If you attended the inaugural InfluenceHR, you saw The Starr Conspiracy’s founder deliver a keynote on understanding Drive. You can see the <140 character definition below from TSC Agent Lance Haun:
Your company’s Drive exists where your obsession (what you have to do), boundaries, legacy, and brand archetype intersect. Your employee, prospect and customer groups have their own versions of Drive — what motivates them and what makes them tick.
Without understanding the ecosystem of Drive — where your customer and prospect groups’ desires, motivations and needs collide with your brand’s desires, motivations, and solutions — your content marketing strategy will fall flat.
That’s obvious, right?
Great content takes too much time, too much sweat and blood, too many resources, too much money to be churning it out and throwing it against a wall, right?
That’s what happens when content is created for no one in particular — when we don’t understand what our “target markets” want or need from us:
- Do they want to be entertained in a boring market?
- Do they want industry-relevant data analyzed in an engaging way?
- Do they want to “root” for an underdog brand in a market oversaturated by Goliaths?
- Do they want a supreme customer experience or do they just need it to work?
What do they want? What would make their jobs and lives easier or better?
If you don’t know the answer to that question — or if you’re speculating (you know who you are) to know — take a breather from creating content in the dark for a while. There’s a massive LED light at the end of the tunnel — follow it.
Content marketing has to be about story. It has to be about developing voice and persona. It has to be about differentiating yourself and creating some kind of emotional connection to your buyer.
You can’t do that if you don’t know them. And if you’re not willing to talk to your users, customers and prospects to find out what they really want, someone else will.
All I’m sayin’ is this: Content created in a vacuum usually stays there.
Get in front of your customers and prospects — find out what keeps them up at night.
Build your content strategy around that.
P.S. If learning what drives your customers is what keeps you up at night — we should talk.
