Mastering Authority Marketing With Adam Witty

Hello everyone. Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. Once again, we get to listen today to Dan Kennedy as he interviews Adam Witty. Adam Witty is an authority marketing expert. That's the process of systematically positioning a person or an organization to be the leader or the expert in their industry, in their community, in their marketplace. This is how you gain outside attention. This is how you become magnetic. Now Adam Witty has 7 particular pillars that he's going to walk you through on how to do this. Plus, he's going to show you the difference between authority marketing and fame marketing. Both of them are very different in what they're going to give you and what results they're going to give to your business. So let's listen in as Dan Kennedy interviews Adam Witty.

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Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to Diamond Call This Month. As you undoubtedly know, our guest, who we'll get to in just a second, is Adam Whitty, and we will be mostly talking about authority marketing. Adam, thank you for the time and thank you for being here.

Dan, it's my pleasure.

Most of you know Adam in connection to the book publishing business to Advantage. And probably a number of you are Advantage authors, as am I. And a number of my clients are. Adam, I was with Ted Oakley all day yesterday. And as you know, we have a basically a new book every 3 months program. Worked out between he and you, and he has high praise for the editor he's working with, and the product coming out the door is perfect as far as I can tell. So there's another one passed your way that has nothing but a happy song to sing, so congratulations.

Thank you.

But so anyway, most of you know Adam in that connection, and undoubtedly see Advantage at GKIC events and so forth, you may or may not know there is a broader game afoot. Advantage provides a whole plethora of authority expert positioning, celebrity positioning, and so forth services to their authors. And expansion of that is underway. And Adam is very, very good at this thing. He and I have taken to call authority marketing or authority-based marketing. So a broader conversation about that will ensue in a minute. For those who are completely unfamiliar though or partially unfamiliar, Adam, I'll let you give them the, you know, the 3-minute journey of from whence you came and current business and, sense of clients and what it is that you guys do for them.

Well, I'd be happy to. And Dan, thank you again for having me. Of course, I cherish our friendship and certainly more than anything cherish what I have learned from you over the last decade of my professional career. Single-handedly, you are one of the guiding influences on what has helped Advantage become a multimillion-dollar, very profitable company. And our marketing is second to none., and it's a credit to you, so thank you. For the listeners that may not know me or do not know Advantage, as you mentioned, I'm the founder and CEO of Advantage Media Group. We refer to ourselves as the business growth publisher. The reason is our take on the market is that you do not author a book with the intention of selling copies through bookstores. If you can, it's great, but for most authors, it's extremely rare. The reason to create a book is to use it as a marketing tool to position you as authority, as celebrity, as expert in your community, in your industry, in your marketplace. And so that's largely what Advantage does. We've helped entrepreneurs, CEOs, and professionals from 40 US states, 13 countries around the globe create books. The Advantage family has 750 authors in it, and we're helping those entrepreneurs use the book as a platform for a bigger marketing purpose, which is what we're going to talk about today, authority marketing. A little bit about me. I started the company in 2005. In that time, we've grown to significant proportion, having appeared now on the Inc. 500/5000 list for the past 3 consecutive years. In 2011, I was named to the Inc. Magazine 30 list of America's coolest entrepreneurs. I have literally been—

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. They actually put you and the word coolest together? What were they thinking? That's incredible.

I was hoping that I could just zoom right by that without commentary from you, Dan.

Oh no, language matters.

But, you know, been literally anywhere and everywhere from a media perspective. USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, Wall Street Journal. I've been a guest on ABC, on Fox, on CBS. I have authored 5 books of my own. My most recent book, one that you and I co-authored together, Dan, which is titled Book the Business: How to Make Big Money with Your Book Without Even Selling a Single Copy. I am also the founder and chairman of the Authority Marketing Institute, which is the place for information, teachings, and strategies on the topic of authority marketing. We'll talk more about all of that right now. There's a quick overview. I live in Charleston, South Carolina. I'm the chairman of the Yes Carolina Board of Directors. We teach entrepreneurship to low-income kids in South Carolina. I'm also on the Board of Directors for the Entrepreneurship Institute at my alma mater, Clemson University, as well as the College of Charleston.

