Bo Sacks distributed an article by James Evelegh with a rather long title that starts “An even closer union. How close are you to your readers?” (Link below.)
James claims that success in publishing is increasingly measured by proximity to your audience, but I think we need to be a little more precise than that.
Will Bailey and Jennifer Schivas from 67 Bricks say it’s “the holy grail” to get embedded into your customers’ workflow. I agree with that.
Jessica Norell Neeson from BBC Good Food says their success is from meeting the audience where they are and providing relevant content.
Renee Doegar from London Review of Books emphasizes customer research.
Hearst UK is making “determined efforts” to understand customer values.
All these things sound great to me.
- Get into your customers’ workflow
- Know the audience so you can provide relevant content
- Do customer research, and
- Understand your customers’ values
There’s a lot that can be added to that.
- Know their content preferences by type – like video, audio, short- or long-form content, bulleted lists, etc.
- Know their preferences by topic.
- Monitor their usage patterns, like time of day, or day of week.
- Find out what style they prefer, like casual or formal, snide, joking, critical, analytical, etc.
All these things are good ideas, and there’s one thing conspicuously missing – acting as if your customer is your buddy.
That seems to be the obsession of some branding people – i.e., getting people to love your brand. That might be a reasonable strategy in some cases, but not in all.
The message is, get close to your customers in the sense of knowing who they are and what they need, but don’t think that necessarily means you need to be friends.
Links
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