Understanding Your Target Market and Setting Goals for Your Content Marketing Efforts

On this episode, Gresh discusses the importance of building a media company and how to leverage content to grow your business. He shares valuable insights on understanding your target market and setting goals for your content marketing efforts.

Gresh emphasizes the importance of understanding your target market and their pain points.

He highlights the significance of setting clear goals for your content marketing strategy.

Additionally, Gresh explains the concept of the long tail in content marketing and how it can be used to target niche searches and drive more traffic to your website.

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Full Interview:

Transcription:

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Gresham Harkless Intro 00:01

Hello, Hello, Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast and I wanted to share with you one of the episodes that I was a guest on for someone else's podcast. I always talk about how important it is to build a media company. One of the next best things you can do is be on somebody else's media company. So I had the pleasure of being a guest on this podcast and I wanted to share a little snippet with you because it would help support the eight business pillars we've really been trying to focus on with a lot more of our content, a lot more of the solo episodes that I'm doing.

So make sure of course that you subscribe to our podcast, but of course you take some time out. Check out the show notes to subscribe to the podcast that I've been featured on as well too, and get to learn about some of those eight business pillars and how you can continue to leverage and build that up. So you can go from builder to architect to a chorus at Rockstar and Luminary. So this is Gresh signing out. I hope you enjoyed this I AM CEO special episode.

Juma Bannister 00:54

So tell us a little bit about what you do and how you help your clients make useful content.

Gresham Harkless 01:00

Yeah, absolutely. So we're all in the media business as I usually say. I say you are a media company. That's my whole kind of marketing philosophy. A lot of what we do is around like website design, support and SEO services. So we try to provide that foundational level. But as really well, SEO is very all encompassing of most things that you do in marketing, but I'm going back to that being a media company having that mentality, that mindset, it's all around understanding how you can create content for the people that you're trying to target.

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So way back when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, how I would build out the business, how I would try to distinguish myself. I'd already been building some things around CBNation, which is the content and information for entrepreneurs and business owners. And so I decided to just marry those two because I knew that entrepreneurs, CEOs, business owners are always trying to get their name and information out there. So I try to use content in terms of building that media company to try to connect, build relationships with the people that we're ultimately trying to serve.

Juma Bannister 02:01

Do people give you push back about the concept of being a media company?

Gresham Harkless 02:05

I think so in the sense of understanding like media in what that looks like. I think that's where the push back comes in, because automatically, whenever we hear the word media, we're thinking of something. The way that I really look at media is simply the creation of content. That content can be very broad. If you really think about it offline, when you're handing out your business card or you're talking with somebody, a networking event, to some degree, you're creating content. If you're online, obviously you can create blogs, podcasts, social media content. All those things are content.

So when I look at it, and as I've started to even evolve at how I looked at it, it's a lot broader than sometimes people think. And I think when people like redefine it and look at it from that perspective, they start to see that, hey, I am actually talking about my business, talking about my organization, talking about the things that I do on a regular basis. So if I started to look at that a little bit more with a broader scope, maybe then maybe I will understand that, hey, I am in the media business, whether I like social media or I don't like social media, I have a podcast or I have a blog or whatever that is, I'm always creating that content.

 Juma Bannister 03:13

Yeah, so you create stuff for small to medium businesses And what you say to them is that whether you like it or not, you are a media company. It's something that you're just gonna have to accept and you have to put your content out there in order to market your business. And so this is something that you tell them. And is that something that they eventually get a hold of, or is it something that takes a while for people to understand how it will work for them?

Gresham Harkless 03:42

Yeah. Funny enough, Juma is different for everybody, but I feel like as we're moving more and more and more to the importance of content and as we're a lot of people call this the content golden age where because there's so many different ways you can create content. I think when we were talking about 10, 20 years ago, we didn't have the technology that we have in our back pocket right now, which is the smartphone. And now the ability to create content is so much easier. I think people have so much more comfortability, if that's even a word, at being able to do that.

So I think that along with people being a little bit more open to it and having the technology and having different tools, we talk about AI and things like that make it a little bit easier. I think it's becoming something more and more and more where you don't get as much push back, you don't get as much hesitation is something that needs to be done. And I think many more business owners and entrepreneurs and CEOs are stepping into that.

Juma Bannister 04:39

Yeah. And I think that's true. How do you explain how people can use their time efficiently in order to create that content?

Gresham Harkless 04:45

Yeah. I think speaking directly to what you said as well, too. I think what we're seeing is as people are able to create more and more content, it's also getting noisier. So I think also what's happening is there's a huge burgeoning of and growing of the personal brand, so to speak, where people don't want to just hear the content. They want to hear who's behind the content. They want to hear why you created it and so many things like that.

