Why no piece of content should ever be an endpoint unto itself.
Just what you wanted to see after a solid week of indulgences, right?
I know, I know. But humor me for a second.
If you’re shopping for a content agency, or looking for help with content to fuel your startup business, you should know that there is a point where content effort, beautiful and tantalizing as it is, often fails to deliver real (see: measurable) results.
That’s because too many clever marketers give short shrift to the most critical component in their strategy: How to get their message out. (I’ll get to the cake in a second.)
These so-called “experts” either so narrowly focus their distribution strategy that their content fails to deliver quantifiable gains (KPIs)—or, worse, they so broadly overshoot their aim, targeting and retargeting every corner of the web, that their brand becomes a tacky backdrop to the browsing experience—yet another distraction in a world full of mind-numbing distractions.
If you’re going to invest in exceptional content production, you had better have a plan for how to get your message out. Abide by this simple maxim when it comes to content distribution: Meet people where they are.
Spend time looking at the places online, and in the real world, where your prospects and clients hang out with each other. Think about the different challenges that people face at different times of the year. Having recently done this for an ed-tech startup, for example, we looked at the cyclical nature of the school year and the different issues that crop up in communities, from enrollment to testing to graduation, and planned accordingly.
Design your content calendar (yes, you need one) and your campaigns around critical issues—and put serious thought behind exactly how, and when, you choose to send different campaigns to different people. Speaking of people, who do you intend to send your content to? Do you have an email list of existing clients? What about prospects? If the goal is to reach more people, do you have a plan for actively growing the size of your target list? (Note: Sending emails out to everyone you know is far easier than actively prospecting the ones you don’t, especially via email. Don’t take the easy way out.)
Once you have a plan for building and cultivating a stronger list, begin to carefully segment your different audiences. By this, I mean create specific campaigns for different regions of the country and/or job titles, and look closely at the problems your clients and prospects face. Then produce content that offers a path toward reasonable, practical solutions. If that journey eventually leads prospects to your product, fantastic. But don’t start with a sale in mind. Before a prospect will consider buying anything from you, they need to first understand their problems—on their terms, and not because some eager upstart company wants them to. By providing education and adding value to the process of discovery, you form a bond that runs deep. That way, when your prospects are finally ready to make a decision, you’ve earned the right to be in the room.
Content layer cake
Another rule to abide by is this: No single piece of content is an end point unto itself.
Too many email messages feel like hopeless one-and-done sales pitches. Email by itself is not a strategy. Think of your content and campaigns in delicious layers—progressive four- and five-stage events, designed to engage prospects at different times and in decidedly different ways.
A campaign might include an initial email blast featuring an original piece of content, such as a whitepaper, a round of BDR calls, a webinar, and a live presentation at a local community center or industry event. It depends on where your clients are—and where you think your message can do the most good, not for your business necessarily, but for your audience.
Take a similar approach to advertising and paid social media and web promotion. Rather than blanket the web with a hail-mary combination of retargeted ads—please don’t tell me you paid an agency to help you with this—carefully evaluate your resources and decide where and when to spend your time based on the amount of engagement you can reasonably predict. If you know your prospects engage on LinkedIN, for example, or that they watch a ton of Facebook Live videos, focus your attention on these core channels. It doesn’t matter if your competition is on Instagram and Snapchat.
You’re not in business to chase the competition. The reason you launched your startup in the first place was because you identified a problem that the marketplace had so far failed to solve. Worry about your clients and prospects, meet them where they are with great content and practical solutions—and dare your competitors to start chasing you this year.
There’s no dessert more satisfying.
Does your business produce great content, but struggle to gain traction? Are you looking for a strategic plan to meet clients and prospects where they are? Visit contentbetter.com and book your free 20-min. strategy session to see what a difference strategy makes.
