ON CONTENT MARKETING || The Art of Focus
Do you need to be on every online and offline channel marketing your brand?
The answer is no you don’t. Especially if you have limited time and resources to build out your content strategy and content distribution strategy. You need to get rid of FOMO, and learn to focus. Unless you are Coca-Cola, where your consumers are literally EVERYWHERE, my bet is your target audience is likely spending most of their time on a handful of platforms.
WHERE’S YOUR AUDIENCE?
“Where is your target consumer, what are they looking for from each platform, and are you sharing relevant content on that platform in a format that considers the content consumption behaviour for that specific platform?”
Take for example my marketing agency, Catalyst Agents, we are a B2B business with our creative and digital marketing services, and our prospects (by this I mean gatekeepers and decision makers - people who play a part in our defined sales funnel) spend most of their time on Instagram, podcasts, email and LinkedIn. It is also in this space where they are most receptive and in the mindset of being open to learning about new business services and considering them.
Should we be on Pinterest? It’s probably not the best investment of our time because the majority of activity on there are people looking for fashion, interior design, cooking inspiration; they are not likely to be scouring pins for marketing news and tactics.
However, for Pendulum Magazine, it makes sense for us to be on Pinterest, because we are a very visual first online publication, and Pinterest users sharing our original photography with links driving traffic back to our website is a definite PLUS for us. Our readers come to us looking for inspiring stories of artists, restaurants, photographer and entrepreneurs we feature, and when they view our content, they are in a very different mindset compared to when they are scrolling through LinkedIn or Twitter.
So the question is, where is your target consumer, what are they looking for from each platform, and are you sharing relevant content on that platform in a format that considers the content consumption behaviour for that specific platform?
CONTENT CONSUMPTION BEHAVIOUR
This is a hot topic in our marketing office right now and in order to create relevant, shareworthy content for a platform we must understand who is on the platform, what kinds of content they are interested in, and how they consume the content.
For example:
Podcast - likely to be people on the go, from one meeting to another, or commuting to work, or even preparing the night’s dinner, tuning in to consume content through listening.
Youtube Videos - people usually watch Youtube for tutorials, so they consume with the sound ON.
Instagram Stories - people are flipping through at an insanely fast pace, tapping with a single thumb to fast forward through stories; here, they are watching videos with the sound OFF. So, guess what, if you have an educational video you want to add captions and subtitles, or no one knows what you are talking about.
Whether the video is in portrait of landscape is the least of your worries in comparison to understanding HOW your audience consumes your content. If you make it easy and relevant, then guess what? You are most likely to experience a bump in your traffic.
PENDULUM ON APPLE NEWS
We recently launched Pendulum Magazine on Apple News, and saw a tremendous spike in our traffic, in fact, within a week the views and article reads on Apple News was 50% of our monthly traffic! Instead of having our readers come to us, we found a way to go to them. We made it easier for them to consume our news, in an app that they are already using, in an ecosystem that, while large, gives us a higher chance of breaking through the clutter of other articles being shared online.
Here are three takeaways to creating better content:
Define your target audience
Find out where they spend their time
FOCUS on these channels by creating quality, relevant content.
It will be the best use of your time. We promise.
Photo by Drew Graham on Unsplash
