85% of respondents to a recent survey by Converge reported that brand visibility is the overall goal for content amplification. At the same time, the majority of those surveyed reported they had neither the time nor the resources to accomplish what they wanted.
That’s a problem.
CMOs today understand the importance of content marketing for establishing brand authority and driving traffic & sales, but for some reason there’s always a roadblock between content creation and content amplification, resulting in missed opportunities.
Could partnerships play a role here?
That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
Welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts at strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing, and relationship building… oh, and you get to learn too! Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy – with a solid takeaway every episode from partnership experts in the industry.
I mentioned at the outset that 85% of marketers report brand visibility is the overall goal for content amplification, and according to research from LiveRamp, that brand awareness is the metric which matters most to marketers.
And yet, 75% of those same respondents said they’re not spending enough time on content amplification. Lack of time being the #1 reason.
And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Once we’ve spent so much time ideating, researching, and creating a piece of content, it’s a relief to simply get it published, or see our team get it published.
But therein lies the problem. Mark Schaefer once said that, essentially, if no one sees our content, it’s worthless. We should be heavily invested in promoting and amplifying the content we’re creating, but if we’re already time-strapped, what are we supposed to do?
That’s exactly what our guest today, James Tennant, is going to talk to us about.
James has spent years creating content and working with businesses and organizations around the world, including the likes of eBay and Universal Studios. In his drive to help brands with their content strategy, he founded Converge – a platform that helps B2B businesses significantly grow their readership among their target market.
Partnership Unpacked host Mike Allton talked to James Tennant about:
♉️ The strategic importance of content amplification
♉️ How to measure the ROI of content amplification
♉️ Where partnerships can further amplify content and raise awareness
Learn more about James Tennant
Resources & Brands mentioned in this episode
Full Notes & Transcript:
(Lightly edited)
How Partnerships Can Fuel Content Amplification To Drive Brand Awareness with James Tennant
[00:00:00] Mike Allton: 85% of respondents to a recent survey by Converge reported that brand visibility is the overall goal for content amplification. At the same time, the majority of those surveyed reported that they’d needed the time nor the resources to accomplish what they wanted. That’s a problem. CMOs today understand the importance of content marketing for establishing brand authority and driving traffic and sales.
But for some reason there’s always a roadblock between content creation and content amplification resulting in missed opportunities. Partnerships play a role here. That’s what we’re covering in today’s episode of Partnership Unpacked.
This is partnership unpacked your go-to guide to growing your business. Through partnerships quickly. I’m your host
Mike Allton, and each episode unpacks the winning strategies and latest trends from influencer marketing
to brand partnerships and ideas that you can apply to your own business to grow exponentially.
And now the rest of today’s
episode,
welcome back to Partnership Unpacked, where I selfishly use this time to pick the brains of experts. Strategic partnerships, channel programs, affiliates, influencer marketing and relationship building. Oh, and you get to learn, too. Subscribe to learn how you can amplify your growth strategy with a solid takeaway.
Every episode from partnership experts. Industry. Now, I mentioned at the outset that 85% of marketers report brand visibility, the overall goal for content amplification. And according to research from LiveRamp, that brand awareness is the metric that matters most to marketers. And yet 75% of those same respondents said they’re not spending enough time on content.
Amplification lack of time being the number one reason. And that makes sense, doesn’t it? Once we’ve spent so much time ideating, researching, and creating a piece of content, it’s a relief to simply get it published or see our team get it published. But therein life’s the problem. Mark Schafer once said that essentially, if no one sees our content, it’s worthless.
We should be heavily investing in promoting and amplifying the content we’re creating. But if we’re already timet strapped, what are we supposed to do? That’s exactly what our guest today James Tenet is gonna talk to us about. James has spent years creating content and working with businesses and organizations around the world, including.
The likes of eBay and Universal Studios in his drive to help brands with their content strategy, he thought it converge a platform that helps B two B businesses significantly grow their readership among their target audience. Hey James, welcome to the show. How you doing?
