Gatekeepers - They’re Everywhere | Digital Product Launch Pt. 2

In the digital world, gatekeepers hold the key to your content being shared with large targeted audiences.   If you think they’re going to break their habitual inertia just because you ask them to - you’re as deluded as we were.

With a pitiful response to our initial outreach to leading grief organizations, we recognized the need to sweeten the deal.  If they were going to do something for us - we needed to reciprocate.

Plan B

What if we created an entry about their organization on our site?  They’d have increased visibility, they’d have new content to share on social platforms and of course they’d have a link back - hell - everyone wins!

We came up with a set of simple questions for the organizations to answer, amended the outreach letter and sat back and waited for the responses to roll in.

Beware Early Outliers

We had a beautiful early response and suddenly everything looked like it was going to work, but with an overall response rate of less than 5% it became apparent that plan B was also going to strike out.

On reflection we should have seen the obvious flaw.  If it was too much for people to share a simple link, it was even more unlikely that they would sit down and take the time to answer questions and source images for a record label that they’d never heard of.

Running Out Of Time

If you’ve read my piece on Helmuth von Moltke the Elder you’ll know that this is pretty much par for the course, the thing is for small businesses, there isn’t a lot of runway to get it right.

Next week: Go Big or Go Home

Dealing with Loss or Grief? Listen to this, it really helps you feel better.