Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Why Your Audience Doesn’t Grow & What to Do About It
28 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez talks abou t the main problem behind most content channels that stops audience growth. He calls it the lack of the media/market fit.
Listen in to see how Dan applies a concept from the startup world to content channels to unlock growth.
Listen in to see how Dan applies a concept from the startup world to content channels to unlock growth.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Audience Growth Series
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome back to the Attention podcast. I'm your host, Dan Sanchez with Sweetfish, and I'm here to talk about the problem, the biggest problem that I see with audience growth. But before we dive into that topic, I want to say that the next four, five, six episodes are going to be me dropping a tidbit of wisdom I've learned as working as the director of audience growth for Sweetfish and helping multiple podcasts grow their audience, including B2B Growth, our largest podcast that we host here at Sweetfish.
What is Media Market Fit?
00:00:37
Speaker
And there's a number of issues that I see customers run into over and over again. And there's still things that I'm learning and testing today. But the biggest one I wanted to share with you is around what I think is the missing step of content marketing. And it's called a media market fit.
Understanding Product Market Fit with Segway
00:01:04
Speaker
So if you're in the startup world, you've probably heard of product market fit, right? It's a common term. It became popular from Steve Blank's book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, which became even more popular when Four Steps to the Epiphany was taken and re-written into the lean startup by Eric Ryze, right? We have this idea of product market fit because we found that entrepreneurs were failing over and over again. We would bet really big on a product based on all our kind of passive,
00:01:33
Speaker
market research, and then we would scale a company.
00:01:37
Speaker
launch a massive product and then all of a sudden find that the market didn't want it, right? Of which the big case study in the four steps to the epiphany is like segue, right? They spent like tens of millions of dollars on R&D inventing this, I don't know what to call it, it's a segue, right? It's the roller machine. And they thought it would eliminate walking, like no one would need to walk ever again. All of a sudden they roll it out and they find the market's like,
00:02:08
Speaker
It's hard, you can't go up steps with it. It's really expensive. I'd rather walk. It's better for exercise. And it looks kind of nerdy anyway, right? The market didn't want it.
Applying Market Fit to Content Marketing
00:02:20
Speaker
So Steve Blank wrote the book, Four Steps to the Epiphany, which became like the bedrock, especially for Silicon Valley tech startups, to say, hey, maybe your product should really be in a hypothesis to test a problem first, right? And we all know that that's how the product market fits starts. You start with the hypothesis that mitts fit.
00:02:41
Speaker
fits a problem that you've researched ahead of time around a certain target audience. And then you come up with ideas of what the product could be or service could be that helps solve that customer's problem.
00:02:57
Speaker
You then take time to iterate on the product and you start with the minimum viable product right to see if it's right. Instead of starting with the fully baked segue, they could have started with maybe a skateboard, I don't know. Or something that didn't take so much R&D to develop and then test their way there and work with the customers, with the prospects in order to build something that they actually want, right?
00:03:21
Speaker
And that's where it comes back to the word, that's where the word pivot became famous, right? Because you would pivot and pivot and pivot and try over and over again until you reached product market fit. And even if you started to scale and found that you didn't have as good of a fit as you thought, you might pivot back to the beginning where you were still testing the hypothesis of the product. It's a fantastic methodology. It's become like a staple concept of Silicon Valley and all startups today.
Pitfalls in Content Marketing Strategies
00:03:50
Speaker
But what if we took that same approach and applied it to content marketing? Honestly find that it's missing. Honestly find that it's missing in the world of content marketing because
00:04:17
Speaker
I honestly find that it's missing in the world of content marketing. If you just look at what most large B2B companies are doing, they come up with their hypothesis and then they don't test it. They just put it into a strategic plan and begin executing on it, putting years sometimes of work with content marketers and writers and videographers just pumping out content.
00:04:42
Speaker
All the while, their audience isn't growing. Or if it is growing, it's just, it's okay. They get 10,000 followers on YouTube. Their blog, where they're writing multiple articles a day after a couple of years, only has 20,000, 30,000 page views a month.
00:05:04
Speaker
Meanwhile, independent creators are getting hundreds of thousands of page views or hundreds of thousands of followers on YouTube. There's something missing and it's something that independent creators are doing that big companies aren't when it comes to media unless they're a media company in themselves where the product is the content.
00:05:25
Speaker
And the difference between a media company and what most product and service-based companies are missing is this step of media market fit. So let's take what we've learned from product market fit and just apply it to our content marketing. And all of a sudden, you'll see why it's the biggest missing piece in B2B companies, but I'd say even B2C companies. Any company that's using content marketing to reach an audience is usually skipping this step.
