3 Key Questions To Shape Your Content’s ValueImagine your free content as a subscription someone might buy. Would anyone buy it? This is such a good thought experiment to stay honest about the value you’re providing to your audience. The closer you can get to believing a monetary transaction for your content might happen, the closer you are to getting meaningful engagement with it. If you’re pretty sure no one would buy your content, here are three follow-up questions to understand why:
One of my favorite inspirational examples about high-value content is National Journal’s Presentation Center. The Presentation Center offers professional presentations to government affairs leaders about whatever is going on in Washington. Customers pay for access. In return, they have endless, updated, nice looking presentations to send back to their corporate offices. It saves them time, makes their lives easier – and is the reason they have a 90%+ renewal rate. I love this example because the value is in the format – a bullet-point list, a video, a series of articles wouldn’t work. Policy wonks use decks to communicate, and it takes a lot of time to make good ones. Ask yourself: Is there a formatting change that would make your content more useful to your audience? The goal is always to find something that makes your audience’s lives better, easier, happier. Let us know if we can help you think through how to do it.
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Solve Their Problems, Steal Their AttentionYour content’s job is to work, not just perform. The content you create, in its best form, is a tool your audience uses to get something done. The first step is knowing what their problems are (here’s how to do that). The second is figuring out how to solve them with the assets and resources you have: 1. Pretend you’re a startup Your audience has jobs to do—internal conversations to prep for, reports to write, initiatives to defend, goals to hit. The...
We’re in the business of solving problems. How do we know what they are? If you want to build something that earns attention, you have to understand what your audience is struggling with. It’s the surest path to marketing success: Find a pain point, and solve it. Here’s how to find those pain points: 1. Talk to people. This is a surprisingly rare tactic in a world driven by digital metrics. But it will be the most illuminating part of your research, getting a human reaction, in words humans...
How Do I Pick An Audience To Focus On? An audience focus that’s too broad means you’ll never be special to anyone. It seems obvious, right? But the wrong answer to “Who’s your target audience?” can waste a bunch of time and resources. And I hate that. When I ask marketing, comms and editorial leaders about their target audience, what I’m trying to get to is: For your most consequential growth opportunity, how are purchase decisions made, and who makes them? How do we make a case for focusing...