CHAPTER 5
Be Relevant (on a Molecular Level)
In the same way that each individual's DNA is unique, so is each member of your audience, and subsequently each and every one of your customers. As the discussion for being relevant begins, you will learn from basic examples the techniques you need to think of each person as an entire audience—in and of themselves.
In the previous chapter, you learned the importance of stepping back and listening intently to your audience. Here, you will learn how to put that advice into action. Listening is all about looking before you leap, and being relevant is making sure you're talking about the topics that interest your audience by addressing their pain points. Being relevant means speaking to their pain points in a language they understand. It's about remembering that no matter the size of the audience you're talking to, there is only one person at a time on the other side of the screen hearing your message.
Because you've listened, you'll find you have different segments (e.g., men versus women, traders versus investors, general practitioners versus medical specialists, and so on). And every bit of content you produce must be personalized to provide choices for those people, whether you're sending out magazines or emailing the link to your blog. You could deliver choices via a switch at the top of the home of your blog that says “men/women” or “investor/trader.”
You can use tricks to personalize the language of your articles, making each reader feel as if you're speaking directly to them. Remember: The uniqueness of DNA is the perfect analogy for each of your customers. And by keeping that point in mind, you can treat each individual as they are—a unique member of your audience. It begins with the validation of their pain, not your gain. You have to talk less about yourself and more about the individuals in your audience. Next, you have to stop yourself from trying to cast a wide net, and instead discuss in detail the points that are relevant to your audience. Then, you have to remember to speak their language; after all “you're trying to create a meaningful dialogue between yourself and your audience members, a credible, genuine conversation that resonates with them.”1 Don't make you language too complicated or invent words. Use words your audience understands. Finally, you have to be a storyteller, because stories are relevant.
Imagine “Molecular” Customer Service
Imagine a place where you're not being served. Wouldn't it be great if you were in line and tweeting your discouragement in real time? “I'm in line at WeSave Bank and it sucks!”
What if WeSave Bank tweeted you right back to apologize and let you know which hours of the day might have the fewest number of people in line? This type of “molecular” customer service is a brand taking care of their customers at the individual level. One person at a time.
Because it is personalized, it immediately resonates with the person and moves them closer to enlightenment and trust in your brand. As they absorb more and more relevant content of yours, they become advocates of your brand and brand ambassadors. Even if they don't purchase something from you or hire your services, they will likely be sharing your content with someone who will.
Content marketing at the molecular level is making sure the right information (relevant content) is getting to each individual at the right time in the places they're hanging out. Conversation isn't just about writing stories in your content marketing strategy. It's taking care of each individual's information needs as quickly as possible. It could be on a live, public forum like Twitter, a personalized email campaign that sends you curated content that is most relevant to your tastes and purchase history, or just using smart SEO best practices so that your content is more easily found by those who need it most.
You may recall in Chapter 2 that a brand's “handshake moment” is what they choose to do when they reach out to their audience, perhaps for the first time. When we break down what is really happening here, it's not that the brand is talking to an audience, but the brand recognizes they're talking to people, one at a time, and in most cases, on the other side of a screen. Oreo understood this truth and pulled off a conversation with all the individuals who were watching the 2013 Super Bowl. And they did it with a simple tweet.
Participating in the Conversation
Oreo, by simply listening and paying attention to what the conversation was about (the blackout at the Super Bowl), was able to jump into the conversation at the molecular level. Think in terms of where on the molecular level you are in participating in the conversation, whatever the conversation may be. When you figure out where your customers are, you can participate live on social media, through a blog, or some other type of media like a magazine. You can produce content and hope for a response, or listen on social media and then try to lead or participate in the conversation in real time.
Working at the molecular level on social media is known as participating in “micro-conversations.” Macro-conversations like how to save for retirement, for example, get disrupted by micro-conversations about why the stock market crashed 10 percent that week. Suddenly, the macro-conversation about saving for the long term gets disrupted by micro-conversations about what to do in the short term.
In response, a financial advisor, can push out content in real time to their clients to provide reassurances that they're in good hands—content that says, “Hey, we've done research and we feel this drop in the market was precipitated by electronic trading, not fundamentals.
If you're going to stay fully invested in the market, here are some tips on protecting your portfolio in the short term, without taking your eye off your long-term goals.” Being relevant on a molecular level is addressing the needs of customers, not just with broad, “evergreen” topics, but those beneath the surface that are timely and in the moment.
The Road to Irrelevance: Common Mistakes Marketers Make
Often, in the attempt to be more relevant, marketers can make mistakes that actually make them irrelevant:
- Making the information your audience members need hard to find. Investors with questions go to investment websites, but if they have a question about 401k plans or how to budget their Social Security checks, are those “molecular” topics easy to find?
- Being afraid to go niche and casting too wide a net (talking too broadly), thereby alienating your audience.
- Using jargon or slang and making members of your audience feel left out or confused.
- Sounding like a cheerleader for your company.
- Talking about yourself. Developing promotional copy cloaked as content.