Cool. The one thing— and I actually have never asked you this and it's visible, but I don't know if you would keep count. And I think it sort of speaks to the importance of all this. Of the Advantage authors who've done a book, what percentage of them or how many of them have come back and done at least another book?

Great question. It's about 28%. So a little less than one-third.

Yeah, and there are some who are doing 3 and 4 and, you know, have continuous programs like Ted and so forth. And, you know, I think what that high number speaks to is the efficacy of the tool in and of itself and more importantly those nearly 1 in 3 are probably the smarter about using the tool within the context of a complete approach. So let's just start definitionally and then we'll sort of talk about the whys. Why do it? But when you talk about authority marketing and really when I talk about it, I mean, what do you mean by it?

So technical definition of authority marketing is this: the strategic process of systematically positioning a person or organization as the leader and expert in their industry, community, or marketplace to command outsized influence over all competitors. That is the technical definition. The layman's definition is following a formula to position yourself or business as the authority, as the celebrity, as the credible expert. Literally to make you or your business the go-to place that everybody in the market sees first, which literally creates a magnet position where people are coming to you versus you having to go and fetch them.

Yeah, and that's— and sea changes can occur, you know, when that happens. I mean, generally when you look at certain industries, I mean, for probably at least the first decade of existence, the chiropractor was viewed as a fringe, freakish thing, the place you went for any and all healthcare was the family doctor who was an MD. The AMA, of course, did everything they could to kill the entire profession, etc., etc., etc. And, you know, today that profession status is very, very different, and for large numbers of people they view it as the first place to go, not the last place to go or the least place to go. The client right now that they— Pharmacy Development Services, they're the largest developer of independent and community pharmacies. And, you know, one of the things they've been very successful at doing is making the pharmacist and the independent community pharmacy an authority, a leader in healthcare rather than a third citizen, a fourth citizen, a fifth citizen. And it's important for them not be the place that they just take the script from the doctor to pick up their pills, but to go there for expert advice and in many cases to go there instead of or in advance of the doc. And you see the efficacy of that business's movement in this direction in that many of the drug ads you see on TV not all that long ago always said, "Ask your doctor about." They now say, "Ask your doctor or your pharmacist about." So these shifts come to entire industries often slowly and over time.

Well, and at the end of the day, it's all about positioning. It's positioning you or your company in the mind of the consumer. In this case, the mind of the prospect. And if you are able to position yourself, and it's a strategic systematic process, but if you are able to position yourself as the expert, then people just naturally come to you. If you don't go through the process of positioning yourself as expert, you're a commodity and there's a lot of people that probably do what you do or what your business does. And the first question the prospect says is, number one, how much does it cost? And number two, how are you different than Company X, Company Y, or Company Z?

Yeah, and often if the questions are in the order you just asked them, you've already lost. Exactly. I'm as concerned. So, you know, when we call it authority marketing, we almost leave out half of the benefit picture. I'm personally as concerned, and when I do work for my clients, I'm as concerned with what happens after attraction and acquisition as well as attraction and acquisition. So I think this is pretty important in attracting people to you and having them come to you. For example, as you just said, with price not really on their top 10 list or not very high in it of the way in which they are trying to determine whether or not it's appropriate to to do business with you. But sort of the other side of the coin is now what happens after we get them? And there our issues are compliance, good behavior on the part of the customer, client, patient, or donor, retention, being able to keep them, how easy it is for somebody else to seduce them away. And ultimately referrals, the ability to multiply them. And I think that all revolves around the chief benefit of authority marketing done well, which is the power to prescribe.

Yeah, you made such a great point. Most people when they hear authority marketing, they think the big payoff, the big benefit is on the front end. It helps a lot there, but the backend is where the real money is. It's turning your customers into evangelists. You being the authority, the leader that they look to, that they respect, that they follow. Compliance equals more consumption. More consumption equals more evangelism. More evangelism leads to more, repeat purchase and/or referral to friends, family, colleagues that will come to you. And that's where the real money is on the backend. Make no mistake, the frontend benefits are tremendous, but oftentimes when you talk about credibility marketing, everything's focused on the frontend with really no discussion at all of the backend.

So let's talk application. And I'll sort of— I'll obviously let you go first and foremost. So a story or two, an example or two of individual or business making the shift from more ordinary approaches to attracting and monetizing their customers to very heavily using authority and authority devices and authority media in doing so?

