Know What Your Audience Wants Before Investing in Content Creation and Marketing - Whiteboard Friday randfish Posted by randfish Content marketing is an iterative process: We learn and improve by analyzing the success of the things we produce. That doesnt mean, though, that we shouldnt set ourselves up for that success in the first place, and the best way to do that is by knowing what our audiences want before we actually go through the effort to create it. In todays Whiteboard Friday, Rand (along with his stick-figure friends Rainy Bill and Hailstorm Hal) explains how we can stack our own decks in our favor with that knowledge. For reference, heres a still of this weeks whiteboard! Video transcription Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Its 2015. Its going to be a year where, again, many, many marketers engage in a ton of content investments and content marketing for a wide variety of purposes from SEO to driving traffic to growing their email newsletters and lists to earning links and attention and growing their social channels. Unfortunately, theres a content marketing problem that we see over and over and over again, and that is that folks are making investments in content without knowing whether their audience is going to know and love and appreciate what theyre doing beforehand. That kind of sucks because it adds a lot of risk to a process that is already risk intensive. Youre going to put a lot of work into the content that youre creating. Well, hopefully you are. If youre not, I dont know how well its going to do. All of that work can be for naught. Let me show you two examples. Over here I have Rainy Bill from WhatTheWeather, and heres Hailstorm Hal from KingOfClimate. Well start with Rainy Bills story. So Rainy Bill, hes thinking to himself, You know, I want to invest in some content marketing for WhatTheWeather. He has an idea. Hes like, You know, maybe I could make a chart of the T-shirts that meteorologists wear by season. Ill look at all the TV meteorologists, all the Internet meteorologists, and Ill look at the T-shirts that they wear. They all wear T-shirts, and Ill make a big chart of them. You might think this is a ridiculous idea. I have seen worse. But Rainy Bill is thinking to himself, Well, if I do this, its kind of ego bait. I get all the meteorologists involved. Ill feature all their T-shirts, and, of course, all of them will see it and theyll all link to me, talk about me, share it on their social media channels, email their friends with it. Oh check it out. Put it on their Facebook. He makes it. Hes got this beautiful chart showing different kinds of T-shirts that meteorologists are wearing over the seasons, and Bills just as happy as a clam. He cant believe how beautiful that is until he tries to launch and promote it. Then its just sadness. Hes just crying tears. What happened here is that no one actually cared what Bill had to say. No one cared about T-shirt patterns that are worn by meteorologists, and Bill didnt actually realize this until he had already made the investment and started trying to do the promotion. This might be a slightly ridiculous example, but I cant tell you how many times Ive seen exactly this story play out by marketer after marketer of content investments. They put something together that they hope will achieve their goal of reaching a new audience, of getting promoted, but it falls flat mostly because they had the idea before they talked to anyone else. Before they realized whether anyone else was interested, they went and built it. Thats actually kind of a terrible idea. Unless you have your finger on the pulse of an industry, a field so incredibly well that you dont need that process, Im going to say that is the 1% of the 1% who can do this without going out and first talking to their audience and understanding. Hailstorm Hal, from KingOfClimate, instead of having a great idea for a piece of content, Hailstorm Hal is going to start with the idea from which all content marketing springs, which is, I want to make something people will really want and something theyll really love. Okay. They want it, and theyre going to love it when they see it and when they get it. So Hailstorm Hal is going to go out and say, Well, what are the weather watchers talking about? People who are active in this community, in this industry, the people who do the sharing and the amplification, who influence what the rest of us see, what are they talking about? So he goes onto this weather forum and hears someone complaining, The weather in Cincinnati is totally unpredictable. The reply, Yeah, but its way more predictable than Seattle is. Nuh-uh, you liar. From this, eureka, Hailstorm Hal has a great idea. Wait a minute. What if I were to actually go and take all of this online commentary and turn it into something useful where these two commenters could prove to each other whos correct and people would know for certain how much . . . Its not just helpful to them. This is helpful to a huge, broad swath of society. How accurate are your meteorologists, on average, city by city? I dont actually know, but I would be fascinated to know whether when I go to San Diego -- I was there for the holidays to see my wifes family -- maybe the weather reports in San Diego are much more or much less accurate than what Im used to here at home in Seattle. So Hals going to put together this great map thats got an illustration of different regions of the United States, and you can see that in the Midwest actually weather is more predictable than it is on the coast or less predictable than it is on the coast. Thats awesome. Thats terrific. This is going to work far, far better than anything that Hal could have come up with on his own without