RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help Mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. Before you can sell to your clients, you have to find them , right? I mean, where do you find your ideal clients, both online and offline? This is an important question. If you know where they’re at, then you can go and be there and be, build relationships with them and get plugged in and then start doing business with them. But the question is, how and where do you find these people?
RV (01:01):
In this video, we’re gonna share with you the eight top ways to find where your perfect clients all hang out. Let’s dive in right away with number one. And the first one is, it should be where you hang out. It really should be, it should be all the places that you hang out. Why? One of our fundamental core beliefs at Brand Builders Group is that you are always most powerfully positioned to serve the person you once were. Which means that if you are building a personal brand, it should be built around people that you’re trying to help. The people that you are best suited to help and who you are most likely to make a lot of money from quickly are the people who are like you were a few years ago. That is who you’re most powerfully positioned to serve. It’s who you are most divinely equipped to help support, which means that those people should be you.
RV (02:00):
They should have been you maybe five or 10 years ago or something like that, right up front. If you’re having a hard time finding your ideal clients, then you might be serving the wrong avatar because that means you are trying to reach someone who you don’t fully understand. If you’ve done the rest of your personal brand strategy right, and you’ve had a good strategist from our team, or if you’re doing it yourself, you should be dialed in on these people because it should be you. So ask yourself that question. Where do you hang out? What are the, what are the magazines that you read? You know, what are the conferences that you go to? And, and you really should know those if you don’t. That brings us to number two, which is ask, ask your current clients where they hang out. Send them a survey, call them on the phone, shoot ’em a quick email, like when you see them at your, in your next encounter, just ask, Hey, what are the books that you read?
RV (02:59):
What are the magazines you subscribe to? What are the podcasts that you listen to? What are the conferences you go to? What associations are you involved with? Who do you follow? Like ask your current clients. Where are their favorite sources of media? And there’s lots of ways to ask. You could do that in person with a email, with a survey, et cetera, et cetera. But ask, it is one of the legitimate best ways to find new pockets where your clients might be hanging out that you’re just not aware of. So go ahead and ask. It’s super, super, super simple. Number three is follow other industry leaders. You should follow other industry leaders. One of the biggest mistakes that personal brands make is that they forget, in order to be a great teacher, you must first be a great student. So you should, again, you should be studying, you should be learning, you should be following other industry leaders or other leaders who are in your space, not ’cause you’re gonna copy them, not ’cause you’re gonna steal their stuff, because you’re gonna learn from them.
RV (04:02):
And because that’s gonna help shape you and, and, and help you understand your space. It’s gonna help you know what’s already been written. It’s gonna help you in order to forward the conversation, which is what a thought leader does. A thought leader forwards the conversation. You have to be in the conversation, right? You have to know what conversation is being had. So follow the other industry thought leaders, because they’re gonna point you to resources and talk about people and events and tools and media outlets and groups that you can be, you know, plugging into. And that’s gonna help, help you understand really quickly where those people are. Which brings us to number four, which is kind of related. It’s podcasts. You should be listening to the podcasts in your space, right? Like they’re going to interview and feature other guests who are world renowned leaders in, in your space.
RV (04:54):
Now, our goal here, right as we build your personal brand, is that one day we want you to be the guest, right? I mean, one day you’ll probably be the host first, and we want you to get interviews with those other people. And then one day we want you to become the guest where you are the expert thought leader. You are the most world renowned authority. You are, you know, the leading, recognized voice in your space, but you have to kind of know who those people are. And so listen to the podcast and this plugs into number five, which is search. Use the search, search for your topic, search for your space, search for your audience in each of the search functions, not just Google, but search in the YouTube search bar, search inside of Twitter, search inside of Facebook, search the terms on TikTok, search the actual terms, and that will introduce you to the leaders, the influencers, the movers and shakers.
RV (05:49):
And it’s gonna show you the groups, right? Search on LinkedIn and, and you search a topic like sales and all the top sales groups are gonna come up. They’re all right there, right? Someone has already gathered your audience. That’s the great thing is while you want, while you build an audience, you want to find existing audiences while you build your own audience, which is one of the things we’re super passionate about, is teaching you how to build your own audience while you’re building your own audience. You need to find existing audiences, and that’s what this whole video lesson is all about, right? So use the search feature. Relatedly is hashtags, which is number six. Hashtags are going to help you find your people. And, and if you’re following industry leaders pay attention when they use a hashtag, right? If you don’t know what a hashtag is, right, it’s just, it’s just the pound sign and then a word, right?
RV (06:42):
Like, you know, we sometimes use mis pound mission driven messengers. And so if you’re following brand builders group, that’s like one of the hashtags that our, our people youth, right? So you would, if you were following us, you would pay attention and go, oh, there’s other people who are following this, this type of a hashtag. You gotta know what are the top hashtags in your industry? Again, this tool that I’m gonna share with you at the end of this video is gonna do all of these for you. So make sure that you stick around. Number seven is Google Alerts. Google Alerts. Google Alerts is one of the oldest features of Google. A lot of people still don’t know about it, but it still works really, really well. You can actually take any term that you would ever type into a Google search bar, and you can set an alert for that term.
RV (07:29):
And what a Google Alert does is it automatically emails you anytime that term shows up in a new published article or in a new online mention somewhere. So Google is scraping the web and it’s, it’s basically like making Google an employee for you, like a virtual assistant or something that’s gonna go scour the internet every day for all the new articles and all the new websites and any new mention of the terms that matter most to you. By the way, you should at least have a Google alert for your name, because you definitely wanna know when people are talking about you and writing about you online. So make sure that you set up Google alerts. And then finally, number eight, the tool is called Spark Toro. This is my absolute favorite. This is a tool that we discovered maybe about a year ago, and it is incredibly powerful because it basically does all of these first seven things for you.
RV (08:25):
What Spark Toro allows you to do is basically type in a topic and then it will tell you all of the people who are sort of like the leading authorities on that topic, or basically it, it scrapes the web and says, people who follow this topic also follow all of these people. The other thing it will do is you can say, you can put in a person and say something like, you know, whoever Mel Robbins and you say, I wanna reach people like the people Mel Robbins reaches. And so you could say people you type in Mel Robbins and Spark Toro will tell you, here’s everybody who has followers that are similar to the people who follow Mel Robbins. It’s a tremendously powerful tool. It it’ll introduce you to you know, branded, like branded or themed accounts or company accounts or just like communities as well as other thought leaders who you’ll be like, I didn’t even, I’ve never even heard of that person, even though maybe you have been in the space for a long time.
RV (09:26):
So we’ll include an our affiliate link to Spark Toro, but it’s a free tool. You get so many free uses of it, or at, at least at the time of this video, it is a free tool and you can use a couple free searches a month, and then you pay some very nominal rate to have access to this. So check out spark Toro. You can click on our affiliate link or just check it out on your own. But there you have it. There you have it. Eight ways to find your ideal audience. You have to find your audience before you can sell to your audience. And remember, before you can be a great teacher, you must first be a great student. So make sure you’re plugged in to your area and to your space to that you are one of these people in and among the crowd, so that you can then rise and raise your personal brand to where you’ll become at the front of that crowd.
