Dave Mastovich of the No B******t Marketing Podcast stops by to share his insights on how to segment our audiences.

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Welcome to Episode 221 of the Content Marketing Podcast! 

If you joined us for last week’s podcast, you’ll recall we look at research from Google that spelled bad news for some of the most popular B2B marketing myths. (Need to get caught up?)

Today we welcome Dave Mastovich of MASSolutions and The No B******t Marketing Podcast to share his insights on market segmentation for content marketers.

Give today’s episode a listen to hear:

• Houston peeps: Early bird registration for the MarTech Conference is still open — who wants to join me?
• How to grab your copy of our complimentary e-book “Top 10 Reasons Why Your Social Media Sucks“
• Our latest News Feed segment:
  • Facebook launches Facebook Stories for all users (click here to learn more)
  • Facebook opens 360 Live video and spatial audio to all profiles and pages (click here to learn more)
  • Content Hit of the Week: “Why You Need Content Strategy Before Editorial Planning” by Meghan Casey on the Content Marketing Institute blog
• The biggest misunderstanding marketers have regarding their target markets
• How to speak to your various market segments through your content
• How to balance various segments when you only have one channel
• How many segments you really need … and how much is overkill
• Download your free gift from Dave at biz/rachel
• Tip of the Week: Are you targeting your content to the people you’re marketing to … or just to the people you’re selling to?

Please remember that this podcast is about you — your questions, your frustrations, your hopes and dreams for your content marketing program. So please take a moment to send me your feedback, questions, or comments via email, on our Facebook Page, or via Twitter.

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Today’s video transcript

Dave Mastovich On How to Segment Your Audience

This is The Content Marketing Podcast episode No.221, Dave Mastovich on ‘How to Segment Your Audience’.

Rachel: Hello and welcome to The Content Marketing podcast. This is the show where we help you grow your tribe and your bottom line through insanely good content. I’m your host Rachel Parker, of Resonance Content Marketing, and today is April 6th 2017.

Hello! Hello! Or as we say it in Texas, “howdy,” or “howdy, y’all,” if you want to be real proper, and thank you for joining us for today’s episode of content marketing podcast.

Speaking of Texas, I have a special invitation for my peeps here in Houston. On May 25^th, I will have the honour of presenting at MarTech Houston. This is going to be a fantastic one day conference, focussed on the latest marketing strategies for small and medium sized businesses, and I would love to see you there. For more information I’m going to give you a URL it’s bit.ly/MARTECHHOUSTON. Now MarTech Houston is spelled MARTECH HOUSTON and that is all caps, so bit.ly/MARTECHHOUSTON. Early bird pricing is available but only through April 15th, so grab your spot ASAP, and if you’re planning on coming, shoot me a tweet and let me know. I’ll keep an eye out for you.

Okay, just a reminder, this podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, and Google Play Music, so if you like what you hear, please feel free to click on over and subscribe. I also invite you to download our complementary e-book “Top 10 Reasons Why Your Social Media Sucks.” Download today to learn the top 10 mistakes that businesses make on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social

networks, and easy turn around tips for each situation. To snag your free copy go to contentmarketinggift.com.

Okay, last week I shared some insights from no larger a source than Google itself. Yes the Gods of Mountain View have spoken, and they shared the results of some interesting research that actually busts some of the biggest myths around B2B marketing, and we shared that with you last week. If you happen to miss that episode feel free to check it out on iTunes or Google Play Music, or via the RSS feed.

Today we are delighted to welcome a special guest to the show, Dave Mastovich of the No B***S*** Marketing podcast, who’ll be stopping by to hear his insights on how to segment our audiences.

But first it’s time to check in with our newsfeed, with this week’s rundown of “News You Can Use.”

In the beginning there was Snapchat, then there was Instagram Stories, now big papa Facebook itself is getting in on the ephemeral content game. Yes Facebook stories has now launched for all users, and we’ve been talking about this here and there, they did a beta run in Ireland a few months ago, but now it is out there for all to use.

