Crown Your Buyers' Best People

Publicly recognize your audience's leaders and they promote you for free.

Every industry has a job title that does real, hard work and gets zero public credit for it. Nobody throws that person a parade. If you sell to that title, throw the parade yourself. Name the best people who hold it, put their names and faces on your own site, and let them do your marketing simply by being proud of the honor.

What to do: Pick the exact job title your buyer holds, not the broad industry around it. Open a public nomination process, pick winners by vote or editorial call, interview each one, and publish the interviews on your own channels under your own name.

Why it works: A person shares praise about themselves far more readily than they share an ad about you, and here the praise is the ad.

Example: Data-privacy startup Mine ran a "Top DPOs" program that named the most respected Data Protection Officers in tech, took public nominations at nominate@saymine.com, and published interviews with winners from Microsoft, Klarna, ASOS, Cloudflare, Wix, Udemy, Amdocs, Grindr, Logitech, and iRobot. Growth lead Tom Orbach later summed up the result in one line: "They all shared our interviews with them."

Walk it through

Here is the version Orbach ran at Mine, rebuilt as steps you can copy.

1. Narrow the title until it names a real community, not a market segment. "Privacy people" is too broad to flatter anyone specifically. "Data Protection Officer" is a job title with its own LinkedIn groups, conferences, and professional pride attached to it. If your buyer's title is that specific, the list is already waiting to be built.

2. Open the nomination process in public, not behind a form buried on page nine. Mine ran nominations through a plain email address and asked its own social following to name DPOs worth recognizing, a short note and a profile link was all it took. That low bar is the whole trick. Make nominating someone easy enough that a colleague will do it for a colleague.

3. Interview the winners and publish under your own banner. Mine turned the winners into a running interview series on its own site, one DPO at a time, drawn from Microsoft, Klarna, Wix, Cloudflare, Amdocs, and more. Here is what that looks like once it is written up: a single roundup carrying ten real company logos, ASOS through Cloudflare, sitting right next to the interview.

That banner is not stock art. Every logo is a real company whose DPO sat for an interview because Mine asked, and the company gets its own logo next to Microsoft's for free.

4. Congratulate them somewhere their own network will see it. The interview alone is not the play. Announcing it, tagging the winner, and calling them a "Top DPO" in public is what gives them something to repost. You are not asking them to share your product. You are handing them a reason to talk about themselves, and they carry it from there.

The read

• The title has to carry status on its own. This only works for a job people introduce themselves by. Nobody brags about being a "growth stakeholder."
• The friction to fix is the nomination, not the vote. Keep entering someone's name down to one email or one short form. Every extra field loses nominators.
• The company rides along for free. Winners rarely share alone. They tag their employer too, so the recognition compounds into a second logo standing next to yours.

Steal it

Find the job title your own buyer holds and ask whether anyone has ever built them a public list. In most B2B categories the answer is no, because founders assume awards belong to industries, not to job titles. Open a nomination inbox this week, ask your own audience to name the best people they know in that role, and commit to interviewing the first ten. You do not need a panel of judges or a black-tie ceremony. You need one page per winner and a willingness to say their name in public before anyone else does.

Defend it by keeping the bar for who gets named genuinely high. If a "Top X" list starts including anyone who filled out a form, the winners stop bragging about it, because the honor is worth nothing once it stops being scarce. Pick fewer people than you are tempted to, and say no to nominees who do not fit the title.

Gotchas

• It is a slow build, not a launch-day spike. Mine's list grew one interview at a time. Budget for a running series, not one splashy post.
• Winners will not share a thin write-up. If the interview reads like a form response, nobody reposts it. Spend real time on each one or skip it.
• Do not let the list go stale. A "Top DPOs" page with the same names three years running reads as abandoned, and abandoned recognition insults the people still listed on it. Refresh it or retire it.