A client is attending an in-person event and asked for advice on how to collect prospect leads at the event. (For awareness.)
Since I practice a mix of old school and new-school technologies, I’m suggesting the following:
Create a landing page for the event with a form to collect the prospect’s name, email, and other essential information, and feed those names into the client’s customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Create a printed sheet with a QR code leading to the landing page, have the prospect point their camera to the QR code, and then the prospect can enter their information directly from their phone.
There are many other ways to collect information, including specialized software and (really old school) business cards, but this way will work.
I wanted to demonstrate how to do this, but Bredemarket doesn’t have any in-person events on its calendar, and I don’t ask my prospects to sign up for my CRM.
Leftover pizza is the best pizza. Preparation credit: Pizza N Such, Claremont, California. Can I earn free pizza as a powerful influencer? Probably not, but I’ll disclose on the 0.00001% chance that I do.
Now that it’s time to write the “separate post,” I really don’t want to get into the mechanics of how posts that attract prospects (hungry people, target audience) increase awareness and help you convert prospects for your products and services.
So forget that. I’m going to tell a story instead about two executives at a fictional company that has a real problem. The executives’ names are Jones and Smith.
The story
Jones was troubled. Sales weren’t increasing, prospects weren’t appearing, and if this malaise continued the company would have to conduct a second round of layoffs. Jones knew that “rightsizing” would be disastrous, so the company needed another solution.
So Jones videoconferenced Smith and asked, “How can we make 2024 better than 2023?”
Smith replied, “Increasing sales calls could help, and ads could help, but there’s another way to increase our awareness with our prospects. We could create content on our website and on our social channels that spreads knowlesge of our products and services.”
Jones exclaimed, “That’s great! We could get generative AI to create content for us!”
“No, not that!” Smith replied. “Generative AI text sounds like a bot wrote it, and makes us sound boring, just like everyone else using generative AI text. Do we want to sound like that and put our prospects to sleep?”
“So we need a human writer,” Jones realized, “one who can describe all of the features of our products.”
“Absolutely not,” Smith emphasized. “Customers don’t care about our features. They care about the benefits we can provide to them. If we just list a bunch of features, they’ll say, ‘So what?'”
“OK, we’ll go with benefits,” said Jones. “But why is content so important?”
“Take blogging,” replied Smith. “The average company that blogs generates 55% more website visitors. B2B marketers that use blogs get 67% more leads than those who do not. Marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI. And 92% of companies who blog multiple times per day have acquired a customer from their blog.”
“Wow.” Jones was silent for a moment. “How do you know all of this stuff, Smith?”
“Because of the content that I’ve read online from a marketing and writing services company called Bredemarket. The company creates content to urge others to create content. Bredemarket eats its own wildebeest food.”
Have you ever seen those posts from self-appointed gurus?
Specifically, the ones that authoritatively state the BEST time to WRITE a post on Instagram, or LinkedIn, or TikTok, or whatever?
I religiously ignore those posts for a simple reason: My country has multiple time zones. So the best time in one time zone may be the worst time in another time zone.
However, I can tell you the WORST time to READ a post in the PACIFIC Time Zone…if the post concerns pizza.
And I’ll explain what all this means…eventually.
Ophir Tal on awareness
In addition to saying WHEN to post, the gurus also provide authoritative (and often contradictory) advice about WHAT to post.
For example, some gurus assert that you MUST prioritize bottom of funnel (conversion) content over top of funnel (awareness) content because it’s most important to get people to buy.
Ophir Tal disagrees, and has evidence to support his position.
This hook caught my attention. People want leads, and people like pizza, so I paid attention. But I also paid attention for a third reason that I’ll discuss later.
Tal then noted that the gurus would have recommended NOT posting this because he was “doing it wrong.” Specifically:
The post didn’t solve a problem for his potential clients. (Unless they regularly drop slices of pizza, I guess.)
It didn’t have a strong call to action.
It wasn’t targeted to his ideal clients. (Again, unless they regularly drop slices of pizza, or unless they love chicken wings.)