So Facebook Stories are photos and short video collections that can be viewed up to two times and that disappear after 24 hours, just like Snapchat, just like Instagram Stories. Now one advantage over Instagram Stories — by the way Instagram is owned by Facebook so wrap your little noggin around that fact any way you can — one advantage over Instagram Stories is that Facebook Stories harnesses the filters and the lenses that Snapchat users love; in fact, of the people who I have talked to, who are digging their heels in over at Snapchat, they say “I love the filters and I love the lenses,” well, Facebook Stories has a lot of those cool features that the Snapchat crowd loves.

So okay how to get to it? So when you open your Facebook mobile app, you will see Stories from the people in your network at the top of the screen and it will be a little row of circles at the top of the screen, just like you see in Instagram Stories. And to create your own story, when you are on the Facebook mobile app on the home screen, just swipe right and that will take you to the camera from which you can create your Stories.

Now, once you’ve created your content, you can either share it with individual contacts or you can share it under “my story” which means it will be visible to everyone in your community. Once again, just like Instagram Stories. And of-course once you share a post to your — once you’ve shared that story it will display, or will be available for 24 hours and then it will be gone forever.

So let me know: have you checked out Facebook Stories, have you kicked the tires, taken around the block a few times? What are your thoughts about it? Will you use it or, you dig in your heals in Snapchat or Instagram Stories? I’d love to hear what you think about this latest development. So go ahead and Tweet me at @rachparker and I would love to hear what you think.

Okay more news out of Facebook — they have been very busy this month, Facebook has — actually good news for fans of 360 degree video. Facebook 360 Live is now available to all profiles and pages. So now anyone with a 360 camera can go live on Facebook, and what  Facebook has done, they have integrated with several of the most popular 360 cameras , those different models are out there to make as they put it to make live 360 videos “easy, reliable and fun.”

Now they are also introducing what they call spatial audio, and I’m quoting from the Facebook post here “gives viewers the ability to experience 360-degree sound just as they would in real life.” Now I have not seen or I have not heard rather a spatial audio in action, but I would think that it works the same as the 360 camera, as you move your device around, you’ll be able to hear what’s going on in that direction instead of just seeing it. So, very cool stuff, I could see this being a great feature for you know conferences or live events or you know maybe looking at new locations and showing people your new digs. Lots and lots of ways to use this, but you do have to have a 360 camera to hook it up. If you’d like to learn more, check out the blog post for this episode and I will provide the link there — it is a bit long for me to share here — but I will provide the link in the blog post for this episode of the content marketing podcast.

Okay our Content Hit of The Week is a post titled “Why you need content strategy before editorial planning” This was written by Megan Casey over at the Content Marketing Institute website, and you know I smiled as soon as I saw the title for this post because you know I said “I know exactly what she’s going to be talking about.” I talk to so many content marketers, or so many marketers, they want to get into content marketing and they want to jump right into the editorial calendar, now if that, some of them are just ready to, just kind of get the ball rolling and start posting wherever, but as Megan points out, you first need a content strategy and I really like how she phrases it, she says,  “Content strategy helps organizations provide the right content, to the right people at the right times, for the right reasons, and that should be the purpose of any strategy.” And so instead of, you know, wasting our time on ventures that have nothing to do with providing the right content to the right people at the right time, for the right reasons, we really need to back up and do a strategy.

Now, if you’ve picked up a copy of “The Content Marketing Coach”, you’ll know that I go into great detail about how to put together a strategy. If you want to grab your copy today you can go to http://contentmarketingcoachbook.com, but Megan also in this post provided some very sound advice for putting together a solid content strategy. It is a very good read and I will of course provide the link in the blog post for this episode.

That’s it for this week’s update. If you stumble across something that might be of interest to your fellow content marketers, please tweet it to me at @rachparker so that we can share.

Now it’s time for this week’s spotlight segment, Dave Mastovich on how to segment our audiences.

