MackCollier.com

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Depth vs Reach; Why Talking to a Few People Beats Yelling at Everyone

I suspect there will be an update in the next Monday’s Marketing MInute, but the DOJ, along with multiple states, has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. The Senate has said it wants the CEOs of both Facebook and Twitter to come before it and explain why their platforms are censoring content. And both presidential candidates, Trump and Biden, have signaled that they will change CDA 230.

Over a year ago, I started talking about how there would be great disruption coming to the social media space over the coming years. Even before this, I began advising clients to lower their dependence on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, and focus more on communication channels they control, like their website/blog and email newsletters. Honestly, I don’t think Twitter and Facebook will be here 5 years from now. And I think as the social media landscape changes, I would hope that how we approach social media would change as well.

Years ago as influencer marketing was taking off, I advised companies interested in this space to invest in working with  the T-Shaped Influencer. A T-Shaped Influencer is one that doesn’t have a large following or reach, but who has a depth of connection with their smaller audience.  It’s the difference between an influencer who has 500,000 followers and no real connection with any of them, and am influencer who has 500 followers, who they know individually, and who all come from the same space.

Depth vs Reach.

One of the great failings of social media has been that it pushed us to pursue reach. Platforms weren’t built around communication (which is where depth occurs), they were built around extending reach. Build a network of followers, even buy them if you have to. Share your content  Track the number of Likes, Favs, ReTweets. If you really want to ramp things up, engage with only ‘Verified’ users or users that have over 100,000 followers!

Doesn’t this all sound like bullshit? How does any of this reflect ‘social’ as in social media? The reality is, social media for years has been far more about the media than it has the social. When Twitter first launched, if you followed someone, you saw ALL their tweets. You may think you do now, but you don’t. If you are following Sarah and Tom, and Sarah replies to Tom, you will see that tweet. But if you are following Sarah and NOT following Tom, you won’t see if Sarah replies to Tom. When Twitter first launched, this wasn’t the case. This allowed you to follow people, then see who they were talking to, and meet new people through their conversations. It was a wonderful way to build your Twitter network organically and make new connections and friends. But Twitter decided this was creating the need for a lot of bandwidth they didn’t want to pay for, so they ended this feature. When Twitter users complained, Twitter clarified that it was never intended to be a communications platform, but rather a broadcast platform.

Think about that for a minute. And then think about the UX at Facebook, is it positioned more as a communication or broadcast platform in your opinion?

I think we will see fundamental changes in social media over the next few years. I think as these changes are happening, we need to be vigilant in pushing for changes that bring the ‘social’ back into social media. We need platforms that allow us to forge deeper connections with fewer people versus having little or no connection with everyone.

Depth vs Reach. If Social Media 1.0 was all about maximizing Reach, let’s make Social Media 2.0 all about maximizing Depth.

 

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Marketing and Movies: Hearts In Atlantis

Hearts In Atlantis is a wonderful drama that, when you finish watching it you will likely say “Wait, that was based on a Stephen King book?” It was, and it features a wonderful performance by the always brilliant Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins plays Ted Brautigan, a man with psychic powers who is being chased by a governmental group that wants to use Ted’s powers. Ted frequently moves to stay one step ahead of the government or ‘low men’ as he calls them.

But as the movie opens, we are in the present day and the studio of Bobby Garfield. Bobby has just received a package from the attorney of his childhood friend ‘Sully’ Sullivan. Bobby, Sully and Carol Gerber were childhood friends, and when they were children, Sully had once promised Bobby that he would leave Bobby his baseball glove in his will. Bobby opens the package to find that baseball glove inside. He soon learns that Sully was killed in a car accident, and travels back to his hometown to attend the funeral. While there, he meets with Sully’s attorney, and mentions that he hadn’t seen Carol yet, and that he was very much looking forward to seeing her during his trip. The attorney then informs Bobby that Carol had actually died a few years earlier. Shocked, Bobby returns to his old childhood home, and the majority of the movie is shown as Bobby remembering what his life was like one summer with Sully and Carol, and then later, when Ted Brautigan came into their lives.