So to really answer your question, I think it's marrying those two parts and especially going into understanding exactly like who's going to be creating this content if you're going to be creating it or you're potentially having an agency or some somewhere in between you doing that. I think you really start out with just understanding like what are your superpowers? What are you comfortable with? What do you do sometimes naturally? If you prefer to speak and talk, maybe you're doing a podcast, maybe that's going to be like your foundational piece of content.

If you enjoy writing, maybe you're going to do a blog. If you enjoy being a little bit of both, maybe you're going to be on camera. So I think it's really understanding when you're thinking about time, you're honest about your time, but you're honest about what might be a quote unquote easier way to create at least that first piece of content. And if you're thinking about doing it yourself, think about what is coming a little bit more naturally and you can use that as a easier way to create content, spend less time and spend less of those resources.

Juma Bannister 06:03

So you're saying that everyone is different, not everyone will double down on the same type of content. And it's not a case of doing everything, it's a case of choosing something that works for you, yeah?

Gresham Harkless 06:14

Yeah, absolutely, play to your superpowers.

Juma Bannister 06:17

All right, that's a really great opening. I'm talking about becoming a media company. Let's move on to some of the more specific things about becoming a media company. And there's something that you see that you need to ask before you start with your marketing. There, I think there are three things, your goals, your target market and your resources. So tell us how those three things work in planning your marketing.

Gresham Harkless 06:41

Yeah, I think to start everything off is I think so many times we hear about all these different ways that we can create content that we can be our own media companies. I like to call them ingredients. So when you're going to the grocery store, you figure out what ingredients you're going to put into your cart, what are you going to use? And I think we can always rush into that. There's a new platform that we need to jump on. Do all the things and be active.

And while there's a space for that to be able to create, to test out and do those things, I think those three foundational questions are so huge because it's going to allow you to understand what ingredients you're going to use, why you're going to use them, and be a lot more strategic in your marketing, which I think doesn't happen a lot for people in general, but definitely even for us marketers as well too, is that we wanna try to test out those things.

We wanna try to be in those places, but are we really being strategic with how we're doing it? And really understanding first and foremost, as you said, who are you targeting? And there's a word avatar, and that's literally just painting the picture of the people that you're trying to target. You're talking about age, you're talking about gender, you're talking about location. All those things are gonna be important for your avatar, but really understand and try to delve down a little bit deeper into the things that keep them might be their goals and might be the things that like all those questions ask.

And I think that that first question is huge because you want to paint that picture of who you're targeting, not just the age and demographics and all those things, but also the intentions of what they have, what keeps them up at night, how and where is there essentially a gap in their life that they want to accomplish? Because when you start creating content and thinking about what ingredients, what platforms you're going to use, it's going to help you to make sure that you're drilling down on those people that you're targeting.

After that, you really wanna be clear on the goals that you have. If you have an e-commerce business versus you being a speaker versus you being an author, you're gonna have different goals for your marketing initiatives and what you're doing. Essentially, you're trying to sell an e-book because the e-book is going to give people an opportunity to join your your email list, because on your blog, you're sending out emails that are going to have affiliate links. That's going to be completely different from somebody that might have a new t-shirt line.

And is it trying to sell t-shirts and they want people to go to their website and actually buy those t-shirts or hats or whatever it might be. So it's just understanding what success means because the way that you focus on your marketing, the way you put that blend together is going to be different depending on that goals. And then we already touched on the most powerful question, which I think sometimes we're not as honest about how to answer that and what that looks like, which is the resources. And we're automatically thinking resources. It's all about money. How much money are we spending? What's the budget and all those things? But it's time and money as well too. If you're bootstrapping it, maybe you have more time than you have money.

And if you're a little bit further along on the journey, maybe you have more money than you have time or maybe that starts to transition as you grow get clients and customers and so on and so forth so you just want to be really clear on the resources where you are along that journey because when we're figuring out what ingredients we're gonna use whether we're figuring out we're gonna do a podcast versus having a blog, if you're going to be DIY in it, you're going to put a lot more sweat equity into it. So you don't want to start something that you're not going to be consistent with because at the end of the day, that's going to be 1 of the most powerful and big things that you want to make sure that you stay with.

Juma Bannister 10:16

Okay, great. That's a really great overview of target market goals and resources. Let's dive a little deeper into each of those areas. And I want to first start, I want to talk about goals, but I want to first start with target market, because I think that is something that people really struggle with. It's something that they don't know how to determine. They might say, who am I talking to really? And they don't know how they're gonna figure that out. The first question I wanna ask you is, how do you find out what keeps people up at night? What is, is there a method that you can use to discover that?