Author and marketing trailblazer Dave Mastovich has helped companies transform their messaging and improve their marketing ROI for decades. He’s the founder and CEO of MASSolutions, host of the No B***S*** podcast, and author of the book “Get Where You Want To Go Through Marketing, Selling and Storytelling.” His blog “Light Reading” has been featured in over 50 media outlets with a readership of more than one million, and today he has graciously agreed to stop by The Content Marketing Podcast and drop some wisdom about segmenting our audiences. So without further ado here is my interview with Dave Mastovich.

Rachel: Hey Dave, welcome to the podcast!

Dave:  Thanks for having me Rachel

Rachel: Absolutely my pleasure. Well I just gave everyone your official bio, but why don’t you give us a little more personal introduction to who you are and what you do?

Dave: Sure, I have a background throughout my career of doing turnaround leadership, which implemented a lot of marketing, communication and sales to help companies turn around or to build divisions, and while doing that I kept realizing that every two or three years I would get excited to go on to the next endeavour , the next big opportunity, and thought why don’t I just turn this into a company, so I wish I could say it was that clear cut, because it really wasn’t, there were many failures along the way, some successes and a lot of times being humbled, and then at some point I just said this is time and started MASSolutions and it’s a company that is a pure marketing firm. There aren’t many in my estimation and there is a big difference between and ad agency, a PR firm, and a content firm as opposed to a marketing firm. It doesn’t mean that any of those aren’t good or that you’re better than the others, it’s just different and so we’re a pure marketing firm and I use the phrase No B***S**** marketing

Rachel: [Laughs]

Dave: So I have helped companies be No B***S*** marketers, in which we have all been B***S*** marketers at some point, including me. So it takes discipline to remain that way.

Rachel: Lord knows there is enough B***S*** around that we need somebody to help us cut through it.

Dave: Yes

Rachel: Great, so thank you for agreeing to come on and share with us your wisdom about market segmentation. As a faithful graduate of my eighth grade composition class, I was taught to always define our terms before we get into discussion, so give us some insight into what we really mean when we talk about market segmentation.

Dave: Market segmentation involves dividing a market into distinct groups of buyer who have distinct needs, characteristics, or behaviors and who might require separate products, services, or marketing mixes, that’s really what market segmentation comes down to.

Rachel: Okay, okay, so let’s look at; because sometimes you know gurus talk about these concepts and they never really get down to what it looks like in the real world. So can you give us an example of what segmentation looks like in the real world?

Dave: Absolutely, I think when you look at dividing that market into those distinct groups that I said people often take a quick stab at their target markets and go by their instincts and think that they have their target markets drilled down. I often say a subtle tweak in your market segmentation can be a huge impact on the bottom line. To take one industry that we have worked with quite a bit, I had some chief marketing officer positions in healthcare and so many of our clients about 40% of our clients were healthcare. One industry is senior living. When you look at senior living that could be

• Assisted living,
• Independent living, or
• Skilled care.

In that space to drill down their target markets, immediately you would look at the actual person who can live in the community, but equally important, if not more important are the adult children who make that decision.

Rachel: Yes

Dave: So that’s a target market. Now then you also have referral sources, which could be social service, staff at a healthcare facility or a health system, or a hospital, it could be the area agency on aging, could be all kinds of different referral sources. So with those three, and there are others, but to start and keep it simple, those three are broad segments that each would need to be drilled down, and that’s the key, it’s the drill down of the market segmentation.

Rachel: Yeah great example and you know its funny Dave just last week I was at a conference about healthcare marketing and another very important segment for them is recruiting, because they need nurses, they need techs, and that needs to kind of fold into their whole marketing mix.

Dave: You’re exactly right, a phrase that I use is” No B***S***, Go B*****S****” and the first No B*****S**** means No B***S*** like the term you know

Rachel: Right

Dave: But Go B*****S**** means “go beyond sales,” and that leads to this phrase “Who you market to, is different than who you sell to,” and you just touched on that because recruitment and retention are so essential to any successful company, and recruitment and retention means you have to make employees a key target audience, a key market segment, that you actually build specific marketing plans towards, and you build plans towards perspective employees. so No B***S***, Go B*****S**** means No B***S***, Go Beyond Sales because many companies do their market segments based on who they can sell to, and who you market to is different from who you sell to, because you have employees, prospective employees, referral sources, even outside of healthcare we all have referral sources. You and I both have people that refer clients to us. There are referral sources in just about any business, so who you market to is different than who you sell to, you have to make your employees a key target market, you have to make prospective employees a key target market, and you have to make referral sources a key target market.