One of the over-arching themes of the movie is the magic of being a child during the summer. So many of us seem to have that one magical summer of our youth where we made special friends, had our ‘summer love’ or just enjoyed being a carefree child enjoying a magical time in our lives. The movie does a great job of making us nostalgic for the summers of our youth. I’ll talk about this more in a minute. When Ted arrives on the scene, he is living next door to Bobby and his mom. Ted soon offers to pay Bobby $1 a week to read the newspaper to him, claiming his eyesight is failing him. Bobby shrewdly suspects that there’s more to the offer, and asks Ted to tell him what the REAL job is. Ted then explains that what he really wants Bobby to do is keep an eye out around town for the government group or ‘low men’ that are chasing him. One of Ted’s psychic abilities includes being able to ‘sense’ when his pursuers are closing in on him. Ted can also read minds, and when Bobby’s mom suddenly arrives home and yells for him, Bobby flinches, but Ted quickly grabs his hand and tells him “She can’t tell what you are thinking. You think she can, and that’s her power over you.”

All three of the childhood friends grow a quick affection for Ted, especially Bobby. Bobby’s father died when he was very young, and one of the subplots of the movie is Bobby recalling his love of his father. And in this scene, we find out that Bobby’s father and Ted were once at the same football game sharing another love, that of former Chicago Bears great Bronco Nagurski:

Nostalgia in marketing is very powerful, and I think it’s even more impactful in volatile times like this when we want to return to a time when things were more…pleasant. More peaceful, more normal. Nostalgia often involves us returning to our youth, and note that Ted made his story far more interesting to Bobby by involving his dad in the telling of the story.

Whenever I talk about creating content that builds awareness, I mention that you (as the content creator) need to remember that you are trying to connect with an audience that doesn’t know who you are. So you create content that focuses on what’s important and relevant to the customer. In the above scene, what if Ted had told Bobby a story about “Jim Thorpe, the greatest football player that ever lived.” Bobby’s first reaction might have been “Well he wasn’t as good as Bronco Nagurski, my dad LOVED Bronco Nagurski!” Bobby likely doesn’t know who Thorpe was, but he knows who Bronco Nagurski was, cause his dad loved him. Ted reaches Bobby by telling a story about a football player that his dad loved.

Nostalgia in marketing can be very powerful. Anytime you can tie your marketing messages to something else that your customer loves and remembers fondly, it’s a good thing. And if you haven’t, do check out Hearts In Atlantis, a wonderful movie. This quote from Ted may tell you where the movie gets it title from “Sometimes when you’re young, you have moments of such happiness, you think you’re living in someplace magical, like Atlantis must have been?”

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Toolbox Saturday: Writing Better Headlines

One of the best skills you can learn as a content creator is how to write better headlines for your content.  It can be a blog post title, a YouTube video title, a title for your Twitch stream. The headline you give content is vital to grabbing attention and then letting people quickly know what your content is about, and why it is interesting.

When I first started blogging, I wrote horrible headlines.  I’m fair to middlin’ now, as we say in the South. At first, I would write my post, then when the post was done, whip up a short headline that basically summarized what the post was about. The problem with this approach is that the headline is often the only thing someone sees about a post when it is shared on other social media sites. So as sharing on social sites became a more important way to boost awareness for your content, I began to get more serious about crafting better headlines.

What you want to do with your headline is give readers the most interesting parts of the post so they are compelled to click that link and read your post. If you write a boring headline or one that simply summarizes the post, your content can quickly get lost in a sea of links on social media homefeeds.

Let’s look at a few post examples and then talk about bad and good headlines you can write for that post.

1 – You are writing a post on the last decade in college football.

Boring headline – A Brief History of Modern College Football

Great headline – Rising Tide: How Alabama and the SEC Have Dominated College Football For Over a Decade

 

See how specific the second headline is? The first headline is pretty bland, it gives you a general sense of what the post is about, but by adding specifics, you can spark greater interest. Also note that with the second headline, we are honing in on a story within a story; we’ll look at recent college football history, but more specifically how Alabama and the SEC have dominated. This will interest fans of Alabama and the SEC, but it can also interest fans of programs like Clemson, who may think their program should be talked about more.

 

2 – You are writing a post financial planning.

Boring headline – Creating a Retirement Plan From Scratch

Great Headline – The Four Things Financial Experts Say You Can Do Today to Increase Your Retirement Nestegg By Up to 500%!

 

Again, the second headline is much more specific and gives the reader a better idea of what content they will be reading if they click the link and go to your blog. With the first post, you really have no idea how in-depth the post will be or how helpful.  The second post tells you there’s four things you can do, and doing those four things can increase the amount you have for retirement by up to 500%.  A slightly less effective version of this headline could be “Financial Experts Say Doing These Things Could Greatly Increase Your Retirement Nestegg!” That’s better than the boring headline because it’s slightly more specific, but the ‘great’ headline is even more specific, so it works better.

