Content Marketing Is NOT Advertising

Content Markting is a big deal, no doubt about it. According to HubSpot, 70% of U.S. companies have included content marketing in their marketing budgets for 2020. Unfortunately, many of them are looking at it the wrong way. Becuase, also according to HubSpot, the most common metric for measuring success in content marketing efforts is Total Sales.

And here's the main problem with that: content marketing is NOT advertising. Content marketing is the effort to build your own highly targeted audience so that you won't have to spend money to put your ads in front of someone else's. Can you advertise to your own, specially cultivated audience? Of course. Will publishing ads thinly veiled as entertaining or informative content build you an audience that will come close to the audiences you normally spend to advertise to? Absolutely not.

If you hope to create an audience that outperforms those of the outlets where you regularly place your ad dollars, you must do what they have already done: generate entertaining and/or informative content designed to engage and enlighten a highly targeted audience. Those outlets have done so around a specific topic. As a business, you want to go about building your targeted audience in a slightly different way.

1. Profile Your Target.

Your target of course is someone like your current stable of best customers. In order to attract more people like them, the first thing you must do is define who they are. Determine your best customers and dig into what dat you have on them. What are the common factors, both in terms of your business relationship and those traits that lie outside of that relationship. Age, job title, geographic location, education, things they like on LinkedIn or Facebook. Send them a survey with an incentive of some sort for participation to try and root out common trends among them.

2. What Will You Focus On?

Based on your profile or profiles, what are five broad categories or topics that would interest your best customers (and others like them)? Not entirely open ended categories like "world news" or "weather," but not too niche either. We want people like our best customers to self-select into this audience... that should be our guide post.

3. What Are Their Concerns?

For each of these topics, come up with as many "Emotional Needs" your audience might have attached to it as you can. As a strange example. Let's say one of your topics was eating apples. What sort of emotional issues might your audience have with eating apples? Well, "can I eat apples on my diet," "what about GMO apples/how can I tell," "my kids won't eat apples," "apples are boring," "what kinds of pesticides/fertilizers are used on apples," "how long will apples stay fresh?"

That's a list of seven emotional-based questions centered around eating apples I came up with in just a few minutes. For even more, you could go to Google's keyword tool and type in "eating apples"and see what the most commonly searched questions are. Also, visit walmart, whole foods and amazon and look at reviews for apples. Finding emotionally charged sentiments around almost any topic is not a difficult task if you have internet access.

4. What Can You Offer?

Now that you have 10 to 20 "emotional needs" centered on your topic, how many informational offerings can you create for each to help meet those emotional needs? Eating apples on a diet, for instance: "7 Diets you didn't know recommend apples." "Apples vs. the Paleo Diet," "Apples vs. the Keto Diet," "Apples vs. the [name your] Diet." "Weight Watchers' Take on Eating Apples," "A Nutritionist’s Guide to Including Apples in Your Diet." Now, it might be that a particular diet does not allow apples. But that in and of itself is useful information that is still relevant to your audience. "Keto says 'No' to Apples: here's why." Or whatever (I have not researched apples and diets... this is just a quick and dirty example).

That's seven specific content ideas just for the first “emotional need” we identified. Let's say you have five topics. For each you have ten Emotional Needs. For each of those you have ten Information Offerings. That comes to 500 specific content ideas you have come up with in just a few minutes' time.

5. Repurpose, Reuse, Recycle

But wait, we're not done. Let's say you pick an item that seems rich with possibilities. You choose to do a 20-minute podcast with an expert on the subject. That podcast ought to be able to translate into 2-3 separate blog posts relevant to the topic.

Each of those might be excerpted to create 5-7 social media cards, memes or infographics.

That's 8-11 individual pieces of content for each of your informational offerings. 500 x 8 = 4,000. 500 x 11 = 5,500. That few minutes of brainstorming emotional and informational ideas for your target audience could potentially lead to 4,000 to 5,500 individual pieces of content, most of which are just small bits pulled out of the initial execution of those 500 ideas.

Will all 500 really produce a podcast episode, 3 blog posts and a dozen bits for social media? No. But even if only 25% do, that's more than 1000 pieces of conent. 10% is still 400-550. And some will produce more.

With that sort of volume of content, you should still be able to actively advertise to your audience without driving them away or having them experience fatigue. In fact, with that volume of content rising directly from a strategy built to help your current best customers, you should be attracting more people just like them and cultivating an audience-- possibly even a community-- that is also a pool of prospective customers from which to draw… a pool which is more tailor-made to your products and services than any periodical, tv show or even industrial publications could hope to match.

Yes, you still pay attention to SEO and SEM and all the things you'd normally do to drive traffic to your site. But even that is with an eye toward growing your audience rather than directly driving sales. Let your metrics be subscribers, or engagement with your content, or mentons in social media and/or traditional media outlets. Because, in the long game, having your own, highly cultivated, loyal audience who trusts you will make driving sales much easier and more cost effective.

That is the true promise of Content Marketing. All you need is the patience and discipline to build it without shoving pushy ads down their throat right out of the gate.

What does your CM strategy look like? Could it benefit from a more ad-agnostic approach like this? Let's discuss in the comments below!