Decide on which content to create
A few notes about creating good content.
Audience research is more important than creating the actual content.
Your audience’s interests > your interests (always)
Great content producers have one thing in common: they are prolific.
Key points:
Define your audience very specifically: think geography, industry qualifiers, and their ideal client.
Make sure it is something people want to hear, not just what you want to produce.
Know your audience, and what they are interested in.
Create systems to monitor what your audience wants and translate that into your own content.
If you can create content that people HAVE to hear (Continuing Education), even better.
Who exactly is your audience?
One mistake people make when they define their audience is that they go too broad.
The problem with going too broad is that it will make doing audience consumption research hard to do.
If you say your audience is “small business owners”, not only does it make creating a product for the audience hard to do - it makes it hard to do research on where they are consuming things.
This is because a small business owner could be a bait-n-tackle store in Portland Maine, a floral-scented candle maker who sells through Etsy, or an independent financial advisor. All 3 can be considered businesses, but they will have very different needs, interests, and clients.
So, niche down. Define exactly who you sell to.
For example, if you want to reach financial advisors, you’ll need to be much more specific. Instead define your target based on geography, organizational structure, company headcount, or another industry qualifier. “Our target is independent financial advisors who manage at least $100MM in California, Oregon and Arizona, who have under 25 employees. You will be looking for a manageable number of prospects to market to.
For another example, if you are a real estate agent trying to reach homeowners, you will also need to be much more specific. Instead define your target market based on geography, zip code, house style, and value of house. Use government / municipal sources of data to help you refine down until you get to a manageable number of prospects.
Pro tip: it may be easier to figure out a niche by identifying one that may have been defined already. The “small” in small business might be as a measure of employee headcount, or revenue, or profit, or some other measure (EBITDA). Inc 5000 or other rankings can help you identify industry qualifiers.
Another tip: This exercise also helps you figure out how large your market is. Is it 500 companies/people, 5000, or 500,000?
What does your audience want to consume?
(not always what you want to create)
Identifying what the audience wants is study in supply & demand. To know what they will want in the future, understand what they have wanted now. Taste doesn’t change dramatically.
To understand what they are attracted to now, dive into the SEO of the industry. Use sites like google trends, Ahrefs or other SEO sites and analyze traffic trends on different topics. These will cost some money, but they will help you avoid creating content you want to create and direct you to the topics your audience is already interested in. This will help you answer the question “What are they reading already?”
In our financial advisor example, there are specific magazines such as Barron’s, RIA Biz,or Forbes Advisor that already create content for financial advisors. We can use this to our advantage by analyzing the traffic to these sites, youtube views & comments on content, and comments made by the audience. It will not be 100% perfect, but the data will give us good direction on what topics people are engaging with.
This works because it shows what people are engaging with. It also helps you avoid creating content you like but your audience doesn’t care about.
For example, If you do analysis on a site and see a piece of content on the Secure Act 2.0 (what is that? Who cares? doesn’t matter right now) is getting a lot of traffic, and other websites are referring to it because of its popularity, that is a signal. If, on the other hand, you LOVE antique chinese vases, and you want to write a piece about this for your audience, your work might be met with crickets. It is a very esoteric topic that the broad audience isn’t interested in.
This isn’t to say that creating esoteric content is a bad idea. But, it needs to be done in moderation.
Massive publishing houses create larger, more time-intensive content, by doing small tests of esoteric content first. After analyzing the traffic of the content, they decide whether it is worth making a larger bet.
The feedback you get from content - good or bad - is just as important as the content itself. Swap out “content” for “products” and you have Jeff Bezos feelings on failure at amazon. Speaking about the failure of the Fire Phone, Bezos once said "If you think that's a big failure, we're working on much bigger failures right now. And I am not kidding. And some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip.”
Do research to figure out what your audience wants: where are they gathering, and what questions are they asking? What topics are sparking the most controversy? What are they saying where they are gathering - Reddit, linkedin, facebook…or CONFERENCES.
Conference research:
Although attending a conference, or hosting a conference, is a great way to get feedback on what topics attendees are most interested in, you can study engagement even without attending.
Analyzing content topics that repeat or rhyme across the board is a signal as to what will be popular.
Why? Conference producers need perennial sellers to act as ‘filler’ to give people something to do as they wait for the big ticket item. The longer the audience stays, the more likely sponsors have a chance to speak with the audience. This is what conferences are all about (for the producer).
To find these repeating or rhyming topics, go to the conference website for the last few years on 3-5 conference holders. Analyze the headlines. What topics repeat or rhyme with one another?
For example, if we look at two Barron’s conferences, we see that the opening day topic is something related to Crypto for both events. Another conference, the InformaConnect RIA Edge conference, also has sessions on Crypto and digital currencies. We see that the RIA Edge conference has an entire track (set of sessions on one topic) focused on ETFs (something that advisors purchase). Curiously this is nowhere to be found at the Barron’s conference. But lets keep looking.
Another event, the Shook Research advisor conference has topics like “Branding” “Lessons learned in 10 years””ESG” and “Real Estate”. And these are just the content before breakfast. Then we see topics like “options” “referrals” “family wealth” and “inflation”.
So we have a good list of proper nouns and industry buzzwords we can search for at other conferences.
What about crossover topics between the conferences year over year?
Hot newsworthy topics may not happen year over year, but if they show a continued rise in importance, they are worth a look. For example, if a topic is a “breakout” topic (breakouts session happens between meals, and often happen at the same time as each other. The group “breaks out” into groups.) and then becomes a main topic (this happens over lunch or on a main stage or is chosen as a keynote topic) it is a signal that the topic has great popularity. Conference producers won’t put something on a big stage if they don’t expect people to be interested. Big stages are expensive.
Bringing it all together.
Its taken us a few hours, but we’ve done research on digital traffic from across the web. We’ve also gone to conference websites and we have an idea of what topics are rising in importance at conferences. Now, we can cross reference these topics with online traffic analysis to identify your core group of topics for your audience.
This is what our audience is interested in now.
Talking to your actual audience, while time consuming, will give you good qualitative data idea of what they want to hear.
The comedian Chris Rock has been studied for how he creates jokes. Jerry Seinfeld does similar things. They write, they practice jokes from multiple angles at smaller clubs, they refine, they study the laughter of the crowd, and refine some more. They might do 50 shows before they have a working set - a 45-60 minute show. By the time they are at this point, they have bombed more times than they’ve gotten laughs. They are so used to bombing because they realize it is feedback. Everything is feedback for their larger show. And when they do a large headliner show that is recorded and put on Netflix, the content has been practiced and engineered so that the show that IS recorded is the one that gets the most laughs.