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AI-Driven Marketer: Master Practical AI Marketing Skills
What's Your Authority Score? [The 5-Factor Test]
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- [00:05]
A
Everybody wants authority. I remember when I set out on my journey to understand what thought leadership was so that I could go on the journey to actually build authority. I was amazed that there was really no clear roadmap to go from just being a professional to becoming an authority in a niche field somewhere. And that's why we created this whole framework to help you and others actually figure out where you're at on the path and what steps you need to take in order to actually grow your authority from where you're at to where you actually want to be. So, welcome back to the AI Driven Marketer. I'm Dan Sanchez. I'm joined by my co host, Ken Frey.
- [00:43]
B
Hey, man, it's good to be back.
- [00:45]
A
And we are getting pretty close to done on this series, for this podcast series we're doing called Own the show where we're talking about how to grow authority in the age of AI. Because trust is going to be become a premium item. Like, people are going to be trusting things less and less as AI creates more and more of the content out there. So growing your authority, especially around a personal brand, is going to be the. The thing that drives a lot of marketing in the future. That's our prediction. That's why we're putting out this book ahead of time. Because not only do we want the playbook for ourselves, but we want the playbook for our clients. We want the playbook for other marketers out there who are going to be at risk from all this AI stuff happening. So we are trying to write the book that we're going to be following ourselves and have been following. And today we're talking about kind of this last leg of trying to understand where we're at in this landscape of authority. Now, we've already painted a clear picture or kind of a broad stroke map of what the path looks like. It starts with being a professional and then moving from professional to being a really a true expert, like understanding everything that's been said or written about and published. On the topic of a very narrow expertise, then we talked about going from there to actually contributing unique ideas to fill in the gaps of what hasn't actually been accomplished yet, problems that haven't been solved, understandings that haven't been found, and then you go from there to actually building your authority and becoming known for those ideas. So that's kind of the broad path and based on hearing that most people can be like, oh, I'm kind of in this section. But today we wanted to introduce kind of like a deeper dive, a whole Assessment on how you can actually assess where you're at in that broader path and, and what action items you need to take in order to become the authority. Because we all know if you apply the wrong advice from one part of the journey to a different part of the journey, it can be devastating. Trying to build authority when you're still just a professional, it's going to be tough trying to do some of the things you do in the beginning, when you're towards the end, it's not going to work as well. So trying to find the exact right thing that you need to take the next steps is what it's all about. So we're going to talk about the five factors of authority. And just to summarize, the five factors of authority are your expertise factor, your ideas factor, your relationship factor, your reach factor, and your depth factor. You can see it covers a lot of the material we've covered in this series slash, slash book so far. But now we're going to actually grade and actually talk about, like, the different levels within each factor so you can get a better sense of where you're at in that factor and what you can do to push, push it forward. So the first one is the expertise factor. Ken, do you want to break down a little bit about what this factor is all about?
- [03:36]
B
Yeah. So this is, you know, the expertise factor. This is about measuring the depth of knowledge and the source of that knowledge. So it distinguishes between those who simply do the work, right. Like just a professional, and those who have mastered the canon and add something to it. And I think this is where most people fall short. They actually don't know where they're at in the expertise level. They might assume they're an expert, but they might not actually be an expert. So this is why we want to measure that. And there's three ways that we look at it, and we've talked about this a lot, but it's the professional, the student expert, and the contributor. And I'll let you kind of walk us through that.
