WPenner's Blog

As I launch my micro media business, I am awash in the confusion of a million voices and opinions about what to do and how to do it. What I want is clarity. Clarity is important to me because it leads to leadership.

My working definition of a leader is the person who sees the furthest and communicates the clearest. Anyone putting together a blog, newsletter, video channel, podcast, or any other micro media business already strives to communicate more clearly than others. Add seeing even a little further than the competition and leadership becomes automatic.

Except our education system has left most of us in a constant state of confusion and waiting for others to tell us what to do.¹ This article lays out my game plan for achieving clarity based on more than a decade of working in web and communications sprinkled with some MBA learning. To start, there are five things I aim to understand:

• audience
• competition
• content
• promotion
• ethics.

Understand Audience

When working with a marketer or business consultant, audience is the first or second question most will ask about. It really is that important. The detail that can go into understanding an audience is massive! I use three questions to simplify and focus on what I want to know about my audience:

• Who are they?
• Where are they?
• What do they want?

Who are they?

Most marketers will jump straight to understanding audience demographics (where do they live, their age and gender, income bracket, etc.). For a micro media business, however, the demographics of the community are less important than psychographics (beliefs, values, desires, challenges, fears, etc.). An audience’s psychographics probably more closely define the group than any demographic.

Starting with assumptions is a valid way of figuring out who your audience is. Write what you know (or think you know and need to validate). There are many ways to test these assumptions that simultaneously build conversation and connection — the beginnings of community.

I also find it useful to collect stories from the community. Stories of things people are doing, struggling with, disagree with, and so on are useful grist of the mill!

An elementary mistake I still sometimes fall into at this stage is jumping from problem to solution. Understanding what an audience struggles with, I sometimes rush to formulate solutions, experiences, products, or services. The trap, though, is finding a solution that only partially fits because I have not understood the full extent problem.

Where Are they?

Where they are does not refer to demographics (e.g. country or city) but platform. Does the target audience hang out on social media? If so, what platforms? Or do they congregate in chat rooms or on bulletin boards? Then don’t waste time posting on Facebook.

A short-cut is going where an audience already gathers helps grow yours. Relationship building in communities of like-minded people is the easiest way to grow an audience. Go to where people are rather than just expecting them to come to you.

What do they want?

Most people are looking for a transformation to a higher state of success than they are in. They are looking for the metamorphosis of a heroic journey. As you listen to your prospective audience, keep in mind the four (highly simplified²) steps of the heroic journey: leaving the status quo, fighting the dragon(s), gaining the gold, returning and assuming leadership.

Deepening my understanding of what the community I want to reach wants helps me remember everyone is at a different stage in their journey. Different stages have unique challenges and require different tools. The end goal in content marketing is assisting people in returning to their place as leaders.

Rather than developing passive, subservient followers, communicators try to raise others to leadership. In this vein, the Amazon leadership core principles include one about developing leaders:

Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognise people with exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organisation. Leaders develop leaders and are serious about their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice.³

Understand Competition

The next thing most marketers want to know about is the competition in the space. People way smarter than me write massive books on competitive analysis, so I simplify all that to look for four types of competition.

Who is:

1. listened to most carefully?
2. followed most religiously?
3. debated most ferociously?
4. ignored most studiously?

The positive two (listened to and followed) I want to learn from. I push to understand their connection to the community, how they position their offerings, and their style. These are the qualities I will most likely try to emulate.

On the negative side, however, I’m looking at similar attributes. These are the ones I will use to distinguish my brand by being different.

Understand Content

The obviousness of this statement makes it worth stressing: content without clarity fails.

It seems like there is a hot new social media platform every week. Keeping up with all of them could become a full-time job. Adding content to all of them the full-time job for a team! Since concentration of power multiplies force, carefully choosing which media, platform, and style to use will provide much more power in the market.

Media

Media (in the sense of what kind of content) choice is usually a function of what inspires the creator the most. I like to write and am not so good at video, so I am starting with a newsletter. I am keeping a weather eye on what my audience gravitates to (see the "What do they Want?" Section above), though. Working to overcome personal biases and tendencies to better serve my audience, by adding alternative forms of media, even if my primary media remains constant, shows caring.

Platform

Knowing where your audience is (see "Where Are They" Section above) simplifies platform choice as long as it fits your media. The temptation is to use too many platforms.

In the spirit of concentrating power, mastering a few platforms is more powerful than trying to be everywhere. Get clarity on the best platforms for your audience, message, and media. Choose a few key platforms rather than catering too widely. Being “everywhere” provides no tangible benefits.

Style

I think other people are like this, too: I usually want certainty of success before I make a move. Mimicking others is a way we reduce the possibility of making errors. That’s a workable strategy until trying to sell something — a product, a service, or an idea.

