Page 74 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

These brand advocates are a rapt audience. When you focus on
engaging them through social, at all the moments that matter, you’ll
turn them into your most valuable customers—loyal ones that don’t
just buy your products again and again, but encourage others to do the
same.

Can you begin to see how critically important your Alpha Audience is? For
many companies, it might be their most important asset … but how many of
them recognize its power?

Developing a proprietary audience

Jeffery Rohrs, a vice president at Salesforce, wrote a wonderful book called
Audience that describes the importance of your “proprietary audience.” He
explains:7

All content marketers are a bit mad. There is more content being
produced every day than a person could consume in a lifetime, and yet,
we venture forth to do what? Produce more content.

We do so because we’re betting on ourselves. We’re betting that we
can rise above all that other content and reach clients, prospects, and
influencers that matter to our company. And so 99 percent of our effort
goes into creating amazing content thinking the best content wins. And
then we hit “publish” and wait. And wait. And wait.

We collectively suffer from Audience Assumption Disorder, the
magical belief that great content magnetically draws audiences we
need to succeed. However, publication is not distribution, and a
content marketing strategy without an audience development plan is
no strategy at all.

There is no magic potion you can drink to make your audience double
or triple in size. Rather, there is the hard work of growing your
audience with each new piece of content you produce. You must
always be building audiences.

Audience development is part and parcel of content marketing, and it’s
simply not enough to put 1 percent of your effort there. You must