If you’ve been following the vlog for a while, you’ll know I spent quite a lot of time talking about content marketing and how powerful it can be in your business. Content marketing is a brilliant way of growing a tribe, but a lot of people ask me, “Exactly how does content marketing grow your tribe?”

It’s a really good question. How exactly does producing high-quality content grow your tribe? Well, it’s a two-part answer…

The Mechanics Of Using Content Marketing To Grow Your Tribe…

Content Marketing can grow you a tribe of people who are interested in your specific Zone of Genius, your specific niche, because you are actively putting out content that is about that one specific thing.

People are looking for information about your Zone of Genius because they’re interested in that specific subject. They find your content and therefore they find you. They become a part of your tribe, and the more content you put out, the more people find you and the bigger your tribe becomes.

It’s a simple concept, but it take a lot of careful planning to get it right.

How To Target Content To Grow Your Tribe Of Ideal Clients…

The second part of the answer and the part most people are really interested in: exactly how do you get your content to grow a true tribe; a group of people that you are specifically targeting.

We’re talking ideal clients.

What people really want to know is not ‘How does content marketing work?’ but ‘Exactly how do I use content marketing to target the right people, to form a tribe that is right for me and my business?’

That’s really crucial. If you don’t have a strategy, if you don’t have a plan and a really clear idea of the tribe that you’re trying to build, you can end up with a generic tribe that won’t do you any good.

Generic Tribes…

A really good example of how this happens is publishing content on lots of different topics that you are interested in. You just like writing about lots of different things. That’s great. If you’re running a personal blog, an interest blog, or a hobby blog, that’s a brilliant outlet for your creativity. You can write about whatever you want. But if you’re running a business, changing your topics around and talking about lots of different things week to week lacks any kind of cohesion. It lacks consistency. And it also makes it incredibly difficult to grow your tribe, because the people coming to your blog are always going to be very varied.

One week attract one type of person, the next you’ll be attracting a totally different type of person. The people you’re attracting also aren’t necessarily going to be interested in your business. They might be interested in what you’re talking about in a particular blog post, or even several blog posts, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to wanting to buy what you sell. And that’s the name of the game: building a tribe who want to buy exactly what you are selling.

8 Ways Content Can Grow An Insanely Powerful Tribe…

Today I’m going to go through eight ways you can use content marketing to grow your tribe by being crystal clear and strategic about who you target with that content. A huge part of this is knowing your ideal client. I talk an awful lot about ideal clients in other blogs, so I’m not going to go into that today, but do check those out. Certainly have a look at how I use archetypes to hone down exactly who your ideal client is so you know what you’re aiming for. So for these eight tips to work, you need to know who your ideal client is, okay? So this is assuming you already know that, all right?

Passion…

The first way to use content marketing to grow your tribe of dedicated ideal clients is one a lot of female entrepreneurs use: passion.

If you share your passion for the very specific thing you do, and you share it in such a way that ignites that passion in others, you will quickly grow your tribe of like-minded individuals, who are equally passionate about the same thing. The key is to ensure the passion you’re pouring into your content is a passion for your very specific niche, so the people you’re attracting are people who will be really passionate about what you can do for them, and they will therefore want what you have to offer.

Whether it’s products, services, coaching, whatever you’re doing, make sure you find a way to work in your passion in such a way that it gets them really fired up about what you have to offer.

A really good example of this is one of my favourite female entrepreneurs, Denise Duffield-Thomas.

Denise is astonishingly passionate about the topic of money and making money and manifesting money. It really shines through in all her content: she cares, not just about the topic of money, but of the actual process of making more money for yourself and living the life of your dreams, whatever that life may be.

As a result, Denise has quickly been able to build a phenomenally powerful and dedicated tribe of followers who share her passion for manifesting money, and who are interested in exactly what it is she is teaching.

Just like her, they want to be able to release their money blocks, and find a way to manifest the money that they need to live the life of their dreams. Denise has used content marketing absolutely perfectly to grow a powerful tribe of her ideal clients, and it’s resulted in a multi-million dollar business.

That’s what you’re aiming for.

You don’t have to be teaching money, you don’t have to be teaching anything. Just find a way to tie your passion for what you do into your ideal client’s passion for what you sell.

Be The Inspiration That Motivates Them…

The second way to use your content to grow your tribe is to actually be the inspiration that motivates people. If you are, for example, a dieting expert, a health coach, a nutritionalist, if you’re teaching people how to live healthier lives, eat better, lose weight, or increase their fitness, it’s really helpful if you’ve already been on the journey that they are about to embark on.

