Converse, Connect and Assess Before Selling Online

The Social Network Show welcomes you to the first episode of The Spider Graham Series.Much has been said about getting to know your target audience by listening to social media conversations before using the channel to offer a product or service. But how do you accomplish that?Rob “Spider” Graham is a twenty-year veteran of digital media buying, selling, and production. He is CEO of Trainingcraft LLC, a company he founded to train and consult with publishers and advertisers with regard to digital advertising, marketing, and sales. In this interview, he shares highlights from Taking down Goliath: Digital marketing strategies for beating competitors with 100 times your spending power with you and Dr. J.The goal is to create opportunities to start conversations that are about your audience and not your brand by • carefully analyzing needs and interests that characterize your ideal or potential customers, you can search for conversations revolving around those topics. You might respond to blog posts with a comment or join a Twitter conversation in real time. • offering your audience unique or exclusive content or information • creating forums (blog, webinars, articles, etc.) that allow you to speak directly to the needs and interests of your prospects and customers • giving your prospects a forum where they can interact with you.Spider will return with Kevin M. Ryan, the co-author of Taking down Goliath: Digital marketing strategies for beating competitors with 100 times your spending power.Rob ‘Spider’ Graham is a 20 year veteran of the digital media buying, selling and production industries and is currently the CEO of Trainingcraft, LLC, a company providing digital advertising strategies, marketing and sales consulting and training solutions to publishers and advertisers. They provide industry leading training specifically for publisher sales teams through their CertifiedSalesTraining.com site and have just recently rolled out a training and education community for digital marketers and advertisers at spidergraham.com.Spider is an expert on many areas of digital advertising and marketing including interactive marketing, digital media sales, audience targeting and programmatic media selling and buying.Rob has over 20 years of experience designing and creating digital advertising and marketing materials-education and training products; he has spent 18 years as an adjunct University professor teaching over 100 digital media development, online marketing, media buying and ecommerce business courses at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard University and Emerson College; Rob has over 12 years online course development; he has been a speaker at over 100 different digital marketing conferences and venues ; he is experienced in Rich Media advertising and audience targeting; he is the Author of Advertising Interactively, Fishing From A Barrel, Going Native and Co-author of Taking Down Goliath: The Digital Marketing Strategy for Beating Competitors with 100 Times Your Spending Power. He has over 8 years as a monthly columnist for ClickZ.com covering Streaming and Rich Media technologies, Behavioral Targeting strategies and technologies and targeted media buying; and Rob is presently a columnist for BizJournals.com covering online business and digital marketing best practices for small businesses.