So let me start with myself as an example. And I'm going to use myself only because I just went over my biography a few minutes ago. If you listen to my biography, I'm the founder and CEO of a company. Okay. That gives me some authority. But then I told you my company has been named to the Inc. 500, 5,000 lists the last 3 years. Then I told you I was named to the Inc. 30 Under 30 list. Then I told you that I have authored 5 different books. Then I told you that I've appeared in USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, Wall Street Journal, ABC, and Fox. Then I told you that I am the chairman of the board of directors of a nonprofit, and I told you I'm on the board at 2 universities. So when you look at all of those things, each individually drives authority, but collectively when you put them all together, it drives major authority. And after I shared that professional background, biography with you, I suspect that, that those listening to us said, wow, this guy knows his stuff, I should probably pay attention. Um, that, that's what it's all about. So I use myself as first an example.

But let me— you could take that whole thing and overlay it over chiropractor in, in, in Charleston, uh, over an interior decorator in Charleston, over an auto repair guy in— you could overlay it over just about anybody. They could create all of that for themselves, or variations of it for themselves.— they clearly can do the book piece of it for themselves and be in the same position with their prospective clientele. It's—

so before I give an example, I want to share what I call the pillars of authority marketing. These are really the building blocks that help make you an authority., and the bio that we just went over of mine, you'll see exactly where these building blocks fall into place. There are 7 pillars of authority marketing. The first is branding and omnipresence. The second is content marketing, continually disseminating content, whether it be Articles, blog posts, white papers, books, newsletters, magazines. The third pillar is PR and media. So being a respected source for information. You're the person that people go to when they want commentary on breaking news or events. You heard that in my biography. I've been featured on Fox. In USA Today, Investor's Business Daily, Wall Street Journal. Speaking is another pillar of authority marketing, whether it be on your stage or someone else's stage. The only people that are invited to speak to address audiences are clearly people that know what they're talking about. The last pillar 3 pillars of authority marketing are events, largely events that you put on yourself, but this is in person as well as online webinars, teleseminars, podcasts as well. Then the final 2 pieces, lead generation, because truly if you are an authority, your ability to generate leads is much easier than competitors. Then lastly, referral marketing is that 7th pillar. These are the 7 building blocks. Not all of them are necessary. Depending on the business you're in, depending on the goals that you have for yourself or your business, you may only need some of those 7 pillars, but those are really the essential building blocks to positioning yourself or your business as the thought leader, as the authority.

Okay, so now to examples.

Okay, so let's start with some examples of people that everybody probably knows. One of my favorite is Suzy Orman. Suzy Orman is a name that most people know, but 10 years ago, she was a financial advisor in her local community. By the way, there's about 160,000 financial advisors in America, so she was one of 160,000. She was a commodity. She differentiated herself by first writing a book and then very aggressively promoting that book. And the aggressiveness for most is simply hard work. I mean, it's doing smart things, but it's really putting in the muscle to keep pushing something. She pushed her book. She got the eyes of a few television producers. She was invited as a guest on a CNBC program Did pretty well on the show. Helped fit a demographic need of a female giving financial advice because up until this point it had largely been males. And ultimately that, of course, turned into her own television program which has made her one of the top speakers, which has made her an authority.

Okay?

So that's a famous example that everybody knows.

And so here's context that's really important. And, and I don't put that frame around it enough. So when people look at anybody like this, they really ought to look at the bottom of the pyramid they rose up, how broad and big it is. That's right. You know, 1 in 160,000, and then now probably maybe 1 of 50 authority at best who are household names, brands perceived as authority figures in their category. That's a big, big climb. Your point, a lot of it is pushing, but you do need to know how to push and where to push. Which is where your work and essentially mine comes in. But that frame of reference, you know, most people look at the authority/celebrity that now, as you say, everybody knows, and they don't really think about not only where they came from, but how many they had to separate themselves from in order to be there. And that's really significant.