But despite doing everything wrong, that particular piece of content attracted the attention of someone “at a 6 figure ecom company.” After viewing the content, the reader looked at Tal’s profile and realized Tal could meet their need for ghostwriting services.
And now I’ll tell you the third reason why I paid attention to Tal’s post.
John Bredehoft on birthdays
As I noted above, I paid attention to Ophir Tal’s pizza post for two reasons:
People want leads.
People like pizza.
Now let’s jump back to a post I wrote all the way back in 2023, one that described why I’ve soured on the term “target audience.” (Or, in Tal’s words, “ideal clients.”) I started that post by wondering if the term “needy people” would be better than “target audience.” Yes, but not good enough.
I’ll grant that “needy people” has a negative connotation, like the person who is sad when people forget their birthday.
It turns out that these people had a VERY GOOD reason for forgetting my birthday. However, I cannot reveal this reason to you because the disclosure would force me to reveal someone’s personal identifiable information, or PII. (Mine.)
So after they remembered my birthday, one of them asked what I did for my birthday…and I told them that my wife, father-in-law, and brother-in-law went out to dinner.
For pizza.
And I also told them that there were leftovers, which my wife and I enjoyed a few days later.
Leftover pizza is the best pizza. Preparation credit: Pizza N Such, Claremont, California. Can I earn free pizza as a powerful influencer? Probably not, but I’ll disclose on the 0.00001% chance that I do.
A nice story, and while I was reading Ophir Tal’s story on dropped pizza, I realized that I had missed an opportunity to tell my own story about leftover pizza.
Time to channel Steve Jobs…
Oh, and there’s one more thing
I forgot to mention one thing about the Ophir Tal story.
When I read the story, it was around 4:00 pm in California.
So when I read about Tal’s dropped pizza, and thought about my leftover pizza (which I had already eaten)…I was hungry.
Technologists, you know how tough it is to create a technology product.
You have to assemble the technology, or perhaps create the technology yourself.
You have to work on the most minute details and make sure that everything is just right.
It takes a great deal of effort.
What if your product story is ignored?
But when you want to tell the story about your product, and all the effort you put into it, your prospects ignore everything you say. You might as well not be there.
Because they don’t care about you. It’s all about them.
People want to satisfy their own needs
But the “it’s all about me” attitude is actually a GOOD thing, if you can harness it in your messaging. Let’s face it; we all have an “it’s all about me” attitude because we want to satisfy our needs.
You want to satisfy your own needs because you only care about selling your product.
I want to satisfy my own needs because I only care about selling Bredemarket’s services. (I’ll get to the selling part later.)
And your prospects want to satisfy their own needs because they only care about their problems. And because of your customers’ self-focus, they’re only going to care about your product if it solves their problems.
So when it’s time to tell the story about your product, don’t talk about your technology.
Kasey Jones alerted me to the phrase “trust funnel,” and I’ve been thinking about it and its relationship to content marketing. Here are my thoughts.
The sales funnel
Many of us are familiar with the concept of sales funnels. The idea is that there are a bunch of people at the top of the funnel, and people move through the sales process.
As people move down, the funnel gets narrower and narrower as some people exit the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, there is a very small hole that represents the customers who have converted, or who have actually purchased something.
In a rare instance of my championing simplicity, I like to use an easy three-step sales funnel model with awareness, consideration, and conversion.
From Venn Marketing, “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion: A 4 Minute Intro To Marketing 101.” (Link)
You may use a more complex sales funnel, but the exact number of steps in the funnel really doesn’t matter. What does matter is that your content marketers create content that addresses each step in your funnel.
In early steps of the funnel, the content goal is to ensure that prospects know that you’re out there and you have a solution that benefits the prospects.
In later steps of the funnel, the content goal is to move prospects to the point where they will purchase something from you, rather than purchasing it from one of your competitors or not purchasing anything at all.
Some of the approaches to sales funnel-based content marketing are based upon the faulty assumption that people progress through the funnel in a logical and predictable manner. In the logical model, you present an awareness piece of content, then follow that with a consideration piece of content, then finally present content to convert the prospect into a customer.
