You Cannot Sell A Car By Riding A Bicycle
Let’s start this article with a silly example. Suppose your target audience is riding a Mercedes on Bandra-Worli Sea Link daily from 10 AM to 6 PM. This is the crowd that you want to target.
Now, as a content marketer, your task is to send out a message to this crowd convincing them to change the route and use another bridge that has less traffic. But don’t forget that your target is only Mercedes owners.
Your target audience and purpose are well-defined. What strategy are you going to use here? Many marketers will still try to stop the traffic on social media platforms. When the organic campaigns fail, they will convince the brand to invest money in advertising as that is the only way to reach out to a maximum number of people.
Did you even once think that if your audience is driving a Mercedes daily on Bandra-Worli sea link, you should come up with a way to post your content on the sea link? Instead of constantly tweeting or posting a new message on Facebook every other day, put up a hoarding, or even better than that, befriend them. Yea I know you cannot ask a fellow Mercedes owner to stop the car in between the road and ask him to change the route. But then you can always follow them to their destination, see where they stop to refill the petrol, start a conversation with them, talk about the traffic, and then it becomes easy to not just pass on the message but also to make them take the route you want them to. This way, you will also be able to understand what other problems Mercedes owners are facing while driving on a Bandra-Worli Sea link which will help you craft a better message.
You must be thinking that I have lost it as the above idea of following your TA is unrealistic.
Agreed, the above way to reach out to your target audience is not practical. But that is why we moved to digital, didn’t we? We have tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush that help us study customer behavior. We don’t have to chase them anymore.
My only point here is, explore the road. Go where your target audience is. Do not ride a bicycle when your objective is to sell a car. What does that mean? Do not limit your content marketing strategy to only social media platforms. Explore. Get on the road. Befriend your TA. Then convert your friends into customers. Convincing friends to purchase a product you believe in is easier than convincing a stranger to purchase a product a salesman is selling.
To explain this better, I would like to share my personal experience with you. While working on the content strategy for an IT company (my current organization), like many others, I also first noted down all the known social media platforms, checked what competitors are doing on those platforms, what content they are posting, what content they are not posting, and came up with an outline.
But as I dived deeper, I realized that even though social media might help us mark our presence, the audience that we are targeting may not always be active on these platforms. For example, software developers and the other part of the IT industry that is busy innovating will not waste its time posting on Facebook or liking random tweets. I found them in different IT related online magazines. I found them on development/innovation related forums. Now, this gave me a direction and helped me plan my content better. Instead of focusing on Facebook, my focus shifted to online publications.
My content marketing strategy drastically changed. This is why platform planning is a must. Research your options. Find out where your target audience is most active. And then, hit the target. Trust me, it will be ‘Bull’s Eye.’
Published By Shreya Naik
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