An important one here is leaving out the jargon and speaking human. If you're writing a blog for a relationship therapy practice, avoid phrases like, “After performing an extensive gap analysis, it was conclusive that the synergies between the subjects were present at the onset and will continue to exist in the future” when what you're really trying to say is, “After several months of intense counseling, the couple realized the love that brought them together is the same love that will keep them together.”
Remember: No matter how tempting it is to show off your academic prowess, there is no substitute for meaningful prose. Don't be so fact-focused that you forget to make a personal connection.
An “Audience” Is Still One Person at a Time
In the discussion so far, you've learned that each person is an audience in and of themselves, which leads to the question: How can they all be reached effectively when companies, in most cases, have an extremely diverse audience? It all goes back to the strategy discussion. It's an exercise with your firm in trying to figure out who they're talking to plus the old argument about not selling a man a camera but showing him how to use it.
Imagine you're a camera company and you're tasked with starting a blog targeting an audience of both professional and amateur photographers. You're tasked with selling everything to everyone. Your company sells simple point-and-shoot cameras to the amateurs and elaborate DSLRs to the pros.
In this scenario, you have to think of each person (the typical amateur or the typical pro) as an audience of one, entirely unto themselves. They have a general sense of what they'd like to do, maybe know a few different techniques, and use their cameras in unique ways. How will you organize the information in your strategy to address their pain points and answer their questions? And how will you make this information easy for them to find?
Information must be organized in a way that addresses these needs as well as engages your audience members. You're about to jump into a macro-conversation that has already started. When you jump in, what is your unique contribution to the conversation that will make individual photographers stop and take notice? As some point, you need to choose words on a molecular level—meaning you have to find information that's relevant and important to each member of the audience and organized in a way that's easy for them to find it. When a person feels confident that you're able to solve a problem or pain point and answers are easy to find through your channel, you've become a resource for them. Don't underestimate the branding power that means for you. They may not use your services now, but when your blog or channel is elevated to a “utility” for someone, they come back time and time again, and likely share what they find with others.
Super Molecular: A Final Thought
In a previous life, I taught investment seminars. One day, sometime in 2004, a student of mine, a retired gentleman from Texas, with $500,000 in his retirement account, pulled me aside and said, “I want to put all my money in Ford. I worked there my whole life, and I want to buy American!”
I'm not a financial adviser, and I'm sure most financial advisers would shudder at this idea. Don't put all your eggs in one basket, right? But I knew better. I took the time to explain to him how he could not only do this but protect his investment entirely. “Buy all the stock you can afford but leave enough to buy puts on the whole position,” I told him. (A put is a form of “insurance” that protects a stock against price declines.)
Later that year, the stock got cut in half, and yes, his investment got cut in half, too. However, his puts increased as much, completely offsetting the loss in the stock, so he came out unscathed. He would have lost half his life savings if he'd invested directly, but he ended up losing just a few thousand on the cost of the protection.
The success of this story can be credited to pure content marketing at the conversational level. My student came in from the company blog, which he discovered online. He attended a free event where he learned the basics of options. He paid for a seminar, which he was able to attend multiple times to learn something that he didn't already know. When he was ready, he had a micro-conversation with me personally, which ended up saving him from losing nearly $250,000. He shared his experience with others, and got friends and family involved in the seminar as well.
I realize that you may not be able to have this type of molecular conversation in person with each customer. And neither could I. But his success, and the success of the company I worked for at the time, was based entirely on the back of a thoughtful content marketing strategy that became a relevant conversation on a molecular level.
The point is, your content strategy doesn't have to stop with a blog or social media channel. This was a series of content channels strung together strategically, with conversation- based marketing at each level. The path to purchase for him took him through three channels before he became a customer. But the lifetime value of this person was far greater as he recommended us to the many people he brought in after he became a brand ambassador.
Icebreaker
Can you build a business entirely by having a relevant conversation on a molecular level, from information that began as content strategy?
In his book, Content Inc., Joe Pulizzi explains how to create and execute a content marketing strategy before building the product. Its premise basically states you build an audience first with good, relevant content. Then give them a reason to buy from you. For this exercise, challenge yourself to think about how you might attack a content strategy for your product or business if all you had was content. How deep (molecular) would you go to cultivate a relationship with your brand ambassadors?
The audience is built around a pain point. In my case, one of the pain points for the seminars was people were losing money in the market. The audience was built and retained by the company's blog at the center of a content marketing strategy that used several content channels that provided relevant, useful, knowledge-based articles and seminars.
Now, as an exercise, rethink your strategy right now along these lines:
- Build an audience around a pain point. What is the pain point in your industry that is happening right now? If you aren't sure, stop and listen carefully before moving to the next step.
- How can you address, answer, or solve the problem of the pain point in a relevant, unique, and useful way? Think about how to use at least one of your channels as a means of a “one to many” conversation, as if it were one to one, with you sharing your knowledge.
- What channel(s) will best reach your audience most effectively? A blog, a newsletter, Facebook posts, emails, articles on a webpage, seminars, or a combination of two or more?
Get your relevant conversation going at the molecular level, build your following, and then introduce what you have to offer as you build your business.