It’s about time we redefine the classic marketing funnel. It describes the user journey as a rather linear path, while the reality is a lot more messy, complex, and unpredictable.
Let’s scrap the dated marketing funnel and try to map out the real user journey.
It starts with a trigger, and then it goes into an almost infinite loop between exploration and evaluation – over and over again. And finally, the user exits the loop by making a decision or a purchase.
Oh, and in addition to assuming logic, standard content creation methods assume that your firm knows where every buyer is on their journey. This assumption is essential so that your firm can detect a prospect in the awareness phase and take the necessary steps to move them downward into the funnel (or toward the endless loop pictured above).
Kasey Jones and the trust funnel
I mentioned Kasey Jones at the beginning of this blog post, based upon something she shared on LinkedIn. She started with an inconvenient truth that blew the second assumption out of the water.
Your buyers will probably never like or comment on your posts.
So much for all of those fancy tools that identify the sources of interaction with your content. They don’t work if people don’t interact with your content.
Yet Jones notes that these people are still buying. Three of them reached out to her in the last two weeks.
Each mentioned my content as why they wanted to work with me.
But they have never, not once, engaged with anything I’ve done on here.
Still, they were in my trust funnel, just the same.
It’s different from the sales funnel that we are laboriously tracking in our customer relationship management (CRM) tool. For content marketers, these things literally pop up out of the blue from a “trust funnel” that we know nothing about, even though we’re building it with our content.
If I wished, I could name multiple examples of people reaching out to me because of my content or Bredemarket’s content.
Jones’ point in all this was to emphasize that you need to keep on creating “scroll-stopping content” to attract DREAM (her capitalization) clients.
Even though you don’t know who you are attracting.
You’re not a sausage grinder making sausages. You’re a flower attracting bees.
By The original uploader was Y6y6y6 at English Wikipedia. – Original image located at PDPhoto.org. Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons by Drilnoth using CommonsHelper., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7365698
Now I could end this discussion right here with Kasey Jones’ comments, but I thought I’d perform a LinkedIn search to see who else was talking about the trust funnel.
And I found Kevin Schmitz.
Kevin Schmitz and the trust funnel
Schmitz approached the topic from a different perspective in his post from earlier this week. He focused on a particular piece of content: a person’s LinkedIn profile and activity.
Schmitz asserted that if someone approaches you with a meeting request, and the person’s LinkedIn presence is (his words) “bare bones,” you’re less likely to take the meeting. But if a meeting requester posts engaging, relevant content, perhaps you’ll take that call.
Schmitz went on to say:
Your presence on LinkedIn is not a “lead funnel”.
It’s a “trust funnel”.
We work so damn hard to establish trust in the meeting.
Yet, most of us are person 1 (the “bare bones” person) with an uphill battle each and every meeting.
Kevin Schmitz LinkedIn post, 8/22/2023 ot 8/23/2023. (Link)
If you’re interested, Schmitz’s post goes on to suggest ways to make your LinkedIn presence more engaging.
The meaning for content marketing
So what does the idea of “creating content that resonates with your invisible trust funnel” mean for content marketing?
Most people realize (or I hope they realize) that organic content often does not have an immediate payoff, especially for complex B2B sales. Even if I write the most amazing automated biometric identification system (ABIS) content for a Bredemarket client, the client won’t get orders within the first three days of posting the content. (I’ll have more to say about “three days” in a future post discussing go-to-market efforts.) Even if I am the biometric content marketing expert. (I’ve been working on promoting THAT piece of content for a while now.)
It takes longer than three days for content marketing to yield results. One source estimates four to five months. Another source says six to twelve months. Joe Pulizzi (quoted by Neil Patel) estimates 15 to 17 months. And all the sources say that their estimates may not apply to your particular case.
But Bredemarket (and I in my personal communications) will continue to cater to that invisible trust funnel and see what happen.
And if you’re reading this post in Janury 2025, thank you. If you want to talk to me about content creation, some of these links may still work!
From Venn Marketing, “Awareness, Consideration, Conversion: A 4 Minute Intro To Marketing 101.” (Link)
The picture above shows a simple sales funnel example. The second of the three items in the funnel is the “consideration” phase.
