How do you speak to the different parts of your market?
It’s a fair enough question.
Makes me think of when we were selling IT training. And we had to simultaneously sell to the broke-but-aspiring IT superstar who wanted to get a certification so they could land a high-paying job… AND also sell to the training manager for a global company overseeing the training needs of their division’s IT force of dozens of workers, with varying training needs. All from the same website and core marketing content.
I have a few ideas below.
But first — what the heck am I doing today?
Today is an impromptu Mailbox Monday — on a Thursday…
I changed the way I ask new subscribers for Mailbox Monday questions recently. And it’s led to me getting more. Like, a lot more.
So in the last couple months, my queue of questions has grown to dozens long. Enough that if I answer every Monday, there’s no way I’m ever keeping up.
I’m considering how to clear them out. There are common questions I can answer together. Others that may not be a great fit. And then, I can take other opportunities to answer some. Like by answering one on a random Thursday. I’m also contemplating just sitting down and cranking out a bunch of YouTube videos. I’ll figure it out.
In the meantime…
Here’s today’s question…
—
Roy,
Here’s my question for you.
In a professional service market, how do I balance Thought Leadership (White Paper type stuff) usually good for intermediary referrals with dumbed-down content to attract end users?
JS
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Okay, where do we start?
I guess we start here…
Don’t assume your smart audience wants smart content…
First things first, remember we’re all freaking human beings. As humans, we share the same base drives and desires. We all make our decisions rationally, and justify them with logic.
(When I meet someone — stereotypically an engineering guy — who says they’re not emotional, I get a little scared because that just means they’ve repressed their emotions to the point they don’t understand their influence.)
One absolute truth about humans is that we don’t like to think. At least, we don’t like to be MADE to think. Some of us happily do it on our own. But we don’t like thinking imposed on us by an outside force — and especially not by someone trying to sell us on something.
So, even if your audience is smart, be careful to maintain simplicity.
Quoting my own article, KISS me… [copywriting secret]…
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Mark Ford, a partner in the Agora empire of publishing companies, analyzed readability scores on a bunch of financial newsletter writers’ editorial prose. And he compared readability stats to subscription renewal rates.
He found that renewals dramatically increased when the editorial was written at a grade level of 7.5 or below.
There are doctors, lawyers, corporate executives, and academics that subscribe to these newsletters. It’s not all Main Street Joes. And even these people whose job is to think all day long are more likely to subscribe when the complexities of investing are presented in simple ways.
(And note: it’s NOT about investment performance!)
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I may not be the best example here. I like to think a lot in my emails and articles. But also, thinking is not the same as presentation.
A “dumbed-down” presentation may actually be appreciated by your smart readers. Because they can get all the benefit of your thought leadership, without having to think too hard themselves.
That said, this is just one of many recommendations. Next…
Make sure you speak to the red-hot core…
Before we get into how to actually speak to different segments of your market, I want to address one more common malpractice in marketing.
The question kind of assumes there are a couple different audiences. Which can very quickly slip into trying to please everybody.
It’s usually much easier to succeed if you speak to the hottest core of buyers in your audience. NOT try to juggle multiple markets, with varying interests.
It’s trite, but true…
The more you try to serve everybody, the more you actually serve nobody.
Be careful with the question above. Because it sounds like you want to speak to the smart segment of your market, by creating white papers. But those aren’t creating a response from the people who are actually giving you money.
If you want to do it just to do it, with business earned as a happy byproduct, keep doing this.
But first, seriously question whether your true market isn’t actually the “dumbed down” crowd.
If that’s not who you want to serve, you may have a bigger issue. But if that’s who is buying, and you can find fulfillment in serving that audience, more power to you.
I think there’s a HUGE opportunity in making the complex (what thought leaders like to think about) simple (what most people want to buy).
More and more, that’s what I’m aiming to do with my training. Especially my newest client-getting training to be announced soon. There’s a ton of accurate-but-complex information out there on how to get clients. What’s missing is the simple models, frameworks, principles, and strategies for how to what to use when to be most effective.
