Imagine this situation for a moment, you are really enthusiastic about content marketing and decided to add it to your marketing mix. So you spend some time figuring out your target audience and what kind of content they would like. Your team then spent days creating great content that you think would be relevant to your audience. Finally, you put it out there only to find that it receives no response whatsoever (We are not counting family and friends here). The whole experience leaves you dejected with a bad taste in the mouth.
If you relate to the story above then you are not alone. With millions of content pieces posted every day, its difficult to figure how to attract the right audience to our content?
These days a typical post on a social media has a maximum vitality of few hours and then its lost in the stream. The way to gain further traction is either by paid boosting or if the content gets picked up by search engines or communities in social interactions. To depend on both these options is like shooting in the dark. You can never guarantee the result.
So how to make sure we don’t lose our content in the crowd? A simple trick that can work is to build a content daisy chain( A chain of content stringed together to lead an audience to the desired output) that links together.
Let me give you an example.
Recently I saw a post by Brian Solis on LinkedIn. As his follower, I trust his recommendations and the title of the post was interesting enough for me to have a look. It was a decent article with good information and a checklist that seemed very important. Now, who doesn’t click on a checklist that is on their favorites subject so I obliged? Guess, where did that take me? If you guessed Brian’s website, you are on the money, my friend.
Wait, whats the point here?
Brian Solis has worked hard to build his reputation as a thought leader in Digital Transformation. I trust the guy enough to consider his recommendation to be good and worthy of my attention. Notice, how Brian never asked me to do something, he just acknowledged his liking for the post. But that was enough for me to get sucked into the content rabbit hole & give my attention to a content daisy chain built by Brian.
I wasn’t asked to download a white paper or read an article which could’ve felt like content bait. However, Solis liking the post piqued my curiosity and I was on my way. Every step of the content daisy chain built my trust in the content journey more & more. Before I realised I had already downloaded the white paper that felt like an information gem. Yippee !!!
These days, good marketing strategy is about how efficiently you can hijack your audience’s attention. A good thing is you don’t have to do it all by yourself. In the example above, Solis did not create all the content. Stitching a customer journey made up of original as well as curated content adds a certain bit of social proof to the equation. In many cases this social proof is the differentiator when it comes to conversion. Look to leverage any such opportunities to do such collaborative work.
Whats the ROI ?
You may be wondering, what exactly did Brian gain from this whole exercise. Of course, other than knowing what kinda of content I enjoy reading. The answer is ‘Attention’. Attention along with cryptocurrency is the exchange revenue of the future. What Brian now has is the power to grab my attention any time he wants cause I gave him permission to do so. Going forward he has two option either to sell something to me or sell my attention to someone. In both cases, the content marketing has helped him get something that can be of value.
However, just like anything of value you got to be very careful that you don’t waste it. You need to invest it in the right way and it will help you grow exponentially. This attention marketing is the backbone of the Micro-Influencer industry works.
The “We are original” Campaign by Levi’s in China is a great example of how brands are leveraging attention. So to reach its target audience Levi’s partnered with mobile music app Tencent’s QQ music. The idea was to harness a segment of QQ’s audience that embodies Levi’s brand spirit. This was the fastest way to amplify the campaign and get it in front of the right audience.
So…
Creating and putting our content out there does not guarantee that our audience will pick it. The job of a content marketer is to figure out these synergies and start increasing the numbers in their Audience Attention (AA) account. It may seem like a long and tedious ordeal but remember, there is no short-term solution. It takes time for a content strategy to show result so don’t get disheartened and keep building chains of content journey stitched for your audience.
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