As content creators we find ourselves stretched across four, five, six, or more platforms which are voracious black holes for content. And tomorrow, they will scream for more. We feel we have to be everywhere or we feel we are falling behind. Falling behind what is a question we will explore later. But what is definitely real is the pressure to repurpose every bit of content to be able to have the reach that comes from showing up on as many platforms as possible. To this end it is easy to simply repurpose content designed for one platform and post on the others. But I would like to use this episode to consider the thought that every audience is worth investing in, not just collecting.

My name is Bill Strand and you are listening to the Niche Content Creator Podcast. Here I discuss issues facing content creators.

In today’s world we have unprecedented outreach capabilities. I have access to billions of people through my Instagram, podcast, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, VERO, and website outreaches.  And, if that wasn’t enough for me I could add on LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit, and this is just a list of the highest profile platforms. And all of these are free to jump on…at least they are free as far as monetary cost. If you are a social media jockey doing content creation you know how easily an entire day of life can disappear as you manage each platform, respond to comments, check analytics, spend .5 hours commenting on other people’s posts in a way that makes it seem like you are engaging, but are really just showing off, and then post again because you weren’t happy with your morning post performance.

We swallowed a line that said that we needed to be everywhere and we measure our success by follows, subscribes, likes, and the numbers under those icons we are not 100% what they mean. Today, I would like you to take a break from that with me. Let’s step back, take a look at what we have available to us, and, perhaps, reassess our perspective.

And I want to start by recognizing what we want out of this. Many of us actually want opportunities to engage deeper with our audience. We want to find the people that are interested in the same thing we are. Yes, we have access to billions of people, but only a fraction of them are interested in our niche. We want to find them! Now, I say “many of us” because there are some outreaches that are 100% interested in follower numbers. There are some strategies that value this above all else. But all I want to do is acknowledge that enough to be accurate. If you are enough of a niche content creator to be listening to a podcast on content creation, I heavily suspect you are interested in finding the right people so you can create community and/or find people who would be interested in what you are selling. That comes from establishing a trust which is the deeper relationship. And, that is tough to get from taking one piece of content, stretching it thin and spreading it over every platform you can get your hands on. Yes, I know, that is what you are told to do. I know that is how so many people do it and they seem to be having success. But for this one episode. Just these 30 minutes, let’s consider whether there is a better way.

I would like to propose that every audience is worth investing in. People are on different platforms because they like that particular experience. And if we want to develop a loyal audience on the different platforms then we need to give them what they want. People on YouTube are expecting videos. Putting a single image and your podcast audio for 45 minutes will have less than enthusiastic response. Taking the audio from your YouTube video directly onto a podcast risks alienating your listeners when you start talking about things that can be seen on the video, but are completely lost in pure audio. For me, when I listen to a podcast and I get wind that this is just the audio from a video I lose interest.

Instagram is probably the most abused platform because it has so many different aspects.  Some people just scroll reels. Then you have the stories surfers that may or may not want to check out a reel you linked to from your stories!

The common thread is that when people choose to be on a platform they are looking for the experience that that platform offers. And, so, I would like to propose that when you plan to repurpose a show, for example, you use the overall theme and create content for each outreach independently. And, I don’t mean do different short form video for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. The short form consumers on all three platforms are looking for the same experience. If you want to then two thumbs up, but that is not what I am talking about here. What I am getting at is that if your theme for the week is How to change oil in a Delorean car you decide at the start how the video will go, write the 30 minute podcast that talks about the details, history, and colorful personalities that debated the placement of the engine. Then jot down the seven main points or fun facts you would like to get across and create Instagram posts that communicate these things. But here is where I am going to suggest a somewhat radical departure to the common strategy. Instead of using Instagram to point to the episode, use Instagram to present the topic points you feel are important and present them in a way where your Instagram viewer feels they were the focus of the post.

Not only that, but my Instagram feed and Instagram stories are different outreaches as well. They are all talking about the central topics of the week theme and can definitely use common video, graphics, and sound bites, but when the person who likes to scroll the feed sees my posts they feel like they got value without having to go listen to the podcast. So much so that they are curious about the podcast without me having to make it a marketing pitch to make them think they are missing something if they don’t listen to the podcast. And the person that likes to surf the stories doesn’t feel like they have to stop their surfing to click on a link that takes them to a reel and then totally changes up the dynamic of their time on Instagram.

