As an 18-year old I was the leader of a punk rock band.
I say leader, I was the guitarist. In my head, that made me the leader. Guitarists will understand. Drummers won’t.
This month I turn 40. I’m now grabbing the mic in a duo (podcasting). I’m taking the stage as a solo act (conference speaking).
Times have mellowed a little, but there’s still a duty that connects the two time periods. The then and now.
That duty is to the listening audience.
We can all walk on stage and ‘perform’. Those God awful Simon Cowell shows are my case and point. We can all go on stage and sing somebody else’s song. We can mime. We can do whatever we want once we’re on that stage.
The measurement of success is the response of your audience.
Let’s think about this idea of ‘creating’ for a moment.
If I handed you a mic and asked you to walk out on stage you’d probably feel an enormous sense of dread. All those watching eyes. What if you took to the stage and the room was empty. A big sigh of relief? Sure, you’ll run through a few of your favourite choruses and exit the stage pretty sharpish. You might even enjoy it. A sense of freedom. Hearing your warbling blast out of the PA system, it’s something different that stands out from the daily routine.
Even still, you’re thankful nobody was there to hear.
Would you say you ‘created’ something? Or, did you simply react to the situation you found yourself in?
Let’s bring this into context now. There was no audience. It was easy. When you publish your article, when you share on Social Media. Are you really aware that there’s an audience watching and listening. If you were, would it change your approach entirely?
We have a responsibility to our audience.
It’s easy to dismiss the importance of analytics data. 100 visits. 1000 page views. 10,000 this, that or the other. Those numbers are real people. Like you. Like me. Listening and considering what you’ve created and how it makes us feel.
You can experience success giving people what they want to hear. The safe bet. The cover band. There’s nothing new, but you’re still out there. You’re still being heard.
How long will that success last? Is there the argument that once you’ve performed one cover song, your audience will tire and grow restless? Aren’t the most successful covers where the artist puts their own stamp on somebody else’s work? To retain interest. If not, we may as well go to the source?
This is why the long-term approach to content marketing is vital. If you’re after some quick-wins, put out a infographic that collates data from different sources. Publish a blog that consolidates the views of the influencers within your market. You’ll be noticed. Your work will be shared. You’ll witness a spike. What about the long-term? Do you rely upon this strategy each and every week?
Don’t let your future work rely upon the one-hit wonder you put out last week.
There was something so rewarding about my days in the punk rock band. We created our own work. As each gig finished we could sense we were getting better and better. Our confidence grew. The work that we created got better.
We had our own little conversion analysis going on. For each gig we played we had a table packed full of demo tapes and t-shirts for sale. That feeling coming off stage and seeing that people wanted to hear more. They were actually buying our demo cassettes. Our performance converted our audience into paying subscribers!
I never forget the feeling when my A-Level English teacher reported back that he’d seen somebody wearing one of our t-shirts. At a Chelsea match. 200 miles south of where our core audience lived. That’s great advertising. If only social media was around back then. This was the early 90s. Marketing was far more DIY for a unsigned band.
Take to the stage
Right now you have such a great opportunity to create something new to build your audience. Admittedly, not quite as rock-n-roll, but the Marketing Homebrew Podcast I create with Mark Masters (he’s the smart chap that wrote the book The Content Revolution) each week. I have a sense that we’re creating something special (special brew?).
Each week we pick a topic for a 30-minute conversation. A topic, we believe, is important to our listeners. Something they can relate with. We then create a new podcast show every week (it’s now our 13th week) and share it with our own growing audience. We started at zero. That moment when nobody was in the auditorium listening. Now, our audience has just topped 2,000. We have a responsibility, a duty, to create something new each week that matters.
There’s so much noise out there. Picture walking into a venue and a dozen bands are all playing at the same time. On stage, you need to do something to capture and retain attention. It’s not the pyrotechnics, it’s what you create yourselves that wins interest. The music. Your work.
That’s the task we, as marketers, face each and every day. We can be heard, we simply crank the amps to 11, but we need to be heard for the right reason. We want our audience to stop by and rock along with us. To get what we’re about. To show their interest. Just like that guy at the Chelsea match many years ago.
Whether you’re taking to the stage for the very first time, or you’re seasoned rockers, you have a duty to your audience. Your duty is to entertain and give us something to remember you by. I want to by humming your chorus at my desk next week. Give me something that resonates with me.
Your website is your stage. Take the stage and own the stage. Look down once in a while at the reaction of your audience. Are they lining up to grab a little more of what you’ve created? The newsletter subscription? The Twitter followers and Facebook likes from people that found out about you on your site?
Stop putting ‘stuff’ out there to grab attention. That includes your blogs, those infographics, your Adwords ads, anything where you’re not concerned about the response of your audience. It creates a din. It adds to the noise. Be more purposeful. Be less ordinary.
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