first understanding the industry. Now the process and tips that Im going to recommend here are not exhaustive. There are a lot more things in this. But if you follow these five, at least, I think youre going to do much better with your content investment. First off, even before you do this process, get to know the industry, the niche, or the community that youre operating in. If Hal didnt know where to find weather watchers, he might just search weather forum, click on the first link in Google, and be at some place that doesnt really have a very serious investment from the community of people hes trying to reach. Without understanding all of the sites and pages, without understanding who are the big influencers in the community on social media, without understanding what are the popular websites, what gets a lot of interaction and engagement and doesnt, thats going to be really tough for him to figure out. So thats why I would say you need to go out and learn about your industry before you make something for it. Incidentally, this is why its really tough to do this as a consultant and why if you are paying consultants to go and do this, youre going to actually be paying quite a bit of money for this research time. This is going to be dozens of hours of research to understand the niche before you can effectively create content for it. Thats something where it isnt just an on demand kind of thing. Then from there you want to use the discussion forums, Q&A sites, social media, and blog comments to find topics and discussions that inspire questions, curiosity, and need. Some of that is going to be very blatant. Some of it is going to be much more latent, and youre going to be drawing from both of those. Your job is to have insight and empathy, and thats what a great marketer should be able to do when theyre researching these communities. Number three, you want to validate that if you created something, (a) it would be unique, no one else has made it before, and (b) others would actually share it. You can do this very directly by reaching out and talking to people. So Hal can go and say, Hey, whos this commenter right here? Lets have a quick conversation. Would you like this? If the answer is, Yeah, not only would I like that, I would help share that. I would spread that. I would love to know the answer to this question. Or no reply, or Sounds interesting, let me know when you get it up. Theres going to be a different variation. You can go and use Twitter, Google+, and email to reach out directly to these people. Most of the time, if youre finding commentary on these forums and in these places, there will be a way to reach them. I also have two tools Im going to recommend, both for email. One is Conspire and the other is VoilaNorbert. VoilaNorbert is an email finding tool. I think its the best one out there right now, and Conspire is a great tool for seeing who youre connected to thats connected to people you might want to reach. When youre trying to reach someone, those can be very helpful. Number four, it tends to be the case that visual and/or interactive content is going to perform a lot better than text. So if Hals list had simply been a list of data -- here are all the major U.S. regions and heres how predictable and unpredictable their weather is -- well, that might work okay. But this map, this visual is probably going to sail around the weather world much faster, much better, be picked up by news sources, be written about, be embedded in social media graphics, all that kind of stuff, far better than a mere chart would be. Number five, remember that as youre doing the creation, you need to align the audience goals with your business goals. So if KingOfClimates goal is to get people signing up for a weather tracking service on an email list, well great, you should have this and then say, We can send you variability reports. We can tell you if things are getting more or less accurate, and have an email call to action to get people to sign up to the newsletter. But you want to tie those business goals together. The one thing Id be careful of and this is a mistake that many, many folks who invest in content marketing make is that a lot of those benefits are going to be indirect and long term, meaning if the goal is that KingOfClimate is trying to sell professional meteorologists on a software subscription service, well, you know what? Youre probably not going to sell a whole lot with this. But you are going to get a lot more professional meteorologists who remember the name, KingOfClimate, and that brand memory is going to influence future purchase decisions, likely nudging conversation rates up a little bit. Its probably going to help with links. Links will lead to rankings. Rankings will lead to being higher up in search engines when professional meteorologists search for precisely, Im looking for weather tracking software or weather notification software. So these kings of things are long term and indirect. You have to make sure youre tying together all of the benefits of content marketing with your business goals that you might achieve. I hope to see some phenomenal content here in 2015. Im sure you guys are already working on some great stuff. Applying this can mean that you dont have to be psychic. You just have to put in a little bit of elbow grease, and you can make things that will perform far better for your customers, for your community, and for your business. All right, everyone. Look forward to the discussion, and we will see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you dont have time to hunt down but want to read!
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 08:38:49 +0000
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