Gone Fishin' With Content Marketing
These two images have taken up space in my brain for the past 12 years. Together, they can help you land all the fish you need to grow.
Which of these images is the right way to look at content?
Yes.
In any content marketing plan, as you start thinking through your content, two questions always need to be answered:
What's the right bait
How many hooks are enough?
It was a thing in the early days of content/inbound marketing for blogs to have a variation of “fishing for leads.”
Makes sense. You need the right bait and hook for the right fish and you need to be in the right place – you aren’t going to catch a Tuna in a lake.
Here’s what these somewhat contradictory images make me think about, at least today.
On the one hand, focus and the right bait can fill your boat up. All the high-tech equipment in the world won’t fix fishing with the wrong bait (offer) in the wrong pond (market). The surface lesson is focus on one thing and bring in the fish.
On the other hand, not everyone has an offer or service where a single piece of bait is enough to land a fish.
I saw this stat on a HubSpot post a few weeks ago:
47% of people consume 3-5 pieces of content before taking the first step towards making a purchase.
Variations of that number have been floating around for 15-plus years. Whether it’s 2 pieces of content or 10 and 40% or 60% of people who need to see multiple pieces of content before buying; a huge portion of your potential customers want to be touched multiple times (appropriately!) before they’ll buy from you.
Originally, I thought of these images only in the context of producing content. Today, I take a different meaning from each image.
From the guy fishing with a single pole:
Know who you are. Be that.
Focus on serving your customers.
Know what your customers want and where they are.
Know what your customers want and where they are.
Instead of:
Trying to be all things to all customers.
Trying to attract all the fish at the same time.
Then I think we need to combine the focus of the single line with the second image because most potential customers wanna nibble on a few things before taking the hook.
When you combine that focus on customers and being useful to them with fishing with the right bait on the various social channels; that’s a winning combo.
Of course, deciding WHICH types of content and where you should share them isn’t easy (hey, that’s why all of us content marketing folks exist, to help you figure that out).
Strike the right combo of bait, customer, and timing and, to absolutely mix metaphors: You’re gonna need a bigger boat!
Let’s land some fish, er, customers for you together. Contact me here or bryant@simplyusefulmarketing.co.
I can no longer find the source of the first image, I have it labeled as “fishing with good bait.” The image with social media is by Mark Armstrong Illustration (love his style).