Laurel Mintz
Hi there, Laurel Mintz here with Elevate My Brand. Now you all know that I am a networking queen, and I really truly love it. And I’m so glad that we’re going back to IRL, I’m getting that energy back from meeting new people and sharing their stories and I really love that. But let’s be honest, not really everybody does, and so what I wanted to offer today were a couple of tips and tools along the way on how you can become a networking king or queen.
Number one is making sure that you are creating a consistent list of all the conferences and events that you’re going to. Ever since day one, we created this list, and let me tell you, I kissed a lot of bad conference and event frogs but making sure that you’re following up on that list, marking the conferences that were of value and why, seeing if there is any PR speaking media opportunities, etcetera, will help to create that rise and repeat conference cadence and you’d be surprised by how many people I run into every single year at very specific conferences and you create this little fun conference family, and you end up having drinks every time you see each other once a year, and it’s really great. And that’s how you create that sense of memory and that lasting impression for conferences.
Now, of course, not everything is going to be IRL, there’s still a lot of importance in building your digital networking skills as well. So making sure that you’re creating a digital billboard for yourself, and that that branding is consistent on all of your channels together, so that if someone sees your image here, here and here that it’s the same across all channels whether that’s for you personally or for your brand.
Number three is to make sure that you understand what you’re offering in that networking relationship. For us, like what we do a lot here, we offer a ton of different types of content, we are connectors, so if you need to find someone in XY&Z category, we’re happy to make those introductions. We also provide a lot of value and support for our non-profit community and for anyone that needs a little bit of mentorship and guidance. But whatever your offer is might be something totally different. Make sure that you’re really clear, whether that’s in your bio on your social pages or whathaveyou, or if you’re going to a conference, that you’re like here is what I am going to offer at this conference, here is the value that I’m bringing to everyone that I meet here so that you can see how the connectivity really works and how you pay it forward.
And then I would say that make sure you’re doing the follow-up. It sounds like such an easy tip but I can not tell you how many times I’ve been to conferences and not had a single person follow-up. Hopefully, that wasn’t because I wasn’t providing good value, but I always follow up, and you can do it in a really effective way by creating a copy-paste message and then personalizing it just a little bit for the conversation that you had with that individual. Now you don’t have to follow up with everyone, but also building that list of follow-ups into your database so that you can drip-market to them through your email lists over time is also super effective.
And I don’t know if you know this, but we’ve built a list of over 30,000 people because of this network effect. And it’s been really really valuable for us. So I hope that you found these tips helpful, and if you are just starting out, there is no time like the present to get out there, start networking with people, and to build your database, your list, your digital network presence, all of those things are super critical and important to help you build a really smart brand.