In traditional mass-media advertising, you sell to strangers.

A large media company rents you a huge collection of nameless people, and you give the same message to all of them. You can try to be selective about which audience you rent, but in the end, you have no control. You cannot be sure if they like you, or what you’re pitching to them. The media company manages the relationship, and has a vested interest in keeping you from getting too close to their audience.

However, when you start to see the power of the Connection Economy, you quickly realize that you get the choice of selling to strangers, or selling to friends. Your friends are people who already know you, trust you, and would love to know what you are coming out with next.

With intelligent content marketing, you can build and grow an entire business around high-quality, high-profit relationships with your ideal customers.

It’s your business; who would you rather sell to?

 

Choose your Friends

The first step of building your new strategy is to choose your Ideal Audience.

If you could do business with anyone in the world, who would it be? Who provides the most value to your business? Who do you enjoy doing business with the most? Which customers give you the energy and motivation to keep going?

Alternatively, think about the customers you don’t want – clients who suck the energy out of you, or customers you wish you could pay to not come into your store.

Maybe you run a classy restaurant and don’t like serving the coupon-carrying, water-drinking people that come in and complain that it’s too dark. You prefer the person who already knows why your wine from Bordeaux is more expensive than the one from Napa.

Maybe you have a landscaping business and you prefer clients who already know what they want, and who let you execute the plan to perfection. Your skin crawls every time you meet someone who says, “I don’t know, just do something pretty.”

Maybe you are an accountant, and you prefer the excitement of working with startups as opposed to the monotony of the work that established companies give you.

 

Once you have your Ideal Audience down, figure out how many of them you need to make your business plan viable. If you are an app developer, you might need to reach a million downloads before you can achieve your goal. If you are a highly experienced industry-specific consultant, you might only need 2-3 clients.

 

Get to Know your Friends

Your success in using an intelligent content marketing strategy is based on how well you know your Ideal Audience. Do you know what makes them tick? Where do they go for information? What kind of natural language do they use when talking about things in your field?

Every decision from this point forward is based on what you know about your Ideal Audience. It is impossible to know too much about them.

 

Here’s an example:

Hailey is starting her own salon geared toward professional women. ‘Professional women’ is a little vague, so let’s break it down.

Basic demographic information? Hailey’s Ideal Audience is unmarried women between the ages of 25 and 35 who live on their own in the city and have a large disposable income. She has nothing against married women with children, but she just prefers the single crowd.

What are their motivations and challenges? What keeps them up at night? Hailey thinks these women are motivated by success, independence, and excitement. They find it challenging to keep up their pace of life, but wouldn’t trade it for anything, at least for now. They worry that they may get lonely later in life and won’t have their close friends around them forever. They also worry about missing out on the latest trends and being marked as out-of-date.

Have they ever given money in the past for the product you plan on selling to them? Yes, they are used to paying for haircuts and facials. However, Hailey is eventually looking to start offering Ayurvedic treatments at her salon, which would be new for most of her customers.

How much do these people know about your industry? The women Hailey is looking at are well-versed in her industry. They subscribe to a few style magazines and already know the leading names and brands.

How much do they know about you already? Hailey has a large group of friends in this category, and she has been cutting some friends’ hair at her apartment for two years now.

What story do these people tell themselves about your industry? “Life is too short to not look great”, and “Looks matter more than anyone will admit”.

What do you not know about them that would be extremely useful? Hailey wishes she knew how many different shops and stores her customers go to for different needs. Do they like having a store for hair, a store for nails, and a website to order other beauty products from? Or would they prefer a consolidated solution?

 

Hailey has a better picture about her Ideal Audience, but there is still more she needs to learn. The most important thing she can do now is to find and create situations where she can have more conversations with these people. She shouldn’t pass up a chance to learn more about them and get some of her questions answered. The fact that you have to spend a lot of time with this group is yet another compelling reason to pick an Ideal Audience that you actually like.

 

If you have a diverse audience base, you will need to think about a different strategy for each group. Start with the group that carries the most personal and business value for you, and then you can expand your strategy later.

 

Your Audience Needs You

The good news is that the audience you are trying to reach exists, likely in large numbers. The better news is that they may be more connected, findable, and organized than ever before.

Even if they don’t exist in the numbers you need, there is a second group of people who would love to be in the kind of group you just described. If only someone would show them how to get in.

All of these people are waiting for you.

They are waiting for a new voice to lead them. They are waiting for someone to teach them. They are waiting for someone to get everyone together. They are waiting for someone to make it fun, serious, clear, or interesting. They need someone who will speak into their lives and be a guide.

All that is left is for you is to find them and give them what they want.

 

The old way of marketing is selling to strangers, and it can still work. But a more intelligent approach is selling to a large group of devoted fans, who prefer to call themselves your friends.