Know Your Readers Like You Know Your Close Friends
How to get people to listen to what you have to say.
Many companies do research on who their audience is. They do an objective analysis and develop customer avatars and buyer personas. It includes details such as the customer’s age, gender, location, income, marital status, etc. However, an objective understanding of the customer is not enough to create content that connects with the audience.
Think about your relationship with a close friend that you know from college. Your understanding of your friend is not objective. It’s subjective. You know him in a way that cannot be expressed in words. That’s why you can talk to him in a way that gets his attention. The purpose of communication is to transfer what you have in your mind to his mind with the least slippage.
If you can communicate with your close friend very effectively, you are capable of doing the same with your audience. But most creators have not honed that skill. The content that most creators create is not signal, it’s noise. Their content falls on deaf ears. No one pays attention to what they say because they are saying something for the sake of saying and getting attention, not because they have something to say and desire to share it with their audience.
When you tell something to your friend, you do not “create that content” with an agenda of getting something back. The desire is to communicate that message. To share. And there is a joy in sharing. Similarly, you need to create content for your audience because you have something valuable (an idea or an insight) and you have a desire to share it with your audience. For example, this post is out of a desire to share my insight with you. That’s why most of my content pieces do not have a sales pitch in the end. This post doesn’t either.
When you create content with a genuine desire to share ideas, there is no direct expectation of an ROI from the efforts. The sharing of the message itself is the joy and the return. Such is the type of content that, ironically, gives the best returns because it builds trust and people tend to transact with the people they like and trust.
Unlike your friend, the audience is not a single person. If I publish this post, it will reach 100,000+ people. But I do have a subjective understanding of who my audience is. It’s a crowd and the crowd has its own character traits. However, when I am writing content, it shouldn’t feel like I am talking to a crowd for you. You should feel like I am talking to you. And each person in the audience should feel the same.
It takes time and effort to understand who your audience is subjectively. This understanding doesn’t come from online market research and building buyer personas. It comes from interacting with your community in real life. This includes doing offline meet-ups, and events and talking to as many people as possible in as many contexts as possible.
Every time you meet a new person and interact with them, your understanding of your audience becomes better. It keeps getting crystallized over time. The clearer it becomes, the better your content will penetrate into the attention spans of your audience. It will be signal to them while every other creator’s content will be noise. You want to cut through the clutter, not by adding more to the clutter, but by relevancy. The relevancy comes from your subjective understanding of your audience.
The supply of content is infinite but attention spans are scarce. Everyone has only 24 hours in a day and only an hour or two to consume other’s content. More content creators create content because it’s a good opportunity, but the consumption of the same is not equally divided. Some will get a higher share than others. The ones that get the highest share are the ones who have the deepest subjective understanding of their audience. These are the ones who are sending out signals, not noise.
As you evolve as a content creator, you will find more pleasure in creating content than consuming content because creation is empowering. Creating content also helps you think clearly and that kind of clarity can never come through reading or watching videos alone. When you have to communicate what you have in your mind to others, you are forced to organize your thoughts in a certain way and it can be intellectually orgasmic if you get into the flow of it.
Aim to divide your time into 30% creation and 70% consumption to start with. Eventually, you can get to 50/50. If you are consuming content for 1 hour in a day, create content for 1 hour in a day. It could be written content, YouTube videos, podcasts, or short social media posts. It takes time and practice. Start as early as possible.
"The content that most creators create is not signal, it’s noise. Their content falls on deaf ears. No one pays attention to what they say because they are saying something for the sake of saying and getting attention, not because they have something to say and desire to share it with their audience."
"When you have to communicate what you have in your mind to others, you are forced to organize your thoughts in a certain way and it can be intellectually orgasmic if you get into the flow of it."