Brands are built and run not by robots but people. People like you and I! People who have targets to meet and have problems that collaborations can solve.
They will happily talk to anyone who solves these problems for them. Coincidentally, if you solve their problems, you will never have any problems as you scale your purpose.
“Ah, stop talking riddles and get to the point, Himanshu” one of my managers spit when I shared this with her.
Clearly, she was neither happy nor did she understand how this will solve a complex problem we were then facing to have journalists note us and other brands pay us!
This is fourth lesson from a post I wrote about my learnings from building Stories Worth Sharing. If you have not checked , I recommend you visit it once for the context 7 Things Stories Worth Sharing taught me!
The fourth lesson in this list?
Internet has it all that you need, learn to look in the right place(s)
As things scaled and more cities came under our banner, we were lucky to earn organic attention of national media.
However, if you have scaled a brand, you will understand that luck runs out quick. We were thriving in national media; for smaller cities, we needed local journalists to talk about us.
Over time, we realized that journalists make a fortune out of gifts and 'packets' business owners present to them for talking about them. It was an ethical shock for me. Nevertheless, I needed them to get their audience to learn about me. How do I do it without money following our 'no money first' policy?
Once again, think of my words that prompted my manager to throw an eye roll. They are people who have targets to meet and have problems that collaborations can solve.
This can only happen if they approach us (cuz if we do, we don’t have money to give *gifts*)
How to go about it?
"Don't stress yourself. Just make a list of the journalists you want to talk about you. Find them online. They must be somewhere, Twitter/FB/IG; somewhere!!" I fired back.
"Log in to SWS social media accounts and drop likes and comments/replies on their account. Let them visit our page but be careful to do this just around the session in their city so that when they visit our page to see who's showering love, they shall feel emotion to their city."
...and this emotion helped us help them solve their problems and meet their targets.
What did we really do? Just followed their work online and asked them to ask us about us.
Result? Free PR from the most read newspapers of the town! The journalists met their targets while we met our goals.
The same method got us to work with biggest of brands in India.
Remember: Brands are built and run not by robots but people. People like you and I! People who have targets to meet and have problems that collaborations can solve. And you can find these people on internet, just look for them in the right places. *wink*
Next week, I will tell you final story about lesson 5:
You owe it to yourself!
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