Rachel: Yeah I love that, that mantra , that” who you market to is different from who you sell to,” and I was thinking about the B2B world, which is a world that I work in, fairly often, and I ask these companies, who do you want to target and they say, oh the CEO, or the CTO, or the CMO or whoever, you know whoever signs the check, and for one thing these people are ridiculously hard to get to, and number two, it’s you know that’s not where the decision making begins so you know by only focusing on who signs the check, you could be missing out on huge opportunities.

Dave: Exactly, when you have the B2B world they often don’t realize how important their cultural messaging is for their current employees and to recruit new employees. So that’s one topic and why I talk about with that is, in a recent study I read shows that two out of three consumers today have their decisions impacted by the perceptions of the CEO and others in the C Suite. So when you run into a B2B company and you start talking about how critical it is that the CEO, CFO, CTO, they have a presence on LinkedIn, they have their own brand within the company brand. You often get scratching on the heads and you say we’re a B2B company, why do I need to do that?

Rachel: Right

Dave: Two out of three people make their assumptions about companies, based on their perception of the C Suite, so you still have to build a brand around that, so that is another market segment where you have to say, we have to have our perception of our C Suites have to help reach our target markets as well for both our retaining employees and recruiting of employees.

Rachel: Yeah, yeah, great example. So Dave you mentioned that some companies approach segmenting kind of  going by their guts and just kind of glossing over it and saying “okay here is who we think we’re talking to, let’s go in and do our marketing,” but on the other side, how do you know when you’re done segmenting? Because I can easily see this becoming an obsession and winding up with a hundred segments that help you not at all. So how do you know when you’ve got a solid segmentation plan?

Dave: The thing that I tell companies is that segmentation doesn’t end ever, and you have to have discipline, because you just made a tremendous point. Having 100 segments or 50 segments or 30 segments is probably not going to work. What you’re going to do is have three to five major segments that you slice and dice within that to have maybe another three to five. If you are business to consumer you might have 10 under one of the large groups, but when I mentioned referral sources the actual residents, and adult children, and as three major target markets for senior living. Those are the three major target markets, each of those segments get drilled down and they might have three to five segments under them. So the first thing is you don’t want to go so segmented that it becomes just an obsession as you said and a waste of time, but it doesn’t ever end, because what you wanted to do is continually adapt and adjust based on what happened, based on the results and based on trends in the industry.

Rachel: Yup, absolutely, absolutely wonderful advice. So of course Dave this is the Content Marketing podcast, so tell us a little about okay we’ve done our homework, we’ve got our segments, how do we approach those various segments through our content?

Dave: What I like to say about the content aspect is, you utilise your segments and you position yourself through each segment, through content. Let me say that again it’s the positioning by segment is done through your content. So if you’re unable to tweak your content by segment, you become what I call a ‘content polluter’, in that you’re far from hitting the bull’s eye. We talk a lot about hitting the bull’s eye, and hit the bull’s eye marketing title to the No B***S*** theme, we don’t want to be content polluters, and you become a content polluter when you have not drilled down that segment and you haven’t positioned based on the segment and by positioning I mean each segment has a different want and need. Remember we said they have distinct needs, characteristics, or behaviours. Well you as a company have multiple positive attributes. Your company has three to five to seven major things that you do that your clients love, so does Mass Solutions. Well each segment wants something slightly different, so you have to position by segment through your content and that means tweaking the message to what matters most to them, making it about them and using and adjusting to the medium that they use to consume content.

Rachel: Okay great advice. So Dave that being said, you know most organizations, unless you’re talking about IBM or huge Corporations, most organizations have one blog, one Facebook page, one LinkedIn page etc. so given that they might be serving up to 10 different segments how do they balance the need to speak to each of these segments, given that they only have one channel on each venue.

