Page 75 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

create content with your audience and action in mind.

In his book, Rohrs lists three reasons why this important idea has been
largely ignored in the marketing community:

The concept of proprietary audiences is new. Prior to the Internet, a
proprietary audience was a direct mail database hidden in some huge,
distant server. Today proprietary audiences exist inside and outside our
databases, and across a vast array of public and private channels.
We’re typically focused on channel management instead of audience
development. Many companies have Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube
strategies, but few have comprehensive Proprietary Audience Development
strategies. This leaves marketing pigeon-holed into tactical discussions
instead of debates about strategic priorities.
Channels are still evolving. The channels that support proprietary
audiences haven’t evolved to the point where they provide marketers with
simple, consistent ROI measurements. This makes it difficult to provide
leadership with more than anecdotal stories of positive audience
engagement.

To be clear, an Alpha Audience that is proprietary to your company is not
owned by your company because no audience is owned. Members can leave any
time they want. Whether reading a blog, using a mobile app, or subscribing to an
email list, the audience member always has the option to walk away.

While not owned, your core audience can still be proprietary in that the right
to communicate with them belongs to a single entity. You.

Digital consultant and author Jay Baer describes this group as the audience of
“reliable reach.” When you send content into the ether of the web, you never
really know where it’s going to sink in and take root. But with your Alpha
Audience, you know there is a probability they’re processing your information
and perhaps even acting on it because they’ve raised their hands and asked for it.

The Alpha Audience profile

A large following on the social channels can make you feel important, but you
need to look past the ego-driven need for bigger numbers and devote time to
finding and nurturing the only audience who matters, the Alphas.

It’s an elite group. A poll of prominent bloggers determined that their Alpha