In that phase, those people who are aware of you can then consider your products and services.
If they like what they see, they move on to conversion and hopefully buy your products and services.
But how do prospects in the funnel consideration phase evaluate your offering as opposed to competitor offerings? Is it truly a quantitative and logical process, or is it in reality qualitative and emotional?
Quantitative consideration
For purposes of this post, let’s assume that there are two competing companies, Bredemarket and Debamarket, who are fighting each other for business.
Second, let’s assume that Bredemarket and Debamarket offer similar services to their prospects and customers:
Blog posts
Case studies
White papers
Finally, let’s assume that a big government agency (the BGA) has issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) for blog/case study/white paper services, and Bredemarket and Debamarket are the two companies competing for the award.
A pre-acquisition consultant will develop a Source Selection Plan (SSP). In competitive procurements such as the one in this example, the SSP will state exactly how proposals will be evaluated, and how the best proposal will be selected.
Here is the U.S. Government’s guidance on Source Selection Plans. (link)
SSPs can be very complex for certain opportunities, and not so complex for others. In all cases, the SSP dictates the evaluation criteria used to select the best vendor.
The weighted scoring approach breaks down your RFP evaluation criteria and assigns a value to each question or section. For example, your RFP criteria may consider questions of technical expertise, capabilities, data security, HR policies and diversity and sustainability. Weighted scoring prioritizes the criteria that are most important to your business by assigning them a point or percentage value. So your weighted scoring criteria may look like this:
Technical expertise – 25%
Capabilities – 40%
Data security – 10%
HR policies – 10%
Diversity and sustainability – 15%
RFP360, “A guide to RFP evaluation criteria: Basics, tips and examples.” (Link)
Individual question evaluation
In most cases the evaluator doesn’t look at the entire technical expertise section and give it a single score. In large RFPs, the technical expertise section may consist of 96 questions (or even 960 questions), each of which is evaluated and fed into the total technical expertise score.
For example, the RFP may include a question such as this one, and the responses from the bidders (Bredemarket and Debamarket) are evaluated.
Question
Bredemarket
Debamarket
96. The completed blog post shall include no references to 1960s songs.
Example evaluation of a proposal response to an individual RFP question.
Final quantitative recommendation for award
Now repeat this evaluation method for every RFP question in every RFP category and you end up with a report in which one of the vendors receives more points than the other and is clearly the preferred bidder. Here’s an example from a U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission proposal source selection process. (And you can bet that a nuclear agency doesn’t use an evaluation method that is, um, haphazard.)
From U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, “FINAL EVALUATION RECOMMENDATION REPORT FOR PROPOSALS SUBMITTED UNDER RFP NO. RQ-CIO-01-0290 ENTITLED, “INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES AND SUPPORT CONTRACT (ISSC).”” (link)
So what does this example show us? It shows that L-3 Communications/EER received a total score of 83.8, while its closest competitor Logicon only received a score of 80. So EER is the preferred bidder.
So in our example, BGA would evaluate Bredemarket and Debamarket, come up with a number for each bidder, and award the contract to the bidder with the highest evaluation score.
Quantitative recommendation for the little guys
Perhaps people who aren’t big government agencies don’t go to this level of detail, but many prospects who reach the consideration phase use some type of quantitative method.
For example, if the (non-weighted) pros for an item under consideration outnumber the cons, go for it.
Now of course the discussion above assumes that everyone is a logical being who solely evaluates based on objective criteria.
But even Sages such as myself may deviate from the objective norm. Here’s a story of one time when I did just that.
As I previously mentioned, I had never written a proposal response before I started consulting for Printrak. But I had written a Request for Proposal before I joined Printrak. For a prior employer (located in Monterey Park), I worked with an outside consultant to develop an RFP to help my employer select a vendor for a computer system. The questions posed to the bidders were not complex. Frankly, it was a simple checklist. Does your computer system perform function A? Does it perform function B?
The outside consultant and I sent the final RFP to several computer system providers, and received several proposals in response.