- [04:12]
A
Yep. So the professional is the one who's actually getting paid to do it. You're a pro, you're a professional because it is your profession. Oftentimes we think of pro as people are at the top of their game because of athletics. You know, if you're a professional baseball player, well, there's lots of people who play baseball, but the only people who really get paid for baseball are the people who are at the top of their game. But in a normal career sense, like, lots of people get paid to be marketers and aren't very good at marketing. It is not like baseball or football or any of the major sports out there. Right. Where only the top professionals get paid anything that they can actually live on for any amount of time. Right. So I think that makes it a little confusing, but when we call it we say pro or professional, we're talking about someone who just makes, makes a living at this thing. And that is good news because that means a lot of us can actually make it to this level. If you're a college student, then you are not even at this level yet. But that's okay. You can actually move forward with the same advice we've given, especially the 3030 plan, even as a student, and just, just pretend you're a professional and start working that plan. It'll start working. It'll probably help you land your first job much faster that way. The student expert is actually someone who's actually positioning themselves as a student, but actually is on the journey to understanding everything about a very niche part of that profession. So if you're a marketer, it's actually doing the deep dive on email marketing. Believe it or not, it's not that hard to dive deep into just email marketing. How many books are written about email marketing? Probably 20 to 30. I know because I've read a few of them. I've gone looking through the category. It's not that deep. There's a lot and then, and then you just run into sub niche like email marketing for nonprofits, email marketing for contractors, like all that kind of stuff. And those are out there. But you can generally hit all the books on the topic and kind of get to know it. And that's why the 30 30, 30 plan that we've reviewed earlier is so important. But the difference between a professional and an expert is really your understanding of even like a professional has like a baseline understanding of everything. An expert knows everything. Like there's very little you haven't touched in this very niche world yet or you haven't been exposed to. You've kind of know all the voices, you've read all the stuff and you haven't, you've seen everything. Right. Trying to think of like the academic equivalent is this like in academics this is kind of like the very beginning of a PhD level when you're going into a very niche topic. Right? Like you have to read generally everything on that niche.
- [06:35]
B
Yeah, I, you know, I was going to say if you're in academics, I would say a professional might be someone who's like a. Has A master's and is teaching. Right. But then the student expert might be someone who's starting their PhD and working on helping graduate study people get their grades up and kind of being a tutor or something like that, or a teacher's assistant. That's what I'm looking for. So they're applying their expertise and helping people a little bit along the way.
- [07:05]
A
And then the last level within this expertise factor is really not just knowing everything, but understanding where the gaps are. Ooh, that's hard. It's really hard. Which is why when you. Even when you get your PhD and you're trying to fill a gap somewhere, like, you're. You're pretty much on a hunt, like your whole PhD, just looking for the right problem or the right question to ask. Right. And that's the hard part, is actually figuring out, like, what to do. A deep dive in that nobody's ever done before. That is the game. But that should be the game if you want to be a thought leader, too. You want to start knowing the topic so well and knowing your audience so well that you understand what their pain points are that haven't been resolved yet. Because sometimes people have pain points and there is already advice out there on how to solve it. That's good. They just haven't been exposed to it yet. That's fine. But you're looking for where's the pain that no one's figured out a thing for? It's why we're even talking about this, because I had a pain. I went and read every book on thought leadership ever published, and I did not find a suitable way to grade authority and have a clear path to go from, like, not zero, but from professional to actual authority, which is why we've been writing this whole book. I'm doing it out of the pain of not of wanting something myself. Found that other people wanted to traverse this. This path. And so we're creating the book, which.
- [08:24]
B
Then leads to our second factor. Right. So the first factor is the expertise factor. The second factor is the ideas factor. So this is based on the intersection of you being helpful and unique. Right. And there's two ways to measure this. So as we look at the helpfulness and unique. Let's talk about the uniqueness part of this idea factor.
- [08:49]
A
You could almost think of it as like a matrix, right? If you wanted to grade how strong your ideas are, and this is really what the ideas factor all is all about, is how strong are your ideas, not just, do you have unique ideas. That's kind of like, okay, like Everyone has ideas. You have the intern in the room who's just barely starting in the field. They have ideas, but the strength of their ideas is measured on the two things you just said, Ken. Like how helpful is it? And then how unique is it? The helpfulness part is really important because if it's not helpful, it's just like, well, it's just a useless idea. So you have to have that. It's the baseline. But then uniqueness factor becomes a thing. And that's why the expertise factor is so important. So these things build on each other. There's a couple different levels in which to measure just uniqueness. For example, a lot of people have ideas, but they're still iterating on it, right? They're still playing with it. Even I have ideas around AI and marketing that I'm still playing with. And I might test out on LinkedIn and then I get some feedback and then I change it up and then I do a whole podcast episode about it. I tweak it. I'd say this whole book actually is like something I've been working on for years. And then the problem for the book, I started thinking deeply about last spring when I gave a presentation on it and then podcasted about it and then kicked it around with people and, and then talk to you about it and then morphed it with some other ideas. It became the whole packaging for this whole book called Own the Show. So it goes from level one to iteration to level two, adaption, where you're actually.
