If you are struggling to get attention from your target audience, more than likely, it’s because you are boring them to tears by talking about yourself, your products, your services, your awards, etc…
Well guess what?
Nobody cares. At least not yet.
Rule #1: Be Interesting
If you are going to attract visitors to your site, you need to think about them before you think about what you are trying to sell.
It’s time for some target audience analysis.
Who is your target audience? What are they struggling with? What are they trying to learn? What do they find entertaining?
If you don’t yet know your target audience well enough to answer these questions, step one is to thoroughly define your target audience. Once you know who they are, then you can start to focus on being interesting.
How to Become What People Are Interested In
Now that you know who you are trying to attract, becoming interesting is going to be quite a bit easier. Here are a few ways you can do that.
1. Study What is Already Popular
According to Neil Patel, founder of the popular blog KissMetrics, one of the very best ways to discover what your audience is interested in is to study the other blogs in your niche. What you are looking for are posts that have received a lot of comments and social sharing.
Whenever you find a blog post that has generated this type of engagement, you have found a topic or an idea that your audience is very interested in.
Now that you know this topic is interesting to your audience, all you need to do is to write an article that gives your opinion on the topic, as well as to add some additional value. In fact, you may even want to cite the original article in the post you are writing.
The easiest way to do this is to use a wonderful tool that Neil has created. Here’s how you do it:
Come up with a list of 5 of your competitors, take their URLs and plug them into the Quick Sprout analyzer tool.
What the tool will show you is all of the popular blog posts that your competitors have created from a social media aspect. You can then take the list and sort it by a specific social channel to see what post titles people like the most.
You can then generate your own version of that blog post with your own twist, so that way you aren’t copying your competition blatantly.
This will help you create more content that gets more social traffic versus writing blog posts that don’t get shared.
2. Create Content That Has Nothing to Do with What You Sell
Being interesting means being diverse. Every once in a while, it’s a very good idea to create (or find) content that has absolutely nothing to do with what you sell; yet will still be of interest to your target audience.
There are several ways to do this.
The first way is to spend time talking to the people in your niche to gain an understanding of current events, news, or industry trends. Once you have uncovered something that is of interest, put your reporter hat on, research it further, and then write an op-ed article about it.
If you do a good job on the article, people will share it and you’ll succeed in attracting new visitors to your site. If your site was build with conversion in mind, in all likelihood, 1-3% of these visitors will convert to leads. Once they convert to a lead, if you have a well designed marketing funnel, you will have all the time you need to start introducing them to your products and/or services.
The second way to be interesting is to find or create content that you think will be entertaining to your audience. To see what I mean, take a look at the two videos below.
Evian, “Baby & Me,” 90,487,249 views
This first video has been viewed 90 million times since it was published on Youtube back on April 19, 2013.
In case you are thinking, what the heck do babies have to do with Evian? Agency and client both pointed out that the babies aren’t just an advertising gimmick. They’re rooted in the brand’s history.
“The babies are true to our story and heritage,” Laurent Houel, global brand director for Evian, tells Adweek. “The love affair of the brand with babies started in France in 1935, when Evian was first recommended as a perfect water for babies. It is still today the No. 1 water used by mothers for their babies [thanks to its pH-neutral mineral composition]. So fundamentally, there is a true link, it is not a marketing trick.”
Houel adds: “BETC had the idea to go beyond this, and leverage the babies into a powerful symbol of purity and youth. This baby is a symbol of you and how you feel when you experience Evian, and a symbol of the purity of our water.”
DollarShaveClub.com – “Our Blades Are F***ing Great” 14,971,597 views
This next video has been viewed 15 million times since it was published on Youtube back on March 6, 2012.
The cost to produce the video below was just $4,500.
Below are some tips that Dubin shared for making a video viral:
- “Think deeply about the problem you’re solving,” Mr. Dubin said. In other words, find the insights that will make people care about the video — which in this case were the same ones that made them care about the Dollar Shave Club brand. Razor blades — both the high cost and the inconvenience of buying them from the locked “razor fortress” in stores — are “an emotionally supercharged subject.”
- “Identify a resonant shared human experience around it and then build your concept around that ,” Mr. Dubin said. “In just about every beat of the video … we’re talking about the business and the benefit of the business.”
- Keep it brief. “The video is really really tight,” Mr. Dubin said. “This video is a minute-and-a-half long, and that ‘s really, really important. It was going to be a lot longer, and thankfully the director I worked with who helped me, who I also did some improv with in New York, she really helped me pare it down and keep it brief. Nobody wants to watch your five-minute video. Nobody forwards around a video they didn’t watch all the way through.”
- “Don’t give people a video they could have written themselves.” Dollar Shave Club’s video may have been low-budget, but it was created by people, including Mr. Dubin, with years of experience both in improv comedy and video production, giving it considerably more punch than your average $4,500 production. “I would encourage you … to hire some comedy writers. Go down to the local comedy club and bring them into your marketing brainstorm. I studied improv for eight years at the Upright Citizens Brigade as a hobby and loved it. … A lot of my teachers are now on television and in film … and I always thought they were missing a big opportunity, which was to start their own agency.”
Converting “Interesting” into “Revenue”
As you might imagine, simply posting funny videos of cats isn’t going to cut it when it comes to generating revenue.
Hence my not using a cat video for my example *smirk*
Like I said earlier, if you have a well designed website with proper calls to action on each blog post (like the one below), it’s quite reasonable to expect 1-3% of your traffic will convert to leads.
Once you have captured someone’s contact information, the next step is to feed them more content and collect data on what they are interested in; a topic that I will cover at length in a future post.
For now, just know that that if you get this right, the natural result will be that some of the leads you capture will flow all the way through your funnel and become what is called a sales qualified lead. (meaning they are ready and willing to talk to your sales team)
