I became mesmerized with a film production company — the quality of the television commercials and short films they produced were witty, picturesque, and imaginative.

I met with them. As a team of two, they had earned a respected role as the key commercial film agency for major companies, by and large, due to a savant CEO/Film Director and a deeply empathetic business development and production coordinator. For their brand, just an interactive website, a couple social media accounts, and sales prospect list. Together, they seemed to know every CEO in the city. They asked me: Where’s the value in inbund marketing?

Over the last decade, I’ve followed the trends of digital marketing — always on search for solutions that don’t rely on large amounts of existing data for value. Through mentors, I got into “Brand Tribalism”, a concept rooted in Dr. Robert Cialdini’s frameworks, popularized by Godin’s best-seller “Tribes”, and detailed by authors like Alisa Zayasenko. Through advances in digital platforms, white hat (and grey hat) applications, I’ve explored how well-executed strategies in brand tribalism can help small organizations with great content become fierce disrupters in creative markets.

For this agency, I built an automated lead generation engine that filtered prospects into convertible clients.

By leveraging years worth of beautiful film content, we told a story of how a master commercial film director worked. The weathered, behind-the-scenes education and guidance came naturally through interviews about the details of every shoot. The result? Articulate and insightful content that could generate real discussions. We used a dynamic content repository to plan every aspect of the multi-channel content release. Visually breathtaking posts across digital channels targeted opinion leaders and helped us shape ‘social proof’ influence in discussions. New community emerged.

As perception of the agency’s brand developed — we measured the most engaging post topics and reiterated on content themes in drip campaigns to the newest followers of the content release. In email we analyzed click locations and scored engaged leads into hyper-targeted profiles that were later re-marketed to and “socially sniped” for additional brand engagement activities.

When we measured the outcomes of our brand growth strategy, the agency had reached more than 200,000 potential clients, engaged 15,000 targeted leads, and lined up 175 close-to-target contacts who had already seen and engaged with the work of the company. Over the next 6 months, the business development director contacted, sold, and completed several new productions through new leads. 

New content continues to be added to the process, and the ROI of this project lives on.