Dave: The first thing that I emphasise, that companies need to do is you know the great Simon Sinek book talked about “Start With Why,” when I read that book I thought about people like you and I who have to take that step beyond and we have to ask our clients to answer the two why questions, the first why is their why or reason for being, the second why is the customer’s why or reason for buying. Once you’ve answered those two “why” questions, hopefully there’s some similarities there and there often is where your why and your customers why is close enough that you can build messaging around that and answer the question what’s the big idea. So you have your core theme or big idea and the messaging pillar underneath that, that are used based on the target markets. So I am not suggesting that someone has to re-write and re-create all kinds of content because they have multiple segments. I’m saying that, that core message should still work as the over arching theme. When I was with the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, we were trying to convince people within a 29 county region that they needed to come to major University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospitals, and we used the positioning statement “Choose your healthcare as if your life depended on it.”

Rachel: Mhmm

Dave: That relates to anyone, but when we went to each segment, we tweaked the comment content based on that segment using our messaging pillars and medium we wanted to use. So when we were talking to employers it was “Back to, back to, back single digit rate increases for your health insurance” that resonates with CEO’s and CFO’s, but when we were talking to the Weekend Warrior we showed them that we had an affiliation with the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Pittsburgh Penguins and that our sports medicine program was great, so it still was about “Choosing your healthcare as if your life depended on it,” so if you blew out your knee playing flag football, that was different than the employer, that was “single digit rate increases back to back to back years.” So you have your core big idea —

Rachel: Right

Dave: And messaging pillars under it. You adjust those messaging pillars based on the segment and based on the medium they use. So you match them to various social media outlets. I stress to people that within the company use whatever medium works for them. I’m a big LinkedIn person, and B2B segment is a big piece of what Mass Solutions does my C Suite people are connected on LinkedIn, I’m able to reach thousands of people through LinkedIn, so I personally use LinkedIn in a lot of my direct marketing and direct selling, and business development to CEO’s, CFO’s and CMO’s, but my team takes the message and applies that to Twitter and applies that to podcasts and the blog to reach those different segments, with slightly different messaging not totally recreated, not B***S***, not being duplicitous. You take messages tied to your key message pillars and you make it about them. Each segment, each segment wants one of your attributes, you focus on your attribute for that segment.

Rachel: Yup, yup, great advice, and you know Dave as you’re talking about different audiences for different venues, you know sometimes when I talk to people about Instagram, they say oh that’s a millennial thing, that’s not, they’re not signing the cheques, they are not making the decisions. First of all that’s not entirely true because the millennials are starting to rise up in their organizations, but they are part of that greater network that talked about the referral sources, the employees. So how do you, you know approach different networks in term of, the different market segments that are active on those networks.

Dave: It goes back to the target market segmentation I mentioned earlier and let’s go back to the original example about senior living being, independent living, assisted living, or skilled nursing. We work with many clients and there is a need for social media presence, but they also know that the adult children tend to be in the 50 to 70 year age range, and they know that the actual residents tend to be 80 to 95 years old even 85 to 95, both of those segments will use Facebook to reach, but you’re not going to necessarily be as strong with them on Twitter, but Instagram lends itself tremendously because of the visual element, so we can show the seniors living a quality life and having an enhanced life by moving into this community. So we will still use Instagram, and the other point that you made that I want to touch on is that, each segment uses Social Media. When I hear people say “that’s a millennial thing” I almost chuckle and say really, really, do you think that someone 52 years old doesn’t use social media? They might not use Instagram as much as they use LinkedIn, but they might use Facebook a lot. So it’s about all through the course of time, we’ve had multiple mediums, it’s not really different from the time when we had 25 different radio stations and 55 cable stations, three broadcast networks, a bunch of newspapers , direct mail, it’s not that different, and I get frustrated when people say the millennials this, the millennials  that because back in 1990 we still had to say “how do we reach someone who is 50, how do we reach someone one who is 60, how do we reach someone 25,” and it was different then, and it’s different now, and it’ll be different tomorrow.