A few of the proposals checked every box, saying that they could do anything and everything. We threw those proposals out, because we knew that no one could meet every one of our demanding requirements. (“I can’t trust that response.”)
We focused on the proposals that included more realistic responses. (“That respondent really thought about the questions.”)
As you can see, we introduced a qualitative, emotional element into our consideration phase.
According to Kaye Putnam, this is not uncommon.
Qualitative consideration
Humans think that we are very logical when we consider alternatives, and that our consideration processes are logical and quantitative. Putnam has looked into this assertion and says that it’s hogwash. Take a look at this excerpt from Putnam’s first brand psychology secret:
Your brand has to meet people at that emotional level – if you want them to buy. (And I know you do!)
Findings from several studies support this, but one of the most seminal was outlined in Harvard professor Gerald Zellman’s 2003 book, The Subconscious Mind of the Consumer. Zellman’s research and learnings prompted him to come to the industry-rocking conclusion that, “95 percent of our purchase decision making takes place in the subconscious mind.”
From Kaye Putnam, “7 Brand Psychology Secrets – Revealed!” (link)
But how can the subconscious mind affect quantitative evaluations?
While logic still has to play SOME role in a purchase decision (as Putnam further explains in her first and second brand psychology secrets), a positive or negative predisposition toward a bidder can influence the quantitative scores.
Imagine if the evaluators got together and discussed the Bredmarket and Debamarket responses to question 96, above. The back and forth between the evaluators may sound like this:
“OK, we’re up to question 96. That’s a no brainer, because no one would ever put song references in a BGA blog post.”
“Yeah, but did you see Bredemarket’s own post that has multiple references to the song ‘Dead Man’s Curve’?”
“So what? Bredemarket would never do that when writing for a government agency. That piece was solely for Bredemarket.”
“How do you KNOW that Bredemarket would never slip a song reference into a BGA post? You know, I really don’t trust that guy. He wore two different colored shoes to the orals presentation, a brown one and a black one. Someone as slopy as that could do anything, with huge consequences for BGA communications. I’m deducting points from Bredemarket for question 96.”
“OK. I think you’re being ridiculous, but if you say so.”
And just like that, your quantitative logical consideration process is exposed as a bunch of subconscious emotional feelings.
How does qualitative consideration affect you?
As you develop your collateral for the consideration phase, you need to go beyond logic (even if you have a Sage predisposition) and speak to the needs and pain points of your prospects.
Spock is behaving illogically. Jayenkai, “Pain – Star Trek Remix.” (link)
Here’s a example from my law enforcement automated fingerprint identificaiton system (AFIS) days.
If your prospect is a police chief who is sick and tired of burglars ransacking homes and causing problems for the police department, don’t tell your prospect about your AFIS image detail or independent accuracy testing results. After all, 1000 ppi and 99.967 accuracy are only numbers.
Provide the police chief with customer-focusedbenefit statements about how quickly your AFIS will clean up the burglary problem in the town, giving residents peace of mind and the police department less stress.
If you can appeal to those emotions, that police chief will consider you more highly and move on to conversion (purchase).
Can I help?
If your messaging concentrates on things your prospects don’t care about, most of them will ignore you and not shower you with money. Using the wrong words with your customers impacts your livelihood, and may leave you poor and destitute with few possessions.
If you need a writer to work with you to ensure that your written content includes the right words that speak directly to your prospects, hire…Debamarket!
Blog posts are transitory things, reflecting the views of the author at a particular point in time. Those views can change as the world evolves, or as the author evolves.
Take the author who wrote the following statement in late 2022: “Posts for awareness don’t need CTAs (calls to action).”
The author who wrote that statement was…um, it was me.
This post simply talked about a new candy store in Ontario, California, but never talked about Bredemarket’s content creation or proposal writing services.
So why did I write a post that doesn’t directly lead to business?
While perhaps it’s valid to say that the Candy Street Market blog post didn’t need a CTA (although some would dispute that), I myself have written other “awareness” blog posts and content that DID need a CTA.
