Building Online Audiences by Burns Marketing

BUILDING ONLINE AUDIENCES: Four ways to stand out, attract the right people, and keep them coming back for more 1

We regret to inform you that your audience doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need you. (Yet.)

Digital marketers are a little like hipsters.

72% of buyers begin with a Google search; 80% of them ignore Google-sponsored ads.

With every ounce of mental energy we have, we’re striving to be different… in all the same ways.

themselves on their own terms, and they affiliate with our brands only after we prove ourselves valuable. They venture online primarily in search of useful content – content that informs, solves problems, entertains, and inspires.

Nowhere is that more of a problem than in attracting and retaining the audiences that sustain our organizations. You know the issue already: Online audiences are slippery, and their B.S. detectors are ridiculously sensitive. They can tell a poseur from a mile away. What’s more, potential B2B partners are infinitely connected to information about you and your competitors, and they’re very discerning.

You’ll probably recognize that as content marketing. Most companies are already adopting it, as they should, but your good fortune is that many still aren’t doing it well. Often the writing is sub-par. Or the content is directed at everyone on the planet, which really means that it’s not very good for anybody. Often it doesn’t leverage online media well. We could go on.

In other words, our online audience members aren’t a bunch of fish waiting for our hooks, even though we often treat them that way. They don’t just want one-size-fitsall marketing. They want meaning. Consider this: While 72% of buyers begin with a Google search1, 80% of them ignore Google-sponsored ads.2 This reflects an important reality: Audiences conduct

These potential pitfalls are your opportunities for building an audience, and this guide will show you the way. With four important ideas you can put into practice right now, it will give you the education and tools you need to differentiate your organization with sizzling content marketing. It should also give you hope.

Content marketing is a technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. The best content marketing leverages the principles of education, emotion, needs, and the user journey.

Pardot

Hubspot

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WHAT’S COMING Each of our four keys to building and working with your audience includes three tangible action items. That’s 12 things you and your organization can do – right now. Twelve ways to start differentiating yourself, engaging your audiences distinctively, and building sustainable success. 06...Make writing your secret weapon Most writing is lackluster. Differentiate yourself with razor-sharp mechanics.

10...Expand your audience by limiting it Pivot away from the wrong people to get closer to the right people.

14...Win the Internet with your digital media A million opportunities await those who are bold with their digital media. Very little awaits those who are not.

18...Rethink your audience’s journey Leverage the full audience lifecycle, or your best assets will leave you.

22...Case study FREIGHTLINER “TeamRunSmart”

1 MAKE WRITING YOUR SECRET WEAPON

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Most writing is lackluster. Send a message with razor-sharp mechanics. Your voice is content. So are your punctuation habits. And your grammar. Only one-third of the largest companies in the world regularly publish content with passable style, clarity, grammar, and tone.3

While most of us think about reaching our audiences in terms of conveying key ideas – what education we can provide, what confusion we can clarify, or what pain points we can wipe away – busy marketers often lose sight of the language. But the way you talk to people is a message in and of itself. In fact, it’s one of the most important messages you can possibly convey because it’s a message about nothing less than your identity.

READ ALONG WITH US: Increasingly, Facebook’s ever-shifting algorithms are burdening content marketers everywhere.

Facebook’s decisions are affecting all of us. We feel your pain.

Zuckerberg sucks, yo. Those are three different voices with (hopefully) three different audiences. And in these messages, it wasn’t the idea that lingered, but the language.

So here’s a challenge: Go to your website and look up a data intake form, or maybe your Contact Us page. Look down at the lowly submit button and ask yourself: What could you rename that button to make it indicative of who you are? Name it “Go!” or “Proceed,” or “Fire All Torpedoes” (you probably have your own ideas as you read this). Just think of any possible linguistic touch point – even a button on a form – as a way to use writing to your advantage. Here’s why this is such an important tactic: By being more thoughtful with your verbiage, you’ll create differentiation using only the mechanics of your communication. Of course you’ll help audiences make sense of your content – that’s a great outcome by itself. But, just as important, those audiences will attribute your refinement to your organization as a whole – potentially benefiting every facet of your operation. The door is wide open, too. One study done by Acrolinx, a company whose business is linguistic analysis, suggests that among the largest companies in the world, only one-third regularly publish content with passable style, clarity, grammar, and tone.3 7

