Have you heard about the Trojan Horse marketing strategy for gaining high-paying clients?
The metaphor of a Trojan Horse has come to mean a strategy that causes a target to invite a foe into a securely protected place.
As you probably learned in school, the Trojan Horse is a mythical story about a tricky move the ancient Greeks used to enter the city of Troy and win the war. Here is a recap. After a long siege, the Greeks constructed a huge wooden horse, and hid men inside. The Greeks pretended to sail away, and the Trojans pulled the gift horse into their city as a victory trophy (I know, you think they would have been more suspicious). That night hidden Greek soldiers snuck out of the wooden horse and opened the gates for the rest of the Greek army, which had sailed back under cover of night. The Greeks entered and destroyed the city of Troy, ending the war.
Stephen Woessner, the host of the Onward Nation podcast, shared his Trojan Horse strategy for attracting high-paying clients. If you do it as a tricky stratagem, it won’t work: if you use it as an honest relationship-building strategy, then it will work wonders (I have seen it work time and again).
Woessner says you can use this strategy with podcasts or YouTube videos, but for ease of explanation I will use YouTube videos. This is a farming, not a hunting, business development strategy for prospecting. The Trojan Horse strategy can take up to 120 days for each prospect to fully ripen. Here are Woessner’s seven steps:
Step One. Identify and interview 25 dream prospects and post the interviews on YouTube. Invite prospects who have complimentary offerings, not competitors. You can use Zoom to do the video interviews very cost effectively. Make sure each interview is 10 minutes or less. Schedule a date for the YouTube video to go live.
Step Two. Share with the dream prospects you interviewed the date that their YouTube interview video is going to be available. Give them the link and give them a wonderful thank you. Also give them some social media content to make it really easy for them to share the YouTube video link the day it goes live.
Step Three. Then, 30 days after that initial airing of the YouTube video, “Take the highlights, the insights, the big gold nuggets that were shared during that video and feature them in a long form LinkedIn post,” says Woesnner. “This has to be 1,300 characters or less.”
Step Four. Be sure you tag your guests in those 1,300 characters. “It’s not about you, it’s about the insights and wisdom that your guest shared within the YouTube video,” says Woessner.
Step Five. At 60 days after a video has aired you want to go deeper. Do a deeper summary of the insights and wisdom in a blog post on your website or an email you send to your opt-in list. Tell the interview guest you are doing this. Embed the YouTube video in that blog post for SEO (search engine optimization) benefit.
Step Six. Create an ebook of the 25 blog posts. This can be a simple PDF. Share with your opt-in lists and on social media the offer of the free ebook. Share with the interview subjects that the ebook is available. Give them easy social media tools to share the ebook offer.
Step Seven. At 120 days after the interview reach back to the prospect. Thank them again for helping you create and share great content. Ask them if they are open to a conversation over the phone.
According to Woessner, 90% of the prospects are going to agree to a conversation.
“This works because this entire process should never, ever feel like business development and you are totally genuine through the entire process,” says Woessner. “You are seeking their insights and wisdom to be helpful to your audience. Now you’re reaching back out to them and saying, ‘Hey, I think there might be an opportunity for me to be helpful to you. Is there a time that we can sit down and talk about that?’”
Bottom line: This Trojan Horse marketing strategy works because you’ve built so much rapport and you’ve sincerely built a relationship. Prospects are grateful for the real gift you have given them, shining a positive spotlight on their work.