And I just want to apologize for anyone who is not familiar with the jungle that Instagram is. You literally could spend your life helping people figure out Instagram. And, some people do! It is a very powerful platform, but there are so many twists and turns that those of us who take it seriously can sound like we speak a different language.

The point is that every audience is worth investing in. So I am suggesting that You construct your posts on your secondary platforms as if they were independent. And if that means you do not have time to do six extra platforms, consider whether it is worth it to have a high level of superficial followers or a smaller number of dedicated followers. Creating super fans on Instagram will naturally lead them to your podcast or YouTube channel. So you are actually coming out ahead because the Instagram followers are not going because they think the title of your episode was intriguing, which may be the level they are at if you advertise the episode. No, they are going because, as a result of your focused posts, they want to hear what you say and interest in you is much better than interest in an episode.

Newsletters.

I think the place we most need to see a revival of perspective is with email newsletters. And to those not using them yet, yes, your email newsletter will be a full outreach in itself. It will take discipline to do it consistently and strategy to do it effectively.

Case in point, how many do you have clogging up your junk folder? A recent study placed the average email newsletter open rate across all industries at 17%. This is ridiculous. That means for every 100 people that voluntarily signed up to receive the email newsletter, only 17 people actually opened up the email. That is pretty sad. Now, we would have to dig deeper into the various industry studies to find out why it was so low, but maybe we can get a clue by just asking ourselves why we don’t open the emails that come to us. With all self-introspection, here are my top two reasons why I do not open the emails I signed up for and confirmed I would like to be on the list. See if these reasons resonate with you.

1. I was interested in a free digital download something or other and I had to sign up to be on the email list to get it. I didn’t necessarily want to be on the email list, but they made that part of the deal. So whether I open the email newsletters or not depends 100% on whether the digital download provided knocked my socks off. If it truly gave me value then I may read the emails. If the download just a bunch of basic stuff thrown together on a .pdf with the obvious motive of getting my email address I will probably be underwhelmed and will unsubscribe when I get around to it. Though maybe I won’t anytime soon because your email goes directly to the spam folder and I won’t remember I am on the list until my email provider says I have used up too much memory and I now have to look for things to remove. Or maybe you have a topic I am interested in, but….
2. You are constantly marketing to me. If I am in the market for something you sell then I will open your marketing newsletters. But I can tell when someone has bought into the line that they need to send an email a week to the email list and they need to sell items. There are precious few email lists I am on where I do not roll my eyes at the thinly veiled sales pitch in each and every newsletter. I am like anyone else – we have so much trying to grab our attention you really have to earn a place on my reading list. Yes, it is a tall order to continue providing value until I am ready for what you are selling, but you can do it if you take the email newsletter seriously and plan it as a way to provide valuable information to your dedicated followers. Whether you view your newsletter as a sales opportunity or an opportunity to share deeper value, I will know. And if you want to be one of the few non-personal email I actually open up, it better be high on the value side.

So, what can I determine about an email newsletter that I would read on a regular basis? First, if you dangle a carrot in front of me that looks good enough to sign up for, that carrot better be darn good when I get it or else I am not going to read your email out of principle. So my message is to cool it with luring people in. I know that is going against the standard line in the industry. But coercing people is never a positive approach.  Make your newsletter something worth getting and opening. Advertise what you are going to be talking about in your next newsletter and let that be your way to get people to sign up for your newsletter. 

So, wait a minute, it seems like this whole email thing is serious business. It almost seems like an after thought with everyone saying you need an email list and every website interrupting you with pop-ups telling you to join their lists. Since when did email newsletters become an such a demanding outreach? Well, it did since the newsletter pioneers so long ago discovered they could make money selling via email and then made money selling courses telling everyone they could make money selling via email. And now so many people think they need an email list that our inbox is clogged with digital garbage and we have all developed the ability to ignore most of what comes in. So, what does that mean for you as a content creator? It means the bar is low but the stakes are high. It means that you need to respect your newsletter audience and optimize their experience. And I do not mean sales effectiveness. There are a dearth of marketing gurus sharing advice and email services offering analytics and A/B tests that optimize the sales effectiveness of your emails. Yes, that gives you the numbers and is important to achieve your goals. But the value starts with you sitting down and asking yourself, how do I provide value with my email outreach. How do I make this email worth opening every time I send it? Once you have figured out that your email newsletter deserves just as much attention and care as your primary outreach then you are on the right track. You can add the sales part in there after you have provided rock hard value. And, why am I making such a big deal about this email newsletter? It is because this is one of the most effective ways to create a deep relationship with your audience. You being there is because someone decided you could provide enough value to them to deserve a place in their inbox. That is a hot lead. And most people throw away that opportunity by sending out garbage. You get one chance to prove you are worth the read. Maybe you might get a second chance. But probably not a third.

