Page 80 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

management products doesn’t have a new product to announce every
month. It does, however, have a large and active consumer base. People
with diabetes want to hear from other people with diabetes. They don’t
want to hear yet another doctor giving advice in “medical speak.”
Medtronic taps into that audience and regularly asks for stories, resulting in
awareness, news, and sales:
Nearly 300 customers have shared stories and photos.
Over 80 percent of customers have given Medtronic the rights to use their
stories and photos in other media.
Their “Share Your Story” Facebook app is responsible for a two-to-one
increase in return on investment in the effort.

The Escalator Audience model

As you can imagine, the idea of creating an audience of super fans is relevant to
almost any industry, but perhaps none has been so intensely studied as sports
marketing … where your job literally depends on creating fans.

In a study on sports fan loyalty,11 researchers found four stages of “fan-
hood:” 1) non-fans; 2) light fans; 3) medium users; and 4) heavy users. Heavy
users (the Alpha fans) contribute 80 percent of the revenue to a sports team
through ticket sales and merchandise purchases but make up 20 percent or less
of the total fan base.

The study proposed distinct marketing strategies aimed at all four user groups
with the purpose of moving fans “up the escalator” from one segment to the
next. The model emphasizes the importance of satisfying the different needs of
each group while promoting movement to the next level.

The strategy for non-fans (or non-consumers, if you like) is devoted entirely
to awareness through promotion (which is the focus of Chapter 8). How do you
let people know your content exists? What value is there for them to try it? In
sports marketing terms, the goal is to get people to attend one game. If they like
the experience, chances are they might become a “light consumer.”

The next job is identify those who have attended one game—or have had an
initial experience with your content—and provide incentives to increase the
frequency of their attendance, or in your case, content consumption. Some
common techniques in the digital marketing world include offering free content
like training videos, webinars, and eBooks in exchange for signing up for a
newsletter or subscribing to a content channel. This is the process of turning
weak links into stronger links.