Why It's a Bad Idea to Only Create Content for Your Specific Target Audience - Whiteboard Friday9/2/2016 Posted by randfish Knowing what content to create is one of a marketer's most difficult jobs. It's all too easy to imagine your target audience and what they already appreciate, then create more of that. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand discusses why that's a bit short-sighted, and we should have a broader vision. Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This one comes to us via submission from email. This is a question from Michael. No other details given, which is totally fine, Michael. So he wanted to know, since he's working on a content strategy, working on a new blog and having conversations with his manager and his team about, "Hey, should we be writing only extremely focused, narrowly focused content for our specific target audience, or should we be trying to branch out and broaden so that we can reach a bigger audience or a new audience?" General goals of content in SEO & web marketingSo general goals that we usually have around content marketing and content as it relates to SEO and web marketing more broadly is that we want something that potentially
Usually, most content goals fall into one of these or several of them. Now, there's overlap between them. I haven't perfectly illustrated this with a great Venn diagram. But in here there is lots of overlap between these different goals. You could have a piece of content that is both designed to earn press and amplification and links and is reaching a broad new audience. Or you might have some content that is directly converting customers that maybe also has some link amplification sorts of overlap. It's pretty tough to overlap anything else with directly converting customers, but the other three definitely easier to do overlap.
Risky businessIf you're only doing that content that's hyper-specifically targeting these directly converting customers, you're going to run into some big problems. First off, heavy competition. It tends to be the case if you're trying to earn that audience's attention, so too are all your competitors, and they're probably trying in very, very similar ways. It's often a competitive advantage to actually be a little bit broader and to branch out of that.You are usually ignoring great link opportunities from websites and press and blogs and events and all sorts of places that you could have earned had that content had a broader focus or just a broader appeal in general. It could be because you hyper-focused your data or your study on too narrow a market that only served your specific customer set, when in fact had you gone a little bit broader, there would have been a lot of press and industry coverage sites that might have written about you. It could be that you've only written about your customers' problems, when in fact if you had written about the problem a little more generally, you might have had the chance to reach bloggers and people on Twitter and folks on LinkedIn and folks through Facebook and those types of places. Finally, you're probably missing potential customers and influencers that are outside what your current sphere of influence is. Whatever that sphere is, the content that is most targeted at your audience is going to have a very tough time making this any bigger than it is. The content that's more broadly-focused, especially if it does well, is going to help expand this sphere so that you reach more of these people over here with that new expanded sphere. All the right movesMy recommendations, instead of making your content way narrowly focused, I would try and think broader, and I would think about it in these ways. First off...
You do these things right, I think you're going to have a much more successful conversation when it comes time to say, "Should we create broad content or specific, hyper-focused content?" All right, everyone, look forward to your comments and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read! via The Moz Blog http://tracking.feedpress.it/link/9375/4314189
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