Audience Development for Content Marketing eBook

“Publication is not distribution and a content marketing strategy without audience development is no strategy at all.” Jeff Rohrs @jkrohrs

Wise words from the guy who literally “wrote the book” on Audience. With all the investment in content creation, curation and repurposing being made, it’s amazing how little is actually invested in growing the audience and community for that content.

If you publish content uninformed by audience insight and without a community to receive it, does anyone care?  Sadly, no.

Nearly everyone in the business of creating content for marketing has made something amazing, a blog post, eBook or infographic, published it and experienced an underwhelming response. The content might have been awesome to you, but did the audience think so? Have you created anticipation amongst your community? And how much of a real audience was there?

To help content marketers better answer those questions, we’ve connected with Jeff and 9 other brand and industry marketing experts to share their advice on audience development for content marketing. This is the second #CMWorld eBook in a series of four featuring select speakers from the upcoming Content Marketing World conference.

The content marketing story tellers in the Audience Development eBook include:

• Ann Handley @annhandley
  Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs
  “Audience and Oysters”

• Jeff Rohrs @jkrohrs
  President at ExactTarget
  “(ABBA) Always Be Building Audiences”

• Leigh Blaylock @leighblaylock
  Manager of Content Marketing at Red Hat
  “Compelling Content Methodology”

• Scott Stratten @unmarketing
  President at Unmarketing
  “Respect Your Audience”

• Heidi Cohen @heidicohen
  President at Riverside Marketing Strategies
  “Attracting an Audience: 7 Ways”

• Scott Monty @scottmonty
  Executive VP of Strategy at SHIFT
  “Tell the Best Story for Your Audience”

• Brian Clark @brianclark
  CEO at Copyblogger
  “Building an Audience in Wonderland”

• Scott Abel @scottabel
  Content Marketing Strategist at The Content Wrangler
  “Content Performances”

• Jonathon Colman @jcolman
  Content Strategist at Facebook
  “Serve Your Audience Better with Empathy”

• Adele Revella @buyerpersona
  President at Buyer Persona Institute
  “Speak Customer”

An essential part of every content marketing strategy has to consider Audience Development, or as Jeff says above, it’s really not much of a content marketing strategy. Luckily, we have contributions from the 10 content marketing experts above to point us in the right direction.

You can view the entire Audience Development eBook below:

Building An Audience Development Strategy for Content Marketing is the second in our series of 4 Content Marketing eBooks featuring a selection of the 2014 #CMWorld speakers. These eBooks cover Strategy, Audience Development, Visual Content and ROI.

You can find the first eBook here: Building a Content Marketing Strategy 

Walking the Talk. This series of eBooks is a result of my digital marketing agency, TopRank Online Marketing partnering with Content Marketing Institute, the organization behind the Content Marketing World conference along with our sponsor Curata. Fittingly, we’re walking the talk to create, co-create and curate content to promote the largest conference on content marketing in the world.

The next eBook in the series to publish will be A Visual Content Marketing Strategy featuring content marketing insights from experts that include: Maggie Burke from EMC, Tim Washer from Cisco, Brant McLean from Tumblr, Carla Johnson from Type A, Steve Clayton from Microsoft, Mark Schaefer, Lee Odden (hey that’s me!), Jim Kukral, Jason Miller from LinkedIn and Pam Didner, author of the new book Global Content Marketing. Watch for the Visual Content eBook to post here, on Monday August 18th. You won’t want to miss it!

Want to learn more?

I will be giving a presentation at Content Marketing World September 9th at 3:30pm (Content + Influencer Marketing = A Powerful Way to Grow Your Business) on how to connect with industry influencers to co-create amazing content to grow your business. I’ll be sharing some of the strategies and tactics I used to create influencer eBooks just like the one above.

Susan Misukanis, my business partner and I are also giving an industry lab workshop: Content Marketing for Technology and Software companies on September 11 with guest speakers from Dell (Connie Bensen), LinkedIn (Koka Sexton and Deanna Lazzaroni) and Pam Didner, previously with Intel and author of the new book, Global Content Marketing. If you work in the tech/software world, this lab is going to ROCK!

If you’re thinking of attending the Content Marketing World Conference in Cleveland, OH Sept 8-11, I can save you $100 off of the registration if you use the code: TopRank.