How to Create Content With Your Audience
I had a journalism professor in college who would automatically mark your grade down to a 65 if you included any of “I”, “Me”, “My” (or other possessive terms) anywhere in your work.
“I’ll take this red pen…this mighty red pen…and slash your grade down to a D right off the bat,” he told us, almost joyously, on the first day of class.
"What the hell is this?", I thought to myself.
An entire article…weeks worth of research and reporting, essentially tossed out because of one word? Lighten up.
After class, the roomful of us aspiring journalists would commiserate.
The main takeaway? It was some sort of power trip.
But as the semester went on, and as most of us got to learn more about his methods by being on the receiving end of that mighty red pen, his point became clearer.
His point was not that our opinions didn’t matter.
His point was that there’s always a bigger story to be told that we alone cannot observe. Great reporting, or a great point-of-view, often requires the thoughts, experiences, and insights of others.
I’ve never forgotten that.
And while I don’t agree that personal opinions or experiences hold no place in B2B content (I think a balance of objectivity and subjectivity is best), I do wonder how things could be different for many companies if they worried less about being the expert, and more about finding and featuring the experts in their content.
Here’s how I think things would be different…
***
Everybody wanna be a media company but nobody wanna be a journalist.
But that’s the real work—to find and tell the stories that our collective audiences care about. The ones that inspire and motivate them. The ones they look to learn from.
Those stories, as my journalism professor said, often sit just beyond our own observations.
Here's what happens when we do the work to discover and tell those stories.
1. You'll have warmer reasons to reach out to your ideal customers and prospects
I like to describe this approach as ABM(ish)—have a wishlist of companies you’d like to work with?
Or, a customer profile that you already know is a good user/prospect/customer?
Instead of cold pitching your product, work with them to feature their insights around common challenges you know your audience has. Let them describe how they solve these challenges. (And yes, these are also challenges that your product/service ends up solving, too.)
2. People share the content for you.
Have you ever looked into conversion rates from referral traffic?
When you include your audience in the content, they’re also more likely to share it from their social accounts, link to it from their own content, share with their newsletter list, the Slack/Facebook groups they belong to, etc.
As time goes by, you’ll have dozens upon dozens of the right people sharing the content they contributed to. All of this compounds over time to make all channels more effective, including SEO.
There's a massive ancillary benefit to this as well...
3. Contributors will help drive more of the right traffic (and less of the wrong kind)
Founders tend to follow other founders.
Product managers tend to follow other product managers.
HR managers tend to follow other HR managers.
By featuring more of your ideal customer/client/prospect in your content, you’ll also attract more of them and less of the low-quality traffic that often comes as a result of a keyword-focused strategy. This might mean less overall traffic, but more of the right people.
4. The right people will find the content more relatable and relevant
So often when readers bounce from websites, it’s because they’re not feeling understood or represented in the content they're consuming.
A few years ago, an old exec I worked with said of a new company he was working with, “we have a lot content ranking on page one, I just hope no one sees it.”
They didn’t have writers with subject matter expertise, and as a result, he felt the content was empty calories. I told him that he was looking at the problem wrong—he didn’t need better writers. He needed writers who would go out and create content with their audience instead of for it. This will solve the problem as those same prospects will see themselves more accurately reflected in your content.
5. People will trust you to bring them the right information.
Think of your marketing team as curators of expertise — you research and plan your editorial around common challenges and go out and find the right answers, data, or people to help shape a more honest narrative.
When your audience views you more as a resource rather than a marketing touch point, they tend to come back.
***
My hope is that this inspires one article, one podcast, one video...you don't need to revamp your entire content strategy all at once.
There are relatively small steps we can take with one piece to test the concept and show progress:
Research topics and angles. What are people in your audience talking about on LinkedIn? Use the search functionality on LinkedIn to search about specific topics you know your audience cares about and see what people are saying. Which posts get the most engagement? What are people saying in the comments? Who are the common players posting about it? This could inspire some original angles that you'd never land on by relying solely on keyword research.
Survey your audience. This could be done manually with 1:1 outreach, or, you can actually create and promote a survey to your existing audience and explain what topics you're working on and what you hope to learn and share.
Leverage contributors in distribution. When you approach content this way, you'll have more substantial pieces to distribute. Quotes, data, examples, etc. No more link dumps––work with your contributors to amplify their own insights.
Let's get even more specific.
You can gather quotes literally right now on LinkedIn for your next content piece.
Search for the subject you’re writing about in LinkedIn’s search field
Filter by “posts”
Filter by date posted to find the most recent ones (this one is optional)
Review all of the relevant posts and the subsequent comments and connect with everyone who shared or posted a thoughtful response.
(“Connect” in this case means actually reaching out to share what you’re working on and how they can be a part of it.)
This is a goldmine of people already publicly posting about the very thing you’d want insights/quotes on. And if you filter by date posted, they’ve done so recently. So, it’s top of mind. Both are factors that should result in high response rates.
We need more reporters and fewer columnists.
We need to create content with our audience, not for them.
Enjoy the rest of your day. Someone, or some brand, is going to create that next piece of content that really explores and inspires your industry. Might as well be you.
- John
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