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Chapter 4

Adding Audience to Your Sweet Spot

My sweet spot is figuring out how to make a product that people love and how to refine it to make them love it more. All the rest is business noise.

NOLAN BUSHNELL

In early 2014, I had the opportunity to participate in a workshop for a number of enterprise marketers in Toronto, Canada. In one particular conversation at the workshop, the blog manager for a billion-dollar technology company told me she was having problems with her blog. She had been adding more and more daily content to the blog and at the same time was seeing stagnant website traffic and far fewer subscribers and conversions.

My first question was this: “Who is the audience for your blog?”

She answered: “We target 18 different audiences on the blog.”

“I found your problem.”

WHO’S THE WHO?

The sweet spot is a place where a combination of factors results in a maximum response for a given amount of effort.

WIKIPEDIA

Countless businesses fail with their Content Inc. model because they stop after identifying the intersection of their knowledge area or skill and their passion. To this point, it’s all about us. It’s sharing what we know.

Who cares? Probably not very many people.

In order to complete the sweet spot formula, we need to identify the “who.” Who is the audience for your content? Remember, for the Content Inc. model to work, we need to figure out how we can build the engine that positions us as the leading informational expert in our particular market niche. We want to define our audience as specifically as possible.

Ask the following questions:

1. Who is he or she? How does this person live an average day?

2. What’s the person’s need? This is not “Why does the person need our product or service?” but “What are his or her informational needs and pain points as they relate to the stories we will tell?”

3. Why will this person care about us, our products, our services? It’s the information provided to him or her that will make that person care or garner attention.

Your idea of the “who” doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be detailed enough so that you can clearly visualize this person in your head as you develop content.

Doug Kessler, cofounder of the UK agency Velocity Partners, said the sweet spot is “the thing your company knows better than—or at least as well as—anyone else in the world.” Understanding the “who” gives you the context you need to make this happen.

Marcus Sheridan from River Pools & Spas became the worldwide leader in information about fiberglass pools for those homeowners interested in purchasing a pool. If Marcus were targeting, let’s say, manufacturers of fiberglass pools, the content would be vastly different. It’s the “who” that gives the content the context it needs to be successful.

The Story of River Pools & Spas

In late 2009, River Pools & Spas, a 20-employee installer of fiberglass pools in the Virginia and Maryland area, was in trouble. Homeowners were not running out and buying fiberglass pools during the Great Recession. Worse yet, customers who had actually planned on buying a pool were calling up River Pools to request their deposits back, which, in some cases, ran around $50,000 or more.

For multiple weeks, River Pools overdrew its checking account. Not only was it becoming difficult to pay employees, but the company was looking at possibly closing up shop for good.

Marcus Sheridan, CEO of River Pools & Spas, believed that the only way to survive was to steal market share from the competition, and that meant thinking differently about how the company went to market.

At the beginning of this process, River Pools did just over $4 million in annual revenues and spent approximately $250,000 a year on marketing. There were four competitors in the Virginia area that had greater market share than River.

Two years later in 2011, River Pools & Spas sold more fiberglass pools than any other fiberglass pools installer in North America. The company also decreased its marketing spend from $250,000 to around $40,000, while at the same time winning 15 percent more bids and cutting its sales cycle in half. The average pool builder lost 50 to 75 percent in sales during the time that River Pools increased sales to more than $5 million.

Needless to say, River Pools & Spas stayed open for business.

How did Marcus do it? He wrote down every conceivable customer question and answered it on his blog. Today, from search engine results to social media sharing, Marcus and River Pools & Spas are the leading information provider in the world on the subject of fiberglass pools.

The Rest of the Story

River’s story has been shared around the world. It’s a fairly popular Content Inc. example. But here’s something you probably don’t know. River Pools is now a national, even an international, force because of its content creation. Marcus was being called upon by companies all over the world to install pools and was even asked to fly in to oversee an installation. Unfortunately, River Pools only serviced companies in a very small area and could not take advantage of the additional demand.

Enter manufacturing. River Pools made the decision to begin manufacturing its own fiberglass pools. This came about directly because of its content exposure. River Pools & Spas is now positioning itself as the leading installer and manufacturer of fiberglass pools, taking the business in a completely unexpected direction.

Once you develop an audience around your content, the opportunities to sell additional products is almost endless. River Pools & Spas is an example of Content Inc. in action.

MAKING IT REAL

As we add in our audience group, we’ve added a new dimension to our sweet spot.

Let’s go back to our friend the Chicken Whisperer. Andy Schneider’s original sweet spot was a knowledge area of backyard poultry and a passion for teaching and instruction.

Now let’s add the audience to make our sweet spot come to life.

Now we have enough information to capture the sweet spot in a single sentence. This is very similar to how media companies start to construct an editorial mission statement.

Andy Schneider’s mission statement might have looked something like this: Helping suburban homeowners answer all their possible questions regarding raising chickens at home.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Now that you’ve seen a visual example of the sweet spot, let’s start adding some dimension to your model. Here’s a useful template you can use to begin to construct the initial stages of your strategy.

Mission: ________________

Key Audience: (Be as specific as possible.) ________

Sample Titles/Functions:_______________

Why This Group Is Important: (This is a critical first step to thinking about the purchase power these people have. You’ll learn more about this in Chapter 22 on monetization.) ____________________

Sample Topic Areas:______________

Here are examples of what a completed form looks like for Content Marketing Institute. We have three different audiences that we target with our content. Note that when we began our Content Inc. model in 2007, we only focused on one audience. We added the second audience group in 2014 and the third group in 2015.

Content Marketing Institute

Mission: Advance the practice of content marketing.

Key Audience: Content marketing practitioners. CMI helps the people who are planning and executing the content marketing strategy in their large enterprise organizations.

Sample Titles/Functions: Content marketing director, content marketing manager, manager of digital strategy, vice president marketing, digital marketing manager, public relations manager/director, director of social media, communications directors.

Why This Group Is Important: The majority of marketing in organizations still involves paid media. CMI believes that, over the next decade, the majority of marketing will be content coming directly from brands instead of advertising or sponsorship on outside properties. Enterprises today are completely unequipped to handle this transformation and need vast amounts of education and training on the strategies and tactics of content marketing.

Sample Topic Areas: Building a strategy; building an audience; operationalizing the process (including getting executive buy-in and continually justifying and communicating progress); content creation; content promotion and distribution; measurement and ROI.

In the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel, the job of the lobby boy was to know the clientele so well that he could anticipate their needs. That is your role now. Your job is to learn your audience so well that you’ll be able to develop ongoing content that is so good, the people in your audience are not even aware they needed it in the first place.

CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS

To be successful with our Content Inc. strategy, you have to become indispensable to your audience. That means creating a strategy that can actually position you as the leading informational or entertainment expert in your content area.

The more audiences you target, the more likely you will fail. Focus on the most defined audience possible.

As you get started, don’t get bogged down focusing on more than one audience. Choose one audience and become the indispensable expert to that audience. Once that is successful, you can move on to other audiences.