Rachel: Yup absolutely, it’s funny that you mentioned that Dave because my mother in-law is 74 and if I want to reach her I have to message her on Facebook. That’s where she is [laughs] every day, so;

Dave: And your; yup I agree, and your other point about millennials, you know I’m a millennial defender even though it’s a challenge adjusting to them in our workplace and as clients, but they have a potential to be a tremendous generation, and they will, most generations that have been great; what you just said rings true, I was just speaking to a group of CEOs in Kansas city last week and there were 18 CEOs and four of them were 29 to 33 years old, four of them. That is what’s happening, you’re seeing that and those four had a completely different mindset than the four that were 60 plus and the rest were Gen Xers probably and you looked at it and the way they consume content was completely different.

Rachel: Yeah

Dave: The millennials were actually much more data driven, they saw the data side of marketing and content, where as the older audiences saw the creative side of marketing and content. So you and I have to adjust to that and so do your listeners, of how we create our content.

Rachel: Yup, absolutely, absolutely, well Dave I want to shift gears a little bit because I talked about in your intro about your book “Get Where You Want to Go,” and in that book you talk about marketing, selling and storytelling. So tell us a little about the book and about how you approach that?

Dave: Throughout my career I would take these stops that I mentioned earlier, where I would go and be a part of an amazing turnaround with a team of tremendous people at each stop, and at each place crazy things would happen, because when you have six days cash on hand for a 100 million dollar year company, you’re worried about making payroll for 1200 employees. You see crazy things happen, and each step of the way I would often say “that’s going to make a chapter of my book”, and finally people kept saying to me when are you going to do that book, when are you going to do that book? And finally I just said I’m going to take the time to write this book and I broke it down to stuff that I was passionate about from the marketing, selling and storytelling, because that title says it all. Storytelling is a part of almost everything we do in life.

It is so critical to how we function in society, and storytelling plays a significant role in both sales and also in marketing, and marketing and sales are two separate, yet equally important groups, and I often use the “Law and Order” phrase as part of my workshop as I talk about how if you think of the show “Law and Order” in the beginning, it talks about the criminal justice system and its two separate yet equally important groups that’s what sales and marketing are. It should be marketing sales, not sales and marketing. So those are the facets of that book where I talk about what the difference of sales is between marketing. What the No B***S*** definition of marketing is, and how storytelling drives everything. And it was just so exhilarating to put that together, get that book in its hard cover and paperback and E-book, get that out and just see the response to it, and it’s just been fascinating and I just love it and I continually work on new ways to get that message out.

I’ve moved to the podcast like you, we’ve both been at this for a while with hundreds of episodes. I see podcasts as a big, big content thing, so I shifted a lot of my effort to that. After having that first book, had a second smaller E-book, and in the midst of doing a third book, but now my big focus is getting the word out about No B***S*** marketing through workshops, Keynotes and the podcasts.

Rachel: Fantastic, well Dave where can our listeners go if they want to follow you on Social Media and also learn more about market segmentation?

Dave: My favorite place is LinkedIn, I’m most comfortable with that, I was an early adopter for LinkedIn, probably within the first six months of LinkedIn, and I post a lot of content there and I have a lot of conversations there, so that’s David M Mastovich on LinkedIn and for your guests if you go to massolutions.biz/rachel, we have a market segmentation hit the bulls eye, target market drill down summary for you, that I basically took segments of my workshop and turned it into an audio deck that anyone when it comes to massolution.biz/rachel can get that for free.

Rachel: Wonderful, wonderful, and of course where can they go to find your podcast?

Dave: That is at the; it’s at massoultions.biz/boldsolutions, but it’s also on iTunes and Stitcher and all the others it’s “No Bullshit Marketing” with Dave Mastovich of course the word “bullshit” had to have nine little asterisks, so iTunes kicked me back and so they kicked me out initially and told me that’s what I had to do and I was completely fine with that.

