Chapter 4
Adding Audience to Your Sweet Spot
My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.
In early 2014, I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop for a number of enterprise marketers in Toronto, Canada. In one particular conversation at the workshop, the blog manager for a billion-dollar technology company told me she was having problems with her blog. She had been adding more and more daily content to the blog and at the same time was seeing stagnant website traffic and far fewer subscribers and conversions.
My first question was this: “Who is the audience for your blog?”
She answered: “We target 18 different audiences on the blog.”
“I found your problem.”
WHO’S THE WHO?
The sweet spot is a place where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort.
Countless businesses fail with their Content Inc. model because they stop after identifying the intersection of their knowledge area or skill and their passion. To this point, it’s all about us. It’s sharing what we know.
Who cares? Probably not very many people.
In order to complete the sweet spot formula, we need to identify the “who.” Who is the audience for your content? Remember, for the Content Inc. model to work, we need to figure out how we can build the engine that positions us as the leading informational expert in our particular market niche. We want to define our audience as specifically as possible.
Ask the following questions:
1. Who is he or she? How does this person live an average day?
2. What’s the person’s need? This is not “Why does the person need our product or service?” but “What are his or her informational needs and pain points as they relate to the stories we will tell?”
3. Why will this person care about us, our products, our services? It’s the information provided to him or her that will make that person care or garner attention.
Your idea of the “who” doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be detailed enough so that you can clearly visualize this person in your head as you develop content.
Doug Kessler, cofounder of the UK agency Velocity Partners, said the sweet spot is “the thing your company knows better than—or at least as well as—anyone else in the world.” Understanding the “who” gives you the context you need to make this happen.
Marcus Sheridan from River Pools & Spas became the worldwide leader in information about fiberglass pools for those homeowners interested in purchasing a pool. If Marcus were targeting, let’s say, manufacturers of fiberglass pools, the content would be vastly different. It’s the “who” that gives the content the context it needs to be successful.
MAKING IT REAL
As we add in our audience group, we’ve added a new dimension to our sweet spot (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 By adding your specific audience to the mix, now the sweet spot truly becomes meaningful.
Let’s go back to our friend the Chicken Whisperer. Andy Schneider’s original sweet spot was a knowledge area of backyard poultry and a passion for teaching and instruction.
Now let’s add the audience to make our sweet spot come to life (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 Wrapping the sweet spot with a specific audience will bring your sweet spot to life.
Now we have enough information to capture the sweet spot in a single sentence. This is very similar to how media companies start to construct an editorial mission statement (more on this in Chapter 6).
Andy Schneider’s mission statement might have looked something like this:
Helping suburban homeowners answer all their possible questions regarding raising chickens at home.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
Now that you’ve seen a visual example of the sweet spot, let’s start adding some dimension to your model. Here’s a useful template you can use to begin to construct the initial stages of your strategy.
Here are examples of what a completed form looks like for Content Marketing Institute. We have three different audiences that we target with our content. Note that when we began our Content Inc. model in 2007, we only focused on one audience. We added the second audience group in 2014 and the third group in 2015.
In the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, the job of the lobby boy was to know the clientele so well that he could anticipate their needs. That is your role now. Your job is to learn your audience so well that you’ll be able to develop ongoing content that is so good, the people in your audience are not even aware they needed it in the first place.
If you are in need of an easy-to-use resource on building out who your audience really is, you’ll find the CMI resource on audience personas (http://cmi.media/CI-personas) helpful.
CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS
To be successful with our Content Inc. strategy, you have to become indispensable to your audience. That means creating a strategy that can actually position you as the leading informational or entertainment expert in your content area.
The more audiences you target, the more likely you will fail. Focus on the most defined audience possible.
As you get started, don’t get bogged down focusing on more than one audience. Choose one audience and become the indispensable expert to that audience. Once that is successful, you can move on to other audiences.
Resource
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Fox Searchlight Pictures, released March 2014.