[00:02:47] James Tennant: I’m doing very well, Mike. Thanks for having me on. [00:02:49] Mike Allton: Absolutely. Let’s cover some basics real quick. What exactly in your mind is content amplification and why is it so important for brands and content creators? [00:03:00] James Tennant: Okay, so in my opinion, content amplification content promotion, those two are basically interchangeable. There’s some school of thought that thinks that amplification is more the paid side of content promotion, but for me it’s, it’s essentially the same thing, and it’s simply a case of getting your content in front of more of the right people in the places they hang out and in the formats that they want your content in.
The reason for that, As you pointed out in the intro there, as Mark Schaeffer said, if nobody sees your content, it’s worthless. So it’s not really a good thing to spend as much time and effort and money as we’re spending on content creation if nobody’s actually seeing it after it’s been published. Right.
[00:03:39] Mike Allton: So what are the, some of the reasons that amplification and promotion seem to be such a challenge given how important it’s. [00:03:47] James Tennant: So you highlighted one in the intro again. Uh, the biggest one actually, we do the content amplification report every year and, uh, without fail, every year the same, we hear the same thing.
Most content marketers, I think it was around 80 odd percent, maybe 90%, understand the importance of content promotion and that they should be doing it, but a very high percentage, somewhere in the region of 80 to 85% saying that, uh, they weren’t doing it enough because of a lack of time. And yeah, it’s because of, you know, often marketers, content marketers are given enough work for two roles rather than just one.
And there’s a lot going on. You know, you’re not just doing content creation. You’re doing, maybe you’re in charge of your social media as a company as well. Maybe you handle the, the newsletter and you’ve gotta go to all those meetings to. Share all that information back with the stakeholders. So it’s no surprise that there’s not much time left, but I would argue it’s not necessarily a lack of time, but possibly a lack of priority for content promotion and amplification.
I think the quickest fix for that is baking it into your content strategy from from the get go. So instead of treating it as something that you do when you, when you think, oh, I’ve got 20 minutes at the end of the day, I can do some content promotion in or, or it’s Friday. I haven’t done any this week.
Let’s just quickly do an hour of promotion. You know, that fi do it when I find the time sort of mentality. If you can change your perception of it and. Bake it into your strategy so that it has its own time in your schedule to be done properly, then you’re gonna get, you’re not gonna find that you have a lack of time because it’s, it’s in there.
You know, it might come at the cost of some content creation, but that, that’s no bad thing. One of the other issues that we get as well is sometimes a business is feeling a bit overwhelmed, but where they need to start when it comes to the promotion, especially if they treat it as something to do when they find the time.
You know? And the biggest fix again for that is preparation. Do some research. Figure out where your audience are hanging out, what content they want, the formats they want their content in, and when they want to receive that content. And if you do all that in the strategy phase, in the research phase, then when it comes to.
Doing it, you won’t feel overwhelmed because you are prepared. You know exactly what it is you’re sharing, why you’re sharing it, who you sharing it with, and you know you’ve got enough time to do it as well. So it seems that most of the problems or challenges that stem that, that we hear about that people have with content promotion come from a lack of priority and a lack of preparation.
You fix those two things and you probably won’t have a problem anymore.
[00:06:09] Mike Allton: I couldn’t agree more, particularly on the prioritization aspect of it. In fact, one of my top all time digital downloads that I’ve ever created is a checklist for blog promotion, and there’s a huge article that goes along with it.
I’ll, I’ll put it in the notes for those of you listening that talks through preparing all the channels so that when you have now a piece of content that’s been created, you’ve got this checklist that you can simply run through and spend, like you said, you know, half hour to an hour and just get it all.
Done, get it out there so that there are eyeballs on this content that you’ve spent so much time creating. Love that quick follow up question. I wanted to know, you may may not know the answer to this and it’s okay, but for those of the respondents to that particular survey, do you have a sense of how much of them were individual content creators versus like team members or maybe team of one as a content manager for other brands?
[00:07:02] James Tennant: So we typically, it’s more. Weight it towards, in fact, I can just open it up and tell you exactly how many we get. So it’s just under, so it’s around 5% are solo and then it’s another 45% ish that are one to 10. So that could be, uh, you know, one or two very small teams. So it’s about half, I would say, of the people who’ve responded over the last couple of years who are either working for themselves or working for a, like a very small team and are likely.