 

Now, the one thing you don’t want to do is go overboard with your headline and make it too ‘interesting’. You never want to make a promise with your headline that your post can’t back up. There’s nothing worst than clicking on an amazing headline, then finding out that the post itself is an ad for a product or a post that’s completely different from what the headline promised. That’s the quickest way to ensure that I never click on your links again.

So when you’re writing headlines, look and post and ask yourself ‘why is this post interesting?  What’s the HOOK that will grab readers attention and make them want to click the link and read the post?’  Again, make the headline as specific and interesting as possible, but make sure your post delivers on the big promises that the headline makes. Do both those things, and you’ll see your content getting more views and more exposure!

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Toolbox Saturday: Using Topic Buckets to Create Better Content

You’re at a conference (pretend it’s 2019 back when we went to conferences), and you’re leaving the breakfast area to go up to the 3rd floor where the session you want to attend is about to start. A guy runs on the elevator with you and you both are on your way.  He asks what your company does. Now what do you say?  What are the 3 or so things that your company does that you would mention to this stranger? What do you want your company to be known for?

Those are your topic buckets.  Those are the areas you should focus on when you create content. Typically it’s best to pick around 3 areas that relate to your company, that you want to be associated with your company.

For instance, I have three main topic buckets for my content here; Customer experience, customer service/support, and customer loyalty. I want every piece of content I create to touch on at least one of those areas or buckets.

By using this system it makes it much easier to not only create a content calendar for your blog, it also makes it much easier for you to focus your content. The more defined your content is, the easier it will be for your readers to understand what you are writing about AND it will be much easier for search engines to understand what content identifies with your site.

For instance, when someone asks you “Hey what’s a good site to learn about Chinese cooking?”, then you will point them toward sites or blogs that you know cover Chinese cooking.  When someone goes to a search engine and asks “How do I get started with Chinese cooking?”, the search engine will point that person toward the website that it thinks best answers that question. In other words, it will be a site devoted to Chinese cooking.

Topic buckets can also help you fill and set your content calendar.  Let’s say you have committed to writing three new posts a week on your blog. If you have three Topic Buckets you want to focus on, then simply write a post for each Topic Bucket, once a week! Bam, three posts a week!  You can follow this schedule and over time you can track the performance of the posts in each Topic Bucket.  You may find that the posts in one of your Topic Buckets usually perform much better than the other two. This is likely a sign that your readers want to see more from you on that topic.  So you can adjust your content schedule, maybe write two posts a week from that Topic Bucket, then rotate your third post between the two remaining Topic Buckets.

 

I love using Topic Buckets because I am all about anything that simplifies the content creation process. Anything that we, as content creators, can do to create good content, faster, I’m all for it! Hope using Topic Buckets helps you with your content creation efforts! Have a great weekend, see you on Monday!

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Three Ways to Create Content That Connects With Customers

create contentIt’s really tough to create content that consistently connects with customers. Part of the problem is simply staffing; Most companies hand off content creation to mid or lower-level digital people. If they do a good job, they often get promoted into more marketing-oriented roles. So there can be a constant talent-drain happening for your content team.

One way to avoid this is to have good processes in place. Part of this is having a system for the type of content that you should be creating to connect with your customers. Today I wanted to talk about three different roles that your content can play. This will help you think about how you can quickly and easily create content that has value for your customers.

 

Be a teacher. Think about how you use search engines. If you have a problem, you’re searching for a solution, right?  Here’s some of the basic search terms you’ve probably used before:

“What’s the best way to…”

“How do I get rid of…”

“Which (product) is best to solve (problem)?”

 

Often, when we use search engines, we are really searching for the answer to a question or the solution to a problem we are having. So apply this to your customers; What problems do they have, and what solutions do they need?  Once you have those answers, then create content that answers those questions and provides those solutions! This not creates valuable content for your customers, but it also creates the content that search engines will serve up when other customers when they search for those same terms!

So how do you figure out what questions your customers have?  First, look at any feedback you are already getting from your customers. This could be emails feedback on social media channels, or even letters. Next, talk to your customer support team, and see what are the common issues that customers are having. Is there a certain product feature that many customers are having trouble understanding how to use? Is there a common complaint that customers have, and maybe you can create a blog post that helps explain the issue to customers?

