I’m going to tell you the story of how one of the celebrity entrepreneurs in North America is doing his marketing for 2019. For those of you who don’t know who Gary Vaynerchuk is, I present him to you.
Gary is originally from Belarus. He came to New York/New Jersey as a child with his parents in 1978 when he was just three years old. His father managed to establish a liquor business. Gary went to college, and upon graduation, he entered the family business.
Gary is known worldwide because, in eight years, he 20Xed his family business from 3 to 60 Million dollars. His success was achieved through a rebranding model and an online selling strategy. He built e-commerce for the alcohol business called Wine Library with a daily webcast where he spoke about wines.
In 2009 Gary stepped aside to lead his new project, VaynerMedia, a company that surpassed 100M dollars in yearly revenue. THE BUSINESS MODEL Today’s advertising and media giant has developed an exciting investment and business model that deserves to be mentioned and shared. The nucleus of everything is VaynerMedia, whose target customers are the Fortune 500 companies; in other words, the 500 most prominent companies in The United States.
Following VaynerMedia is The Gallery, an editorial creative writing company whose most critical asset is the digital magazine PureWow. Next on the list is VaynerRSE, a private fund of 25 Million dollars with Matt Higgins and Stephen Ross (owner of the Miami Dolphins). The fund has a form of an incubator and angel investor.
Then comes BraVe Ventures, a firm that coaches television channels, and VaynerSports, the agency that represents professional athletes. He finishes his presentation with Sasha, the latest company in VaynerMedia for medium and small businesses.
AGENCY EVENTS
What we found most interesting in this business model was that Gary Vee, as he is most commonly named, organizes events designed for independents and the general audience to have a global reach.
This event’s philosophy is to give as much valuable information as possible in one day to all assistants. On this occasion, there were around 1000 attendees, according to the team. This event took place in Miami, Florida and people from all over the world came. Most of them came from the united States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Since you arrive early in the morning, you come into a friendly environment with music, great food, and impeccable organization. The event was held in the Miami Dolphin Stadium (the local football team), and it is split into three different areas, so people are in different locations throughout the day.
The market niche for this event was agents: insurance agents, mortgage agents, automobile agents, and real estate agents. A very interesting niche for various reasons.
First, they have an entrepreneurial spirit and therefore understand the importance of marketing and selling. Secondly, they tend to have good purchase power, therefore, are great clients. Third, they are a point of social reference for other people with high incomes: people who pay for insurance, cars, real estate, commercial lease, etc.
AGENTS AND CULTURE
The complexity level of the conference was high. There were three guest speakers, and the last was a live Q&A session with Gary Vee himself. Additionally, during the morning and the afternoon, there were segmented conferences about the art of digital marketing and social media.
The topics were each one of the leading platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, YouTube, Reddit, Quora, Nextdoor, Panoply/ Gimlet, y Amazon Google Voice Skills). To wrap up this expo, VaynerMedia got marketing teams to participate in the event and even had Facebook and Instagram set up their stand.
The other two essential topics were how to generate leads and influencers. In his final presentation, Gary Vee shared his opinion about the state of the art of digital marketing. Personal branding and content marketing are the two main topics that mark and will mark the difference from here on.
If you want to know more about international live events on marketing and entrepreneurship, subscribe to our Newsletter here: Subscribe
For more information about Gary Vaynerchuk and his conference, Agent 2021, you can check out his website here: Agent 2021.
=====
JD Rico is the founder of Holistics and Partner and Editor of the Digitalist Hub. He is a researcher and entrepreneur in the topics of Business Intelligence, Digital Media and Venture Capital. He holds degrees in Anthropology (BA), Economics (BSc), Project Management- Innovation (MSc), Cultural Studies (Min) and Artificial Intelligence Product and Service Design (Cert.). He serves at the board of companies in Emerging Tech, Wellness, Food Tech and Cultural Impact. He writes Cap∙Hackers, a newsletter for 33,000 business owners and investors.