(UPDATE OCTOBER 23, 2023: “SIX QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU IS SO 2022. DOWNLOAD THE NEWER “SEVEN QUESTIONS YOUR CONTENT CREATOR SHOULD ASK YOU” HERE.)
For example, take another blog post that I wrote in December 2022, “Six Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You: the e-book version.” It didn’t end with a request to contact me. It didn’t attempt to move the reader down the funnel from awareness to consideration. The blog post merely said that there are six questions.
But it did have a “download” CTA.
While the CTA didn’t in and of itself move the reader to consideration (and hopefully to conversion), it did make them, um, more aware. For those who followed my CTA and downloaded the e-book, they learned why their content creator should ask “why” and other questions. And by the time they got to page 13 14, they saw this:
For some of you, this e-book has helped you to decide on the questions that you will ask your preferred content creator, or the questions that you will ask yourself before you create your own content.
But for others, you might be asking how Bredemarket can help you create content. As I said earlier, you’re probably not ready to contract with me yet. We have to talk first.
If you’re interested in Bredemarket’s services, contact me via one of the methods listed at the https://bredemarket.com/contact/ URL.
From “Six Questions Your Content Creator Should Ask You.” Go here to download.
So THAT’S where I moved the reader on to the considerationphase—AFTER they had read the blog post AND the e-book.
But while they were still on the blog post, I assumed they were still in the awareness phase.
The Candy Street blog post was an awareness blog post that didn’t need a Bredemarket-focused CTA, because it only alerted people of Bredemarket’s existence.
The Six Questions e-book blog post was an awareness blog post that DID need a Bredemarket-focused CTA, because I wanted them to download and read the e-book and THEN move on to consideration.
I’m going to update the old blog/CTA blog post to refer to THIS one.
I may change my mind again.
As for the CTA to THIS blog post, there isn’t one—yet. This post was written for a purpose that I will reveal shortly.
I’ve talked about the words “why,” “how,” and “what” and their relation to writing, but I haven’t talked about the word “which.”
Not in relation to sandwiches, but in relation to words.
If you are a marketing executive, you know that the words you use in your marketing content can make or break your success. When your company asks employees or consultants to write marketing content for you, which words should they use?
Here are four suggestions for you and your writers to follow.
Your writers should use the right words for your brand.
Your writers should use the right words for your industry.
Your writers should use words that get results.
Your writers should be succinct.
Your writers should use the right words for your brand
Your company has a tone of voice, and your writers should know what it is. If you can’t tell them what it is, they will figure it out themselves.
Your company has a particular writing style—hopefully one that engages your prospects and customers. Regardless of your writer’s personal style, they must create copy that aligns with your own style. In effect, they put on a “mask” that aligns the words they create with the words that your company needs.
Your writers should use the right words for your industry
Similarly, your company provides products and services in one or more industries, and your copy must align with the terms those industries use, and the way industry participants express themselves.
For example, a writer who is writing content for the biometric industry will use different terms than a writer who is writing content for art collectors because of the differences in the two target audiences.
Biometric readers (the people, not the devices) care about matching accuracy measurements, such as those compiled by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in its Face Recognition Vendor Test, or as measured in agency-managed benchmarks. (Mike French’s example.) They often respond to quantitative things, although more high-level concepts like “keeping citizens safe from repeat offenders” (a public safety-related benefit) also resonate.
Art collectors care about more qualitative things, such as not being scared of handing over their dream to a commissioned artist whose work will inspire affection. (Well, unless the collector is an art investor and not an art lover; investors use different terminology than lovers.)
So make sure your writers get the words right. Otherwise, it’s as if someone is speaking Italian to a bunch of French speakers. (Kaye Putnam’s example.) Your prospects will tune you out if you use words they don’t understand.
Your writers should use words that get results
There is one important exception to my suggestions above. If your company’s current words don’t result in action, quit using your current words and use better ones that support your awareness, consideration, conversion, or other goals.
If you start talking about your solution without addressing your prospect’s pain points or problems, they won’t know why they should care about your solution.
For example, let’s say that the message you want to give to your prospects is that your company makes wireless headphones.
