We hear frequently from marketers who are frustrated that their audiences aren’t sharing their content, making them think the only way to promote their brands is to pay for exposure. In today’s Whiteboard Friday, Rand shows you a new way to think about your marketing that may be just the solution.
Howdy Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. So last week I was in Minneapolis for the MnSearch Summit, and it was a very impressive event. But I had a number of conversations with folks there. I talked about some content marketing and SEO stuff in one of my keynotes, and what I heard was something that I’ve heard many, many times over the years. That was nearly this exact phrase: “But I have to have to buy links or ads or exposure because my customers won’t amplify or share my content.”
You’ve probably heard this too if you work in marketing, or maybe you’re in this world. Maybe you watch Whiteboard Friday sometimes, and you think to yourself, yeah, that’s great when you talk about how your customers are going to go out and share this content you created, but my customers don’t do that. So how am I supposed to get all the social shares that lead to links, all the mentions from blogs, all the press? I’m shouting into a graveyard. Nobody’s listening.
Okay, I hear you. This is you, and you’re trying to amplify your own content, and you’re saying, “Hey, we have this great stuff. I made this great content for you guys. I’ve produced whatever this great product.”
Your customers, your current or potential customers are essentially doing nothing. They’re shutting it down. They’re keeping quiet.
This can happen for a number of reasons. The two most common that I hear are, number one, they’re in a demographic group that doesn’t use social media or the Web to share things, and that can often be older, more traditional folks in B2B types of companies. It can sometimes also be because they don’t want their peers or their friends finding out that they use you.
So in one of the examples where I had this conversation in Minneapolis, the person I was talking to was working at a B2B supplier, and he said, “All of the companies that you said that use us,” I think in this case it was print shops, none of them wanted to tell anyone else in the print world that they used this supplier because the prices were so good and the product was so good. They wanted to keep it as a competitive advantage for their own shop, which makes total sense. It happens a lot in B2B types of supplying worlds.
If there’s no one to amplify from your customer base, you run into this problem over and over. People say to me, “Well then, how am I going to solve this issue of no one amplifying the work that I’m putting out?” My answer, time and time again — and that’s why I figured we should codify it into a Whiteboard Friday — is that these people might not be influenced and might not be influencing their peers or their cohorts or potential new customers for you. But they are influenced by something. That something is how they discovered you and everything else that they use, and that something often falls under press and classic media, which is a completely different channel than your customer set.
It might be that they’re finding content on blogs, but they’re just not sharing it. Or they’re finding stuff in trade publications and magazines, at events and conferences, on social accounts that they follow but don’t amplify or re-share. They might be in listen only mode, which many users of social networks like Twitter and Google+ and LinkedIn are. They might listen to industry experts and get their viewpoint from those few influencers in the industry. Or, and this is the most pernicious one because it happens a lot in the SEO world, they get all their recommendations by using search engines. Since they use search engines, and in order to rank in search engines you have to be amplified, people say,
“It’s a Catch-22, man. I’m screwed forever. There’s nothing I can do. SEO is just not going to work for me. Or white hat SEO is not for me. I’m going to have to buy my links if I want to rank or buy ads because I can’t rank in the organic section.”
Here’s the trick. If it’s the case that search engines are how people are influenced, then what you have to do is think a little differently. You have to think of these people, these other ones — press, classic media, blogs, trade publications, events and conferences, social accounts, industry experts, whatever it is. The list may go on and on. You probably know what those few are.
Those are what you need to use to nudge the search engines into ranking you. By influencing these folks, you also influence the search engines and ranking, because when they talk about you and link to you and mention your brand and cite your work, you rank higher in search engines, and that reaches your customers.
This is the trick. The challenge here is what influences these people is not the same thing that you’re broadcasting and amplifying to your customers. So you need to think of yourself as a whole different kind of marketer, marketing an entirely different product. The product you are marketing to these people is most of the time not your product. It is a kind of content, an expertise, an informational value, a piece of research, work that these people care about, that will make them look good, that they know their audience will care about, that’s going to be interesting and useful and unique to them. This becomes your new customer set, and your new product becomes whatever they will care about and amplify and cite from you.
Now you have closed the gap between how to figure out how to reach these people by indirectly targeting another group. This is a challenging process. I’m not going to lie. It is hard. But you can do this. When you do, when you figure out the kind of content marketing and production and amplification, whether that’s through social or through blogs or through conferences or whatever it might be, when you figure out how that system works, you can get a flywheel going that gets you more and more exposure to these folks and higher and higher rankings in the search engines. As you build up your domain authority, as you start to produce content directly for your customers that will influence them, it ranks in the engines.
Now it’s convoluted. It’s challenging, but it’s possible. It is possible. You don’t have to buy links or only ads or only buy exposure. You can reach people organically through this system.
All right, everyone, hope you’ve enjoyed this edition of Whiteboard Friday. We’ll see you again next week. Take care.
