Nowadays any brand can become a publisher. But that doesn't mean that there will be a captive audience. We sometimes forget to treat publishing as a privilege. Just because we have a soapbox doesn't mean there will be an audience to listen to us.
Marketers are traditionally trained to repeat our single-minded proposition over and over until consumers buy whatever it is that we're marketing. In an effort to get our features and benefits across, we often lose sight of what's actually valuable to our audience. Great content marketing turns the mirror on the audience.
At Marketoon Studios, we create cartoons for brands that are genuinely about the audience, not the brands. For Intuit, we focused on the world of professional tax preparers. Rather than simply illustrate the features and benefits of QuickBooks, we designed the series to commiserate with their tax season headaches. One cartoon called "How To Tell It's April 15th" showed an error display of the office printer: "Toner Life End, You're All Out, And The Stores Are Closed. Bwah Ha Ha Ha Ha."
We took this series a step further and invited tax preparers to share some of their tax preparation horror stories. We captured the winning story in a cartoon, showing a 5-year-old pushing the off button on the computer to get her dad's attention, losing all of his tax preparation work. The winner received a framed print of this cartoon capturing their story and recognition from fellow tax preparers who shared the series because it reflected their world.
The cartoon series struck a chord because it wasn't overtly about QuickBooks. It was about the audience of professional tax preparers.
As software developer Kathy Sierra said “It does not matter how awesome your product is or your presentation or your post. Your awesome thing matters ONLY to the extent that it serves the user’s ability to be a little more awesome.”
Startup fashion brand Betabrand built its company on the premise of making their audience awesome with content marketing. They describe their brand as "1% fashion, 99% fiction". Every article of clothing comes with talking points to make the wearer more awesome. For Thanksgiving, Betabrand introduced Gluttony Pants, with extra buttons to create more space in the waist over the course of a Thanksgiving meal. The pants come with their own napkin.
To channel the awesomeness of their audience, Betabrand redesigned its web site around their audience of "Model Citizens". They invited customers to send in pictures of themselves doing something awesome with their clothes. Every entry received a special link of themselves as if they were the star of the Betabrand website. Betabrand evolved so that the website was no longer about the products; it was about the "Model Citizens".
Betabrand understand that it wasn't enough to sell pants made of out of disco ball material. It was that someone from their audience was inspired to sky dive into Burning Man wearing those pants, and then inspired further to share their awesomeness with the world from the Model Citizen website.
In content marketing, we need to focus less on how "awesome" we are and more on making our customers more "awesome." We need to treat publishing as a privilege.
Follow Tom Fishburne's cartoons on his Marketoonist blog or on Twitter @tomfishburne.