A short YouTube monologue by Jeff Harrison (Swing Point Media) giving practical advice on building a content marketing strategy. In this chunk he emphasizes narrowing and clearly defining the ideal target audience, warning against overly broad demographic descriptions and using a hunting metaphor to illustrate the need for specificity.
Hey, welcome to another Local Marketing Insight. I'm Jeff Harrison with Swing Point Media, where we create media for your business to get found easily and effortlessly online as well as develop a content marketing strategy. In fact, today, that's we're going to talk about is how to develop a content marketing strategy. Now, quite honestly, it's going to sound like it's a big animal, but we're going to take this one bite at a time. Because a long time ago I was taught, if you're going to eat an elephant, how do you do it one bite at a time? So the first thing we want to do is we want to decide who our audience is. Now, I can't tell you how many times we've spoken to groups, local business owners, other entrepreneurs, and we ask them what their, you know, who is their ideal audience? And they start giving us this range. Well, it's male or female, they're between 18 and 34 and that. And I say, well, let me ask you a question.
Imagine if you were going to go hunting. Now, when I use this as just an example, I'm not condoning killing animals. This is just an example. So that's my disclaimer there. But let's say, for instance, I say, hey, we're going to go hunting, okay? I'm going to say, what do you hunt for? Well, I'm going to look for anything with four legs on it, and.
It'S male or female and it grazes, it eats grass, okay? So let's think about that. How wide is that? And some people might say, well, gosh, that's really good because then all these people give me an audience. Well, here's something I want you to write down.
The bigger your audience, in other words, the more people you try to talk to, the fewer people listen. Because all of a sudden they real quickly. Because we're in an environment where, you know what we have to delete real quickly? Is this for me or not me? And so if it sounds like it's too broad and it's really not going to help me, I'll delete you. Or I'll stop watching you, I'll stop listening to you. So we have to dec. Hey, who is our ideal target audience? And as I say this, I want you to know this is not always an easy process because we feel like we're leaving money on the table or opportunities on the table, and it's really not. There's a saying that says niche down till it hurts. And sometimes you have to say, okay, who is your ideal target? Audience? Well, for us, as an example, we said, well, we think we want to talk to local business owners. Man, that's too big. It's too big. Okay. Even though we could create a marketing plan and a video for anyone, not everyone is our ideal client, because quite frankly, not that we're crazy expensive, but at the same time, for some companies that maybe they're just starting out and they're kind of on a shoestring budget, if you will, they couldn't afford us, so they're not our ideal clients. We say, well, who is our ideal client? So this is just an example. So let's say, for instance, we're looking for business owners that have been business for three or more years, okay? So why would we do that? Well, we're looking for somebody has some credibility, there's some longevity. You know, they've made it past that. You know, so many people are going to not make it after the first year. Then we'd say. We'd say, all right, well, we're looking for people to have between three and five employees besides the owner or owner. So in other words, it's not a mom and pop that, you know, mom opens, pop closes, or vice versa. They have an employee, they have a staff. So in other words, they're probably got people filling in and they're managing people, and they probably designed a budget and they've done some. As far as marketing, they've got a marketing budget. So we're looking at. At that. So it also brings it up to say, okay, well, who else would. That's still pretty broad. I'd say, well, we're looking for business owners, okay, three to five years. They have at least five employees, and their gross revenues are 500,000 or above. Now, you see, that one little statement takes a lot of people out of business or out of our ideal audience. Because now we look at and say, well, these are probably businesses that said, hey, you know what? I have a revenue obligation, if you will, to my employees, to my business, to the future of my business, and also my community. So I'm involved in things that might require our services. Content marketing, okay? So content marketing would fit in that demographic. Now, we're not done because somebody said, now we're ready to go. Still too quick. Okay, so we've got a little bit more information, but now we're looking to say, well, what kind of business owners would we look for? Who would that be? Well, we could say, and this is where we're knitting down till it hurts. Not quite, but pretty close. We're getting on that road, you say, well, we're looking for attorneys. Looking for attorneys. Wow. All of a sudden, now if a doctor said, hey, we're looking for this. Sorry, that's not my ideal target market, I can recognize that. You know what that is a cow, not a deer. And I'm going deer hunting and I'm looking for doe, not bucks, because they're not in season. This is what I'm looking for. Or if I were looking for bucks, they have to have at least this many antlers, right? So now I can clearly define that. But now I say, well, okay, attorneys. Well, now think about how many attorneys there are out there. There are a lot, okay? So I might say we're looking for real estate contractual law attorneys. Now we're not. But this is an example, real estate contractual law attorneys. And all of a sudden we have this baby scoped down to a pretty tight group, right? Because if you think about that in your environment, whoever you are listening to, think about, wow, how many people are real estate contractual attorneys in your local environment? It might not. You might say, well, gosh, I can't think of any. But if you look in the phone book, there are people that specialize in that. And maybe there's only eight or 10. And we say that's because, hey, maybe we only have to have five or six, really those type of contacts for our business to be quite successful. Because what we do is really in depth, from creation to production to distribution, and also nurturing all of that stuff we do. So for us to take on 100 clients doesn't make sense because we'll do a really poor job or average job for 100. But we can do a superior, incredibly strong job for that smaller group, and they can get really nice results. So this is finding your ideal target audience. Go with the, with, hey, the age of the people or the age of the business, how many employees, what their gross revenues might be, exactly what kind of profession they might be. And then you might want to take it another step further and decide, well, what kind of things do those kind of owners like to do? Because at the end of the day, don't you want to do things that you enjoy doing? As an example, if, let's say, for instance, our ideal target were attorneys. But you know what? I don't like attorneys. I'm going to try to figure out something else. Say, you know what, my product goes to a lot of other people. Maybe I want to go to plastic surgeons and use that same process to say, now I just want to work with plastic surgeons into my area. And now that plastic surgery, the only thing they do is, let's say, let's say they do reconstructive surgery for nose. They focus on rhinoplasty. Okay? So that way, again, that narrows it down. Or maybe they only do. Maybe they only do breast augmentation. And that's what I want to work with. So I would look for those people that are plastic surgeons that only do that type of surgery, because then I'm going to get very, very good at my craft. I am, or my, our company, we are the one that produce that high qual content for these type of people. So again, we're talking about the first step. Decide and create and really define who your ideal target market is. So I hope you've enjoyed this today. Stay with us because we're going to take you down this process all the way to the point where this becomes an automated process. Thanks for joining me. I'm Jeff Harris with local marketing insight provided to you by Swingpoint Media. We'll see you again next time.
