Why you Should Stop Writing Content for your Customers

Most businesses and organizations assume their content audiences and customers are the same people. Unfortunately, this limited thinking can hamper the broader success of a brand’s content marketing efforts.

So, who will see my content?

A huge part of content marketing success comes from creating the right content for the right people, but if a brand’s content audience are not their customers, who makes up the readerly audience?

Unless your paying customers represent a group unlikely to engage with or consume online content at all (in a recent Hubspot survey, as many as 40% said they don’t read blogs online), some of your customer groups will probably overlap with your content audience — but this doesn’t mean you should make them the be-all and end-all of your content strategy.

How much you focus your content efforts on them should be based on what you are trying to achieve with your content.

Well, what are you trying to achieve?

Based on my 10+ years of experience in the field, I would say that for startups and small businesses, content marketing without a clear strategy is more common than having one.

Good marketers and writers with broad appeal and viral potential can do well without a strategy, but it’s rarer and harder to do. Most of the time, its like throwing out a deck of playing cards with your eyes shut, and hoping as many as possible will land where you want them to.

So, if you want to make your content marketing efforts easier for yourself, you should definitely first work out what you are trying to achieve with your content and why.

I would underline here that ‘increasing traffic to a website’ is not really an acceptable goal if there’s no business reason attached to it:

• Would this increased level of traffic help drive email signups to your newsletter as part of your future brand loyalty and nurture plan?
• Do you need to show more traffic to your site to improve an existing pitch you’re giving to investors regarding content reach?
• Is it because you want to start running ads on your website and want to make money from it?
• If it’s because you think increased traffic will bring more customers to your business, then you should focus your goal on registering ‘x’ of new customers through your website, not on traffic.

The next question you’ll want to consider is how you’re going to achieve this goal. Let’s say your strategic objective for the year is to sign and convert 160 new clients, boosting annual revenue by +300%. You now need to consider all the ways content marketing might help you achieve this goal.

At this point, it’s important to realize that you have many more options available than focusing content on would-be customers alone:

Example Readers that are Not your Customers

Key Influencers

Getting your content shared or referenced by a key influencer that your would-be customers follow could help you reach and convert more customers than trying to reach them directly yourself. This is especially the case in industries involving a lot of thought-leadership and/or if your end-customers are unlikely to be regular online browsers.

I would also consider an ‘influencer’ here to be both the family, colleagues, friends of your target customers or end-users who could recommend your brand.

Editors/Journalists

Even if not directly related to your core business, highly credible and authoritative third-party citations can nonetheless bring great brand value through increased exposure and better rankings. A link or quote from the New York Times may not target your customers directly but could help assert the authority of your brand and boost conversion rates during the sales process.

Customers of your Customers

It’s quite common to hear complaints among B2B marketers when a piece of content performs well among a B2C audience but fails to convert B2B customers directly.

But there is still a lot that can be done with this kind of content:

• Even if your paying customers are businesses, their target audience could be consumers. By showing you have a large captive audience available that they’re trying to reach, there’s a chance you could leverage this to get their attention & open conversations as a direct-approach.
• High-traffic and highly engaged with consumer pages can present loads of value when it comes to running market research experiments or polls which you can later reuse to create new content that is more targeted.

In later posts, I’ll talk a bit more about how to identify, validate, and segment content audience groups in a more granular way. I’ll also explain how reader personas can help to provide a constant frame of reference when considering content topic angles, formats, and styles.