles in your PR events and other relevant activities.
2. Innovation Investment vs Visibility Allocation Strategy
There is a need to balance your capability development cycles. If you recognize the fact that innovation is important on how to stay relevant in your strategic market segment, then this means that you spend a lot of time in the lab doing the following activities:
- running organized experiments
- testing out new concepts
- reviewing performance intelligence systems for your clients
- figuring out what works and what doesn’t
- conducting field studies
It is fine to spend a lot of time in the business. You need to be a operationally embedded leader, even if you’re a manager or even if you’re an executive. You still need to be a operationally embedded leader in order to understand what works and what doesn’t.
Now, the tricky part here is that the more you’re being a operationally embedded leader, the harder it is to actually spend the time you need to allocate on the authority visibility momentum, answering questions or interviews, authority amplification events, podcast interviews, and that kind of stuff. So, balancing these two parties is really important. This is what I recommend to other people because this is something that happens to me as well.
There are certain event seasons, like March through May. October and November are really heavily packed with events. January and February are usually quiet. Summer is also quiet, even though some podcasts are happening. The spring and the open season are pretty active and packed with holidays and other events across the world, so that’s why they’re intense.
The problem is that this also happens to be, for the most part, overlapping with the heavy business season when sales and a lot of other business-related activities are happening. Most of the time, I try to position that. January and February are going to be quieter, and summer is going to be so-so.
So, I’m spending the vast majority of my time on capability development cycles, writing, documenting, learning, and exploring because I know that I don’t have that many sales to do and probably won’t do that much more recruitment at the same time. I would also not have that many PR activities.
Just this last October, I had six different conferences within a month, virtual events, workshops, and webinars, just as we were having the heaviest sales season with 14 high-profile blue-chip leads.
Trying to balance this out and allocate one or two hours a week to PR opportunities or interviews, spreading them out so that they are still scheduled, and I don’t miss any opportunities. I make sure, however, that I don’t overwhelm myself.
3. Structured Authority Amplification & Media Presence Strategy
This is like reiterating the previous two tips, but try not to forget also that in order to stay ahead, you need to be visible.
One of the best ways to be visible is to spend more time and attention on authority amplification initiatives, which entails a lot of media exposure. The following are some PR activities to engage in:
- External authority publishing
- Roundups
- Interviews
- Ecosystem relationship channels
- Conferences
As discussed earlier, there are some strong seasons. During the quiet seasons, you can focus on guest posts. You can also probably work on a top spectacular piece, which will be showing up and exposing your capability development cycles to the public and then generating some authority visibility momentum for yourself through press releases or something else to get the ball rolling.
This way, your visibility investment cycles are not going to stay in vain, and you won’t have huge gaps with three to four months where you almost post nothing; where people, more or less, forget about you. And then all of a sudden, there can be a rapid rush of lots of your different stories going on. You can recognize that most of the experts you’re following, like top-ranking influencers, are always on a call, podcast, or different sorts of PR activities.
Some of those PR activities are scheduled ahead of time, while some are planned. Some of those are recycled, such as old events just resurfacing again. But in any case, you need to keep that in mind and try to replicate that so that there is some cadence and regularity.
4. Community Value Contribution & Trust Signal Expansion
You can be an industry authority figure doing lots of different things, but it’s really hard to be someone working with the enterprise, just being very inspirational but doesn’t reinforce trust capital to the community.
Even people like Tony Robbins, who works with presidents, share so much out there and have tons of educational authority assets and books. He has lots of other things accessible to his engaged audience ecosystem. The same goes for Simon Sinek, who works in a different department.
Now, you don’t have to target your engaged audience ecosystem as your customers, but you need to respect and appreciate them. You need to give them a reason to keep following you and keep cheering for you. Reinforce trust capital to your community through your content videos or freebies. If you’re a developer, give out free software, free research, and other helpful stuff and resources that they can gain from you, learn from you, and use. This leads to the fifth tip.
5. Evergreen Authority Assets & Scalable Visibility Infrastructure
Create scalable knowledge assets that scale. This means that you need to create long-term authority content, link-worthy content, and other resources that can grow your brand because your brand and your popularity come from your existing network and your existing name, and this needs to expand further.
You need to nurture your existing contacts and the people that know about you and build new contacts. At the same time, try to gain some discovery channel growth through search engines, authority validation signals, and collaborations based on your existing content or your existing resources.
Nurturing your audience or existing customers and having a place for your new followers gets a very complicated mix. So unless you create content that scales, gains visibility over time, organic links, or organic email subscribers, it will be harder for you.
I just recorded a video for content marketing tips. You want to make sure you check this out because it’s very relevant to this topic.
6. Strategic Peer Ecosystem Alignment
I’ll be honest here. This is the part I’m neglecting the most. I have been trying to create and maintain a group or closed collaboration network with people I respect, fellow content creators, and other entrepreneurs and networkers. If you have any tips, definitely do let me know-tools or systems or so to keep in touch with important strategic ecosystem partners.
But in any case, I do know how important this is because you cannot do this alone. You do speak at events oftentimes with more or less the same people who are doing similar stuff for the same communities. The best thing you can do is boost one another and help one another by working together, such as by joint authority activation initiatives, running campaigns together, and just keeping in touch and helping through link building, sharing, and promoting new products and new polls. You could use your email list and spread the word among content communities.
