Spotlight Marketing: Get More Traffic, Sales, & Links By Interviewing Influencers
For an e-commerce store there are only three ways to grow your business: get more traffic, improve conversions, or increase sales. Spotlight Marketing is our method to do all three in a very effective, scalable, and efficient way.
As e-commerce store owners, we understand the five key problems that every store owner has to deal with:
- Traffic: How do you find people in a cost-effective way?
- Conversions: How do you make sure those visitors are the most likely to buy?
- Content: How can you publish new unique content consistently?
- Distribution: How do you get people to share and engage your content?
- Relationships: How do you build relationships with industry influencers?
The foundation of Spotlight Marketing is based on a timeless quote by Zig Ziglar: “You can have everything in life you want, if you just help other people get what they want.”
The origins started in 2013 when Travis Marziani (co-host) started interviewing dance studios and instructors for his store’s blog. By interviewing them he was providing a chance to be recognized by peers, family, and friends.
In return, they promoted his store, driving traffic and getting students to buy dance clothing from him. This strategy has contributed to monthly sales growth by over 300% in just one year.
Why Spotlight Marketing Works: Reciprocity
As humans we have a natural instinct to return a favor. If you buy me a beer, I feel obligated to buy your next drink. If you remember my birthday and send me a gift, I feel obligated to do the same when yours comes around.
It’s engrained in every culture that you must give before you can ask.
Reciprocity can also be applied to your customers, industry influencers, or wholesale contacts. They key is figuring out what they want, and give it to them first.
In the online world, this usually means more eyeballs on their business, better marketing to customers, or peer recognition. Spotlight marketing provides this through an interview.
An interview gives someone a chance to talk about themselves. They can reach a new audience, get recognized, and it makes them feel GREAT. As a store owner, interviewing people helps you in a couple of ways:
- Drives high quality traffic to your site
- Builds high quality backlinks from related websites
- Creates new and unique content effortlessly
- Builds relationships with key influencers
- Goes viral among the industry
The best part? All of this is done without paid advertisements, shady SEO tactics, or the latest silver bullet within internet marketing.
Spotlight marketing is effective, legit, and scalable. We believe building your own brand is best long-term strategy, and this is a unique complement to that goal.
How It Works: The Complete Guide
The foundation of Spotlight Marketing is built upon interviewing your customers as a content, SEO, sales, and traffic strategy. The course is broken down into three stages:
Stage 1 – Outreach: Find connectors, mavens, or persuaders and to interview via email. In the course, we include a guide on finding the right contacts, how to have a VA do it, and the email templates to use for the highest response rate.
Stage 2 – Editorial: Edit, create images, and prepare the articles. In the course, we have step by step guides on how to format and create the blog post, in addition to spicing up the content so it flows better for the audience.
Stage 3 – Publication: Schedule and distribute the article on social media. In the course, we have guides on syndicating the post and how to get your guest to share it when their network so that you have more traffic coming back to your site.
Feel free to modify the templates to your own needs. We’re here to give you the entire process so that you can just get up and running today.
Build Relationships With Influencers
In the book The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, he explains how ideas, products, and messages spread throughout society. There are three categories of people required to make this happen:
Connectors: People in a community who know large numbers of contacts and are in a habit of making introductions. Usually they are plugged into social, business, and professional circles.
Mavens: People that thrive on sharing, trading, and learning information. They also have strong knowledge about the marketplace and industry.
Persuaders: Charismatic and passionate individuals. These are your VIP customers that can’t stop talking about you to their friends, family, or peers.
Get Access To Your Best Customers
Connectors, mavens, and persuaders are the gatekeepers to your customers. By interviewing the right individuals and organizations, they open the door to more traffic, sales, and relationships. This is a much better alternative than spamming people with discount offers, cold calling, or hoping someone will just hand customers over on a silver platter.
For example, interviewing the owner of a private forum with 1,000 members of your ideal customer can be extremely valuable. Not only are you building a relationships, but it’s likely that they will also be open to sharing that content with the members, driving relevant traffic and visitors to your website.
Compared to paid traffic where you have to pay for the wrong visitors, clicks, and visits – Spotlight Marketing helps you reduce customer acquisition costs. This allows you to keep more money in the bank and put those resources towards other initiatives.