Finally, look at product reviews, not just for your products, but also your competitors. For instance, if you see that reviews for a competitors product are constantly complaining that the competing product does not have a certain feature that your product does, then you should point that out in your content. But all of these types of customer feedback give you very valuable insights into how you can create content that helps your customers and which also helps address issues they are facing.

 

Be a storyteller. I am a sucker for case studies and ‘real-world’ examples. I love hearing how people ‘just like me’ are using a product or service and hearing how its helping them. This helps me understand how I could use the product or service as well, and its honestly a more effective way of selling and promotion than simply coming directly from the brand. The reality is, we tend to trust other customers more than we do brands. It is the central lesson behind my book Think Like a Rock Star.

So you can create content that showcases how your customers are using your products or services. This will help other potential customers better understand how your products work, and can also address concerns they have about your products. In fact, you can take customer feedback you get from creating content that teaches in the above example, and use it here. Let’s say you write a ‘teaching’ post that shows customers how to use your product in a particular way.  Sarah leaves a comment on your Facebook page saying thank you, and says that your post solved a problem she was having and now she loves using your product. You could contact Sarah and learn more about how she uses your product, then use her experiences as a ‘case study’ post to show other customers how your product helped Sarah.

 

Be inspirational. So we’ve talked about creating content that teaches your customers how to better use your products, and content that showcases how current customers are benefiting from your products. These are great ways to create engaging content for your customers, but these methods are focused on what’s happening today. What if you wanted to create content that shows customers how their lives or daily routines could be changed for the better, by purchasing your product? What if you could create content that could paint a picture for customers of how their lives would be better, if they owned your product?

Here’s an example of how this could work. I have always been a car owner. I hate trucks and SUVs, simply because when I drive one, it feels like I’m driving a slow tank and I’m gonna run over everything and hit every car. I love driving cars because it feels like I’m more in control, like I have better vision and they are just more fun for me to drive.

So I’m not in the market today for an SUV. However, what if you could paint a picture for me of what my life could look like if I owned your SUV? Let’s say you have an SUV you want to tell me about.  “Sorry, I don’t like SUVs, I drive cars.”

“Hear me out!” you say.  “This SUV is different”.

You then tell me about how your SUV has a dedicated wifi router in place, so it is in effect a ‘rolling hotspot’.  The SUV gives the driver a constant, high-speed internet connection. The center console comes with a laptop docking station and multiple USB ports. The back row of seats feature enough room to comfortably sit and the back of the driver and passenger seats have monitors for taking video calls. Finally, the roof has an attachment that allows you to install a green screen so you can create and record videos, with the included interior cameras. Basically, this SUV is a ‘mobile office’, that would allow me to do any of my normal business and content creation functions, no matter where I am.

Would that make me interested in your SUV?  Well…it wouldn’t hurt! By showing me how your SUV could help me perform most or all of my daily business functions even while on the road, that adds a great deal of value for me. If you can paint a picture for the customer via your content of how the customer’s life can be changed for the better TOMORROW by owning your product today, that gets the customer’s attention.

 

So that’s three ways you can create content that will connect with your customers.

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Marketing and Movies: Moneyball

I am a sucker for shows or documentaries that detail how a business started from nothing and became a success. I’m also a big fan of sports movies. Moneyball is both, so of course it’s one of my favorite movies.

Moneyball follows the 2001 offseason and 2002 season that saw the Oakland Athletics overcome massive budget constraints and the loss of its star players to set the American League record for consecutive wins, and make the postseason. I think the story of Moneyball will resonate with a lot of business owners who are having to take a long, hard look at its direction given the economic and business uncertainty we are all facing heading into 2021.

In the 2001 offseason, Oakland lost its two ‘star’ players, Johnny Damon and Jason Giambi to rivals who could afford to pay far richer salaries than the Athletics could. General Manager Bill Beane went to the Athletics owner and told him he needed more money to make the Athletics competitive. The owner said there was no more money for Beane and that he should do the best he can. Beane then went to his scouts who were focused on trying to replace Giambi and Damon. Beane became frustrated with this mentality because he knew that the Athletics couldn’t afford players that could hit the same number of HRs and who had the same batting average as Giambi and Damon. And even if they could find a couple of players that could put up similar stats to Giambi and Damon, the Athletics would lose them in a year or two when a richer ballclub offered them a higher salary that the Athletics couldn’t match.

