The Content Marketing Curve

Content marketing takes time. As I said in my last post, it requires consistency, persistence, and patience. There are no short cuts. You have to do the work, and it’s going to take time.

I understand that you’re impatient. I am too. But unless you are well-established already, content marketing is your only option. I don’t take this as a limitation—I think of it as liberating. One more decision that I don’t have to make. I know that it’s not worth it to spend money on print advertising, radio spots, or press releases. I can grow my audience organically. For free.

Well, it’s not free, of course. It’s going to cost you time and effort. But the organic growth of a deeper connection with your audience is worth it. In fact, it might even surpass the kind of impact you get with traditional marketing and advertising.

The two most common questions I get from prospective clients about content marketing are:

“Does content marketing actually work?”

“If so, how long will it take?”

 

I thought I’d answer that by pulling back the curtain a little bit on my own audience—you. Let me share some actual, real-life data with you. This graph shows the growth of my audience on Twitter—the number of followers as it grows over time.

I picked this graph for two reasons:

1. It shows the quintessential content marketing curve with some very simple data. Yes, it’s only one indicator, but…
2. It correlates to all the other metrics on my site. I’ve described social stats as “shallow metrics.” They’re not that meaningful, but they’re also not meaningless either. Why? Because I can see similar growth in other more important metrics as well, such as site inlets, page views, and sharing my articles. In other words, it’s one facet—but it’s a pretty good representation of my overall growth.

So you can see that it’s working. Here’s the rub, though. This didn’t happen overnight.

I started on about August 1, 2012. It took me until about May 1, 2013 to get to 200 followers, and about June 1, 2014 to get to 500 followers. Then the acceleration. Why? For the same reasons that it always happens.

• Your writing’s good enough to attract the attention of an influencer.
• Those influencers share with their respective audiences.

It’s the only way to see growth of that sort. And it’s the only way to grow an audience that cares about you and your brand.

Compare that to traditional marketing campaigns. The primary goal of advertising is awareness, not trust. You broadcast your message to as many people as you can, in the hopes that someone will stop and take notice. If it works, you get a huge spike in awareness, followed by a sharp decay. It’s a strategy that still works, but 1) you’re going to have to pay for access to a captive audience (think TV commercials or print ads in magazines), and 2) you’re going to get a very small conversion rate. Most people have learned to tune out ads. When was the last time you acted on the basis of an ad?

The cool thing is that the content marketing curve will look like any other population growth curve. It will always start off slow, then once you reach critical mass, it will accelerate. This is because members of the population will start to spread the idea to one another. Sometimes that “idea” can be virus or some other infectious disease. It will show a rapid, geometric growth rate while the conditions are favorable. Then, at some point, the growth will slow again. Every population has a saturation point. Building your audience is no different. There are only so many people who are interested in the same things you are.

The limit may be 10 thousand or 10 million, but you will reach a saturation point. How does that make you think about how you treat your audience? It makes you want to maximize each relationship, as much as you can. That requires trust. And you have to earn that trust.

But you can see the lesson here. You have to produce compelling content and do the work of connecting. There’s no short cut, and there’s no way to fake your way through it. You have to do the work. For me, that was nearly 200 blog posts and about 5,000 Tweets, not to mention posting on LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook.

Is it worth it? You have to decide that for yourself. I am trying to build a business around my own credibility as a writer, advisor, and consultant. How much is an audience worth to you? How much do you need a readership?

As a writer, an audience is your greatest asset. Once you’ve earned the attention of an audience and built up their trust in you, you are in a position of power. You can do something with that attention and trust. It’s a precious commodity, of course. Trust is hard to earn, but easy to lose.

To me, it’s worth it. It’s empowering. It’s encouraging. It’s all possible—if you are just willing to do the work.

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Next week, I’ll show you my own social media methodology for how I was able to get the results I have so far, in a post called, “How to Build an Audience on Twitter.”

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