Don’t Get Caught in the One-Size-Fits-All Content Trap

As a seasoned marketer, you know that identifying and understanding the ideal audiences for your products or services is vitally important. And depending on your company, you may have several, distinct audiences to serve.

But all too often, today’s marketers are taking a one-size-fits-all approach with their content (properties/channels/assets) in the hopes that they will resonate with all audiences they target. In reality, today’s savvy consumers recognize immediately that a piece of content isn’t relevant to their specific situation and bounce (literally in some cases).

“If your content marketing is for everybody, it’s for nobody.” -Joe Pulizzi, CEO of the Content Marketing Institute

This relevance issue takes on even bigger significance when you consider the amount of time and resources that go into launching and feeding one-size-fits-all content properties like corporate website, blogs or all-customer email newsletters.

Countless content marketing research reports reinforce that audience relevance is the largest contributor to the effectiveness of content. So if your existing properties or channels are struggling to move the needle, perhaps you need a different approach.

In a 2014 article, Joe Pulizzi told the story of a large technology company (a fortune 100 company) that had 18 different audiences they were targeting with a single blog. “Needless to say, the blog wasn’t working very well for them.”

Do you really think that a customer or prospect is going to keep visiting your blog, or opening your emails, if the content is irrelevant to their needs 95% of the time?

You know the answer. But most organizations aren’t changing their ways. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” some may say.

Chances are most organizations don’t even have the proper measurement systems in place to identify what “broke” means. Let us shed some light. Relevant content gets opened. It converts prospects. It gets shared and fuels word-of-mouth. It makes the cash register ring. Do you expect your content to trigger that kind of behavior?

Our Advice

If you’re prepping to launch a new content initiative, don’t waste countless hours and resources targeting everyone. Narrow the focus and strategy of your content initiative down to a single audience or persona.

To help guide you through this process, we share a series of exercises in our free ebook, The Definitive Guide to Planning a New Content Initiative. Though this aspect of the content planning process can be challenging to nail down, not doing so is just setting yourself up for failure.