How Third Tribe Marketing Uses “Authority” to Get Sales
Last Updated January 18th, 2011

People tend to obey authority figures – no matter the circumstances. The best example of this is the Stanley Milgrim experiment where Stanley discovered that regular people were willing to administer dangerous electric shocks to others because an authority figure told them to.

While it was a scary discovery, the results forever changed the way some marketers create campaigns. If an authority figure commanded people to hurt others and people listened, using an authority figure to get people to buy products should be a cinch.

How Third Tribe Marketing Uses Authority to Sell Products

Whatever niche you’re in, you probably have hundreds or thousands of competitors. The good news is, many of these competitors often focus on the hard sale, the old school marketing method that cares only about the sales transaction. An example of this would long-form sales letters, or plain e-commerce sites with shopping carts.

With Third Tribe Marketing, your main goal may be sales, but you earn those sales by writing compelling, useful content that helps your customers, with or without buying your products.

The real magic happens when you produce this type of helpful content consistently because the more you educate people, the more they’ll view you as an authority in your niche.  And as we saw from the Milgrim experiment, being an authority earns you the right to sell to your audience.

For example, let me tell you about this one Twitter blog post I wrote last year. In short, Twitter was all the rage amongst some marketers because people were making a lot of money off of Twitter traffic. To capitalize on this, I published a blog post that detailed how I received more than 30,000 unique visits from Twitter with a piece of content.

The result? More than 10 people tried to hire me as a marketing consultant for their website. The funny thing is, I don’t advertise consulting work because I rarely take on clients. Yet, since I established myself as an authority, people wanted to hire me. Just imagine if getting hired was my goal… I’m sure I would have had more inquiries.

3 Key Traits of Content that Builds Authority, Gets Sales

Not all content will instantly propel yourself from novice to expert in the eyes of your audience. However, the type of content that does has these three characteristics:

1. Practical

Your content must be practical, meaning that it should work regularly under normal, real-world circumstances. For example, when I wrote the post on how I got more than 30,000 unique visits from Twitter, I included each step I took to achieve that goal. It showed people that my methodical approach could be replicated by someone else, or from a consulting standpoint, for someone else.

2. Specific

Your content must be specific with several facts and examples. Broad generalizations won’t help you build authority because anyone with half of a brain can come up with those. Instead, you’ll need to show people plenty of real-life examples – case studies work great – and demonstrate easy-to-understand concepts that people can act on.

3. Believe

Your content must be believable, meaning that the people who read your stuff need to believe whatever you’re saying is possible. The problem is, just because you achieved something outstanding, it doesn’t mean people will believe they can do the same thing. Instead, people tend to trust sources much more easily when they can see themselves achieving the same thing when they use your content in the same way.

Share Your Examples…

I’d love to see some examples of what you consider authoritative content. Feel free to promote yourself in the comments below.