How to Reach your Target Audience with your Higher Purpose – PS89
How to Reach your Target Audience with your Higher Purpose
In this episode, I’m offering positivity strategies of a very different kind. I’m focusing on marketing and how you can reach your target audience with your higher purpose. I get asked frequently by my peers and students and others about how I do that.
As a reminder, this podcast focuses on the principles and practices of Appreciative Inquiry, positive psychology and strengths-based approaches to change. It’s my mission to bring more awareness of the power of the work we do to more people and this podcast is an excellent way to do that. With that being the focus of the content of the show and why people listen, there’s also a growing curiosity about why else do I podcast and what does it take.
In this episode, you meet a visionary digital strategist, Juergen Berkessel who will address some of the ways how you can help your brand, your business to be more easily found, reach your target audience, and connect with others more sustainably on the web. If you have a small business, are an author, podcaster, consultant, or offer professional services of any kind, I think you’re going to find his information valuable.
A blending of The Arts and Technology
Just as you don't become a positivity strategist overnight, you also don't become a digital strategist overnight. Juergen had a history and background in the arts, in music and in things totally unrelated to marketing or content strategy. He loved studying photography and moved to New York in order to be a photographer, and it was at a time fresh out of college when photography in the arts just wasn't sustainable.
Even though there are times, Juergen wishes he’d stuck with being an artist, things have a way of working out differently and he says: “creativity can have many forms.” He was able to practice and develop his creativity and shift from visual arts or from auditory arts into designing user experiences. He created a career in the financial institution and moved from programming to product development and a focus on customer experience and user experience.
He describes it as a journey from being a technician or being someone who writes software or who producers solutions for the financial industry to think at a higher level about why are we doing this? What's the experience of the users that are using our systems? For him, it was about utilizing the technology for a greater good or for customer experience.
Connecting Content Creators with their Higher Purpose
For the last seven years, Juergen has been running Polymash Inc., a digital strategy agency. He views his mission as connecting entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, authors, and speakers with the higher purpose or with getting their message out there and heard. He views it as getting in front of an audience utilizing the Internet. He is motivated to connect content creators with technologies that seemed out of reach for many of us even just a few years ago.
The available tools and the techniques are ever more broadening. They are available to many more people if you avail yourself of them somehow and in some cases overcome your resistance or fear of technology; and if you're curious about it, there are some amazing things that you can do to get you to get your platform/website out there.
Generational Differences
Juergen talks a little about how the millennial generation has many more freeing ways to think about being seen on the web. He says: “I observe younger people not being shy and putting themselves out there. They're on video. They're easily comfortable with the entire concept of new media, of marketing, of podcasting or video. And they have no qualms, talking off the cuff to put some videos out there. For older folks, many of us have a perfection focus. We’re more likely to prepare very carefully and not jump in so readily.”
Helping People Reach their Target Audience on the Web
We utilize the Appreciative Inquiry process on some of our projects to really dig down deeper and discover what the goals and aspirations of content creators are. What existing strengths they already had and how that could be levered leveraged in a different way. And often the answer to that is not just a better website or webpage. It was about their overarching ambitions, their overarching goals, the overarching vision that they wanted to achieve and getting them in contact with that.
Inbound Strategy
We call our approach inbound strategy where you are really putting yourself in the shoes of potential visitors to your website or potential fans for your content and potential fans of you and your story are. The better that you understand that the better you can start positioning stories and context and you are more likely to reach your target audience going forward.
So the more you know, the more honoring you can be of the audience that's coming to your site and is giving you some of their time and the more you can adjust to that and start shaping the content and the layout of your website. So it goes beyond the design or the visual design towards the type of content, the type of questions you're answering and ultimately the way in which you're engaging with those visitors.
The Website Visitor’s Journey
Most people are under the misconception that their home page is the most important thing and that’s how visitors discover their site. The entry point to most people's website is through its content, meaning it's blog posts or podcast episodes. So it takes intentionality. This is the idea behind inbound marketing: to create content with intentionality and the intention is to attract people to stick around and to read the whole article; and for that article to be the answer to what they were looking for.
The next usual, most popular page they go to is the “About” page and they read a little bit about person behind this good content. Content strategy really relies on you providing answers to the questions that people have about your subject matter and around your expertise.
Designing Content for your Purpose and the Search Engines
Listen in to learn how you need to do both if you want to increase your findability on the web. If you just want more traffic, you can buy that with Adwords and you’ll show up on page one of Google but that’s not sustainable, as once you stop paying, your website reverts back to where you were before paying for keywords you want to be known for.
This is where digital strategy kicks in. The effort that you spend on getting your content SEO’d or found organically without paying anything, has a longevity that is going to last for years and it has worth. If you can rank for keywords that cost $500 to $1000s a month over the period of two or three years, you're getting into hundreds of thousands of dollars of free traffic that is sustainable.
Other Significant Factors in How to Reach Your Target Audience
Juergen offers many golden nuggets that you won’t want to miss if you are serious about connecting with your audience, including:
- the rise of podcasting as a content strategy;
- length of blog posts and podcast show notes matters;
- using internal and external links to your posts;
- updating and refreshing older posts;
- understanding and acting on the changing Google algorithms.
There is a whole science to be explored. That’s why you need a digital strategist, coach!
The ROI on Your Content
I leave the last words to my muse and mentor:
“It always blows my mind that people have this resistance to learning a little bit about the marketing and SEO side of things after they've spent countless hours creating wonderful content.
The time investment required to bring some of this stuff to the foreground is a drop in the bucket when you compare to the time investment that goes into creating this content in the first place. There's a leveling up, or commensurate time, that could get spent or energy that could get spent in making sure that your valuable content is visible and discoverable by more people.”
Connect with Juergen
Cornerstone content revisited: how to boost your site rank and traffic
How To Start A Podcast As A Content Strategy
https://polymash.com/how-to-start-a-podcast-as-content-strategy/
Let's Stay Connected
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- Share your questions and ideas on the Podcast Feedback page
- Leave a voice message here, and we may feature your question on an upcoming episode
- Leave a comment on the show notes below
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