The only person doing the content in that company. Wow.
[00:07:39] Mike Allton: That’s fascinating. Cool. We will have a link to that entire report as well in the notes, ’cause I found it super fascinating. Let’s talk though for a minute about Converge. How does your company help with content amplification, whether it’s in a solopreneur or your part of a team? [00:07:55] James Tennant: Yeah, so our company basically fixes one of those problems that I mentioned before, that the lack of time to take pressure off content marketers and help them reach significantly more of their target audience with their content. So we like to think of ourselves as a supplemental tool. It’s not in replacement of content promotion at that company should be doing.
You should definitely be doing it yourself as well, and building relationships, which I’m sure we’ll get to in a minute. But we can help do that a little bit more. Make sure that it’s happening maybe more consistently than you are able to do it. So what happens is businesses publish content on our platform and then it’s about a two minute process.
After that, it’s completely hands off. Converge takes over and starts sharing the content in relevant places to relevant people via strategic partnerships with uh, and syndicate platforms. Social media, across social media channels, email newsletters. Via handpicked influencers or sources of influence in relevant sectors.
So yeah, it’s very hands off for the businesses that use it. And what it does is essentially just make sure that the content that they’ve spent so much time and energy, and in some cases a fair amount of money creating, is being consistently promoted to reach more of, uh, significantly more in a lot of cases, the target audience to generate more of that brand awareness we spoke about earlier on.
And, uh, engagement on the content as well. Cool.
[00:09:13] Mike Allton: So we’re not just sharing the content though, right? I would say it’s syndicated, right? If I’ve got an article that I’m gonna share via Converge, I’m publishing a copy of that article on your side, and there’s a conical link back to the original article, so Google doesn’t get confused which one’s the original.
Right. But that’s, that’s my understanding. That’s correct. Right. It’s, it’s, that’s it. Syndication of the content.
[00:09:33] James Tennant: Cool syndication. That’s it. Yeah. Syndication on our platform and then actually syndication further than our platform because of the partnerships that we have in place as well. So once you’re on Converge, you reach a much larger network that goes beyond converge into a lot of new places.
And that, you know, apart from the fact it would, it saves the countless hours that it would take to build those relationships. For that person themselves. Often in a few cases we’ve got relationships where it just wouldn’t ordinarily be possible for, for people to build those relationships. So it’s an advantage to use the platform, but as I said, we definitely stress that we are a supplemental tool, and even though I’m sure some of our members are using us as their only content promotion, we do stress that businesses should be doing that themselves as well.
[00:10:12] Mike Allton: Right. Right. So for brands that are investing in various forms of content amplification and promotion, how do you recommend they measure the return on that investment? Particularly, like you said, if, if they’re using several different platforms, tools, or strategies. [00:10:27] James Tennant: Yeah. That comes down to the goals in the beginning.
So if you understand what it is you want your content and your promotion to be doing, then you’ll know what metrics to track essentially. And. This, you know, depends if you are the only person in the business and you are in full control, and then you know what your goals are, you know exactly what you wanna set and, and how to track that and what the overall goal of your amplification is.
If it is brand awareness or lead generation, if you are working at a company and you’ve got stakeholders, then a recommendation here would be, you know, sit down with them. Take the time to figure out the goals between everybody who’s relevant to that, because it’s only when everybody is understands what the end goal is, that you can all be pulling in the right direction and there’s not gonna be that disconnect that we often find between content and marketing teams, and then sales and business development teams.
You know, everyone knows exactly what the goal of the content and the promotion is. Everyone knows exactly what needs to be tracked. To understand if that is working. And then you all know, yeah, is it working, is it not? And you can evolve your content strategy and your promotion strategy based on those metrics.
I think it’s worthwhile at this point as well to point out, you know, a a hundred percent accurate attribution in, in any marketing activity is not really possible. I don’t think there’s an element of following your gut here that needs to come into it. As it does for, for most marketing activity content, probably more than most, marketing has a bit of a roundabout way of working on your audience and potential future customers.