Beane knew that the Athletics needed to change the way they viewed acquiring players. At first he tried to get the best players the Athletics could afford. He visited the Indians, and proposed several trades or player acquisitions, but Beane noticed that these offers were all rejected after advisor Peter Brand spoke to management. Beane left the meeting frustrated, and decided to speak to Brand directly to find out what he told Indians management to get them to kill his player offers.

Brand then explained to Beane that many baseball teams were making a grave mistake in evaluating players. Most teams at the time were focusing on stats like home runs, runs batted in and batting average. Brand explained “your goal shouldn’t be to buy players, it should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.” Beane was impressed by Brand’s new approach to player evaluation and hired him from the Indians to help him rebuild the Athletics team.

In part of doing that, Beane and Brand began evaluating offensive players based not on HRs, RBIs or BA, but instead on whether or not they got on base. In this scene, Beane meets with the Athletics’ scouts and explains the change in philosophy when it comes to evaluating players:

As you can see, the scouts were confused by this approach as soon as they heard it. As Beane and Brand continued to acquire players who didn’t have flashy stats (but who did get on base), the fans and rest of the league scratched their heads at what the Athletics were doing. Then, the team began to struggle mightily, resulting in huge pressure being put on Beane to change his ‘moneyball’ approach to building his team in order to save his job. Beane decided to see the season through, even trading Carlos Pena, who was projected as a future All-Star, simply because he wasn’t the best fit for his new ‘moneyball’ system. That decision led to Brand asking him to please reconsider, and Beane told him that if they believed in their ‘moneyball’ approach, that they needed to commit to it:

Over time, Beane and Brand worked with the players to help educate them on how to get on base more often and how to play smart once they did. In one scene, Beane explains to a player that he wants him to focus on getting on base, not on stealing bases.  The player replies “but you pay me to steal bases, that’s what I do”, to which Beane replies “I pay you to get on first, not get thrown out at second.”

They worked with the players to stress to them the importance of waiting for their perfect pitch. Brand used analytics to show the players when to take pitches and when to swing, based on their hitting history. The play of the team improved dramatically, as the Athletics went from one of the worst teams in baseball to one of the best. Along the way, the Athletics won 20-straight games, setting an American League record that would stand for 15 years.

Now there’s several themes from Moneyball that I think tie nicely to successful marketing and business. First, there’s having the courage to try something new if your current strategy has proven not to work. Beane faced a ton of resistance to his Moneyball approach both within the Athletics organization, and in the sport of baseball. He was trying something new, and quite honestly a lot of people wanted to see him fail. That leads to the second key lesson, to commit to your strategy and give it a chance. When the Athletics actually did start losing, that just increased the pressure on Beane to drop the ‘moneyball’ approach. But Beane trusted in the strategy that he and Brand had developed, and committed to seeing it through.

But what really resonated for me personally was the idea of evaluating players based on whether or not they get on base versus if they have flashy stats. Getting on base can be done in some very unsexy ways, like taking 12 pitches and a walk, or getting hit by a pitch. Beane just wanted to see his players get on base, he didn’t care how they did it. At the time, many teams wanted a player that would hit 40 HRs, and didn’t really care if his on-base percentage was .250.

For years, I approached blogging and content creation as if I was constantly chasing home runs. Or in terms of blogging, a home run would be an ‘awesome post’. So every post was supposed to be a home run, or ‘awesome’. And we constantly hear this, don’t we?  ‘It’s about quality, not quantity!’ or ‘If you can’t write a great post, wait till you can!’

The reality is, no blogger writes a great post every time. But for years, that was my goal, write a great post every time. And write a lot of them.

I used to love Kathy Sierra’s blog Creating Passionate Users. Kathy was a very infrequent blogger. She would typically blog once, maybe twice a month at most. But almost every post she wrote, was incredible. Whenever a new Kathy Sierra post was published, it would create an immediate ripple throughout the blogging and tech community.

Kathy hit a home run every time she posted. I thought that was the standard. That’s what I wanted to do.

So every time I would start out to blog, I wanted to make every post be an awesome one. By the 3rd or 4th day, I had typically run out of ‘awesome’ ideas for posts. So I would tell myself ‘if you can’t write an awesome blog post today, then don’t write anything’. So I wouldn’t. Then the next day I would try again. Before I knew it, I was blogging once a week, then once every other week.

