“The stock market is not the economy.”
When the stock market rises, it does not always follow that the economy is excellent. When the stock market crashes, it doesn't always mean the economy is bad.
This is as true today as it was 25 years ago when I started marketing. And it's a great reminder to avoid basing business decisions on broken connections.
Over the years, I've learned a close lesson about content and audiences: popularity is not a sign of differentiation. People do not necessarily regard what is popular with online audiences or in the media as high quality – or even true.
If you're successful in chasing trends and feeding popular content to audiences, you haven't necessarily differentiated your content. On the other hand, differentiating by taking a contrarian or very niche approach to what's popular doesn't always work either. How do you combine popularity and differentiation?
#Popularity of content is not a mark of distinction, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click to tweet
Red and Blue Ocean Strategies
In their 2004 book, Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne explain red and blue ocean strategies for marketing. Red oceans are crowded markets where popular products abound and tough sales and marketing strategies rule. Blue oceans are undiscovered markets with little or no competition where businesses can create new customers or die alone.
In strategic content marketing, most businesses focus on red oceans – offering short-term, hyper-targeted feed. They try to drive traffic, engagement and conversions by getting the most people to consume the content. So the red ocean strategy focuses on topics and content that have proven to be popular with audiences.
But this strategy makes it difficult to distinguish the content from everyone else's content.
This myopic view of content often prohibits looking at the other side – investing in a blue ocean mentality to find and create new audiences with less popular content.
Short-term and overly focused #Content feed often prohibits the mindset of creating new audiences, says @Robert_Rose via @CMIContent. Click to tweet
Finding a blue niche in a red world
I recently worked with a financial technology company that provides short-term loans to small businesses experiencing a cash flow crunch. It's as sales driven as any team I've seen.
When they started, they invested much of their marketing and content efforts in a blue-ocean strategy, targeting small businesses that would need a loan within a month.
This is where it gets interesting.
Five years ago, this company was not the only one to recognize the tremendous opportunity in quick, easily accessible, short-term loans. A red ocean of new customers who needed these loans grew in a relatively robust economy (and historically low interest rates).
The value of these loans Grown from $121 million in 2013 to just over $2 billion in 2018. And the competition for the attention of this audience has also increased. As short-term, low-funnel content on accessible lending has saturated the market, this strategy has become less and less successful as so many fintech companies have adopted it.
My client's team knew they couldn't just rely on this red crowd for new business. They recognized the need to invest time in building a new audience – larger, more established, long-term borrowers.
This audience was not an instant producer generating leads. But the company wanted to diversify its product line and better support the loan-related needs of the new audience.
The genius of this strategy was learning, targeting and building demand for new ideas from within a niche Inside The red crowd. Simply put: they created a purple audience by targeting a blue audience within the red audience.
The blue crowd the team was targeting was small, fast-growing businesses that would soon develop into established, long-term borrowers. These businesses may want to know the benefits of the short-term availability of cash. The team focused the new learning content platform on teaching companies that don't currently need a loan about the benefits of an off-the-shelf solution when they do.
The purple crowd took time to develop. But when these audience members entered the red ocean, my client company remained top of mind because it ignored popular trends and offered completely different content.
3 triggers for targeting purple audiences
The decision to invest in cultivating a purple crowd requires thought. These three considerations can motivate the transition to a different type of audience.
1. You are willing to hedge bets on current efforts
So many companies double down on their content to the point where their strategy incorporates the same content at every stage of the operation. The customer journey. Why? Because everyone is talking about it.
I see few B2B marketing organizations providing the same “why to change” thought leadership content to prospects as they do to their own customers. Shouldn't your customers' needs and wants change after they purchase your solution?
Developing thought leadership are you Believing is important but the current audience still doesn't think about can be an excellent hedge.
You don't need to provide the same thought leadership to prospects and customers. After all, your customers' needs and wants should change after they buy.
2. You believe the consensus is wrong
Many companies fold their content marketing like a lawn chair because their content goes against the consensus. Last week, a CMO told me, “Our CEO says we can't go out with this thought leadership message because people won't agree with us.”
You don't need to invest the entire budget in an opposite idea. But if you truly believe that the world will eventually come around to your point of view, build the content infrastructure that supports that view and experience a multiplier on the investment.
3. You see an opportunity to steal an audience
Take a look at the most popular content, and you'll see all your competitors fighting for the eyeballs searching for that topic, trying to outdo everyone else in search, and fighting a red ocean of potential audience members. Then, look up and ask, “What's next?”
You might see a slight trend. Or, as my fintech client did, you might notice a niche blue crowd in the red crowd. Investing in this content can pull audiences from popular content to your starting purple audience.
SAP Content Site The future of customer engagement and experience illustrates this concept. During the pandemic, the team, led by Jen and Anda Zende, Adjusted its editorial focus Steal some of the Red Ocean crowd looking for COVID-19 coverage. Jen and the team designed the content to appeal to people looking not only for lockdown news but also for current practices and industry information for businesses on customer experience in the era of COVID-19.
SAP has created a purple audience.
Be colorful
As a marketer, you should think about new audiences. How can you appeal to them with content that may not be popular now but can help them better prepare for what you believe is coming tomorrow?
This is a question that is best answered for long-term content marketing success.
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Cover image by Yosef Kalinovsky/Content Marketing Institute