The link is certainly not always direct. You know, it’s not someone visits, website reads, article downloads, white paper subscribes, the newsletter, requests phone call. You know, all that is very, very trackable. You can easily follow that route to that journey that someone’s gone on and go, right, okay. It was that piece of content that.
Started that, that’s virtually never the case. You know, it’s more someone sees a piece of content and they’ve probably never heard of you before, but they’ve did a, they did a search and yours came up or was recommended through a link, and they read it and they thought, yeah, that’s, that’s good. I, I enjoy that.
It’s valuable. Then maybe they. Or on LinkedIn and one of your posts comes up and because of the, you know, recency bias, I think it’s the beta Meinhof phenomenon, their brain pays more attention to you because, oh, that’s the person that wrote that article. So now I’m gonna read this LinkedIn post that maybe ordinarily where they would’ve just scrolled right past in the recent past.
So now they’re paying more attention to you, but then they go away again and maybe it’s another month, maybe they read another piece of content. And then maybe you produce a piece of content where you are asking for their email to download it, or you share your newsletter and they, you know, you want them to subscribe.
And at that point, they’re far more likely. To subscribe because they’ve engaged with all that content in the past. They know exactly who you are. They trust you a bit more. They’re aware of your brand. Funnily enough, that’s what we want from it all. And then maybe at that point, once you’ve got the email, there’s a process you have in place that takes that person from newsletter subscriber to potential customer.
But you know, that’s several touch points and I would argue there’s probably no way you could ever track that customer’s journey back to the original piece of content that you wrote that they read. Yet without that original piece of content, the whole journey doesn’t happen. So yes, have your, your metrics and your KPIs that you know are relevant to your end goal, but there has to be an element of, of trusting.
You go as well if, you know you’ve been doing more content promotion and more content, and your numbers are going in the right direction, but you can’t necessarily link it right back to that. There’s a chance. It’s, it’s had an impact. So, yeah. Trust you got, and when it comes to, you know, following metrics that they’re important, but they’re, they’re not.
Everything.
[00:13:52] Mike Allton: You’re so right, and I love that you mentioned recency bias because it makes me think I need to do an entire episode just on some of the biases, the psychological perspectives that we have and how marketers can benefit. Because recency is when you’ve seen something and you begin to realize that you’re seeing it over and over again.
Our brain recognizes that as a truth. When you go car shopping and all of a sudden you’re seeing everybody seemingly driving the car that you just purchased, that’s a recency bias. But frequency bias is another bias. That comes into play where when we begin to see something over and over and over again, our brain becomes more and more attracted to that thing.
And this is why content promotion is so important because if you’re promoting content on a regular basis, you’re putting it out there, you’re enabling the option of frequency bias to happen. You’re enabling the potential and the possibility for people to see you, your content, your brand, your authority more and more often, and create those various touchpoint, which, like you said, we can’t often measure the exact.
Line, the exact customer journey that someone might take place if they’ve consumed 6, 7, 8 pieces of content. But we know statistically it does require 7, 8, 11, sometimes 20 touch points for someone to actually become a. A customer, and this depends on the industry and the buying cycle and so on. So all this is incredibly important.
Measuring the R O I of the content we create and the effort we pour into it is essential. In fact, it’s just one of several channels that CMOs and marketing executives should be paying attention to for more. Here’s our CMO from Agorapulse.
It’s the arc de triumph. Can you imagine if you’re in charge, if you’re the CMO of marketing Paris, what are your main channels?
Well, there’s. The arc of Triumph. There’s the Eiffel Tower, there’s the Louvre. Those are your channels you’re gonna use to drive tourism dollars in. Okay, now, but you’re not the CMO of Paris. In fact, you’re the CMO of your company, product, service. So what are your main channels? Well, I’m gonna guess there are things like pay per click, maybe trade shows, events.
Maybe content. Those are all pretty predictable, right? Let me ask you this question. Are you treating social media as a main channel? By the way, only 1.8% of you today measure social media and can prove an r o i in that investment. HubSpot and Gartner say social media is the number one channel to invest in this year.