The prospect doesn’t care about wireless headphones per se. The prospect cares about the troubles they face with tangled cords, and how your company offers a solution to their problem of tangled cords.
Features are important to you. Benefits are important to your prospects. Since the prospects are the ones with the money, listen to them and talk about benefits that change their lives, not how great your features are.
Your writers should be succinct
I have struggled with succinctness for decades. I could give you countless examples of my long-windedness, but…that wouldn’t be appropriate.
So how do I battle this personally? By creating a draft 0.5 before I create my draft 1. I figure out what I’m going to say, say it, and then sleep on the text—sometimes literally. When I take a fresh look at the text, I usually ruthlessly chop a bunch of it out and focus on the beef.
Now there are times in which detail is appropriate, but there are also times in which a succinct message gets better results.
Selecting your content marketer
If your company needs employees or consultants to write marketing content for you, make sure they create the right content.
If your company’s views on content creation parallel my own, maybe I can help you.
If you need a full-time employee on your staff to drive revenue as your personal Senior Product Marketing Manager or Senior Content Marketing Manager, take a look at my 29 years of technology (identity/biometric) and marketing experience on my LinkedIn profile. If you like what you see, contact me via LinkedIn or at jebredcal@gmail.com.
If you need a marketing consultant for a single project, then you can reach me via my Bredemarket consultancy.
After all, aren’t the benefits of a great product obvious at first glance?
If we stop with the claptrap of understanding our target audiences and pain points and stuff, and just focus on ourselves and our great product, we’ll have a clearly focused message…
…um…
…that no one will give a hoot about.
“OK, I’m glad that your Super Duper Gizmo is so great, but so what? What’s in it for me? Why should I care?”
Sure, talk about your product, but start with the customer first and their needs. Then say how your product benefits the customer, exceeds their needs, and delights them.
(So why did I write this piece of content? Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest…um, suggested that my website needed yet another article on customer focus. I thought I’d do something a little different this time.)
This post explains what “pillar pages” are, the pros and cons of Bredemarket’s pillar pages, what I’ve learned from the “Target Audience” pillar page that I created, and how this can help your business deliver effective, converting messages to your prospects.
What are pillar pages?
I’ve been working on “pillar pages” for the Bredemarket website for over a year now.
As I stated before in an April 2022 blog post, a “pillar page” is simply a central “cluster” page on your website that discusses an important topic, and which is linked to other pages that provide more detail on the topic.
Think of a wheel with a hub and spokes. The pillar page is the hub, and the related pages are the spokes.
Now these pillar pages aren’t as mature as I’d like them to be.
I haven’t really multi-layered my keywords that link to the pillar; currently things are fairly simplistic where benefit “spoke” blog posts link to the benefits “hub” pillar. I haven’t explicitly optimized the “hub and spokes” for people who search for, say, features.
Similarly, the organization of each pillar page is fairly simplistic. Each pillar starts with a brief discussion of the topic in question, and is then followed by excerpts from and links to blog posts that provide more detail on the topic. (And the blog posts themselves link back to the pillar, providing bidirectional…um, benefits.) It’s functional, but perhaps you’d be better served if the pillars grouped subtopics together, rather than listing all the blog posts in reverse chronological order.
But the pillars do their work in terms of navigation and search engine optimization. If you want to find out what Bredemarket says about a topic such as benefits, it’s fairly easy to find this.
What have I learned from the Bredemarket Target Audience pillar page?
This post delves into the fifth of my five pillar pages, the Target Audience page.
I’ve recently worked on beefing up this pillar page by linking to more Bredemarket blog posts that discuss target audiences. And in the process of making these additions, I’ve realized some things about target audiences that I wanted to summarize here. (Repurposing content refocuses the mind, I guess.)
In the process of improving my pillar page, I’ve gleaned five truths about target audiences:
You need to define at least one target audience.
It’s not illegal to have multiple target audiences.
Different target audiences get different messages.
You can create personas, or you can not create personas. Whatever floats your boat.
Target audience definition focuses your content.
I’ll discuss each of these truths and suggest how they can improve your firm’s content.