The distinction is that we pay attention to what stands out. We admire the difficulty of embracing differences. Attracting an audience is often a matter of standing out. Standing out is a matter of being different.

Instead of copying what others are doing, find what makes you unique and amplify those traits. Differentiate enough to distinguish, not enough to alienate.

To be most worthy of attention rather than finding a “right” path, choose the path that makes you unique. The “right” path comes in an infinite number of forms and your way is no less right for being solitary. So, pick a path and customize it for who you are.

Understand your Offering

To get to clarity about the offering requires understanding marketing and business model development. Both topics are massive, and much ink has already been spilt on them. Instead of getting bogged down in details, my plan is to focus only on the most important and actionable elements. I use four questions to uncover the starting points

• What is the offering?
• Who is the audience?
• Why does that person care?
• What makes you different?⁴

What is the offering?

Defining what you do with a topic is a common mistake. Much more important is the transformation you create. A niche can be a topic like “creators”. That niche becomes stronger, actionable, and valuable as a transformation like “I help these kinds of people get these kinds of results”. Clarity and being more specific drives growth faster.

As discussed above, an important aspect of the offering is taking the audience on a journey of transformation. Clarity about the steps of the journey is useful. Be clear about what you make, who can benefit, and how you deliver the outcome.

Work out the details for four groups of followers: beginners starting out, the overwhelmed meeting the challenges of the journey, the lost trying to gain the gold and the disoriented, trying to return to leadership. Work out ways to help them overcome their self-doubt and fears at the various stages of their journey.

Who is the audience?

Since we started this article talking about defining the audience, skipping this step is tempting. Even though this is a brief step, it is critical.

Boil the audience from step 1 down to a single person. This could be a persona (a made-up archetype of your ideal customer) but a real person is better.

Doing this allows everything to focus on somebody specific, providing a much more personal feel for customers. A summary of the benefit of such clarity is:

Create content for everyone and no one responds. Create content for someone and be amazed at how many respond.

Being specific helps people decide whether they want the outcome offered, making the purchasing decision easier, and the purchase feels personal. This observation is as true for a give-away product as something you want people to pay for.

A major by-product of this step is creating better content. When creating content for a specific person, even a fictional one, the content will be smoother, more focused, and easier for the audience to accept.

Why does that person care?

Work on the assumption that value comes from transformation, not information. So rather than asking, " What features does the offering have?" The more important question is: “What benefits does the offering provide?”

A short-cut is to target a past version of you. Targeting people trying to make the same transformation you have made means you can teach them your hard-won lessons, help them avoid the pitfalls, and lead them to success. It means that your personal experience helps understand the benefits.

What makes you different?

Use the competition analysis we talked about earlier to gain useful clarity in this step. The goal is to define an offering customers will see as valuable AND rare AND costly for others to imitate.

Copying the best of the competition and avoiding the worst by-passes many difficulties that trap others. The combination of rare, valuable and difficult to copy creates business sustainability effortlessly.

Make process iterative for extra power. Since your business and market are constantly changing, clarity is rarely a “won and done” war, but an ongoing series of skirmishes. Get started with what you know and be ready to change the plan as contact with real customers teaches you new things. What you know today pales compared to what you’ll know tomorrow from the experience of trying.

Understand Ethics

There is a lot to say about ethics in communications and a lot of ideologically drives discussion. Sidestepping most of that, I focus on just two questions. They are the two questions the audience asks every time they hear from me:

• Does he (the creator) like me (the consumer)?
• Can I trust him (the creator)?

Does he like me?

There’s an old chestnut, “They won’t care how much you know until they know how much you care”. While there are important exceptions in long-term relationships, it is a good rule of thumb. If a relationship is not ethical, it gets ended, so a longer-term relationship is more likely to be ethical. Similarly, a relationship that is not mutually beneficial will probably end, so a longer-term relationship is more likely to be profitable to both parties.

In an online world, it is easier than ever to sever a relationship. So using shady tricks to get money from people won’t work nearly as well as genuine caring to create an ethical and profitable relationship. Stay focused on the other person’s journey and destination more than your own.

Genuinely caring about people attracts reciprocal care. Being generous will attract more attention because generosity fuels the engine of virality. Give to grow. Deserve the audience you develop.

Can I trust him?

Online reputation is straightforward to generate and fortunately completely under our control. Reputation is quality and consistency. Being consistent is the more important of the two.

Consistency, and trust, develops with similar, repeated quality exposures. Consistency in posting, tone, style, quality, and so on all builds a reputation. A strong reputation built on these types of old-fashioned virtues remains the bedrock of relationships.

I need to trust myself to become consistent. Rather than a “fake it till you make it” attitude, I choose to define myself as what I want to be. I am a writer. Not an aspiring writer. I may be a junior writer, or a developing writer, but 100% writer.

Photo by Zac Durant on Unsplash