Gresham Harkless 10:50

Yeah, I think the best thing I usually say when you're thinking about target market, especially if you've been in business for a while, and let's just say you have one or even a handful of clients is really trying to understand from them what keeps them up at night. And I think the best way you can do that is figure out like how your solution probably helps that. Why do they become your client or customer?

So I think whenever you're trying to figure out your ideal clients really start to look internally and start to say, okay, this is the client that I want to work with and I want to have that person come through the door literally or the door virtually over and over again. And those things that usually keep us up at night is another way of saying like, what problems are they having? So when you start to understand that if you have those clients, what solution are you providing to that problem? And when you start to think about that, then you start to close the gap a little bit on what those things are.

And maybe when you start to create content and information start to figure out how you're going to do that you're thinking more solution based you're thinking more how can I be of value even for us one of the big things that I know that we help out with is visibility by having a podcast a blog all those things that helps out with visibility for the people that we're trying to serve? So thinking strategically about what that is and what that looks like. If you have a t-shirt line, what exactly are you doing to help to support the clients that you work with? Are there going to be inspirational teas that is going to help them going through a bad day. Just really think strategically about what that is. Are you a real estate agent? Are people looking for a place to buy? Do they want to enjoy home ownership?

Just have those ideas and those questions so you can really not just say, hey, this is what I do, but this is how I'm going to make your life better. This is how I'm going to improve your day to day operation, the way that you're, you know, walking through life, the way that you look at yourself, just all those things start to really think to the human part of how you're providing those solutions and really start to understand that because that's how you're ultimately going to not just sell your widget or sell the thing that you're providing, but actually provide true transformation. And that's what you ultimately want to do with your product or service.

Juma Bannister 12:57

Well, that's great. So I know goals is 1 big thing when it comes to creating content and when it comes to setting, where is your marketing going to take you? Tell us how you help clients set those goals or how clients are able to set goals for themselves.

Gresham Harkless 13:11

Yeah, I think the biggest misconception around marketing is that you snap your fingers, you put up a Facebook Ad, you do some SEO, you create a blog post and clients run in after that. And I think that's really big misconception around marketing. So I think it's trying to understand from clients what success looks like, have them paint that picture as much as possible. And then you try to figure out what goals can make that happen.

Specifically, like we work a lot with CEOs. So a lot of it is, of course you want to show up if people are typing in that most competitive keyword, but how can you strategically start to move towards that? So it's understanding what might be the quote unquote minor goals that help you to create that domino effect towards the major goal. And I think that's where you start asking those questions. You start to say, okay, if you're a plumber and you want to show up when there's a leak, is there something else that might be an indicator that you can start to get clients or customers for that will potentially turn into those bigger opportunities? Or is there a certain city outside of where you're located that's less competitive, but you can start to rank there.

And it's really just understanding and looking at it for more of a long-term focus so that you can create goals so that you can get those quote-unquote smaller wins so that it can lead to the bigger wins. And I think one of the beautiful things about digital marketing is there's literally opportunities everywhere and online there's opportunities everywhere. There's this concept in SEO called the long tail and the idea of the long tail is that those quote unquote small wins actually end up being more than the big, when you were ultimately searching for. So I think when we were talking with clients, we're trying to understand, have that picture painted, but also try to see how that can translate to an overall strategy to ultimately get to where they want to be.

Juma Bannister 14:59

Let's talk a little bit about what you just said about the long tail, because I know there's a terminology called long tail keywords that you can use. Is that what you're referring to? What is that about?

Gresham Harkless 15:10

Yeah, absolutely. There's a book I think was written back in the 90s, I believe, by Chris Anderson, I believe, was the author. And it talks about the long tail. And it's not as much related to content, but it can be related to content. And many CEOs and people have related to that because it makes sense. And it's a lot because the technology that we use now, specifically in terms of search, we're able to be very targeted in the things that we're looking for.

So as more and more people are looking for those very targeted searches, as we have in Siri and smart speakers, We're able to not just ask for a plumber near me. We're asking for a plumber that can help out with this specific brand of toilet that we have. Can you solve this problem? You're going to be able to create content specifically to that. And the whole concept around the long tail is that if you add up those quote unquote small searches, which are less competitive, they end up being more than showing up as plumber near me. So it's thinking strategically around what might be those niche or very focused searches that might end up being when you add them all up more than that long tail and top-level search.

Gresham Harkless Outro 16:43

Hello, Hello, Hello this is Gresh again and I hope you enjoyed that special episode of the I AM CEO Podcast. Just like I mentioned in the beginning, we're really trying to laser focus on these eight pillars to show you as a builder how you can leverage these eight pillars and really level up there so it helps you level up your business and organization.

So hope you enjoyed this episode and definitely please check out the show notes so you learn more about the pillar, learn more about the person that I guessed it on, their episode, and of course learn more a little bit more about us as well too. This is Gresh signing out. I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

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