This process repeated itself over the years. This year, I decided to try something different. Before, I told myself “Your job is to write an awesome blog post today”.  Now, I tell myself “Your job is to write a blog post today”.

See the difference? Before I was shooting to hit a ‘home run’ at every at bat, which is completely unrealistic.  Now, I focus on getting on base.  Just writing a blog post.

Because the reality is, the more you write, the better you become at writing.  The more often you blog, the better you become at blogging, the better you become at writing awesome posts.

So that’s my ‘moneyball’ approach to blogging; Don’t worry about hitting a home run, just get on base.

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The Blank Space on the Calendar

I talked last week about how I’m enjoying using the Editorial Calendar plugin to help organize and plan my content here. It’s helped me plan out my content this week and last as I rededicated to blogging 6 times a week.

Well all last week and all this week, there’s been a blank spot on Friday, Sept 11th. I simply couldn’t decide on a topic for today’s post. Now in the past, my blogging philosophy has always been if I can’t write something awesome, don’t write anything at all. Which sounds like a good idea. The problem I would often run into was, if I missed one day, it seemed to increase the pressure to make sure I got a post out the next day. But it also had to be an ‘awesome’ post. So if I couldn’t come up with an idea for an ‘awesome’ post on that 2nd day, just wait till the 3rd.  After I had gone 2-3 days without blogging, it was very easy to justify not blogging again till I had that ‘awesome’ idea.

As you can imagine, that often led to gaps of a week or two between posts.  Sometimes longer.

When I was planning out the ‘relaunch’ of my blog over the last few weeks, it came after I saw this wonderful interview given by Kobe Bryant. What really struck me was this portion here Kobe talked about how he had to show up every day:

Kobe’s comments about showing up every day and being faithful to the people who were paying to see him resonated with me.  I was thinking of two separate stories that relate to the value of showing up, and what happens when you don’t.

When I first started blogging in 2005, I had no idea what I was doing, and I wanted to study how other people were blogging in order to improve my craft. I would use Technorati’s blog search (remember them?) to find new blogs, and I wanted to find great blogs that weren’t yet ‘known’, but I also wanted to see how other new bloggers were growing their blogs. I found this one blog, and I started with the first post on the blog. For the first couple of weeks, the blogger had a new post every day like clockwork. Then starting on the third week, the posts came every other day. Then one post the fourth week.  Then a couple of weeks later, the title was the post “Why isn’t anyone commenting on this blog???”

That was the last post on the blog. I knew at that point I’d just seen this blog die. Anyone that’s started a new blog knows that it typically takes months if not years to build a decent and engaged readership. Especially in 2020.

Here’s the second story that Kobe’s comments reminded me of. I talked yesterday about how Twitch content creator Nickmercs is using YouTube to create new content. Nick regularly gets over 100,000 viewers for his Twitch streams. That’s in 2020, so keep that in mind when you see this tweet from 2014:

Here’s Nick in 2014, 6 years ago, happy that he had 170 viewers for that day’s stream. From 170 to 100,000 in 6 years. Not bad.

So I think there’s value in creating the best possible content you can, but it’s also important to show up as often as you can.

Or as Seth Godin likes to say “Done is better than perfect.”

Well today’s post is Done. The blank space on the calendar is filled. On to tomorrow.

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Case Study: Creating Different Video Content For Different Audiences

I’ve talked before about how you can create different types of content based on the Buyer’s Journey, or where they are in the purchase process.

There are four different stages in general:

1 – Unaware and I don’t care.  This person doesn’t know who you are or why they should care about you. So in order to connect with this person, you don’t talk about your company AT ALL. You talk about the potential customer.  That will get their attention and give you a chance to move to the next stages.

2 – Slightly Aware. At this stage the customer has some idea of who your company is and what it does. At this stage you want to create content that helps the customer understand how your products or services fit into their lives, or relate to them. This will help them understand how your company’s products and services can help them, and will grow their interest in your company.

3 – Interested. At this stage the customer knows who you are, knows why your products or services are valuable to them, and is considering making a purchase. At this stage you want to focus almost completely on the product or service you are selling. You have to keep in mind that at this stage, the customer is doing research in anticipation of making a purchase. So give them detailed information on what you have to offer.

4 – Ready to buy, take my money! Pretty self-explanatory, the customer is ready to make a purchase. At this stage you simply complete the transaction, no need to continue to sell to them, they are ready to buy.