Are you doing it? If not, I can tell you why you’re not doing it. Because you don’t have the tools, you don’t have the mentality, and that’s okay. We’ve got you covered. You changed the mentality. We’ll give you the tool, Agorapulse. Tracks, all the r o I for you. One place to manage all your social media activity, your number one channel, change your success.
Treat social media as a channel one CMO to another. My name is Darryl. I’m with Agorapulse. I’ll talk to you soon.
All right, James, this is, this is fascinating. I love how much we’re talking about how brands can help themselves by getting the content they’re already creating out in front of more and more of their target audience. So when it comes to leveraging partnerships, Amplify content. I think brands have a lot of options, including influencer marketing.
Do you have any recommendations for brands who might want to use influencers to help amplify that kind of content?
[00:17:05] James Tennant: Yeah. One, I think it’s a great idea. I talk a lot about the, the power of, and I’m not the only one for sure this, I know Andy Crestodina talks about this a lot as well. Collaborative content, you know, working with other people to create better pieces of content, and then content that’s more likely to be.
Better promoted as well because you’ve got all the people that you’ve collaborated with to create the content who will often help you promote it. So the opportunity to work with others to produce. Better, more valuable content for your audience and then use them as well as a way to get in front of more of the right people is, is super powerful.
But there are a few things obviously to, to look out for. The influencer has to be relevant. I know influencer marketing is, is a bit of a hot topic and at at the minute, and that there may be is some situations where businesses are just looking to work with. Big names, but it’s important to make sure that that person is, is incredibly relevant to, to your audience and has influence over your audience as well.
The often, the thing that I find people stumble on as well is they just look at the numbers of things like, uh, followers or subscribers, but they don’t dig just that one level deeper to find out what the engagement is with those people and that, because, you know, not in every case at all, but in a few cases, You do find that people pay for followers and pay for subscribers, and yes, okay, they may have a 50,000 person email list, but how many people are, those are actually opening, engaging with that piece of content?
How much do people value that influencer’s input or, or content? And that’s arguably the more important metric in that situation. And then things like consistency, you know, does that person. Work with anybody and everybody, is that inconsistency going to lead to lower engagement? Because the audience that that person reaches is so broad, it’s not really relevant to you, or only a tiny percentage of that is is relevant to you.
So those are the three things I would, I would look at. Is that person or business relevant to yours and your products? Do they reach your target audience? Are their engagement numbers good? Do the people who follow them enjoy their content? And then consistency as well. Do they talk on. Similar or relevant topics so that their audience is as relevant as possible, I guess, to your company and, and your products as well.
[00:19:18] Mike Allton: Relevancy, engagement, consistency. That’s great advice. And I love that you mentioned Andy Crestodina. I actually have an email in my inbox from Andy, and I’ve talked about this before. He does an annual survey of bloggers and does this like basically the state of content marketing. And he talks about in this survey, how much time bloggers are planning to invest in blogging in the coming year, what the length of their blog posts are, what kind of success and results they’re seeing from their blog content.
And to your point, He invites not only thousands of bloggers to participate in the survey, so he gets real results, but then he also invites influencers to weigh in, to comment on the findings himself, so that when he publishes his report, he’s got these statistics and melded into it. Our commentary from folks like Ann Handley and Chris Brogan and, and even myself.
And so then when he shares that content, he of course, tags. Us and we’re proud to be a part of that content, so we share it and that’s, that’s just an easy way for brands to do influencer marketing. Like you said, bring them into the content creation process itself and partner them. How about partnering with other brands?
What strategies would you employ to help get your content in front of another brand’s audience?
[00:20:33] James Tennant: That one, possibly a little bit more. Tricky in that you might wanna look. I mean, I guess that’d be similar. It’s similar advice, at least in my experience, it’s been similar. So working with various different brands, but.
In that case the IT possibly a bit more reciprocity involved. I know there is that in, in working with say influencers and individuals where, you know, I’m asking you to collaborate with me on this piece of content. There’s gotta be something in it for you. But I think when you partner with brands, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this, I’m not the brand expert.
