Stop Collecting, Content Marketing Is About Defining Others As Humans

Collecting numbers doesn’t matter, what matters is how we define others as people.

The way we connect with others is the crux for all content to be a success and to build an audience who warm to us and are willing to engage with what we believe in.

Lets Not Jump On Someone Else’s Bus

This was something that Facebook did once upon a time, but now the focus is on ‘buy, buy, buy.’ While Facebook finds new ways to monetise with the increasing precedence of its ads, the more of us tune out. I miss those bygone days of reading about friends and what they’re up to, I don not miss reading about regular seminars from companies I have no relationship with or the invitation to download a guide to be a ‘rockstar’ of some shape or form.

The challenge for us all is to continually refine and develop our audiences via the content marketing programmes that we use. One way that provides an ideal opportunity and shape our message to people who are willing to participate is to maximise the potential with email. I know this is something that I’ve gone into detail in a previous article on email marketing, but the most powerful way to grow your digital space is to own it, rather than on someone else’s terms (take a bow ‘paid for’ advertising and all the social media channels).

Email Never Went Away

Email is the best way to define an actual audience as real people. The base is to start with a database that you have full control of and the ability to build and what’s better is it is free. By utilising our database allows us to control the conversation and a key way to communicate to build and nurture a trusting relationship.

The biggest opportunity we all have as businesses is that we can now reinvent the channels that have perhaps become neglected. We only need to look at the decrease in direct mail, while the wind blows in the direction of digital platforms. A controlled message to a specifically targeted audience, can compliment the overall content marketing strategy of looking to build a dialogue and a trusting relationship with an audience.

Lets Start To Round Up

The key for content marketing success is not to shout the loudest and become everyone’s friend, but to focus on the connections that we make and how we represent ourselves as real people willing to be open, ready to engage and participate.

It’s time to shun the collection of numbers as a vanity exercise, take control of what you can own and define others as real people.