Broad Vs. Niche Content: How to Find the Right Content Marketing Balance

March 16, 2017

By Joshua Nite

’Cause whether you’re high or low, you gotta tip on the tightrope.” –Janelle Monae

Content marketing can sometimes feel like walking a tightrope through treacherous crosswinds. On one side, you have the need for brand recognition: Followers, likes, shares, all the metrics that make marketers feel good.

On the other, there’s the need to prove effectiveness through lead capture, conversions, and closed deals. These metrics used to be the sales department’s problem. As marketing becomes more data-driven, though, marketers are increasingly held responsible for proving their contribution to revenue.

Sometimes we end up swaying from one side to the other, constantly over-correcting. It’s hard to make forward progress if you’re just trying to keep your footing.

The good news is, once you find the right balance you can quickly pick up speed. You can make minor adjustments to make even more progress. You can attract the right audience and help lead them to a purchase decision.

Let’s take a look at two unbalanced ways to approach the problem, then explore what a healthy balance looks like.

Approach #1: Fill the Top of the Funnel

This marketing mentality comes from a reasonable place. Your pipeline is a funnel that has more people at the top and fewer at the bottom. So the more you fill the top, the more paying customers you will eventually acquire. Right?

So you create content that’s maximized for clicks and sharing. Let’s say your company makes artisanal handcrafted backscratchers. But you see a trending video with a dog jumping into a pool. So you make a compilation video of dogs jumping into pools. It’s a great video and it goes viral.

The problem is, if the content is irrelevant to your actual product offering, you’re hitting the wrong audience.

You can’t ask that audience to take the next step, because they haven’t taken a first step.

Approach #2: Focus on the Bottom of the Funnel

So pulling in a broad but irrelevant audience doesn’t work. Why not take it to the other extreme, and focus on the people that you know are interested in your product? They’re more likely to go straight from your content to a purchase decision.

That means creating content that convinces people your backscratcher is the best. Videos that highlight the hours spent lovingly whittling each backscratching tine. Blog posts about how most backscratchers use fake leather to wrap the handle, highlighting your genuine leather handles.

Anyone in the market for a backscratcher would be a fool to buy any other brand after reading your content.

But how many people are already in the market? How many even know there are multiple backscratching options out there?

Most importantly, how many people with itchy backs will never see your content? They’re not searching “what’s the best backscratcher,” they’re searching, “upper back skin irritation.”

This approach can capture a fraction of your potential audience, but leaves the majority out in the cold.

Four Tips for an Effective Content Balance

It should be clear by now that neither approach is going to keep you moving forward on your marketing tightrope. Here’s how to find …read more

Source:: Top Rank Blog

      

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