Spotlight: A new way to open doors
TO: Outbound Team, Content Team
FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO
SUBJECT: Spotlight: A new way to open doors
Guys,
Azleen here. Since we have already stabilised our content production for our internal magazine, it is time for us to weaponise the Spotlight session. I want to use it as our primary angle for cold outreach on LinkedIn.
You can name this interview or feature section as Spotlight or as something else if you can find a better word for it. Just let me know it early so that I can approve the name. Choosing the wrong name can bring disaster for us as a respectable brand.
Why feature other people in our magazine, you ask. Well, CEOs, COOs and decision-makers are tired of being hunted. They are tired of being sold to. Their DMs and emails are full of cold messages wanting to push for discovery calls that they never asked for. If we show up in their inbox doing the same thing, we are just like those heartless brands. I don't want that to happen to us. We will look cheap. We will look desperate. We are not a desperate brand.
Instead, we are going to do the opposite. We are going to ask them to share their side of the stories to our audience. We are going to make them slightly famous and popular. We are going to make them respected thought leaders. This is how we're going to flip the power dynamic. We are doing them a favour, a big one. The feature that we're going to run here can be a written interview, audio, video or a combination of these. You decide. Personally, I wish to recommend we do a combo of all to keep things interesting.
How do we do the outreach then? Okay, here's my thought. The way to run this cold outreach is to make them feel completely harmless when they receive our text or email. Once they smell like the outreach is part of a sales tactic, we will lose them as our potential customers. This is why we need to be extremely careful. The way to go about doing this is by establishing the Humans of New York kind of vibe. They must feel that this outreach is personal, professional, focused on the person behind the title, and the story the person is going to share. Once they say yes, and their stories are published in our magazine, they are in our ecosystem. The trust is already there. The next stage of transitioning them from being featured to becoming paid customers will happen naturally, and the process will be smoother and quicker.
I want both the Content and Outbound Teams to work together to come up with the tactical plans and the best way to execute them, especially the list of potential individuals we can approach on LinkedIn and email, the initial and follow-up scripts, the channels and the right questions you're going to use. At the same time, make a little refinement on the magazine's user interface to insert the feature section, and the webpage for all the features is done.
Get the drafts ready and pull me in during our discussions to finalise them. I'd like to share my thoughts too. Then we roll it out. This strategy is all about making them look good first before we talk business later. Work on it this week. I want to see the drafts by the following Monday morning. Not this Monday, but the following Monday.
Azleen.
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