00:05:54
Speaker
So let's look at that and just apply it to media and see what that looks like,
Steps to Achieve Media Market Fit
00:05:57
Speaker
right? So the first step is, honestly, identifying your target audience. Who are you writing to? Most people get this done, but what they do is skip the next few steps. They have a hypothesis on who the target audience is, and then begin to execute on that. But what if it's somebody different, right? You kind of have to hold it loosely. So I usually try to write to as narrow of audience as possible, knowing that
00:06:19
Speaker
Like if I'm creating this podcast for a B2B SaaS content marketer, that is probably going to be applicable to way more, but even now I'm talking to someone who is a B2B SaaS content marketer. It's a very specific audience that I am talking to right now, but I know my content will be widely applicable to more people than that. Still, that's the hypothesis I've taken with my own podcast. Step two,
00:06:47
Speaker
of five steps here is the hypothesis on what kind of media you need to generate.
00:06:55
Speaker
We often go in thinking like, oh, blogging is the thing. Oh, podcasting is the thing. Oh, YouTube is the thing. But it's still, that's also a hypothesis. You think your content, your target audience is hanging out there, but we don't quite know until we start posting there and trying things. Step three is testing a minimum viable media rather than MVP, minimal viable product. I'm just going to say MVM, minimum viable media.
00:07:21
Speaker
And this is where you're just testing out bite-sized pieces of content to test if you're targeting the right person with the right media on the right channel. Now, this is easier to do on some channels more than others, specifically short form channels like LinkedIn, Twitter, what else is short form? Facebook, Instagram.
00:07:50
Speaker
Those are all short form channels. It's easier to test something small. Even TikTok is shorter than its main competitor, YouTube, right? It's a little harder to do it with podcasts, but you can. Even now I'm testing into podcasts and I'm recording some shorter episodes and it's okay. Or doing interviews, which are easier to record before I spend more time in increasing the production value of this podcast. If you've listened to the first two episodes already, then you know, like I'm not editing the heck out of these things. I'm doing a little bit of editing, but not that much.
00:08:19
Speaker
because I'm starting with the minimum viable media.
Importance of Experimentation in Content Marketing
00:08:23
Speaker
I want to know it works before I start to spend an hour on editing every single episode. And then I'm experimenting to learn, which is step four. Experiment to learn about the market and improve piece by piece until you get to step five. You iterate until you see traction and actually reach media market fit.
00:08:44
Speaker
And there's not like a definition of like, how do you know you've reached media market fit? I'd say it's when, you know, it's becoming easier to pick up subscribers. You're just seeing your subscriber numbers grow steadily. You're pulling beyond where most people get what comes to their reach and their engagement, right? It's always a combination of reach and engagement.
00:09:06
Speaker
but there's not a specific number. For some industries, that number will be very lower because it's smaller, and some industries are large, so you'll have a much, your target audience might be two million people. But in some places, just reaching 5,000 is enough for some companies, depending on how niche your target audience is. So next time you want to launch a content marketing channel and actually want to grow the audience, you're not just putting content out there for sales enablement content, you don't care what the audience is,
00:09:35
Speaker
Think about trying to reach media market fit.
Iterative Approach for Content Creation
00:09:40
Speaker
Think about how you can just frame everything like a hypothesis and test and iterate on your way there. I actually recommend starting with a short form channel like Twitter or LinkedIn first and experimenting there or TikTok. TikTok's a great one for video. And doing little experiments until it connects.
00:10:01
Speaker
This is one of the things that solo creators do so much better than companies because companies feel like they have to roll out the red carpet on the first run. Like the first 10 posts have to be perfect. They don't. Start small and iterate. Solo creators usually have really horrible first posts that's like notorious to go back to any solo YouTuber you've ever watched.
00:10:21
Speaker
and go find their first video and notice how bad these videos are. Not only is the content bad, the quality is bad, it's just a mess. If they leave it up there as like an homage to where they've come from, right? I like to leave some of my early stuff there as well. Think about approaching it with this kind of mindset and you'll find that your content marketing will do so much better.
00:10:47
Speaker
because you're focusing on building the right kinds of things and you're working with the audience in order to deliver it. So thanks for listening to this first solo episode where I'm going to be putting out ideas on what I found is working with audience growth already and if this has been valid
00:11:17
Speaker
If this has been valuable to you, please go and leave a rating on either iTunes or now Spotify, which has a rating system. Go and give it the stars that you feel like it's worth.