Every piece of content that comes out of your business should be aimed at a specific person in your target audience. Writing content with no target person in mind will lead to unfocused content. Unfocused content is not compelling. Content that’s not compelling won’t bring readers.
In addition to targeting a single person for each piece of content, you need to make sure that you spread your marketing efforts across all the experience levels of your prospects. It does you little good to only talk to the people who have followed your work ‘forever’. Nor is it effective to always target those that have been recently introduced to your work.
I’ve been building membership sites for years, but not all of my clients have. When I mention churn, a number of my prospects don’t know what I’m talking about. The longer I’ve been building websites the more I’m tempted to use insider terms that my clients don’t understand.
Don’t fall victim to this trap. Maybe you have been running your Crossfit Box for years and all your marketing efforts unintentionally assume that the person you’re talking to knows what a Power Clean is. Most of the people looking for a place to workout with a group that they can connect with won’t know what that is and using insider language will make them feel like they can never be an insider.
Your marketing should make them feel like they can be insiders and that working with you is the best way to get what they want.
How to make sure you speak to all your prospects
The first step to making sure that you speak to every level of prospect is to define who they are. That means sitting down and developing ‘personas’ for your business. A persona is nothing more than a name you use to describe a certain type of prospect. Maybe ‘Ben’ is the beginner that you talk to.
Your persona’s should cover three areas in your business. First, you should have that beginner. Second you need to develop a persona for your intermediate prospect. They know a bit about your field, but aren’t experts yet. Finally, you develop the expert persona. This final one knows lots about the same things you do, but they look to you as a leader in the field.
With these three persona’s developed it’s time to look at your content. Assuming you’re writing once a week you should work to have 1 blog post a month geared towards beginners. Two should be directed to your intermediate persona and the final 1 post should address the concerns that your expert has.
This break down of persona’s should go for all your marketing efforts. Go to conferences where you’ll meet colleagues, but don’t only go to those. Make sure you head out to meet the beginners in your field.
Most sites slowly start to neglect the beginners. This is a death knell for your sales funnel because beginners are looking for someone to walk along with them. If that’s not you, then when they’re ready to purchase as intermediate or experts, they’re following someone else that talked to the beginners.
If you need help developing your marketing plan we should talk.
photo by: cross_stitch_ninja