acrolinx.com/global-content/

LANGUAGE CAN HURT YOU, TOO. The flip side of the writing coin is that if your language feels hurried, people will think your ideas are hurried. Your writing is a great opportunity, but it’s also a perpetual risk. Take the following topic sentence (picked more or less at random from the Google pile) for example. It’s the start of what could have been a memorable blog post: Video is the next big wave for the Internet, but it has two major enemies: viewers don’t stick around too long, and autoplay is the enemy of a civilized web experience. 1. Video was the next big wave a few years ago, right? This clause doesn’t seem as thoughtful as it could. 2. Excessive use of the word “enemy” makes this sentence the enemy of coherence. 3. Nobody knows what a civilized web experience means. Now, nobody likes a nitpicker, so let’s admit that we’re all susceptible to cranking our lame verbiage. And the above was a blog post, so the Pulitzer Prize committee wasn’t necessarily tuning in. Still, the point is that a lack of refinement can linger as your message even long after people have forgotten what your topic was. So be honest about your current vulnerabilities, and fix them.

Improve your writing now. We all need it. These books won’t waste your time. Spunk and Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style Arthur Plotnik This is the rulebook to use now that all the rules have changed. Read it on the plane. You’ll feel like excellent writing is doable.

Rhetorical Grammar Martha Kolln | Loreta Gray Don’t be dissuaded because this looks like a textbook. It’s a bristling arsenal of strategy, insight, and specific language tactics.

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ACTION ITEMS Discern and define your organization’s writing voice. Decide what is natural to you and your audience, and be consistent. Infuse your language with your unique genetic code. Invest in writers – or at least expose your team to writing best practices. You don’t have to hire an expert memoirist from Yale, but you do need to treat the language with respect. Infuse every word on your web presence and in your collateral – no matter how small or seemingly transactional – with your voice. And be consistent about it.

“There’s a lot of talk around getting the right message... but you cannot forget the packaging that you need to deliver your message, and the packaging you need is language.” Andrew Bredenkamp, president and founder, Acrolinx

2 EXPAND YOUR AUDIENCE BY LIMITING IT

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Pivot away from the wrong people and get closer to the right people. Rule number one: Unless you’re Red Bull, stop trying to be awesome to everyone, everywhere. Drill down to the people you’re meant to reach and really reach them.

52% of marketers support 2 to 4 buyer personas with dedicated content.4

Rule number two: Never forget that there could be audiences you haven’t tapped yet – natural B2B relationships that simply haven’t been cultivated. Explore for them. Be creative. (“Ahem,” you interject. “Does the second rule contradict the first?”) No, because we’re not talking about casting such a wide net that you can’t handle your catch. We’re talking about finding previously hidden opportunities and zooming in on those. For a concrete example, see the case study on page 22.

QUESTION YOUR PERSONAS

HOT TIP: Your personas should not read like bios from dating sites.

Since the early 90s, personas have guided many companies, but their definitions can devolve into wishy-washy biographies or useless tomes weighed down with marketing jargon. One of the most valuable things personas teach us is that our audiences aren’t necessarily like us. Before you publish something, always ask, “Who will this help educate the most: the CEO or the main audience?” Likewise, narrowing your target audience isn’t the same thing as finding people who are the same as each other; it’s about isolating shared pain points, desires, needs, and modes of accessing information among naturally diverse people. Focusing on that helps steer you away from excessive (and valueless) stereotyping.

4 LinkedIn Technology Marketing Community

Do these things: • Define your personas according to needs and goals, not just demographics. • Research your personas’ real choices and challenges. Don’t just ask what their life is like; ask what’s at stake in their life. And if you can, survey real-life representatives of your audience. • Resist creating endless versions. The more you research, the more you might find that a small handful of personas will do.

REPEL SOME PEOPLE Here’s a hard one: Sometimes you should push your audiences away. It’s like that insufferable internship that taught you pre-med wasn’t the right path for you. Politely pivoting away from the people who are wrong for you leaves you facing the people who are right for you. It also offers the bandwidth to find audiences you might have been missing all along. Here’s how to put that into practice. Over the course of your communications tracking and assessments, don’t focus on the people you didn’t capture or convert just for the sake of reversing the outcome. Ask yourself if you should be spending your time with that audience in the first place. Then ask who else might be a better recipient of your cultivation efforts.

Politely pivoting away from the people who are wrong for you leaves you facing the people who are right for you.

