How To Engage The Minds Of The Influential Business Leaders Of Tomorrow

How do you supercharge your marketing initiative to boost the awareness of an early stage business and grow it’s position as a recognised industry leader, take an old school brand to new school status or drive a mature brand to become current in the minds of the up and coming influencer set?

We live in a world where to become noticed can be as achievable as changing a light bulb. With access to digital, social, interactive and creative media, a glimpse of life in the public eye for both business owner and the brand can sometimes be down to clever content creation and an SEO / digital marketing whizz kid sitting in the Philippines playing tech games with your website.

I often wonder if modern youth entrepreneurs even consider what type of notability they seek before creating their profile and creative voice on their chosen social media channels. Does brand image and product creation appear secondarily to them if at all?

You may be aware that generating a bite size version of ‘influential fame’ has become second nature to a 15 year old sitting in his/her bedroom creating a video and watching it go viral with global appeal, yet sustaining and maintaining the fame is the game changing play that we all look to achieve.

What these entrepreneurial social kids have shown us is that it is possible to achieve a quick spike and gain ‘fizzy’ global awareness, however the challenge for any business will always be to create a strategic plan that delivers multiple spikes, a maintenance program and deliver long-term appeal!

Engaging with the minds of tomorrow

Modern entrepreneurs, business owners of the future and leaders of our next business generation are looking at different brand experts / industry peers as their celebrities of today, they consider a night out to be going to a topical networking seminar, viewing Ted Talks as a form of TV and business insights and blogs as a light read on the way to work as opposed to the daily / weekly freebie print magazines that are the popular mind set of current masses.
In order to speak to and engage the future leaders of tomorrow, think about how and where you are influencing their mind-set and more importantly the content that you are creating to engage with their brain.
I invite brands of today to consider engaging these leaders of tomorrow with authentic content. Have you considered that we have perhaps been saturated for too long with big glossy campaigns that engage us less and less and which no longer hold the power over us that they once did. Certainly consider that the leaders of tomorrow are blind to the intention behind these campaigns, and are instead looking for something more tangible or real to capture their interest/attention. You’ll find them seeking out individuals with a voice of authority with genuine, authentic and inspiring stories to tell.

You may be wondering, why these youthful entrepreneurs are so important for a brand?

It is these individuals who will influence the communities of their generation and who will in turn engage and organically promote the awareness of the brand. They are digitally savvy, use current social platforms and are also engaged and in tune with new platforms that are appearing before our eyes. Their conversations are being heard, liked, followed and shared by their like-minded friends and messages are carried across the global airways in an instant.

Where we used to look to celebrity as the brand influencers, now anyone with an opinion and a large enough presence / following can be considered the new opinion formers and brand ambassadors.

I believe that Authentic content is a must to attract these leaders of tomorrow and deliver a ‘believable’ campaign that will ignite the true essence of any brand; creating ‘real life’ conversations and insights is a real concept for today. People want to understand the brand and be shown the mechanics, the true essence of what the brand DNA is made of. When putting together your campaign think about the different options that will provide insight and depth and best showcase this.

• How we made it work
• The insider guide to creating winning product
• The tipping point of fame,
• A conversation with…

Take your audience on a captivating journey, showing both the true nature of what has made it great, the problems that showed up along the way and how they overcame them.

Using spoken word and moving image to tell engaging stories about today’s industry leaders are the modern ways to spark and ignite a conversation that will deliver on a promise of sharing and interacting with peoples communities.
Remember we are living in an Entrepreneurial evolution so words of insight and distilling knowledge drive traffic to a brand.

Sharing knowledge, passing on learning

It is my belief that there is no B2B or B2C just B2P (Business to people). As new school brands look to share their knowledge with industry youths, start-ups and early growth business – on line education, workshops and seminars are becoming a trend of today. Likewise old service based industries are reinventing the wheel by creating e-commerce platforms to sell to the consumer and produce alternative forms of products, evolving from the single product option that are fast
becoming a thing of the past.
Pre products, core products and second sale products are an early trend that will saturate the future business arena once the Entrepreneurial masses start to engage with the possibility of a product vision plan and realise that separating B2B and B2C is also an ageing belief.

No matter what size of business you are working with they all need influencers to engage and ignite the conversations of today and drive business for tomorrow.

Keep this at the forefront of your mind when you come across your cousin sitting in his room with the door closed speaking to someone in China on Facebook – It could be him!

Linzi Boyd, Founder, BoB