Want Warmer Leads? Build a Parasocial Relationship with Your Prospects

Let me tell you about my boyfriends.

First, there's Ed, my AI skeptic boyfriend who rants about how nobody’s making money in AI except Nvidia. Then there's Fredo, who teaches me Spanish. And then there's Alex, who loves to point out when movie tropes are absurdly anti-reality.

Oh, and one more detail: these are all parasocial relationships.

That is, my “relationship” with these men is purely one-sided. I consume their content and have warm feelings for them and drop their names in conversation AND THEY HAVE NEVER HEARD OF ME.

And I trust them all implicitly.

You probably have these parasocial relationships, too, with the hosts of your favorite podcasts or the characters in your favorite TV show or the influencers you follow online.

And if you’re of a certain inclination and willing to commit to a certain amount of “being out there,” you can tap the power of parasocial relationships to build a pipeline of incredibly warm leads for your business.

Why Parasocial Relationship Building Works in B2B Marketing

As you read this, 95 percent of your potential customers are not in the market for what you’re selling. So for business you pitch in any given day, you’re competing for five percent of your total market.

But that’s also the beauty of B2B. Longer sales cycles and higher prices mean “selling” doesn’t happen only when prospects are in buying mode. It happens in the months and years before, when future buyers are interacting with the world, learning about their industry, and seeking out voices of people they can trust.

You, dear reader, can become one of those voices.

One way to do that is to build a parasocial relationship with your prospective clients.

It works like this: you start showing up where your target customers hang out: on LinkedIn, on podcasts, in industry publications, on your own blog. You show up consistently. You show up with interesting opinions, insight, and information.

You engage with the people around you.

As you do this, two things will happen:

1. Your following will grow. This means everything you say (or write) will reach more people. You’ll be able to track this (follows, shares, engagement, etc.). It will be exciting.
2. Your invisible influence will grow. People who never interact with you will see your content. They will see other people interacting with it and will see that as evidence of your legitimacy. They will be influenced by it. And you’ll never have proof.

The thing is, you’re building parasocial relationships with both groups.

Just as you have a range of real-life relationships (people you interact with and seek out, friends you see a few times a year, acquaintances, etc.), you can have a range of parasocial relationships.

You may not pay much attention to that person on your LinkedIn feed for months or even years at a time. But then one day, they’ll share a deep dive on why cost per acquisition kept rising for a recent client—right after a meeting where you puzzled over the same phenomenon with your team.

And you’ll stop to read it. Because you recognize this name. You recognize this face—they’ve been in your feed for years now. You trust them. You click in, visit their site. Read up. They really know their stuff, as it turns out. And you send a quick message. Do they have a few minutes to talk?

You bet they do. In fact, you end up working with them. They solve your problem. It’s fantastic. And they didn’t have to sell you at all, even a little. Because you already felt like you knew them at the moment you were ready to buy.

How to Build a Parasocial Relationship with Your Audience

The best way to learn is by watching the masters. I highly recommend following Rand Fishkind, Amanda Natividad, Wes Kao, and Mike Smart, all of whom are doing this to one extent or another: they show up consistently on relevant platforms, with interesting and useful commentary, and they engage with their audiences.

To start building your own parasocial relationships, follow these steps:

1. Have a point of view. You need a distinct opinion about your area of expertise. It has to be strong enough that some people disagree with it. It has to be clear enough that you can articulate it in one sentence.
2. Express your point of view in relevant ways. Share problems you solved recently. Explain narratives from the news with your lens (like how comms experts were all over the implications of the Cracker Barrel rebrand this summer). Follow the conversation other thought leaders in your industry are having and offer your take.
3. Get your message out in as many formats as you can comfortably sustain. This is a long-term effort. If you’re more comfortable shooting daily videos and posting them to LinkedIn, go for it. If you’d rather talk via keyboard, text-only is your friend. Variety of format is less important than clarity and consistency of message, especially at the beginning.
4. Repeat yourself. Don’t worry about always saying something new. For one thing, most of your audience won’t see all of your messages. For another, people need to hear things multiple times in multiple ways before they click. Repetition is a strength, not a weakness.
5. Be vulnerable. If you pretend to have all the answers, you won’t win the kind of trust you want. Instead, balance confident demonstrations of your expertise with occasional exploration of new ideas. Open yourself to being wrong—and note when you are. Show yourself learning things, and especially learning from the people you encounter and experiences you have.
6. Keep going. Seriously. This is an endurance event.
7. Engage. Reply to comments, engage with people you admire. Use questions and conversations you have to fuel future content.
8. Iterate based on what connects. When you strike a nerve, pay attention. You’ve either landed on something your audience really cares about or accidentally waded into a hot-button issue that may or may not be relevant to your work. If it’s the former, double down.

