Building an audience takes time — and process.
I was on the phone with a salesperson for a large marketing automation software company recently. We were discussing the possibility of integrating the company’s impressive (if a little too pricey) marketing automation suite at one of the startups I work with.
The sales guy (puffing me up here) says, “You guys are absolutely killing it with content. What you need is distribution. You’ve got to get more eyeballs on all that work.”
He’s not wrong. We produce quality content—a daily blog post about topics our audience cares about, an impeccably written, wonderfully designed monthly guide series, compelling case studies illustrating how clients use our products to address persistent pain points, a new website is in the works. Our stuff is good. Compared to what others in our industry are putting out there, it’s crazy good.
But the guy also has a point: Outside of the daily social media grind and some PR and media pitches, we aren’t doing nearly enough to get our content on the desks and in the hands of the people who we know can use it.
A favorite mentor of mine might call this “activity without results.” He’d say, we need to storm the streets. We need to bang the trash can lids. We need to make some damn noise.
I’m not ashamed to admit that I was down after that call. There I sat, looking at two-month’s of content work—the stories, the quotes, the countless hours of design and production. And for what? Ten retweets among a growing but still small cadre of 800 “X” followers?
And here I thought we were on a roll!
Audience building takes time. It’s hard. At times, it’s a downright slog. Our team is disciplined in our work, committed to growth. But there is, and always will be, more to do.
You can have the best, most relatable, audience-focused content in the world—it’s, by any account, a wonderful place to start. But it means little unless you also have a working system and a consistent process for pushing that content out into the world. I’m not talking about a Hootsuite Pro account and a few social streams—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN. That’s your baseline, your starting point.
If your social media work gets you into the conversation, it’s the work your marketing team does beyond social that helps you lead it.
Daily blog posts and tweets are great. But do you have other ways to package your content? What steps are you taking to grow your mailing list, for example? In addition to the usual daily missive, consider launching a monthly guide series or some other rock-solid piece of content that you can deliver via email, or in the press, to customers and prospects.
Grow beyond your blog. Show your audience just how much you know and care about their problems. Create an expectation for your content by offering practical solutions to challenges that your customers and others in your industry face. Build a newsletter and grow your mailing list by adding opt-in forms and other entry points on your website and in every piece of content. Create lead magnets and offer incentives that keep people interested and looking for more.
Once you start to gather steam, consider reaching out to other content providers. Propose content swaps and shares. Independent news sites are struggling. Many of the editors I speak with are more than happy to accept contributed content, so long as it’s objectively good and appeals to their audience. They have space to fill, and they don’t have the bandwidth, or the staff, to meet the persistent demand for content. It’s a difficult reality for the few journalism purists still among us. But it’s one a good content marketer can, and should, use to her advantage.
Great content is a step in the right direction. It gets you into the conversation. Now you’ve just got to find a way to make some damn noise.
Ready to put your content to work? Choose one of our “content sprints” to power your business, or sign up for a 20-minute call to see how we can work to support your marketing and sales goals.
