Page 81 - The Content Code: Six essential strategies to ignite your content, your marketing, and your business - PDFDrive.com

As light users in your audience attend additional events or become more
regular consumers of your content, they become medium users. These
consumers have some interest in you and have probably subscribed to your
content channels. Perhaps they even engage in social transmission at this point.
The marketing objective with this group is to increase the psychological
commitment and get them to identify with a person, brand, or company in a
deeper, more emotional way. This is the hardest part: You probably can’t get
medium consumers to be loyal fans through coupons or eBooks. It takes constant
reinforcement that their psychological commitment is acknowledged and
rewarded.

There is another aspect to achieving this final stage of fandom … and that’s
hope.

The Chicago Cubs are iconic in their futility. They have not won a baseball
World Series since 1908. And yet they have some of the most dedicated fans in
the world, filling Wrigley Field and buying millions in merchandise every losing
season.

How is it possible for a team with so little accomplishment to remain so
popular? Why would a person emotionally commit themselves—for generations
—to a brand associated with futility? Of course part of the answer is emotional
attachment but another part is that each spring, the season starts over and every
team is on equal footing, at least for a few days. There is always hope; there is
always next year. As long as the team owners field a competitive team with a
glimmer of hope, the fandom can persist.

There’s a lesson here for marketers, too. One famous executive once told me
that people keep coming back to his content year after year because they want to
be like him. “The vast majority of them will never achieve that,” he said. “But as
long as I keep giving them hope that yes, it can be done, they keep paying me for
my appearances and books.”

These are interesting ideas for brands: How do you attract your best
customers and most loyal fans by dispensing hope? What would it mean to your
business if you methodically attracted an Alpha Audience as loyal as a Cubs fan
who will stick with you even through “losing seasons?”

Creating your Alpha Audience:
Lessons from the experts

So far, this piece of the Content Code has been about the science of building an