It would be easy to say, you know, give me an example of someone like me. And I'm about to. But your point, Dan, is look, 10 years ago she was like everybody on this call. She was a financial advisor in her local community. She was seen as a commodity just like every other financial advisor. And she specifically used a process and a system to build herself up and essentially pull herself out of that commodity position. She started with a book, which is content marketing. I lovingly say as a publisher, the first 6 letters of authority spell author. But she then took that position of authority as author and turned that into media. And the media was so successful that that has then opened up the spigots for speaking and so forth. So there's very much a stepladder approach that she took where one step simply led to the next. Now, let's talk about an example of someone that's less famous. And I want to preface this example with a comment. There's a lot of people that might be thinking, Susie Orman, great story, but I don't want to be Susie Orman. I don't want to be a national celebrity. Or you might be thinking that's too hard. So here's a big idea. I had this conversation many years ago with one of my authors, and this was a tremendous learning lesson for me. The author is a guy named Jim Ziglar, and he is a consultant to automobile dealers. And he said to me, he said, Adam, outside of the automobile business, nobody knows who I am. But inside of the automobile business, I'm a friggin' rock star. The point of that was that your goal in authority marketing is to be what I call slightly famous. Your goal is to be famous right where you live. Your objective is to be famous to the people that can and will give you money. Anyone outside of your target market, it doesn't matter if they know who you are because at that it's just ego. It's very important though that you be seen as the authority to the people in your industry, in your community, or in your market that have the ability to give you money.

This is so important because while it is true that broad and general fame lifts a little brought into a small target market or audience, the lift from that usually is nowhere near the effort and expense required to get it. But the very targeted approach— so this is what happens to people like they author a book and they hire a publicist for 6 months at however many thousand dollars a month to get them press and get them interviews. And it's very hard to keep that publicist from quantity, not quality. So, like, I've fought it my whole life with publishers and their publicists and so forth. I could care less about being in the Des Moines Register or being interviewed on the Mike and Mike and Pat radio show in morning drive time in Tupelo. The payoff, you know, the needles in that haystack are next to nothing. I know exactly where I want to be, like Success Magazine, that's where I want to be. And this is such a different, you know, you see people all the time spending really a lot of time, energy, and money to be photographed with, seen with indiscriminate famous people, to be famous for the sake of being famous. And for most of us, we're not going to become the Kardashians. And so that's, that's a really sloppy unfocused approach. This is very synced with target marketing overall. And when people get it, they can figure out how to be a Susie Orman in an audience for them that matters. And that's really the difference here between shall we say publicity or we might call it fame marketing and authority marketing.

Let me give an example that is much more pedestrian than anybody on the call could identify with. I've got two. The first is a doctor. His name's Stephen Hotzi, and he runs a health and wellness clinic in Houston, Texas. And prior to Dr. Hotzi following this authority marketing process, he was like every other doctor in Houston, Texas. Now, his specialty, the first thing he did is he was a general MD, and he realized that in order to make real money, he had to niche. He had to specialize. And he went back and did some advanced training, and now he specializes primarily in bioidentical hormones and natural hormone treatment predominantly for females. So 5 years ago, he published a book with us titled Hormones, Health, and Happiness. And the first thing that he was very wise to do, he was able to secure a guest chapter in his book by Suzanne Somers. Suzanne Somers is a huge advocate of natural hormone therapy, huge advocate. And so he was able to rub off of her fame by featuring her in his book. And because of that, she talked about and promoted his book to her audience.

Hope everybody gets this because this is a really useful strategy, local or national.

And make no mistake, this was all very much by design. It wasn't a random occurrence. Suzanne Somers promotes the book to her people, who are primarily women. He sells 70,000 copies of the book through that, the real way, which, which that in and of itself is an abnormality, right? However, here's what he did after that was very smart. The first thing he did was he bought his own weekly radio show in Houston. Anybody on the call can do this in their own market. They can pay to have their own radio show on a station. So he started doing a weekly radio show, author of Hormones, Health and Happiness. That was a big thing of now he had his own media. He had his own book. He had his own radio show. The next thing he did is he got a publicist, but he said to the publicist, we're only focusing on Houston. I don't want you spending a second outside of Houston. So every major morning news program that ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates, he was on as a guest talking about his new book. Two of the stations signed him to come back on a regular basis as a health expert to commentate on local health trends, health news. So currently he is on local morning television on average twice a month commentating on health issues. So another thing of building his own media platform. Then he created an event. So twice a year he does a natural health and wellness summit. It's a one-day event for females. He rents out the ballroom of the Hilton in downtown Houston., and now he's got two events that he puts on where he's the keynote speaker and he brings in other health experts in which he then rubs himself off on those other speakers and the credibility of those speakers rub off on him. A final piece, he lives in Houston which is one of the hubs for Southwest Airlines. He is a monthly advertiser in Southwest Spirit magazine. So Southwest Spirit is the in-flight publication. He has a full-page ad promoting his book, driving you to website to download or request free copy. And when you go to the website, you fill out some information. If you are unqualified based on the information you share, they send you a digital copy of the book. If you're qualified, they send you essentially an information pack that includes an autographed copy of the book in the pack.