Rachel: [Laughs] absolutely, absolutely, it’s a family show, so we got to

Dave: It is, it is, but you know with that phrase, it’s really just to make the point

Rachel: Yeah

Dave: And it’s not so much to be profane, as to make the point, because you know , you and I are in this cluttered content universe where there are a lot of B***S***ers and  so when you get someone like you or me, we have to do something to make sure people know that we’re different, and hence that’s why the mantra and the workshop is built around that because it immediately gets the attention, and yet people at the beginning of my workshop say okay tell me, tell me am I a B***S***er or not? And I say we have all been

Rachel: Yeah

Dave: But here are some tips to not be one. [Laughs]

Rachel: Exactly, exactly, well Dave thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights on market segmentation, and keep in touch, we look forward to having you back in the future.

Dave: Thanks Rachel enjoyed it.

[Music]

Rachel: Many thanks again to our guest Dave Mastovich for sharing his insights on market segmentation for content marketers. Again you can find him on LinkedIn under David M Mastovich and also that URL to get Dave’s audio deck is massolutions.biz/rachel. If you have any questions or if you want to add to the conversation please feel free to tweet me at @rachparker. I would love to hear from you.

Now it’s time for our Content Marketing Tip of the Week.

One of my favorite points that Dave made in our interview is about distinguishing whom you sell to, from whom you market to, and I know I just ended two phrases with a preposition, and I apologize. But often when we create content the temptation is you want to get straight to the decision maker, and as I mentioned this is particularly the case in the B2B world. You know I talk to businesses who have a B2B product or service and I say “okay who is your audience?” and they say we want to go straight to the CEO, we don’t want to mess with, we don’t want to mess with human resources or marketing or whatever the department would be that corresponds to their service. We want to go straight to that C Suite and you know in doing that number one these people are darn near impossible to get to, but number two we neglect the web of individuals around that person  who could be instrumental in getting you on their radar. So yes maybe the CEO does have the final sign off and the final budgetary approval. But the odds are the decision is not going to start with him or her, it’s going to start further down the chain, and so the next time you look at your target audience, your current target audience, broaden your horizons a bit, and think about the network around that person. You know whom does he or she listen to in the area that your product or services concern with, or who else in the organization is likely to start the decision process that would end up on the desk of  the CEO, or the CMO, or the CIO, or someone with that final authority.

By looking at whom we market to instead of only whom we sell to we open up our content to a whole new world of possibilities, and of course open our brands to whole new venues of opportunity.

 

Okay campers! That is it for me today, hope you enjoyed this episode of the Content Marketing Podcast and thanks once again to our special guest Dave Mastovich. If you like what you’ve heard today please feel free to subscribe on iTunes, or Stitcher, or Google Play Music or via our RSS feed, and if you really like what you have heard please leave us a quick review on iTunes I would so appreciate it. Also remember my book “The Content Marketing Coach – Everything you need to get in the game and win” is available in book and Kindle format on Amazon. To learn more about the book and to download a free chapter visit contentmarketingcoachbook.com

As always I like to leave you with a quote and today of course we have had the finals of the NCAA Basketball tournament. Is it called a tournament? Did I use the wrong word? Anyway congratulations! To the North Carolina Tar Heels, so in honour of the crowning of a new champion we have a quote from the world of Basketball. John Wooden once said “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.” Let me say that again “Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”

Again this is Rachel Parker with Resonance Content Marketing. Thank you again for listening and we will see you again next week. Take care.

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• Find out how to connect and convert with content marketing.
• Learn to cut through the clutter with intelligent content that resonates with your specific target audience.
• Get the secrets for turning followers into customers … and customers into evangelists.

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About the Author

A self-described geek who can recite entire episodes of South Park by heart, Rachel Parker has had a passion for content ever since she was old enough to hold a crayon (purple, please).

As Founder and CEO of Resonance, Rachel helps businesses publish content that connects with their audience … and converts those followers into customers. She’s also the host of the Content Marketing Podcast and author of the book The Content Marketing Coach: Everything You Need to Get in the Game … and WIN!

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