I think that’s heightened, goes up a little bit more. Possibly a little bit more in return. You know, it’s not just the mention in the piece of content or the inclusion in the piece of content. It’s maybe that and something else. Like, okay, we’ll work together, but how can then we both market to each other’s audiences?
And is there any way we could work together beyond this piece of content? And I think that’s where you might want to. Look at creating some options and that’s, you know, it could be any one of a thousand different things. It could be something as simple as a discount code, you know, so you can work together to produce content and then both share discount codes with each other’s audiences.
To use each other’s products. But I would still say the same warnings apply from the previous answer that, you know, the brand must be relevant. They have to reach your audience. I think as well. You probably wanna look. It might be the case a little bit more with brands than individuals. Again, I’m not entirely sure if that’s totally correct, but reputation, you know, making sure that if you are going to align your brand with another brand, that the reputation of that brand is not going to harm yours.
So maybe a tiny bit more to think about when it comes to dealing with brands and it, it’s probably also gonna take a lot longer to work with brands. So if you have a deadline, For when you want a certain piece of content to go out and you are going to be working with another brand to produce that piece of content, you might wanna extend that deadline a little bit or start trying to work with them earlier in the process.
Because yeah, in my experience anyway, the number of people that usually have to sign off on a certain thing, it might take a little bit longer than working with an individual.
[00:22:41] Mike Allton: Every single thing you just said is true, so you’re more of a brand partnership expert than you think. There’s definitely a heightened expectation.
In fact, there are far more instances where I need to have a contract. In place with a brand that we’re working with versus an influencer. You know, I can invite influencers to participate in a piece of content that I’m creating. Just like I was talking about with that example of Andy and I don’t need to have a contract in place.
Yeah. There’s very little expectation there. It’s great if they share the content. I’m not expecting them to share the content. I’m really building relationship more than anything else. Yeah, yeah. But if I am. Creating an ebook with a brand, there is an expectation there that they will help share that ebook and promote it, and may even have to hit certain levels of referrals or downloads or something like that.
I’ve done deals with HubSpot and Meta and TikTok, and we’ve always had set expectations written out and documented in advance. Couldn’t agree more. Yeah. Could you share a couple of success stories, maybe of some brands that you’ve seen using partnerships to further amplify their content?
[00:23:44] James Tennant: I think one of the most famous ones that I remember hearing about and when it happened was, if I’m right, it was that the Red Bull and GoPro partnership, when Red Bull did that stunt where they, they went off into space.
They were using GoPro cameras to produce all of the content from it. I mean, that was a huge successful brand awareness campaign for the two of them. But that’s on a super high level. You know, that’s two massive companies with endless budget. When it. Smaller examples. I’ve only really got stuff that’s worked for Converge to go off, so anecdotal evidence.
I guess when we do produce the content amplification report, you know, we do produce it. And invite, in a similar way to Andy, we invite people to come in and contribute to that piece of content to see what one we want their, we want them to make the content better, so we want them to share their insights from the content so that when people are reading through the report, they can kinda see.
All right. Okay. I understand how all this information on this page or the next page, what, how that applies to my industry. So it makes the content better, but it also means that those guys do end up sharing our reports with their audience. So it’s every year the piece of content that does the best for our platform by a mile is the amplification report.
That’s not, the other stuff doesn’t do very well, it’s just this stuff is shared by. Big names in industry who have influence over people who are very relevant to our product and the audience that we want to target. And every year they share it and it gets in front of more and more people and it gets picked up by blogs all over the place who then, you know, link back to us and, and use our report as reference for articles that they are creating.
You know, the. Statistics that we put out are now shared in articles on different types of content statistics. We’re not at the same level as a HubSpot by any stretch, but it is getting picked up by a lot of marketing and relevant blogs around pretty much everywhere. So yeah, from a personal perspective, that’s a situation where a partnership or a collaboration with influencers has worked extremely well for us.
It helped that we produce the high quality piece of content in the first place for sure. But, You know, it, it wouldn’t reach anywhere near probably as, as far as it does without the help of the people who contribute and partner with us to produce that.
[00:26:02] Mike Allton: Two great takeaways here. The, the first, which was unintended, is that creating original research and statistics is hugely, I.