Obviously, this takes a lot of time and energy. This isn’t a strategy you can pilot for a month and expect to get a sense of results from.

Instead, consider your typical sales cycle: how long does it take to go from lead to close? That’s your bare minimum. But remember: most of your customers aren’t ready to buy yet and so aren’t yet leads; to see the payoff from your parasocial relationships, you’ll need to be around for the long term.

PayPal is taking a slightly different approach. They’re so convinced of the power of building parasocial relationships with potential customers that they’ve hired a full-time employee to carry the load. The title: Head of CEO Content. The salary: $236,000 per year.

What You’re Really Trying to Do

There's nothing new about building trust with your audience. That’s what marketers have been doing for decades.

The difference in building a parasocial relationship is that you’re thinking beyond your products or services and certainly beyond the specific problems you can solve for customers. You’re establishing yourself as a public figure, if even for a niche audience. You’re investing more in a kind of branding.

The result is that people in your audience will feel like they know you and, by extension, trust you.

But not only that: when you cultivate parasocial relationships with the people in your target audience, they will actively want to work with you.

They’ll be excited when it’s time to shop for whatever you sell because they’ll have a home-run recommendation to bring to their team. By recommending you, they’ll look smart and savvy and knowledgeable about all the right things.

So. How do you know if it’s working?

How to Evaluate Your Progress

One indicator of success will be metrics: views, impressions, likes, follows, opens, subscribes, etc. Track these monthly and adjust if things aren’t growing. But note that this is not the only indicator of success nor the most important.

For example: if you over-index on easily trackable engagement, you might shift your strategy toward what drives engagement rather than what's most important for you to talk about from a brand-building perspective. That will lead to great metrics but less impressive overall results.

Another important indicator comes from regular conversations with your sales team.

When I asked Chris Rechsteiner, Founder and Chief Strategist at Sightline, about a successful blog he’d run for years, he told me he identified topics by doing exactly that. He asked them what questions they got from, especially the ones preceded by “Hey, can I talk to you offline for a sec?”

Those are often areas where people need and want more information but aren’t comfortable asking in front of the group.

And they’re great topics to address in content.

You might even systematize this process: create a short questionnaire for the sales team and send it out every month or so: common questions, points of confusion, etc. Track these and address the ones that come up most often.

Over time, you’ll want to see two indicators from the sales team:

1. The nature of questions they’re asked is changing. This signals that your content is answering questions that the sales team used to field.
2. The sales cycle is shortening. This signals that prospects are “selling themselves” by developing a parasocial relationship with you via your content. (Note: this is a longer-term indicator.)

Track conversations with members of your audience. What do they ask about, engage with, and respond to? Are conversations deepening over time or staying at the same surface level? Ideally, you’d want to see the former.

A few other indicators that signal your efforts are succeeding:

• Increased inbound requests from the media.
• Improved quality of job applicants.
• Improved performance of other marketing efforts.
• Increased familiarity with you, your brand, and / or your content at IRL events like conferences.

Related: “Everyone Knows Us Now!”

Caution: Be Ready for the Bumps

I’ll be honest: this is not an easy strategy.

It’s hard to not see results right away. I mean that in two ways: it can be hard to continue committing resources to something when you don’t have concrete proof that it’s working, and it can be hard to keep putting yourself out there when you’re not seeing immediate engagement.

It can be hard to hit “publish” often enough. If you’re new to thought leadership, you may feel like you’re repeating yourself too often (you’re not). You may feel like nobody cares.

Keep going.

It can be hard to get pushback.

People will disagree with you. That’s good. If nobody’s disagreeing with you, what you’re saying isn’t interesting enough.

Keep going.

Sometimes you’ll realize you made a crucial typo that reversed your meaning and that can be EMBARRASSING.

Keep going.

The idea is not to be perfect. The idea is to publish so often that mistakes will be inevitable. If you’re not making any mistakes, you’re not publishing often enough.

Should You Try to Build a Parasocial Relationship with Your Audience?

I’ll be honest. This strategy is not for the faint of heart. It requires a long-term commitment of resources and a patient approach to seeing results. That means you may not have much to show at the next board meeting.

It requires having a clear point of view that isn’t just a pile-on of what everyone else is saying.

But the payoff for those who do commit can be significant. The marketing channels available to us today let us not only connect one-to-many but also to engage in a variety of formats, on a variety of channels. There’s a ton of opportunity to do things in a way that feels comfortable to you.

So if you’re looking for an investment with long-term payoff, you’re not afraid of being “out there,” and you’re not intimidated by a few months of ambivalent results, it’s worth a try.

And if you’re curious but not quite ready to dive in, I’d love to talk with you about what it might entail. Feel free to reach out at any time.