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ACTION ITEMS Define and characterize the audiences that you won’t spend time and resources courting. Compare them to your most desired audiences to identify the persona characteristics that matter most. Get historical. Look at your personas over time, if you’ve had them for a while. Which ones have stuck around? Which current personas are likely to stick around, and which are likely to fade as your organization grows and evolves? Reexamine your current audience definitions to make sure you’re not needlessly excluding anyone. Where’s a hidden market?

“If your content is for everybody, it’s for nobody.” Joe Pulizzi, founder, Content Marketing Institute

3 WIN THE INTERNET WITH YOUR DIGITAL MEDIA

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A million opportunities await those who are bold. Very little awaits those who are not. A while back, Hotels.com won the Internet. As part of their Captain Obvious campaign, they rolled out a series of Facebook video ads with subtitles, and the scripts were self-aware – meaning that the subtitles mentioned the fact that the video was subtitled.

Watch the Hotels.com ads on Adweek.5

Got that? Stick with us. In the current state of Facebook, video ads autoplay when viewers scroll onto them, but without sound. Hotels.com used the nature of the medium as an opportunity to be clever – planning ahead, in other words, for two viewer interactions with the video: the first muted and the second with sound. This was a delicious double opportunity. Viewers who stuck around after the short (less than 30 seconds) soundless video found the sound-enriched version even more satisfying. In one video, Captain Obvious sits behind a piano. Only after you view the video with sound is the real hilarity of the scene driven home. (Spoiler alert: he’s not a pianist.) Marketing bloggers mused with delight. Adweek called the ads “infinitely better” without sound4, and Mashable reported that the first two ads garnered five times the engagement as a normal Hotels.com production.

 Don’t join them; beat them. Hotels.com capitalize on a double opportunity through soundless Facebook ads.

http://www.adweek.com/ adfreak/hotelscom-created-facebook-autoplay-ad-thats-infinitely-better-without-sound-165133 5

You don’t have to match that campaign, but you can employ the tools that produced it. • Mechanical understanding: Knowing the nuts and bolts of your media exposes hidden opportunities (like silent autoplay). Your media platforms are not just delivery mechanisms for your stuff; they’re also opportunities. • Outright creativity: Someone was empowered to produce something awesome, even if, by nature, its shelf life was limited. The rest of us are jealous, and you’re probably going to at least peruse Hotels.com next time. • Timing: These ads will end up being a flash in the pan as far as the Internet goes. Everything is. But they will have worked while the rest of us watched from the sidelines.

FIND YOUR NATURAL CONTENT MARKETING COMPANIONS Social media in particular is naturally suited to act as a companion to your content marketing, so don’t screw it up. Remember that the average company uses their social media accounts as half-baked photo albums and numbing press release dumps. Are you one of those companies? Instead, use social media conversations to add value to people’s lives. Comment on and share useful industry ideas. Spark conversations and ask questions. And connect with other companies you want to be associated with. It’s okay to leverage other organizations’ prowess.

QUIZ YOURSELF: 1. How are our audience members using our media right now? What problems do they turn to various media to solve? 2. Where are the hidden creative opportunities in my media platforms? How can I win the Internet for a day? 3. Am I using social media as an extension of my content marketing strategy? 4. Whose media campaigns do I really love? Which ideas can I learn from?

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ACTION ITEMS Strategize and create a social media piggyback campaign. Identify thought leaders you’d like to be associated with, and then engage/leverage them on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. If Boeing likes you, so will some of its people. Pick a platform you’re mediocre at, and make a plan to win it sometime this year. Base that plan on the mechanics of the platform, and be wildly creative. Take a big swing, and give yourself permission to miss. Embrace the fact that creativity and innovation are both forms of risk, and convert your team to become productive risk-takers. You’re not going to lead by following all the time. (Thank you, Captain Obvious.)

4 RETHINK YOUR AUDIENCEâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S JOURNEY

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Leverage the full audience lifecycle, or else your best assets will leave you. Okay, time to turn flyby visitors into returners and eventually brand champions. We know; it’s hard. Organizations always feel a sense of urgency around acquisition, and that’s proper, but it can come at the expense of the people who are already in your orbit. Don’t let those folks float away into space. They’re bound to be at different points in the customer lifecycle and will have different needs. But fortunately for you, the main question they’ll be asking of your partnership won’t change: What’s in it for me?

Select

Purchase

Recommend

Maintain

BUY

OWN

Market and sell

Support and serve

Research

Need

Receive

Use

So, what is in it for them?

Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads.6

MAP THEIR JOURNEY It was Benjamin Franklin (according to the Internet) who said, “A conversion saved is a conversion earned.” A few ideas will get you a long way: • Diversify your touch points. Deploy your various digital media tools in your nurture strategy, and encourage conversation among the people who are likely to have good things to say about you. Remember that word-of-mouth is the original social media platform. • Reward participation. Consider community membership models and how you might provide exclusive content to important audience segments. The impression of privilege is an important emotional tug in the surprisingly emotion-laden B2B lifecycle. • Use your audience as content. Recognize members for being awesome. Create rotating “ask the expert” campaigns and contests, or simply share audience-member profiles that grab people and give you prestige by association.

The impression of privilege is an important emotional tug in the surprisingly emotion-laden B2B lifecycle.

The Annuitas Group

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ACTION ITEMS Revisit the lifecycle map you use for your audience(s), and plot how your messaging changes at each stage. Pick a persona and write his/her desired full user experience with your organization. Ask yourself, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Where do people fall off your lifecycle map?â&#x20AC;? Plug those holes. Compare your newest audience members with your oldest. What do they have in common? What have you given your oldest audience members since they came on as new ones? How intentional has that really been?

CASE STUDY

Freightliner “TeamRunSmart” FREIGHTLINER AT A GLANCE • Industry leader in trucking, with a strong over-the-road brand • Innovators in truck technology, safety, and efficiency • Loyal customer base of savvy, well-connected, business-oriented truckers

TeamRunSmart (.com) is a web community that supports the businessminded trucking professional with relevant content and professional advice. Burns Marketing partnered with Freightliner Trucks North America (a division of Daimler) and ATBS (the largest accounting and business services provider in the trucking industry) to redevelop Freightliner’s highly restrictive customer-facing social media portal into a vigorous community.

At the outset, Freightliner’s approach had three main problems:

They didn’t approach the project as a customer service effort tailored to the needs of their customers (i.e., What’s in it for me?). They underestimated the content requirements necessary to maintain a useful portal, so it was perpetually out of date. Their “Freightliner only” strategy focused just on drivers with Freightliner VINs, which meant they were missing a major segment of their target audience: future prospects and other key influencers of a truck purchase.

We started by surveying a large sample audience of owner-operators, fleet drivers, and fleet managers to gauge their needs and interests, their use of technology, and social media. From that, we learned a great deal about how they access information, what they value, and what keeps them up at night. As you can imagine, most of the feedback centered around truck maintenance, fuel cost, business issues, and personal health. Research in hand, we developed a final content strategy for all owner-operators, fleet managers, and drivers – regardless of their current brand affiliation, and without a login. This openness brought in previously unserved audiences who were keenly positioned for this specialized content. We quickly honed in on emotional needs, demonstrating thought leadership, relevant audience-centered content,

CASE STUDY - CONTINUED

and some product/category evangelism – with very little potentially off-putting direct product marketing.

WHY IT’S EFFECTIVE • TeamRunSmart demonstrates Freightliner’s ethos of pragmatism and professionalism while also putting customer needs front and center. • We honed in on the right audiences for creating brand champions – and discovered new ones. • Great partnerships allow TeamRunSmart to leverage others’ content generation, trust, and expertise – not to mention their brand equity. • The editorial calendar is balanced and sustained. • Web, mobile, and social are used cleverly and in concert with one another. • The community rewards membership/subscription: Members are recognized regularly and receive access to features and a point-earning system. • Direct advertising is secondary to building trust, goodwill, and deep affiliation.

METRICS Attained 12-month goal in eight weeks

Reached nearly 30,000 registered users; 20,000 newsletter subscribers

Increased clickthrough rate on weekly emails to 19%

Received 10,000 visits and 20,000 page views

Won Kentico EMS Site of the Year, AMA Gold Peak, and BMA Gold Key Award

Here’s a rock-solid departing thought At this point, you’re armed with a to-do list and (hopefully) new hope. Building and managing audiences isn’t for the faint of heart, but the potential rewards to your organization are all but infinite. Outshine your hurriedly typing competitors. Zero in on the audiences that really matter to you. Make it a goal to win the Internet sometime this year. And steward your hard-earned audience members like they’ve never been stewarded before.

To put it simply and succinctly, we defer to a real expert: “The most important relationship I will ever have in business is the relationship I have with my audience. Pay attention to who you do your business for.”– Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson

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