 

To give you an idea of how you can create different types of video content, I wanted to go back to the example of how Twitch content creator @nickmercs is creating content for his YouTube channel. I talked about Nick’s video content before, he will stream several hours a day on Twitch, then condense this gameplay down to 15-20 minutes of his ‘best’ content, and post that to YouTube. Nick monetizes his YouTube channel so he gets paid by views, but if we were thinking about where this content would typically fall in the above categories, it would go under the Aware stage. People that watch Nick’s videos are typically aware of who he is, and want to see his content.

But a few weeks ago, Nick did something a bit different with his content on his YouTube channel. He and two teammates won a $100,000 Call of Duty: Warzone tournament. He then created a video where he walks the audience through exactly what he and his team did in the final game that led to them winning the tournament. He breaks down every movement, why they did what they did (or what the ‘strat’ was, as the kids say), and talks about how viewers can replicate his success as they are playing the game. This type of content is much more in depth than a simple highlight video, and as such is aimed at a slightly different audience:

Now, Nick is monetizing his YouTube channel so the content he creates is all about maximizing views. This particular video was done as a bit of an experiment, it seems, just to see how the audience would react. This video currently has over 600,000 views, which is huge, but many of Nick’s Warzone videos have more views. It makes sense that this video would have fewer views, because it would appeal to a smaller audience than his typical ‘highlight’ video. If you were to place this video into one of the above four categories, it would fall under the Interested category for customers who are in the research phase. Now Nick is making money off his YouTube channel via monetization, but if he wanted to sell personal coaching services where he mentored players to perform well in eSports tournaments like Warzone, a video such as this would be a perfect way to sell such services.

Just keep in mind that the type of content you create at each stage of the Buyer’s Journey transcends the content channel. If they are Unaware and just entering your sales or marketing funnel, you create content focused solely on the customer. When they are near the bottom of the funnel in the Interested stage, you talk about what it is that you are selling. Doesn’t matter if you are creating blog posts, videos, podcasts, whatever.

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How Twitch Streamers Are Taking Repurposing Content to the Next Level

Repurposing content means to get multiple uses out of one piece of content. For instance, it could mean writing a long blog post, then repurposing that blog post into a white paper, or a podcast episode, or an infographic. Repurposing content is especially important for companies with a smaller content team, where every piece of content needs to achieve maximum results.

For the last couple years, I’ve been watching how streamers on Twitch are building their communities. It’s been fascinating to watch these streamers leverage smart marketing tactics to create and build engagement around their streams. In fact, they really aren’t calling themselves ‘streamers’ anymore, they are now ‘content creators’. Whatever you call them, they are smart, and there’s a lot you can learn about how they are building their channels and brands, that you can apply to your own company’s content strategy.

For example, I recently started watching one streamer, excuse me…content creator, called NickMercs on Twitch. Basically, here’s what Nick does; He plays video games on Twitch most every day for about 8-10 hours a day.  So he has 8-10 hours a day of content he has created. He then takes that content, and distills it down to about 15-20 mins of the ‘best’ content (think of it as a highlight reel), then creates a new video from that content, and posts it on YouTube. Typically, the videos he posts on YouTube get 300,000-400,000 views in the first 24 hours!

This is a wonderful example of the power of repurposing content. Nick is able to monetize his Twitch content, then he takes that content and repurposes it as a shorter video for YouTube, and he can make ad revenue off it as well. So in essence, he’s found a way to monetize the same content, twice.

Now I can already hear many of you asking “That’s great, but you’re talking video games on Twitch and YouTube. How does that relate to my business and my content?”

You’re right, the odds are your business can’t create a video a day for YouTube that gets a few hundred thousand views. But what you can do is learn from what’s working for Nickmercs, and apply it to your own content creation efforts.

Nick is doing two things with his content that your business can and should replicate:

1 – He’s creating content for his audience where they are. The primary age group for Twitch viewers is around 18-24 years old and mostly male. This same audience that watches Twitch channels will often consume similar content on YouTube. So by taking his Twitch content and repurposing it into shorter YouTube videos, he’s getting a chance to reach a similar audience, but on a different platform. This is a smart content play, because if the people that watch his videos on YouTube enjoy them, he has a great chance to convert them into viewers of his Twitch channel.