- [10:18]
Not just tweaking it, but actually making adjustments to it. And then level three, innovation, where you're actually coming up with brand new things as a result of it. The next one is helpfulness. You can measure helpfulness. I find helpfulness is actually easier to measure than people think. One, did it help you achieve this success personally? That's one level of helpfulness, and that alone is fantastic. You can share that on social. And if you actually use something unique and it helped you get success, that's, that's postworthy. But then it's like, okay, but then you did it work for other people? That's the level two of helpfulness. How many other people has it helped? And you can even quantify that, like, oh, it's helped. That's why the testimonial wall is so powerful. And then level three, I think, is unique in that if you want it to become really helpful, is able to help people that aren't just like you in your situation, but people that are, you know, they, they weren't already on their way to success. They were probably, like, the marginal people, people that were less likely to be successful, and it still helped them. You know, they were the outliers that were like, it's kind of like. It's. It's one thing if you're already a champion swimmer and you have some swimming technique that helps you run, swim faster, but what if you were afraid of swimming and you learned a swimming technique that helped you win a competition? Ooh, it must be freaking good, because it took someone who was on the other end of the spectrum and helped them win. That's like, a level of, like, helpfulness. I don't most people ever make it to this part, but that's. That's honestly what you should seek for, is make. Make the idea so good that even when applied to someone who wasn't already in the realm of success and it helps, it still freaking works.
- [11:55]
B
Dan. You know, I'm.
- [11:56]
A
I'm.
- [11:56]
B
I'm gonna go off script a little bit here, you know, because we're talking about measurements on uniqueness and helpfulness. Where does scaling come into play when it comes to measuring an idea?
- [12:08]
A
I think that's when the idea starts to prove itself in its helpfulness by the amount of people that it's helped. You can almost look at an idea or a method or a system and be like, yeah, but how many testimonials are there? You can grade it based on testimonials, and then you can grade it based on, like, this is why, like, it's easy. It's easy to see in the fitness category, right? Yeah, because you can see the amount of testimonials, but then you can see the craziness of the testimonials, which is why you always. They always highlight the craziest transformations because it shows that, like, oh, it took someone from £400 to 180. Oh, what the heck? And then you have a wall full of those that's starting to show that. That. That third dimension of, like, universal success that this thing's actually helpful for. If it could take people who are this, like, on the opposite end of the spectrum for fitness, they didn't take people and help them lose 20 pounds and then get put on some muscle and tone. It took people who are on the opposite end of the spectrum and made them, like, superheroes, you know, that would be the showcase. So it's easier to see this play out in that. But, like, we should all be looking for that.
- [13:15]
B
Yeah.
- [13:16]
A
With our ideas, and we will be able to directly measure Our, our influence as an authority based on that. Like, that should be the criteria for where we grade authority. But it's not the only factor, which is why we have five of them. So I'm sure the third one is probably going to be near and dear to your heart when we talk about the relationship factor, because it's not just you and your customers, it's also who you know.
- [13:44]
B
Yeah. And this is, you know, if you think about these factors, your influence will only grow as far as, as large as you, your relationships and how deeply connected you are with people. So you have to measure the quality of your network and the direction of the energy in that network. You know, like, is it you always doing the work or, you know, people start reaching out to you? I've always found a great litmus test for the relationship factor, and there's several levels here or several ways to measure it. But like, how many times do people reach out to you to ask you for advice within your network? Or like, hey, can you connect me with this person? Like, are you their go to person? But there are these three ways to measure this. And the first one is the outreach and engagement.
