Repelling Readers With The Right Content

Repelling Readers With The Right Content

Ryan Brock

 

Content is king! Content is amazing! It’s the future of SEO. It’s the beginning and end of marketing in the digital age. With good content, you can guarantee ROI and… Corner the market… And…

Ugh. I only just started writing this post and I’m already exhausted. Why is it that we have to use such strong terms when talking about different methods or tools for marketing? It’s confusing, and it cheapens the many different uses marketing tools like content can have. They don’t have to all be just about immediate return on investment to be valuable.

 

Consider this: how often do you hear marketers talk about “attracting” leads or readers or customers? All the time, right? And that’s great. But when’s the last time you thought about the power of your marketing efforts to repel? When used wisely, good content has just as much potential to push people away from your business as it does to keep them around, and that’s some powerful stuff.

Let’s talk about why you’d want to do such a thing.

 

All Ideas Become Good Ideas

For many, the hardest part of coming up with consistent content to aid in marketing or sales efforts lies at the very beginning. It’s tough to come up with good topics for pieces, let alone connect those pieces back to greater themes so they work together. But here’s a well-kept secret about content marketing: It’s a process. Digital marketing means that you have an endless amount of opportunities to publish new content and try new things, which means there should be no pressure to come out the gate with pieces that are going to start driving sales from day one.

Instead of looking at each piece of content as a new piece of advertising that’s going to convert audiences, try to think about the content you write as an experiment. Maybe there’s an idea you’re kicking around; write about it and see what your audience has to say. Maybe you’ve got an assumption about your audience that you haven’t tested yet; write some content that will help you test how interested your target audience is. Over time, you’ll start learning about who your best customers are simply based on how your assumed targets react to your content. With that in mind, it’s actually a really good phenomenon when you start noticing trends in certain types of readers bouncing from your website after just a few seconds. You can use that information not only to focus future content, but also to better understand where the most opportunity is in the market. And if a piece fails completely, it becomes a learning experience in and of itself about your messaging. You can pick up tomorrow with something new, and that idea ended up being worth something.

 

 

You’ll Stand Out

Let’s say you’re running an IT support company. You work out of Launch Fishers taking phone calls and responding to help desk tickets for a variety of clients (and, trust me, if I’m describing you, it’s an accident; I haven’t been around here long enough to know who does what yet). You have solid customer service, your team is sharp and efficient, and you’ve nurtured some good relationships. That’s fantastic. But at the end of the day, it’s on you to do everything you can to differentiate yourself from the competition, which, save for something superficial like pricing or process, could be almost identical to you.

One immediately obvious way to start differentiating yourself with content marketing is to take a look at what your best customers have in common and begin marketing to a specific segment of the market. Are they certain types of businesses, maybe restaurants or retailers or schools? Do they have a certain number of people on staff? Are they located in a specific area? Do they make a certain amount of money?

Using that common thread as a guide, you can start producing regular content that will appeal specifically to that audience. Let’s say your best customers are retailers in suburban areas with staffs under five. Publish a blog post titled something like “How To Draw Foot Traffic Where There Are No Sidewalks And You Don’t Have Enough Staff To Sit Someone Outside With A Sign” that’s going to address that very specific audience’s problems. Sure, that post will send away companies who have enough staff to have a sign jockey out front, or businesses in busy urban areas, but you don’t really want to be reaching those companies, do you?

 

Save Some Time and Energy

If you keep at that sort of strategy long enough, you’ll build up a knowledge base of materials valuable to the exact right audience (or audiences). Premium pieces behind lead-gen forms will allow you to know something about a prospect before you even talk to them. Your search rankings will go up, but only for the audiences you’re most interested in reaching, and it’s all because you chose to publish some content with such a narrow appeal that it turned the right audiences off and sent them packing.

After all, that’s what this is all about. Repelling the wrong sort of customer from your website will end up saving you precious time and money as your marketing dollars and sales efforts are spent on more qualified leads. So cast off your inhibitions. Write focused content. Don’t be afraid to lose some time on a completely worthless blog post, because that very post might save you some time down the line. And if you really want to learn more about embracing your quirks to write content that’ll appeal to the right audiences, RSVP for my Lunch and Learn at Launch Fishers on Wednesday, November 5th.

 

And, above all else, remember:

The only magnet that doesn’t repel as well as it attracts is a broken one.