The Authority Framework For Becoming An Expert In Your Industry
August 9, 2021
I want to share the authority framework and three secrets to growing your audience and establishing your brand in an industry.
This quote really resonates with the topic that we'll be talking about:
“A small piece of wood creates a small fire, adequate enough to warm you up. Add just a few more pieces to blast an immense bonfire, large enough to one of your entire circle of friends.”
My goal with this framework is to show you how to take that spark, turn it into a flame, and watch it grow into a bonfire.
About Rodney Hu’s Journey:
My background is in the healthcare industry. I'm an MRI technologist, but it wasn't until I went through the patient journey myself, that I really cemented my passion for this industry.
During the process, I was exposed to a lot of different healthcare professionals and a lot of different healthcare technology that I wasn't aware of. I saw an opportunity to bridge that gap in the awareness of people.
When I started reaching out to people to share this idea with them, I had no authority or credibility. No one was interested. I wasn't getting any good feedback, but I stayed consistent. I started to learn the power of a platform and how the people who leveraged platforms in their overall strategy grew.
I decided to create my own podcast and repeat the process over and over until it led to new opportunities. I am documenting the process of what I had, what I was doing and the mindset behind some of the things I incorporated and converted that into the framework to share.
The big picture strategy is to grow your audience and establish the awareness of your brand in an industry.
There are three secrets to doing thing:
- Leverage other people's audience to create your own audience.
- Systemize and maximise your content to attract your ideal audience.
- Adopt the children's horse strategy to turn attention into opportunity.
Leverage other people's audience to create your own audience.
Surround yourself with people who already have the attention of your target audience. Who is it that you're trying to target? Where is their attention? Who has their attention already? Collaborate with the key influencers within that industry and space.
Leverage their credibility and influence in order to reach a percentage of their following. This gives you an increased opportunity to nurture these relationships and reach a wider audience.
Figure out how to create a win-win situation for both you and your audience so that it is valuable for both parties. Reach out and collaborate with people who are established within an industry.
It is important to position yourself where your audience is - whether it's on videos, podcasts, books, blogs, etc.
When you're reaching out to collaborate with people, you need to decide whether it's your platform or their platform that you want to leverage. There are pros and cons to both.
Staying relevant is key when building authority.
Know who your target audience and demographic is and who to collaborate with within that market to reach them.
How can you create a win-win scenario for collaboration? Value-added content creation can be entertainment, education or inspiration. Decide on the relationship you want to have and make it a win-win, whether it is on your platform or theirs.
Determine what others in your industry are having success with. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, just figure out what other people are doing and learn from that model.
Design your content to attract your ideal audience, to really maximize it. For all the effort that you're putting into creating content, make sure to amplify it every which way that you can.
Create long form content and then repurpose that into multiple smaller size multi content pieces and promote it in a way that gives you credibility in the key topics that you want to be an expert in.
From your long form content, it can be repurposed into either free content or premium content. Free content could be in audio, video or text format - whether it's a videogram, quote, infographic - that you would post to social media with the goal to drive attention and awareness towards a premium content funnel.
From it you build a value exchange, where you collect their information in exchange for the premium content that you are providing. This could be an ebook, a template, a trial or promotion, a registration for a webinar or event, etc.
When you look at it from a high level, the pillar content would be content around how you're helping your customers in a longer form content piece. You would then repurpose it into little gold nuggets that you can distribute to all the social channels that your target audience is on.
Their attention has to be there to create a sense of omnipresence. Your visibility becomes credibility and a percentage of that exposure is going to convert into leads. The goal is to get them to the next stage of premium content and value exchange.
Set a goal for your content. Have a plan and a vision.
Be intentional about each move that you make. Otherwise, it's going to be easy to fall off without a clear path.
A great opportunity to start with is to recycle old content that is still relevant. A secret trick is to repurpose already existing content to bring it back to the front.
Take effort to craft and crystalize your message that you want to share with people. Once they're aware of who you are and see your content, you want them to stay loyal long term to your mission and vision.
Communicate how you can help people in their journey and solve a problem for them. Position yourself as an authority and a credible source for the information that you are providing in your field. Taking the effort to educate your audience in an investment in the long run.
As you start building new connections and you nurture the relationships through the content that you have put out, it creates a brand image and perception among your audience.
This is also a way to simplify that whole process - understanding each stage and phase that one needs to go through in order to create a win-win opportunity. When you have this documented, you can reverse engineer the process in order to achieve it.
Choose a funnel to achieve the a goal in lead generation.
It can be a content funnel, a sales funnel, lead funnel, etc., in order to really make this effort as efficient as possible. A lot of the process can be automated as well to take a user through a clear journey and experience.
But at each stage you're getting more and more specific on who's right. So a certain percentage qualify a certain percentage of those that qualify get put onto the next stage and so on, but understanding the goal and the funnel to do this. Just, we'll also want to be aware of your shadow funnel.
As you boost your credibility by leveraging other people’s audiences, leads can accelerate through the funnel faster and with a positive experience. Credibility really helps this process.
Questions to ask at this stage:
- What is the result that you want?
- What are the actions you want your traffic to take?
- What is the step by step journey of a lead?
- What processes need to be set up in order to handle all the incoming traffic?
- What are the key elements that need to be built out?
- What are the tasks and processes that need to be set up?
- Who on my team needs to be assigned for each process?
Subscribe to the podcast:
Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2x0G3Um
Spotify - https://spoti.fi/3dVzK4X
Connect with Rodney:
Healthtech Hustle - Website
Rodney Hu - LinkedIn