Treat Your Audience Like Customers
Content Marketing expert Robert Rose hosted the epitome of a “power lunch workshop” at AMA New York’s inaugural Marketer’s Toolkit Workshop, “Treating Audiences Like Customers – Investing in Audience Personas.” Over 100 attendees participated in this one-hour audience persona workshop, where Rose explored the following:
- Five (5) disruptive questions marketers should be asking themselves
- What gets in our way
- Why content marketing is different from classic marketing
- Treating your valuable audience like customers
Detail, Discover, Decide, Differentiate and Design. This is the five-step process Rose outlined to define audience personas. What does your audience need to know? What do they want to know? When marketers focus on listening vs. promoting their company as “the” solution, they can truly help customers by helping to solve a business need in their audience’s journey.
So, what does this mean? Let’s break down the strategy.
- Detail the addressable audience.
- Discover the story, for example: When I’m rushing at work, and I’m starving and need something to eat, I want to find something that I can eat with one hand so I can be more productive at work.
- Decide which jobs to solve.
- Differentiate beyond “relevance.” What is your unique point of view?
- Design success statements against personas.
Your audience has no reason to pay attention unless the content helps them. Marketers must better understand the contextual journey and experiences of their audience. People’s tolerance for interruptive content is low. Lean into privacy concerns and pull trust forward in the relationship. And, focus on strategy first – not tactics or technology. Said differently, focus on valuable content.
Do you understand the difference between audiences and buyers? Content marketing focuses on audience personas. Develop these by observing behavioral values; build and segment your database, extend the reach of addressable audiences, then, measure your audience. Product marketers use buyer personas to precisely determine motivation, goals, and pain points. Rose emphasized the last stage is “where the rubber meets the road.”
Buyer personas assume “we” (products and services) are the solution. Audience personas focus on developing good content value to develop audiences. This meaningful differentiation can multiply value for both better, faster buyers and more loyal customers. Embrace thinking about measuring audiences as a core piece of your content marketing strategy.
Learn a framework and process for starting to look at audience personas. Work it backward and forward. Strategically master former Harvard professor and editor of the Harvard Business Review Theodore Levitt’s, Jobs-To-Be-Done theory and methodology.
In summary, don’t start with, “What do you need audiences to know?” Start with, “What do audiences want to know?”
This informative workshop is available now On Demand on AMA NewYork’s website.
We look forward to seeing you for our next Marketer’s Toolkit Workshop: Virtual Reality / Augmented Reality (VR/AR) on November 12 at 12:00 p.m. with future-tech expert, Gordon Meyer.
Robert Rose’s Recommended Reading List:
Competing Against Luck – Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillion, David S. Duncan
The Innovator’s Solution – Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
Jobs To Be Done – Anthony W. Ulwick
Jobs To Be Done: A Roadmap for Customer-Centered Innovation – Stephen Wunker, Jessica Wattman, David Farber
Killer Marketing – Joe Pulizzi, Robert Rose
Inspiration for Further Learning:
Content Marketing World Conference and Expo Virtual Event
October 13-16, 2020
- Use code AMANY to get an extra $100 off your registration
- Register here
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