Welcome to the final article in our series covering the six roles of a content creator.
I intentionally saved the role of a promoter for last because your ability to successfully promote to your audience is dependent on how well you fulfil the other five roles. This is especially true when promoting your own goods, services, and content.
What Is a Promoter?
Let’s start by defining what we mean by a promoter.
A promoter is somebody who recommends something to other people. Whenever you recommend a product or service, you’re promoting it.
Of course, it’s one thing to promote something; anyone can say “Look at this! I think it’s really good!”. It’s another thing to promote something and actually have people pay attention to your opinion.
Why Would Anyone Listen to Me?
Two factors determine whether anyone is going to listen to your recommendations.
1 – How much your audience trusts you.
You can only be an effective promoter if your audience trusts you, and this is why your ability to promote depends on the other roles. You earn your audience’s trust by consistently providing value via education, entertainment, inspiration, conversation, and friendship.
You also build trust by being consistent, truthful and accurate with what you say. Trust is built slowly. It takes time. You can’t expect your audience to trust you before you have earned it.
2 – How well you justify your rationale for promoting something.
This point is also linked to trust because the less your audience trusts you, the more convincing your arguments need to be. On the other hand, if your audience already trusts you, they won’t require much convincing as you have already proven yourself to be reliable.
Until you’ve built a reputation, I advise against promoting your own offers too frequently. It’s natural to be suspicious of someone selling their owns goods and services.
Content Marketing is a game of give and take. You need to deliver value upfront. By promoting your products or services before you’ve gained the trust of your audience, you will come across like any other salesman. It will appear that you’re just looking out for yourself.
Let’s look at some examples to illustrate these points.
Promotion From a Person of Influence
Imagine a friend recommends a new restaurant in town. You would be thankful because your friend is sharing valuable knowledge that benefits you. Unless your friend has a terrible taste in food, you would have no reason to doubt the recommendation. You would probably go to the new restaurant without any further justification. This is how powerful your advice becomes when you have the full trust of your audience.
But you have to be careful! Imagine that your friend recommended the restaurant and it was terrible. You would think carefully the next time that they suggested somewhere to eat. Should it happened a second time, you would probably disregard all future food-related advice from this friend.
Promotion From a Person With Little Influence
Now imagine you’re walking down the street, a random person approaches you and they say, “You have to go to this restaurant it’s really good!”.
Chances are you would assume that the restaurant hired this person and you would think, “Of course they’re going to say that, they work there!”.
This is an example of someone promoting their own goods or services without first earning the trust of their audience.
It’s possible that you may still go to the restaurant. However, the chances of you going are less than if your friend had given you the recommendation.
Now imagine that you chose not to go to the restaurant. However, the random person somehow got your contact details and started messaging you several times a day repeating the same message “You have to go to this restaurant it’s really good!”. It wouldn’t take long for you to begin thinking “What sort of crappy restaurant has to harass people all the time?! I will never go there!”.
You may win a couple of customers by constantly promoting yourself before earning your audience’s trust or without providing any good rationale. However, you will also drive away a lot of people. The collateral damage is a shrinking audience as people unsubscribe from your content. Clearly this means that this is not a good strategy.
Promotion With Good Rationale
Now imagine that a random person approaches you about a restaurant however they say the following, “Come to this restaurant it’s really great! It was founded by a famous chef, the food is cooked in front of you, if your food isn’t ready in 15 minutes it’s free, it has 100% 5-star reviews in the local papers, and it is really cheap! Look take a menu and a copy of a local food critic’s review!”.
In these circumstances, despite not knowing or trusting the person they have probably done enough to convince you. You might suspect that the person is lying (which is possible as the person hasn’t earned your trust yet) but they’ve given you evidence (the review and menu) so you’ll probably give them the benefit of the doubt.
Applied to Content Marketing, if you don’t have the trust of your audience but you provide a good rationale for promoting a product or service, you may still need evidence as well. This could be a money-back guarantee or sharing impartial reviews.
The Sweet Spot
Naturally, the most effective form of promotion is when a trusted person recommends something while providing good rationale and evidence. This is where you want to be. Your audience trusts you, you’re recommending an excellent product or service, you have a clear rationale for why the product or service is good, and you can prove it.
People Want to Hear About Good Things
Remember, provided you’re promoting something of value, people like being promoted to. After all, everybody appreciates a good recommendation. Recommendations make life easier because someone else has already done the hard work of deciding if something is valuable.
What Should I Promote?
The first category is your own goods and services. The benefits of promoting your own offerings are obvious. You require trust, rationale, and evidence. We’ve already covered this in this article, so I won’t repeat myself.
The second category are the goods and services of others. By promoting other people’s offerings, you provide a service to your audience. This service is linked to the role of educator. You’re undertaking a difficult analysis for your audience and educating them with your findings. This saves your audience time and stress. It also alleviates the fear of making a wrong decision.
It’s important to clearly state that you’re conducting an impartial review and not making a commission. Otherwise, your audience might think that you’re being paid to advertise or that you’re making affiliate earnings off your recommendations. If your audience suspects that you have ‘some skin in the game’ so to speak, they will no longer see your reviews as a service but as an attempt to benefit yourself.
Your reviews must be accurate. If you go around making terrible recommendations, you’ll end up like the well-meaning friend who keeps suggesting bad restaurants. Nobody will trust your judgment and this would be a big problem for your primary business. After all, you probably wouldn’t allow your friend with a terrible taste in food to cook you dinner!
In Summary
Promotion is a valuable service provided that it’s done correctly and you’re promoting something of value. It’s best to be cautious when promoting something because it only takes a couple of bad recommendations to lose the trust of your audience.
It’s natural that we want to promote our own goods and services and it’s acceptable to do so provided what you offer is of value. Don’t think of promoting as a way to benefit yourself, think of promoting as a way to benefit your audience.
The more value your promotions give to your audience, the more they will listen to you in the future. The more your audience follows your advice, the more powerful your voice will be when you promote your own offers.
As long as you trust your judgement, don’t be afraid to give your opinion!
Don’t be afraid to write reviews. You can use any form of content you like. Blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, etc. Just make sure that your reviews are thorough, impartial, accurate and of high-quality.
Whenever somebody follows your advice, they’re putting their trust in your word, don’t let them down!