And then he has a 4-person sales team that follows up on all those leads. And if I may for a minute to go back to Suzanne Somers, if she never mentioned the book, still having her in it helps all of this work better.

It's the implied credibility. The last thing to say on the Southwest piece is a lot of people are thinking, "Why in the world would he advertise in an airline magazine?" First, it's more media. You've probably seen me before in Southwest magazine. This actually was a very unintended consequence. 80% of his practice are people within a 20-mile radius of Houston. But what he found is that he started attracting out-of-state patients, and most of the out-of-state patients come in from Southwest hub cities—Dallas, Nashville, Orlando, Phoenix—because these are all the point-to-point routes that go direct from Houston to another city. So when you look at Dr. Hotzi, 5 years ago he was an MD, he accepted insurance, take a 5-year transformation using authority marketing, and today he's got a practice that has 100 full-time employees, is 19 times larger than the size he was 5 years ago before he wrote that first book. He is an all-cash practice, does not take insurance, and he has a medical staff of 4 doctors, and he's now the CEO of the business, no longer a practicing MD. Okay, Mary Adler. She owns a restaurant. Doesn't get any more commodity than this. Her restaurant is a bagel shop. It's called the Georgetown Bagelry because she's in Georgetown, which is the area of Washington, D.C. Well, on her block, there are 3 other breakfast places. And that's on her block alone, let alone Metro DC. She writes a book titled Who Scooped My Bagel. She got a review of the book in the Washington Post. She sent the book to, all of the local media outlets. She got interviews in the ABC and NBC affiliates in Washington, D.C. for the book. She sent the book to Women's Presidents Organization, WPO. They invited her to give a keynote speech at their annual conference. When you walk into the store, there is the big die-cut cutout display of her book as soon as you walk in the store. There's pictures throughout the store of her doing book— her doing book signings. She did a book signing at the Barnes Noble in downtown DC. She did a book signing at the bookstore across the street from the White House. And so when you go in her store, you see all of that. There aren't pictures of bagels. There's pictures of her either doing a book signing or being interviewed on TV. So she took book, she turned it into speaking, she turned it into PR and media. Her book came out last year. So her book came out at the beginning of 2014, January of 2014. I interviewed her, Dan, in March of this year, 2015. And she said in her retail bagel store, she experienced an 8.9% bump in sales growth year over year.

Without change, without changing anything.

Meaning, do you mean 8% or 8x? No, 8%. Okay. Which to listeners doesn't seem like a big deal. Well, but in the restaurant business, it's a really big deal. 8% bump in her same-store sales without doing anything except for the book. She's now referred to as the Bagel Lady in Washington, D.C. So she's developed a nickname. And every Saturday she comes to the store to handbag the bagels for customers and sign books.. And every Saturday morning they open at 7:00 AM. There's a line of anywhere from 20 to 50 people in line before the doors open at 7:00 AM every Saturday morning because she is there. She handbags your bagels that you order and she'll sign a copy of her book.

There were several strategies in this call that are really significant and important that people should be able to pick up on and use. And so thanks for a high-content call.

Thank you, Dan.

All right, Adam, bye-bye. Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow, and the more it grows The more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you. Also, Dan would love to give you the most incredible free gift ever designed to help you make maximum money in minimum time. This free gift comes with almost $20,000 in pure money-making information for free just for saying maybe. You can get this gift from Dan right now at NoBSLetter.com. Not only do you get the $20,000 gift, you also get a subscription to 2 marketing newsletters that will be hand-delivered by mailman to your mailbox each and every month. One from Dan Kennedy and one from me, Russell Brunson. To get this gift in your subscription, go to NoBSLetter.com right now.