One: You Need to Define At Least One Target Audience.
The first and most important thing is that you need a target audience before you start writing.
If you have no target audience, who is receiving your message? How do you know what to say?
For example, the primary target audience for THIS blog post is anyone from any type of company who could use Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services. It’s not limited to just the identity folks, or just the Inland Empire folks. If it were, I’d write it differently.
The content addressed two target audiences at the same time, although this post prioritized the companies looking for full-time employees.
As long as you know in advance what you’re going to do, you can define multiple target audiences. Just don’t define a dozen target audiences for a 288-character tweet.
Three: Different Target Audiences Get Different Messages.
Perhaps you are writing a single piece of content that must address multiple target audiences. A proposal is an example of this. For example, a proposal in response to a request for proposal (RFP) for an automated biometric identification system (ABIS) affects multiple target audiences.
Here’s an example of multiple target audiences for a theoretical Ontario, California ABIS proposal, taken from a May 2021 Bredemarket post:
Field investigators.
Examiners.
People who capture biometrics.
Information Technologies.
Purchasing.
The privacy advocate.
The mayor.
Others.
That’s a lot of target audiences, but if you’re submitting a 300 page proposal that answers hundreds of individual questions, you have the ability to customize each of the hundreds of responses to address the affected target audience(s).
For example, if the RFP asks about the maximum resolution of captured latent fingerprint images, your response will address the needs of the “examiner” target audience. Your response to that question won’t need to say anything about your compliance with city purchasing regulations. (Unless you have a really weird city, which is possible I guess.)
At the same time, if the RFP asks if you comply with E-Verify, this is NOT the time to brag about supporting 4,000 pixels per inch image capture.
Four: You Can Create Personas, Or You Can Not Create Personas. Whatever Floats Your Boat.
If you haven’t read the Bredemarket blog that much, you should know that I’m not very hung up on processes—unless my client (or my employer) insists on them. Then they’re the most important thing in the world.
If you find yourself trapped in a room (preferably padded) with a bunch of certified marketing professionals, they’ll probably toss around the word “persona” a lot. A persona helps you visualize your target audience by writing to someone with a particular set of attributes. Here’s an example from the October 2022 post I cited earlier:
Jane Smith is a 54 year old single white owner of a convenience store in a rural area with an MBA and a love for Limp Bizkit…
If I’m going to write a particular piece of content, this persona helps me focus my writing. As I write, I can picture Jane in my mind, fetching the giant cups for the soda dispenser, planning her next trip to the big city, and wondering if her customers would mind if she started blasting this song.
Not the Seldom Scene.
Having this persona in my mind can be an excellent writing support.
What would Jane think about a list of target audience truths?
What would Jane think if a Limp Bizkit song appeared in the middle of the list? (She’d like that.)
So you can create personas, either on the fly (take a LinkedIn profile of a real person and change a few facts so that the persona becomes Jim, a 35 year old product/content marketer who specializes in healthcare) or through an extensive and expensive persona research program.
But what if you escape from the padded room, run away from the marketing professionals, and swear up and down that you will never ever create a persona?
Will your marketing efforts die?
No they won’t.
You can still target your writing without inventing demographic information about the person reading your content.
It depends upon the effort you want to invest in the task.
Five: Target Audience Definition Focuses Your Content.
I kind of already said this, but I wanted to explicitly repeat it and emphasize it.
Regardless of whether your target audience is defined by an expensive research effort, a tweak of a real person’s LinkedIn profile, or the simple statement “we want to target latent fingerprint examiners,” the simple act of defining your target audience focuses your content.
Your text addresses the target audience, and doesn’t go off on tangents that bear no relation to your target audience.
This makes your message much more effective.
But is the message of this post resonating with companies needing content creators?
If you’re still reading, I guess it is.
Bredemarket can help you define your target audience for your content, and can help you define other things also that are necessary for effective content.
Would you like to talk to me about the content you want to create, and the message you want to deliver to your target audience?
Are you ready to take your firm to the next level with a compelling message that addresses your target audience(s) and increases awareness, consideration, conversion, and long-term revenue?
Bredemarket 