Valuable. That’s what Andy’s doing with his annual report. That’s what you guys are doing with your annual report. So again, we’ll have the link in the notes because you could, all of you listening should definitely take a look at that and consider how you and your brand can come up with an angle of questions that you can be asking your targeted community to create statistics that don’t exist today in your niche, in your industry.
And that’s how you’re gonna compete with the major players in your space like HubSpot is for us. The second great takeaway is how you. Formatted that report. And again, those of you listening downloaded the links in the notes because I loved how you had grouped your statistics, like listening and amplification, and there were some other categories.
I’m gonna get ’em wrong, so I’m not gonna repeat ’em. But then you’ve got groupings of statistics, and then you’ve got an influencer who’s weighing in. On the relevancy or the impact or their interest in that particular statistic. They’re their own slide, and you’ve got a great slide at the end that thanks all of the influencers who participated in that particular report with their handles and the websites and their information and their headshots, of course, they look great, which is the second takeaway.
You invite influencers. To participate in your content and you make them look good so that they’re proud and they’re happy to share that content with their audience. You stoke their ego. Yeah, a little bit. You have to, and that will take you very, very far. Last question, James, and this is one my favorite questions.
I’d love to ask this if everybody, how important have relationships been to the success of your career and your SaaS company?
[00:27:41] James Tennant: Massively. I mean, there’s, you know, the old adage of it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. I don’t think it’s quite as black and white as that. I think you have to be good at what you do, but meeting and building relationships with with the right people has a huge impact.
On your career and on your business, you know, those are the people that are gonna open the doors for you to give you opportunities that are perhaps hard to come by if you don’t know the right people. For my business, it wasn’t until I did a certain number of events, actually did a few events down in London about a year or two after I started the business and the people that I met there, two or three of them ended up becoming like massive for converge and.
If I hadn’t done that event and then worked on building that relationship after the event finished, you know, the opportunities I’ve had over the last couple of years with the company would just not have materialized, whether those people in the same way for my personal brand, you know, I’ve built relationships with guys like Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, Andy Crestodina, and Rand Fishkin as well.
All of those guys, I would like to think, you know, I could send them an email and they’ll reply, you know, we’re on a, a reasonable level when it comes to the relationship then, and the various bits of advice I’ve received from them and collaboration opportunities I’ve had with them have had a big impact on my business and or me.
So without those relationships, again, I don’t know where Converge would be, but with them, I know that they’ve had a massive impact. On the company and on sort of my professional development as well. So it’s huge. You gotta do it properly though, you know, it’s legitimately building relationships, not just seeing relationships as a means to an end.
It’s about developing it genuinely as well.
[00:29:23] Mike Allton: Couldn’t agree more. And I love that you mentioned events. In fact, I’ll be in London for three events in November, and relationship building is always really one of the core reasons for me going to any particular event. We can’t ever get enough leads to justify the cost of being an event.
We can’t, you know, speak in front of enough people to justify the cost. But I know going into it that there are people that I’m going to meet and I don’t know who, but I know I’m gonna meet people. And I know, like you said, If I’m going into it with the genuine intention of building great, strong relationships and just being open to whatever happens next, fun, amazing.
Potential opportunities will happen. James, this has been fantastic. I loved the information that you shared. Can you tell folks where to connect with you and learn more?
[00:30:09] James Tennant: Yeah. Um, on LinkedIn, so you can come connect with me there. That’s probably the platform I prefer to use the most. I’m on Twitter as well, less so these days, but that’s at James Converge.
And then, you know, if you ever wanted to check out Converge, if you. Looking at something that might give you a bit of a boost to your content promotion. You can visit the platform and if you go to trial Converge today, you can get a 30 day free trial of the platform to see if it’s right for you.
[00:30:34] Mike Allton: Brilliant. Like I said, we will have all the links to today’s resources in the notes. That’s all we’ve got for today, friends, but I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something. Let us know. Hit me up on social media. Let me know what you think of the show, what you thought of this particular topic, what you would like to learn.
I. More because I’m already looking towards next quarter and next year as to what guests we wanna bring on, and I would love to know how much more we can help you. Until next time,
see you.
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