You can do the same thing for your content. Whatever industry or space your content serves, there’s bound to be at least 2-3 main sites where your audience goes to get its content from. Think about how you could take your content and use it in multiple ways to reach a similar audience on different platforms. For instance, let’s say you’ve identified that your audience wants to consume content from blogs, and Twitter. You could post informative content on your blog, then turn around and have a Twitter chat around the same topic on Twitter. The end result is that one form of content helps promote and push people toward the other form of content.

2 – He’s customizing the content for each platform. On Twitch, Nick’s streams can last for several hours. But most people won’t watch an 8-hour stream on YouTube, in fact it may not even be possible to republish the Twitch stream on YouTube due to Twitch’s TOS. So what Nick does is, he changes the content from Twitch to make it more in line with what the YouTube audience wants.  He takes an 8 hour stream, and cherry-picks the ‘highlights’ or best plays, and condenses it down to a 20-min video, and posts that on YouTube. This results in content that’s better suited for YouTube, plus the content itself promotes Nick and the content he creates on Twitch. He is able to not only monetize the videos on YouTube, but he uses them to drive the YouTube audience back to his Twitch stream, and hopefully convert them to viewers or subscribers there.

Now if you think about what Nick did here, he basically took long-form content (his Twitch stream), and condensed it down and shared the ‘highlights’ as a YouTube video. So he got two very effective pieces of content from one. I like this idea of taking ‘highlights’ from your content and using that as new content or to promote other content. Think about the applications; You could take a series of blog posts about the same topic and condense them into a shorter white paper, and offer that as a freebie to newsletter subscribers. Speaking of your newsletter, you could publish an issue where you give pull quotes or highlights from multiple blog posts as a way to incite subscribers to read your blog. You could use those same pull quotes to promote the posts when you share them on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

The end result for Nick is two standalone pieces of content that he can very effectively monetize, but that also work well together as one serves as promotion for the other. When you are looking at your own content, think about how you could take your long-form content and break it down into smaller pieces of new content, focuses on your ‘highlights’ or best content, and how could that content be used to build an audience for your business, but also push that audience back to your long-form content.

Now, speaking of pushing back to long-form content. There is one thing about Nick’s content strategy that I don’t like. Notice that in this example, the content he is creating and repurposing is going on two platforms that he does not own. I would much rather see the main content be on a platform that Nick owns, like a website, but I do understand that Twitch as a streaming platform is currently a much better alternative than any tech that Nick or another streamer could use on their own site. But the thing I’m always stressing to clients is to own the platforms where your content lives. Too many businesses even in 2020 feel that they don’t need a website as long as they have a brand page on Facebook.

Own your platform, own the experience. Then when the day comes that Facebook and even Twitch goes away, you’ll be ok cause you’ll still have your own platform where you can create all the content you want.

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Understanding the Tool Doesn’t Help If You Don’t Understand Your People

I’ve often been told that I could make a nice career for myself just by advising companies how to start and maintain a blog and social media channels. I sometimes do such consulting, but not that often. One of the reasons why is because too many companies are focused on learning the social media tools moreso than learning to understand the customers they want to reach via social media. They want to talk about what is the best CMS, what’s the best way to schedule and automate content distribution. What’s the best way to tweak a tool’s settings to get more engagement and shares?

It really gets to be depressing sometimes.

Understand yourself, and your audience first, then you can focus on the tools. Too many companies focus on the tools and ignore their customers, which defeats the purpose.

Start by asking and answering these questions:

1 – Who am I creating content for?

2 – What impact will that content make on their daily lives?

3 – What action do I want these people to take after interacting with my content?

 

Notice those questions are focused on the audience for your content and have nothing to do with the tools you could use to reach that audience.

Know your audience first, then that will help you understand which tools you can best use to reach them. THEN you can dig into understanding the tools.  But it makes no sense to learn the nuts and bolts of Twitter, if your audience is on Pinterest.

BONUS: Understand yourself. How do YOU like to communicate with your audience? The content you create has to be interesting to your audience, but it also has to interest you. Granted, this is more of an issue for a solopreneur or maybe an executive versus a team, but the fact remains that if the content creator doesn’t enjoy the process, it will be more difficult for them to create their best content. If you love writing and your audience is reading blog, write a blog. If you think better on the fly and are comfortable in front of a camera, look at shooting videos. Or if you can better explain yourself by talking, but hate being on video, try a podcast.

The point is, understand who your audience is and what you are comfortable doing before you even consider which tool is best. The people decide the tools, not the other way around.