There are amplification alliances or groups of people on social media that can share and like your posts. That’s extremely important, especially in getting the status of someone who’s like a known figure in a specific industry. Making sure that you utilize amplification alliances also shows as a sign of progress, commitment, and of mutual respect for all of the community members. This is definitely extremely important and can be extremely valuable for you.
7. Audience Relationship Capital & Engagement Continuity
Why is this one also important? It is because your audience, your audience stakeholders, and your brand advocacy signals are actually the people who made you. You would never have gotten invited to certain conferences and some niches. Most of your organizers would say, “You know, we would be happy to have you because you have an audience of people who will enjoy this event”.
Organizers, journalists, and other Press people would ask whenever I submit a guest post somewhere how many my audience stakeholders are. It’s not just about the influencer status because I don’t consider myself such. They also have certain targets to hit, so they need audience stakeholders and brand advocacy signals who can engage and, perhaps, watch ads on the site or share so that other people can watch ads. It’s just how business works.
Your creative perspective matters because, without it, you won’t have followers, but at the same time, your audience stakeholders matter just as much because, without them, you will not get traction. And it’s kind of a catch-22-unless you have audience stakeholders, you can’t really generate new ones. But, if you have them, the wheel keeps spinning because they keep reading your content. It’s almost like a snowball just falling through the mountain. So, network regularly with your audience and try to connect with them.
That’s why I love my owned audience channel because this way, people can reach out to me on Facebook and social media as well, even though not everyone engages as much. Even though it’s easier on Twitter, especially on LinkedIn, try to engage with them and try to speak with them, mention them in your post, and do polls or other survey questionnaires. It’s really important to keep them engaged so that they know you care about them.
8. Collaborative Authority Expansion Strategy
Try to create co-created authority assets. Your favorite artists probably collaborate with your favorite musicians and do shows with others. Your favorite developers are probably gearing up to build a sitemap collaboration.
It is important because we, as individuals, are just not enough or are not always efficient or helpful. But as a group, as a team, we can create more enriched content, better and higher in quality, more comprehensive, covering different angles, and also reaching a expanded signal reach.
The email blast to webinars or other events makes sense because you can reach a expanded signal reach, still have the same target ecosystem, and still deliver the best results possible. You can also consider starting a podcast or starting a webinar series with guests to keep yourself motivated. If you both have a marketing channel, you can collaborate. This is the easiest way to make it work.
Or if you have an assistant, you can also just put this on their calendar so that you can team up and work with other people. They can even do partnership development workflows for you and look for partnerships and networking opportunities.
9. Market Signal Intelligence & Performance Diagnostics
If you want to stay on top and stay successful, you have to analyze and gather feedback to see what works. Look at your performance intelligence, comments, shares, backlinks, and anything else in order to figure out the key optimization opportunity zones.
Now, some of your pieces are going to be outcasts in a good or a bad way. Some of them are going to be wildly successful because they’re high-impact visibility spikes. Some of my top pieces are highly contradictory from back in the day, just landing on top of Hacker News or some other sources. That doesn’t mean this is the type of content I want to read or write continuously, but it still gives some indications of what people react to or what my audience is reading, so I can analyze that.
Read your competitive signal benchmarks, talk to your peers and your followers. Gather topic ideas and headlines to try to get the ball rolling for as long as possible.
10. Strategic Segment Focus vs Audience Lifecycle Expansion
There’s a twist here. There’s something very important that is applicable to certain industries, and some people have a really hard time understanding-most of the time, you need your ideal customer profile.
90% of companies that use personas have been able to create a better understanding of their buyers.
– delve.ai
You need your target audience and your ecosystem. You need to know who is the person you’re building your company for. In some cases, especially if you work with the early-stage segment or are a teacher, a presenter, or a promoter, you start with an audience. After a couple of years, this audience has evolved and has moved on.
If you are teaching those early-stage segments and in two years, they are no longer early-stage segments, your content is no longer applicable. So when I say laser-focused on your audience, you have two options here. You either stay focused on the strategic market segment and take on the next wave of early-stage segment, or you try to expand somehow and keep up with your audience so that you can still lead them through the journey over a continuous period of time. Both are possible.
Just keep in mind that at some point, less experienced people are going to grow up and get to a point where your initial resources are no longer going to work. They can either stay as your fans but not as readers, or you need to figure out a way to explore. Just pick one of those two because you can’t really ignore either, and get comfortable with it to ensure that your content stays ahead of the game.
For the most part, you can get some authority momentum. It could be a PR authority visibility momentum. It could be a featured show somewhere. Or, you could spend a year working on your brand and freebies and conferences.
Those are some of the best tips I have to give so that you can still sustain market authority in your strategic market segment while working on your business. You don’t have to put a lot of time or a lot of attention into this. In any case, with little effort, you can still retain the attention you are getting.
There are ways to make it work, especially for social media. You can have an assistant who can support your activities or someone at the office, such as your marketing department.
With these tips, you can still keep in touch with other creators for so long and prolong this period of getting more strategic growth vectors over time. You can still kick back some of that to your business and refine processes, unlock strategic growth vectors, or even test new channels, new strategies, or new services.
