The narrower your audience, the more successful your content marketing effort will be.
This is one of the toughest ideas to grasp when it comes to publishing content. Intuitively, most companies believe that the best way to get a return on the expense and effort of creating valuable, trusted and regular content, is to spread it far and wide.
But take a tip from “old” media – if you narrow your focus to a specific readership, your content will be so much more powerful and relevant.
Here’s an example of focused content: In Competition. This site, all about competition law issues and news is published by the law firm, King & Wood Mallesons.
King & Wood Mallesons is a full-service law firm, yet it has narrowed the focus on its content marketing effort on this particular aspect of its practice.
KWM’s strategy is clear – the firm sees competition law as a growth market.
Through their site, they intend to take control of the debate and be seen as the “go to” place for competition law news and analysis.
Existing clients will feel the love of the on-going value their firm is providing even when they are not necessarily acting for them.
Prospective clients will be building a relationship of trust and respect with KWM, and when the time comes, “who they gonna to call?” (Not ghost busters!)
This is one of the best content marketing efforts I have seen among Australian websites, but it is not flawless. Here’s a few suggestions:
- Reconsider the “slider” – which rotates through five stories. It’s a common practice, but worth questioning. Here’s an interesting challenge to the value of the slider.
- Optimise for iPad. I had trouble clicking through to the stories from the slider.
- Publish daily (Love the dated content – I hate scouring to find out if stories are from yonks ago). Readers will they pop by the site every day to check what’s new.
- The writing and editing is pretty good (see more below), and the stories relevant and valuable, but they vary in their quality. There is a bit too much reliance on readers having prior knowledge in some stories, such as this one, or expecting readers to click through links, rather than finding everything they need in the story and clicking through only for more information.
- Could use some tweaks in the copy, even in strong stories like this, to bring some drama and excitement to the stories.
- There is no weekly or daily newsletter to subscribe to, so the site is missing out on email marketing. As well as being one of the best ways to share content, sign-ups provide a list of email contacts which provide useful marketing information (without misusing the emails in any way – more on using email leads in future posts).
- The RSS feed link is terrible small and discrete in the top right hand corner. Too small. Too discreet.
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