- [14:32]
A
Right.
- [14:33]
B
The second one is the collaboration and association. And then the third one is inbound, the grab, the inbound gravity and endorsement. So let's walk through the outreach and engagement part, the first level, because I think this is where most people are going to be at.
- [14:47]
A
So it really depends on do you have to pitch for opportunities or do opportunities just come straight to you? Obviously, we want to get to the point of authority where opportunities are just coming to us. Like, we have to turn them down. No, no, no, I won't speak on that stage or send the people. Right. Like, we all want that, but we have to get there. So at level one, you're having to do almost all the legwork. And as soon as you stop doing the legwork, the opportunities stop. As soon as you stop reaching out, as soon as you stop engaging with other people's posts, as soon as you stop building relationships with the gatekeepers, all the opportunities dry up. That's what you have to do at first. This is the path. If you're at that level, then you have to keep doing that until you build up enough authority where you can start feeling like you're in level two. I feel like I've only just reached level two, by the way, where I'm now at a place where I don't have to pitch so hard. If I do pitch, it's not a hard pitch. People see what I've done with AI Driven Marketer. They're just kind of like, oh, okay. Like this is a guy he knows so and so he's networked with. So he's been on this podcast, he's spoken on this stage. It's not a hard pitch. I'm at a point now even where it's more of a collaboration. A lot of the other people wheeling and dealing in AI and marketing, like it's, we're collaborating, we're co creating stuff. I don't, I have some inbound opportunities, but not as many as I would like. It would be nice if like I had to beat them down. Like, no, I only take, take the cream of the crop opportunities. But I'm not at that point yet. I'm still at the point where I get inbound opportunities, small podcast requests. Every once in a while. A medium sized podcast requested me for me to be a guest on or speak on stage. But it's just the beginning. That's level two. When you have some inbound, you still have to pitch, but it's not a hard pitch. And you are like at a peer level with a lot of the types of people that you want to become like. But you know when it's starting to hit when you don't have to pitch anymore, people pitch you, you get to pick. And this is the kind of like one of the best markers of authority when you're at this level. And when you do have to pitch, it's not a pitch, it's a text message to a friend and you're in.
- [16:56]
B
Yeah.
- [16:57]
A
You're like, hey, I'd like to be at that conference. You text so and so bam, you have a speaking. That's, that's when you know you've arrived.
- [17:05]
And that's the goal. But there's a way to get there. And I think all of us should seek to expand this part because if you do well with all the other factors, this would probably happen somewhat by itself because people will start coming to you. But if you're building relationships along the way, that helps everything else.
- [17:24]
B
Yeah, and that's the beauty of this, is that most people don't have a system for it. And right now what we're trying to give you is a clear system of how to measure it. And then this whole book has been kind of walking you through ways to set this up for yourself. And especially if you don't know how to build. Like, I think sometimes it's really hard for people to build relationships when you're not like in High school or college or in your own business. Right. Like, how do you keep building just relationships? And this is how I found it. You know, that has worked really well for us is through a podcasting avenue. I have found so many people that I've become dear friends with because I started a podcast five years ago that I don't even run anymore. But we're still connected. And one of them is a client, you know, now. So it's like. But that's how it just works. So anyways, that, that's the third factor. Let's walk through the fourth factor. And this is the reach factor.
- [18:16]
A
The reach factor. This is like the one that, like, if anybody has a factor for authority, they just think of this one factor. Yeah, but it's only one factor. But it is a factor. It is certainly a factor. And it's what we're ultimately kind of for. It's like the hallmark of authority is when you have reach. And so a couple different levels within the reach factor might look like this, where you're running into your growth ceiling or your, your audience growth ceiling. Right. You're like, you have one channel. You, you're building, you're building your reach, but it's kind of leveled off.
- [18:52]
B
Yeah.
