How these three successful entrepreneurs build their market leadership
How these three successful entrepreneurs build their market leadership
During the last month I interviewed Josh Steimleת Bea Pole-Bokor and Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe. There is something all of them are doing that enables them to shine and succeed.
Learn how you can implement the same thing
to your entrepreneurial business:
During the last month, I interviewed three successful young entrepreneurs. I heard about them from different sources, and there wasn’t a practical reason they’ve all been in one month.
Each of the became an entrepreneur differently. And yet, there is a close similarity in the way the three of them are creating their entrepreneurial business success.
Let’s start in knowing a bit about them:
Josh Steimle
Josh Steimle is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, and executive coach. Josh lives on a farm near Boston with his wife, two children, and 27 horses, and is an avid reader, trail runner, triathlete, and skateboarder.
Magazine put Josh Steimle on their 50 Inspirational Entrepreneurs to Watch and Forbes recognized him as one of 25 Marketing Influencers To Watch In 2017.
How did he become an entrepreneur?
In 2013, I got the opportunity to write for Forbes, I also brought on a partner for my business, Cory Blake, and he’d just come on. Right when he came on, I started writing for Forbes; when I first started, nothing good was happening. I was getting attention on my articles, people liked them, but it wasn’t doing anything for my business.
This is because I didn’t understand who my audience was, and I didn’t know how to write for my audience. So, after a few months, I realized this is taking a lot of time, I’m spending a lot of effort, and I’m not getting anything out of it other than it’s fun and building my ego, but it’s not generating anything for the business and I can’t afford to do this unless it’s benefiting the business.
I started looking at this and thinking, well, who am I writing for? Who’s my audience? Who should be my audience? I realized I was targeting the wrong audience, I was writing for entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs don’t hire my agency. So, I asked, who is hiring my agency? Well, mid-sized to larger businesses mostly, and really, I’m looking for people who are looking to hire marketing agencies, that’s my audience.
Once I understood that, it totally changed the content I was creating. I wrote one article that was the golden one. I created an article called, 4 Tips on How to Hire an SEO Firm. This article came out of frustration because here I am, running an agency, and clients would come to me, potential clients, and we would pitch them and sometimes they would hire us and sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes, they wouldn’t hire us because we weren’t the right fit for them, but sometimes they wouldn’t hire us, and I knew we were the best fit for that company and yet, they still didn’t hire us, which frustrated me.
So, I wrote this article to say, hey, when you’re hiring an SEO Firm, here are the things you should do: ask for references, make sure the firm is the right fit for you, and I explained to people, here’s how to hire the right firm. I don’t care if they read that article and don’t hire me, as long as they’re hiring the right agency for them. After I wrote that article, because it was on Forbes, it had a lot of credibility and it jumped to the top of Google whenever somebody searched ‘how to hire an SEO firm’. And who is searching for SEO firms on Google? People who want to hire SEO firms!
It was that experience of working on my personal brand and seeing it build my business that made me think, this is fun and this is something that I would love to help other people do. I’d love to help other people work on their personal brands so they can build their business or get their message out and that’s how this all started. Then, I went from coaching to these courses, to working on this book and I’m trying to get the word out any way I can to help people understand how personal branding works, how influence works, so they can apply it in their businesses and lives.
Joshua’s key success factor
I really care about people, and I try to treat people as individuals rather than as objects, rather than as transactional, and this is hard when you’re running a business, because there’s the math of the business, there’s money coming in and going out, and you have to make decisions based on that math.
Bea Pole-Bokor
Bea Pole-Bokor is the Owner & Founder of B!Social.
She is a professional diplomat by training. She’s worked at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, as well as with marketing giant L’Oréal prior to moving to New Zealand.
With over 10 years of experience in communication, content creation, and events, she is now on a mission to share her passion for all things social.
Bea is an official LinkedIn Local host, a member of the Organizing Committee, and a speaker at the Social Media Conference New Zealand 2019.
How did Bea become an entrepreneur?
I consider myself as a very social person. This was the reason I started my business, B!Social, which is all about social media and beyond. I help businesses leverage the power of social media to grow. I love it because it’s all about people. I used to be a diplomat before and that’s all about social networking, so I’m passionate about people, relationships, getting together and sharing our knowledge, inspiring each other, and growing together.
I started focusing on the local environment in New Zealand first because we moved here and that’s where I wanted to connect with the people and that’s where I saw there’s a need for this kind of service, so I started locally and over time as the business grew, I’ve been expanding past the local region going more into the national and international scene.
Social media is typically a thing that you can do all around the world because it’s digital, you can Skype, you can Zoom, you can Facetime, you can messenger call whatever you want, you can connect on different platforms, but I really enjoy working with local communities and real people, that’s what I love: working with people, in person, in real life.
Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe
Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe, Principal and Founder, Social Espionage
Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe was born in New York City to French and Italian parents. Her father’s passing caused her family to move to Europe, where she became somewhat of a nomad. She has lived in Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom.
Dorothéa is a strategic digital marketing executive who is fluent in 4 languages and specializes in developing business through digital, influencer and social media marketing for the world’s most memorable brands. Dorothéa teaches marketers and business leaders how to increase value and develop strong relationships between brands and fans.
How did Dorothéa become an entrepreneur?
Dorothéa has been involved with marketing and social media from the first years of her career.
In 2010 Dorothéa established her entrepreneurship. Using her vast experience in the marketing and social media world.
Today, I’m heavily involved in marketing strategy in the four areas of my business: digital transformation, e-commerce, influencer, and content and social media marketing, as well as personal branding. The moment I’m done with our interview, I’m heading to a client’s.
Dorothéa also involves with a very unique project:
“I’ve been involved with a brand at L’Oreal that is all about skin cancer prevention and my late George, at the end of his life, had an undiagnosed melanoma on one of his lymph nodes and that’s what ultimately caused the Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, the cancer got into his lymph system and was gone in only a matter of days.
So, I made it my mission to protect and take care of my own skin and the skin of my family and others because I feel like if I could tell that story over and over again. My dear friend said to me, Oh my god, you’re living your mission! If George were still here today, he would see that you’ve helped created products to prevent what happened to you from happening to other people, but you’re also living your mission in that you’re sharing with people that they can prevent losing a loved one by educating themselves on skin cancer prevention”
The similarity between these three entrepreneurs
There is one main factor that is similar to these three entrepreneurs and enables them to succeed and combine between their passion and their financial success;
All three of them are either building or built themselves as influencers in their market category.
Josh Steimle is well established as an influencer in the space of SEO and marketing.
He has written over 300 articles for publications like Fortune, Time, Forbes, Inc., Mashable, TechCrunch, and Entrepreneur, and is the author of Chief Marketing Officers at Work, which was recognized in Success Magazine as one of the 5 Best Business Books of 2016.
Entrepreneur Magazine put Josh on their 50 Inspirational Entrepreneurs to Watch in 2017 list, Forbes recognized him as one of 25 Marketing Influencers To Watch In 2017, and he was ranked #7 on Richtopia’s list of Top 100 Most Influential CMOs.
Bea Pole-Bokor recognized the need and opportunity for an expert leader in the fields of social media in New Zealand.
“I think I tapped into something really deep in myself,” she said, “what I really love, what I’m really good at, and what I would like to do. I saw an opportunity and said, I love social media, I’m always hanging out on social media, I keep in touch with my family and friends, I’m observing the trends, and I said, there’s a need for this.
There’s a need for people to understand how it really works and amazing opportunities for businesses, so I created my own business, and that’s the story of B!Social.”
Bea is an official LinkedIn Localhost, a member of the Organizing Committee, and a speaker at the Social Media Conference New Zealand 2019.
Dorothéa Bozicolona-Volpe is well known for specializing in developing businesses through digital, influencer and social media marketing for the world’s most memorable brands. She teaches marketers and business leaders on how to increase value and develop strong relationships between brands and fans.
Dorothéa is regularly engaged on groups like Altamont (Social Media Intelligence Summit 2012), Mashable, iStrategy and Digital Atlanta, has appeared as an expert on CNN Newsroom with Ali Velshi, a strategy and marketing expert on CBS and serves a long list of notable clients.
The idea of how an expert can become known in their field of expertise is brought to us by Mark Schaefer in his excellent book Known.
“When I wrote my last book, Known, it was about how creating an effective, powerful personal brand is really the only sustainable, competitive advantage we can have. I was addressing the question: Could anybody become known?”
Here are a few practical steps for entrepreneurs to become influencers in their field:
Produce relevant content about this category, to teach and educate your target audience
Examples for contact creation:
The story of the new category; how it has developed and what does it do
A strong presence on social networks
Consider creating a company podcast about the new market category you represent.
Create a blog that focuses on and covers the market category
Create the formal home page for the category
Open groups in Facebook and LinkedIn, named after the new category
”How To’s” tips for potential customers
One of the most important factors to becoming an influencer is consistency.
When I talk about consistency, I refer to two elements – the first is the importance of creating some kind of similarity between the different content. If we want to create an impact, people need to be able to recognize you.
The other kind of consistency is the kind Mark Schaefer talks about, and this is the ability to keep going.
“It was one of the most profound lessons I have learned; consistency is more important than genius. I would never have made it if I had quit. You have to find a way to keep going.”
I look forward to hearing your comments.