Automatic & Unique Content Creation
Most advice on the internet says you should write and post a blog every week. It’s just unrealistic and hard to commit for a store owner with a million things to do. There is significantly less friction to post an interview every week.
Because Spotlight Marketing is conducted through text and email, it’s highly scalable which means you can have multiple posts queued up and ready to go on your content calendar. This makes it easier to commit and follow through over the long-term. Compared to writing 1,000+ words on your own every week, this is content strategy is way more effective.
Small Investment With High Returns
With our current templates, this system has been optimized to less than 10 hours of work every month for the business owner. The team handles the outreach, interviews, editorial, and publications. All you have to do is double check for quality, consistency, and relevance.
The bulk of the work in Spotlight Marketing is during the initial setup and getting the first few interviews published. Once the system is in place, there is minimal time investment required. This means you can spend free time on other projects or initiatives in the business.
Once you’ve fully implemented Spotlight Marketing and your team has a few posts under their belt, it basically runs on autopilot. It’s the all-in-one solution to traffic, conversions, SEO, relationships, and content marketing in a legit and scalable process.
How To Get Started
Spotlight Marketing comes in three versions. We understand many listeners are at different levels of revenue and resources, so we’ve divided them up to account for each level:
Executive: For store owners that want the guide, templates, and a private 60 minute Skype call with Travis and Travis. This is the ultimate solution if you’d like some tailored advice for your business on how to implement Spotlight Marketing. If your team member has any questions, we can step in to help them along the way, brainstorm new ideas, or make personalized recommendations to make this strategy more effective for you. ($997 USD)
Team: For store owners that want the guide and templates. If you have an in-house team, virtual assistant, or just want the how-to guide – this package includes email templates, workflow checklists, and tutorial videos so that anyone can quickly learn how it works. No need to spend time on trial and error figuring out what works. We’ve already done that for you. ($297 USD)
Professional: For store owners on a budget that just want the guide and understand how it works. This audiobook course will provide you with everything you need to get started. You’ll have to come up with your own email templates and systems. ($97 USD)
Frequently Asked Questions
Does This Work For The B2B Space?
Yes, no matter what industry you are in there are connectors, mavens, and persuaders to interview. For a B2B industry the skew might lean towards mavens if persuaders and connectors are harder to get a hold of. Nevertheless, there are many industry associations with event organizers and other peers that you can approach. Remember that it’s all about understanding what other people need, and giving it to them first! If you’d like some help brainstorming people to target, check out the Executive Pack where Travis and Terry will hop on a Skype call to help you out.
Does This Work If I Don’t Have A Virtual Assistant?
Yes. We understand resources might be tight for store owners on a smaller budget, so the audiobook includes all the information needed to get started with some brief examples and templates. You’ll have to create the word document and other templates yourself, but we do tell you what elements to include so you’re not left stranded alone trying to figure things out. By having firsthand experience with the process, it will also make it easier to outsource down the line.
How Do I Get A Virtual Assistant Started With This?
In the tutorials and templates folder, there is a PDF named “Start Here” for anyone to get started. It explains what the purpose of each file/tutorial is, and a step-by-step guide on how to proceed through Spotlight Marketing. The details are very specific with a checklist along with screenshots (example below).
What If It Doesn’t Work For Me?
Just let us know and we’ll refund you within 6o days. We’ve had many members in our mastermind group use these templates and are very confident that they will work. The initial setup does take some time, but once it’s up and running it is smooth sailing from there. Just image all the unique content that will be continually produced week after week, bringing you more traffic, sales, SEO juice, and relationships with industry influencers.
How Can This Help My Existing Content Strategy?
If you have an existing strategy working right now, that’s awesome! We’re not here to put down other efforts, but as store owners we are looking for the biggest bang for the buck and Spotlight Marketing is definitely up there. You can also implement this strategy in video, audio, or other forms of media because the concept of reciprocity is the same no matter what platform. Whether it’s Pinterest, Instagram, or Twitter – you can feature an industry connector, maven, or persuader and apply the same principles.
Excited? Want to try it out? Contact Build My Online Store Today!