- [18:53]
A
Maybe you have a few thousand people following you. Growth is kind of still because you're churning people at the same rate that you're people, and that's where you're at. You probably think a lot about the algorithm and you maybe even like, you look at the algorithm as like punishing you, but you've, you've just reached the first level of what we call the audience growth ceiling. And you now have to actually push past that ceiling and actually grow beyond your one channel. If you have lots of channels going and you feel like you're still at the very beginning, you need to condense it down to one channel. That's why we talk about the two channel rule is so important. But first, it actually starts with just one channel. And then adding a second channel quickly because again, you need the short form factor and the long form factor to make it to level two, where you have at least a two channel engine. One fact, one channel alone, like social media, like LinkedIn or Facebook or Instagram or X or even just speaking on stages is not enough. You need to have a second channel, one to offset the risk of being dependent on one channel. If one channel dies, everyone who was speaking on stages when the pandemic hit, like, lost all their income, like, immediately gone. Right. But even if the algo changes for Facebook like it did over time. Everyone lost their fan page traffic, you know, and then group traffic kind of disappeared and then LinkedIn's good, but still kind of dwindling in some ways a lot. So you want to diversify at least the two channels and have a short form and a long form and you know you're doing well and you're reaching level two when you have consistent, steady growth. And sometimes every once in a while you have like a breakaway where you get strong growth, but you have consistent steady growth. You're increasingly getting better at retaining your people and not just introducing new people in. And then the last level is when you have a bit of a flywheel. You are making long form content that becomes a lot of your short form channel. You're able to automatically post to all the channels even though you still have that one that you doubled down on for engagement, hence the two channel rule. But you're able to get a lot of content going to a lot of places. You do not have problems with consistency on the long form or the short form. And they're playing, they're building synergy between it. You're testing ideas at the short form that become long form, that becomes content. You splinter out into the long form and you have a good form flywheel going, eventually getting to the point where you're actually pushing hard. And maybe you have a team of people helping you do great content across all the channels eventually. But again, you add one at a time and then that leads us to the last factor, which is the, I think the most neglected factor of all when it comes to authority. And that's the depth factor. Not just focusing on reach, but building depth and true community, true growth, true impact within your industry.
- [21:44]
B
Yeah, and there's a lot of ways to measure this, but this is like when you're thinking about retention or trust or like super fan concepts. I think a great way that I think about this many times is if you ever see one, someone in authority get blasted for something, how quickly do people come for their defense? And I, you know, like I'm going to use Michael Hyatt because I work for him. One he owns to any mistakes he made, he's extreme, extremely humble. But how many times people have come up to him like, or have come up to me or say something on social media, they're like, hey, Michael actually didn't say that. This is what he said. Like they just come to his defense because they know his character, they know the depth. Like he's had people for the last 20 years. Just back him up and. And promote him all day long. I was like, that's depth. He's got a loyal tribe and there's a lot of people out there like that. You know, there's. I would say Gary Vee probably had a decent, loyal tribe there.
- [22:40]
A
Oh, yeah, right.
- [22:41]
B
Russell Brunson, I know you, not the biggest fan, but he has a deep, lower tribe, too, of people who are like, I'm. He's my homeboy.
- [22:47]
A
Got a tribe, man.
- [22:48]
B
He's got a tribe.
- [22:49]
A
He's got super fans, he's got evangelists. And that's. That's what it looks like on the, like. The third level when you're an authority is you have super fans, you have evangelists. You had. You don't have to ask them to do anything. They show up, they repurpose your content, they're sharing your ideas, they're even recruiting people into your tribe. They're like, come on, come on, get in here. Did I just pull Ron loose?
- [23:09]
B
You did, yeah. So I skipped the other levels. I went straight to the superfan evangelist. Let's talk about the first two, the passive observer and the parasocial apprentice.