Let’s get this straight. An email newsletter is a opportunity for you to provide exceptional value to people who have said they want to hear from you (unless you coerced them into signing up with some digital download offer). These are the warmest concentration of super fans and deserve to be treated as such. This is such an incredible opportunity for you so don’t mess it up by taking it for granted.

And a note, many website themes have an automatic pop-up that interrupts the browsing experience and wants you to sign up for the email list. Make sure you are actually going to create a newsletter before doing this. How many people here just checked yes for that pop-up and have built a respectable email list over the years and haven’t sent out one email. If you are not putting together any sort of specific newsletter or sale promotion strategy then I would suggest removing the email address collection widget on your website. Someone that signed up last year isn’t necessarily going to remember or appreciate seeing you show up a year later. It is almost disrespectful. You created an expectation and anytime we make empty promises the trust erodes.

Okay, so let’s say that you agree with me about the importance of respecting our audience and we are going to sharpen our content creation skills. What is the high level analysis that can help us be on the right track from the beginning?

My approach to this vast content work is to break up all the social media accounts and outreaches into what they do for you. I separate them with respect to Reach and Retention. The platforms that are best suited to bring in new potential followers will be in the Reach bucket. The platforms that are best suited to develop deep relationships with your followers will be the Retention bucket. In the end, we want to have a balanced portfolio of reach and retention platforms.

Shall we take a look at those buckets? First the Reach Bucket. These are the tools that have a strong search component or are very likely to come into contact with someone making a decision to follow you or not. Tools that are good at reach are ones that have an algorithm deciding to push content that is not from accounts followed. This doesn’t mean they can’t also be used for retention. It just means they excel at finding new people that might consider following you. Tools that come to mind are

Website Blog – Google, Bing, and other search engines will be crawling your blog seeing if you have valuable information to provide the trillion plus search inquiries they get every year.

A YouTube channel – the second biggest search engine on the internet

Short form video whether on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube

LinkedIn

Twitter

Instagram main feed

Next is the retention bucket. These tools are most likely to be consumed by people who are already followers, subscribers, or have chosen to hear more from you.

Podcast

Live Streaming

eMail Newsletter

Instagram Stories

Now a number of the reach tools I listed also have retention capabilities. A YouTube channel is a prime example. You create videos that your followers love and the YouTube algorithm actively searches out non-followers to present your video to see if they will like it. If you are a YouTuber then you make videos that are both welcoming to the newcomer, but satisfying to the super fan.

And podcasters may be surprised that I listed podcasting as a retention tool instead of a reach tool when that is their primary reach tool. I did that because the algorithm pushing podcasts to people in various podcasting apps isn’t that strong and podcasting has a deep value of keeping people’s attention for 30 to 60 minutes. Whatever reach capabilities it has are dwarfed by the retention power.  These are all just tools. They all can be used for either reach or retention depending on your niche and their habits.  But some tools do have much higher capabilities in one or the other area. How high of a reach component they have is dependent upon whether there is an algorithm at work to present your post to people who are not yet following you.  The important thing for you is to select your portfolio of platforms for your outreach with the express idea of which ones you will use for reach and which ones you use for retention.

Some of you may ask why I am bothering separating these tools into separate buckets in the first place. Don’t you pick a platform, figure out its reach tools and work to develop a dedicated followership? And, yes, that is a valid approach. Especially if you are dedicating yourself to that platform. But even if you have decided that YouTube is your bread and butter and you have all the reach and retention tools you need there, you may, at sometime in the future, want to go beyond YouTube. Then the question is, do you want to get more people subscribing and finding you? Well, then knowing what tools have a strong reach component is an important part of your evaluation. Are you thinking about creating a deeper level of experience to feed your super fans? Something from the retention bucket would be more appropriate. Yes, you can create a dedicated fan base on Twitter, but if you are looking to strengthen the loyalty of your YouTube audience you aren’t going to send them to Twitter. That is more of a lateral move.

Making the decision as to what to populate your outreach portfolio with brings us back to the main theme of this episode. And that is to treat each one of these as their own platform even if underlying goal is to support a podcast, YouTube show, or some other platform. Maybe some examples could help out.