Assuming you ACTUALLY have this split market, I’ll give you a more direct response to your question…
Define personas and create chunks of content for each…
This does sound, to a degree, like what you’re already doing. You will benefit from doing it more, and more intentionally.
I create this for this audience, and that for that audience.
This involves first really defining and getting to know each audience. Know what they want and need. Why they’d engage with your content. What their unique problems and challenges are, and how your service helps them.
And then, building content to suit. Designed to really appeal to each of the different personas.
I’ll use the IT training mentioned above as an example.
In that case, I could see at least three big chunks of content.
The first would be more general content about the technology and certifications. This would be relevant to all segments of the audience.
But then, I could do a “career corner” — with content focused explicitly on career development through IT training and certification.
Likewise, I could do a “manager’s minute” — focused on topics specific to training a team, keeping them up on the latest tech, and general management of IT professionals.
This gives me (at least) three distinct ways to chunk my content.
And when there is legitimate separation among buyers, they appreciate how I’m simplifying their decision-making about what content I put out for them to consume.
Now let’s get into implementation.
Build and use hot lists around interests…
Today’s email tech is beautiful for this. You can track every click, every open, you can even tie website visits to an email subscriber — and use all this data for segmentation.
You can also create chunks of content specifically designed to segment subscribers onto hot-lists.
So, continuing the IT training example, I could create a white paper called, “Choosing a staff-wide IT training solution.” I could send out a dedicated email, offering this as a download. Anyone that clicked through could reasonably be considered — at the very least — to be interested in department-wide training. (It’d be far less likely for a early-career IT job seeker to have even enough interest to click.)
When they clicked, they’d be tagged or added to a list so that I could create more relevant content for them in the future, around these bigger solutions.
Likewise, I could create banner ads or even in-content links to this same white paper, in future email newsletters, and on the site. If they clicked one of these links or opted in to download, I’d also add them to this “hot list” of people interested in management topics.
I could do the same thing with other content, such as a report on “Which IT certs give you the biggest salary boost?” And so on…
The same thing can be done with ANY content. Webinars. Downloads. Entry-level offers. Whatever.
If you got serious about this, you could very quickly amass a lot of data about which people within your audience were interested in which topics.
At which point you can create more content for BOTH, without over-exposing either to content for the other group(s) that feels less personally relevant.
One more suggestion…
Create channels for your customers to follow…
There’s a very old (in internet years) book on internet marketing, that still has huge relevance on this topic. (It was published in 2007, Amazon reminds me that I bought it in January 2008.)
The book is Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg’s Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? The Kindle version is $1.99 and for that could easily make you 1,000X or even 10,000X ROI.
The book discusses customer personas and what they call Persuasion Architecture.
Basically, it’s your job to architect the website experience such that there is a natural path or channel for your different customer archetypes to fall into.
Leaning on the IT training example one more time…
When someone lands on the website, it would be nice if you made it really easy for them to self-identify as interested in either the management side, or the career side.
There should be obvious links to click for each, that will make them think subconsciously, “Oh, that’s for me!”
(That is, if you don’t drop them in the channel even before that.)
I actually did this before I moved on from that IT training job, to get a ton of leads for our highest-end (and highest-priced, highest-commission) IT training solutions.
I created little banners that showed up in various places, offering a “Training Consultation” to discuss how the multi-user solutions would meet the client needs. This was created to attract the managers. And it did. I had a steady stream of leads for our $30,000 training library, and seldom spoke with the low-end customers interested only in their personal training needs.
Likewise, other channels were setup to attract and capture the interest of prospects who only wanted individual training titles, and convert them on the spot.
Seriously, I give away too much…
Even just the examples I lay out above were responsible for $100,000s in sales.
… And I had a fraction of my current experience or persuasive ability.
… And I barely tapped the potential today’s tech offers to do all of this.
So, I guess that the people who turn this into action will see it as a breakthrough!
Yours for bigger breakthroughs,
Roy Furr
PS: To my points about speaking to the core of the market… With our IT training we found our best manager-level customers were actually people who’d bought in at the career-level, used and benefited from the training, and grew into a manager role. We never had a lot of success selling from the manager-level down, because their head was somewhere other than the quality and usefulness of the training. Speaking to the core of the market always works.