- [23:18]
A
In the beginning, this is where you're at with level one. You post content and you're starting to get some reach. But most people, they're reading, they're liking. They might drop a comment every once in a while, but they're like, they're not actually doing it. Yeah, they think it's interesting. They're just passive observers. They think what you're doing is interesting, but it's not quite enough for them to reach what we call level two, which is kind of like what we call a parasocial apprenticeship. It's kind of a weird word, but if you think about it, it's people that are actually taking action based on your advice. Ooh, now you're really starting to influence people. They're actually doing what you recommend. This is what we signed up for. This is what thought leadership is. You were leading the thinking of your industry, of this niche that you're carving out. This is when you actually start to get traction as a thought leader. This is exciting because this is where you start to build testimonials, where people show up and give you reviews. They're like, I've been. I tried this and this happened. It was awesome. And this is where things really start to build steam. You can even measure it based on the terminology you use. Are other people using it? I don't know. Do a search on LinkedIn for the phrases of the things you've been promoting and talking about, are other people using it now, even if they're maybe quote unquote, stealing it? To me, I'm like, freaking, yes.
- [24:38]
Steal it. Use it. I mean, I'm a fan. Some people hate it when they steal it without credit. But I'm like, unless you're just like, copying and pasting my posts, but you're actually just taking the idea and sharing it with your other people. That's called influence. We want that all day.
- [24:52]
B
Yeah, absolutely.
- [24:53]
A
And I'm like, fine, steal it. I don't care.
- [24:56]
B
In some ways, it's an encouraging. Because you're like, oh, I'm impacting other people and it. And I would also say that if your whole intellectual property is based on one LinkedIn post or a few social media posts, then we go back to the idea factor and say, hey, your ideas are actually not that. That big or that great. There's got to be some depth to it. There's got to be some uniqueness and helpfulness to it. So, yes, it could be helpful that people are. Are sharing it, but. Or stealing it, whatever you want to call it. But also recognize that, like, your. Your ideas overall, they're going to be so much more powerful than. Or they have to be so much more powerful than just a few posts, right? It's got to be a whole framework that people can start implementing and actually utilizing. And that's, again, part of the reason why we wrote this book is because we've been talking about a lot of these ideas here and there, sprinkled or we've. And you and I have talked about it for years, right? Trying to help people. And it's like little pieces here, little pieces there. And we needed to consolidate it. And this is where all of a sudden the consolidation kicked in. Now, Dan, how do you help someone who. They're listening to this podcast and they're like, okay, there's four stages of authority. There's these five factors. There's all these different ways to measure this. They've been listening to this whole podcast and they're like, how do I actually do this well? And how do I measure this well, because right now, this is a lot of information to take in.
- [26:31]
A
So I want to make it as easy as possible for you, which is why we made an assessment that you can find@aidrivenmarketer.com factors for the five factors of authority. It's aidrivermarketer.com factors. And you can just walk through the assessment. It's about 20 questions. It takes about five to seven minutes to fill out. And then it gives you the score so you know exactly where you're at overall and then where you're at with every single one of these factors. So just asking you about five questions per factor and they're all graded. It's not like there's no trick questions in there. It's pretty self evident, like where you fall based on the questions and it will give you a better sense of where you're at. And then, and then we will follow up. Not only eventually, I'll hook up a copy of the ebook to this, like a digital version of this book as well as the MP3s. Like, I want to give all this information away. That's why we're podcasting the book here. We're trying to get the information out there so that people can begin building the authority they need to overcome this wave called AI. So, but also I'm still working on this. So the first people who sign up for it won't get this. But in the next couple of weeks, there will be an email sequence that customizes the learnings based on your exact score, that takes the best parts of the book and then shows it to you like, hey, this is what you need to do next. Go read this part of the book or read it right here. And these are your action steps based on your strengths you already have, based on your weakest parts, based on where you're at overall. We're going to build a custom journey. Of course I'm going to be using AI to do it. Of course I will break down exactly how I build this whole engine in detail, but I wanted to do that and give it away for free so that other people can learn how to build their authority to be able to stand out in this age of AI. So again, it's aidrivenmarketer.com Factor.