If I had a traveling magic show and wanted to market the show, generate interest, and keep the audience warm between shows a social media platform that had equal parts reach and retention would be a great choice. TikTok is amazing for reach, but Instagram has a more robust set of tools dedicated to reach and retention so IG it is. At least for this example. To go to the extreme to facilitate the point I am trying to make is that even though I have specifically chosen this platform to support my in-person magic show I am not going to be successful if I only post showtimes and locations. Sure, a periodic schedule update may be appropriate, but the real growth will occur when you make content specifically for the Instagram audience to enjoy while they are in the app of their choice. And your desired results will be best achieved if you use the main feed for its reach capabilities and the stories feature for its retention capabilities. Perhaps the main feed would be reels of magic tricks being performed and the stories would be about experiences on the road and funny unexpected things that happen during a magic show? You don’t have to constantly market to your audience. Just create an enjoyable experience optimized for the platform they are on and that does all the marketing for you. Generating a love for magic through your main feed posts will translate into your followers wanting to come to your show. This is the magic (so to speak) of content marketing. And the most effective form of content marketing is treating your audience with respect and giving them content which is right for the platform they are on.

Now, should I sign up for Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube? I know the arguments for being everywhere. And I acknowledge the value of having that reach. But the point of this episode is to respect your audience and to start an outreach only if you have the time bandwidth to properly maintain it. Can you make content optimized for how it is presented on the platform? Do you have the time to engage with the people who comment on your posts and send you direct messages? I just checked my Twitter account and found an email from four months ago. So, do the few people who follow me on my chameleon Twitter account feel like I have a great place to hang out? No. But my Instagram is always buzzing with activity. I have prioritized the Instagram platform for my chameleon outreach. People will catch on if you are treating their platform as a priority or as dumping ground for your reheated repurposed content. There is value in planting a flag on the different platforms – if only to reserve your name so others don’t take it. But your followers there will feel how much you really care about the platform and will respond in kind. None of us can be everywhere unless we start hiring virtual social media managers to take care of both posting and engaging. So I am suggesting that you pick one or two that you feel you can handle and dedicate yourself to creating an optimized experience for that platform. Being excellent on one platform is much more effective than being mediocre on three. To be able to be excellent on Instagram I acknowledge that other platforms will not get the same level of attention. There is a limited amount of time and we have to prioritize.

So, let’s bring this home. I have talked about having a balanced portfolio of platforms that will provide a strategic blend of reach and retention. You will notice I hardly ever talked about sales which is usually the metric by which success is measured. This was deliberate because I think that success is measured by the depth of loyalty and the number of super fans you create. For those unfamiliar, the term super fans refers to the most dedicated of your followers that will engage with what you do because you are doing it and are the greatest source of word-of-mouth recommendations. This trust is built up after consistently providing value. I find my content creation efforts much more fulfilling when I concentrate on how well I can provide an enjoyable or educational experience. Yes, sales is important. We need to be adept at closing the deals because our banks do not accept good will to pay for the mortgage. But I find the sales will come even though I have them as a secondary thought. If my primary purpose is to help my followers then I have found that they provide in kind when I present an opportunity to purchase something. In fact, they often find those opportunities to support me even if I don’t explicitly present the sales. Your audience will know what your dedication is and will take care of you in the way you take care of them. Be good at all the marketing techniques and do your A/B tests. And definitely produce products, services, and Patreon that allow your followers to take care of you. But keep in mind that the service you have chosen to provide is key. Dedicate yourself to being the absolute best you can be at providing that service. And, the main point of this episode is to bring that dedication to each platform and optimize your posts so the people of that platform get an enjoyable experience where they are instead of an invitation to go off platform to see something somewhere else. And if you need to reduce the number of platforms you are on to increase the level of quality you can provide to a select few, then I encourage you to take that step.

Thank you very much for joining me here today to talk about content creation. I am enjoying slowly building up the Niche Content Creator outreach. Starting this week I will be investing in the Instagram outreach. I will create accounts and do some weekly posts on other platforms just to keep my toe in the water, but I will be dedicating myself to making the Instagram experience an enjoyable one. So, I invite you to find the @Nichecontentcreator, all one word, on Instagram and, please, DM me a hello to let me know you heard the podcast episode! I would love to know if any of this resonated with you. This is Bill Strand signing off. Have a great outreach and I will see you next time.

Reference for email open rates:

https://influencermarketinghub.com/email-open-rates/