Ar Weight-Watchers meetings or Slimming World, the leaders of the groups are very often people who used to be dieters. They started off as the average-Joe, walking in off the street, wanting to lose weight. They got on board with the system, lost a shed-load of weight, and were so invested in it that they went on to set up their own business, teaching other people how to do what they did.

I’ve been to Weight-Watchers meetings and even a few slimming world ones, and they very often have before and after photos of themselves, right there at the front. It screams loud and clear: “This is what I used to be, this is what I am now. This is how I did it, you can do it too!

So you actually become the inspiration that motivates people. That’s really important, especially if you’re doing something like fitness or health, or anything involving a particularly difficult personal journey. That can be anything really. Building a business of your own is a phenomenally difficult journey. But if you can be the thing that inspires your ideal clients, that actually motivates them to get started and to keep going, that’s a phenomenally powerful way to grow your tribe.

People need motivation and they need inspiration; if you can be both at the same time then you’re golden.

Phases…

You can also grow your tribe by using your content to tap into a particular phase in life your ideal client is going. We all have stages in life, whether it’s childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, menopause, there are age-related phases, mood-related phases, mentality-related phases, and phases that relate to your career, hobbies, or what do in your spare time.

So, for example, new mums are going through a phase. I don’t mean that in a condescending sense, I mean the period of being a new mum is a phase in your life. Changing careers, that’s a phase. Anything that requires you to experience a particular thing for a set period of time.

Phases are things that happens in your life for a finite amount of time.

During that time you often need a lot of help, people who understand what you’re going through and have been there, and can relate and can support you.

If you can tap into a phase your ideal client is experiencing, that is very specific to your ideal client, and related to your products or services you’re selling, then you can grow your tribe based on that need for community.

The need for support, familiarity, and people that know what you’re going through and can help you through it.

Life Events…

Life events are a lot more specific, and usually a lot shorter-lived than phases. Think weddings, birthdays, promotions, retirement, pregnancy, the birth of a child, the death of a loved one.

Are your ideal clients are experiencing a major milestone that has quite a profound effect on you? Things like graduating from university, your first job, or a change in career.

In a very similar way to phases, if you can hone in on a specific live event your ideal client is going through that’s an excellent way to grow your tribe.

Not everybody will have one. My ideal clients do not have a common life event I can tap into. It doesn’t work for everyone. These methods don’t work universally for all ideal clients, so you need to find the one that suits you. But if, for example, you are a wedding planner or a wedding photographer, or a wedding cake maker, then the obvious life event your ideal clients are sharing is weddings.

You can grow your tribe by tapping into the fact they are planning their wedding.

Say you make wedding cakes. Most of your ideal clients aren’t going to want to know exactly how you make wedding cakes. They like seeing the pictures of the finished cakes, but they’re not really that bothered about how you get there most of the time. What they are interested in, however, is absolutely everything else related to weddings.

They’re planning their wedding, they’re looking for caterers, photographers, tips, the perfect dress.

So make your content focused on weddings, and how to have the perfect wedding, and you will rapidly grow your tribe into a community of people who are planning their wedding, and looking for somebody to make their wedding cake. And there you are, just sat there waiting to do it for them!

The thing I will say about this form of tribe though, it’s transitional.

So if you build a tribe based solely on an event like a wedding, you have a very high turnover in your tribe because people really only want a wedding cake once in their lives. Unless something goes catastrophically wrong and they end up getting married again, it’s going to be a one-off thing. They’re only going to buy it from you once.

You might keep them in your tribe because they follow you out of interest or nostalgia, but they’re never going to buy a cake from you again.

You need to be aware of that if you’re basing your business on a life event. You need to engineer your content in such a way that it’s constantly current, it’s constantly ”now’, so that it’s always attracting new people who are newly interested in the event that you’re dealing with, who will be newly needing what you’re selling.

Build A Community Around A Product Or Services…

The fifth way is to use your product or service you are selling as the core of your tribe. You then build your whole tribe around that product or service.

The best example I can think of for this is Leonie Dawson’s planners.

I discovered Leonie Dawson a few years ago when I was first starting out in business. I was looking for help setting everything up and getting going. I was really learning about how you run a business. One of the first things that I invested in, in terms of my own development as a business owner, was Leonie Dawson’s planners. This was several years ago now, but I’ve bought one every year since.

When I first bought it, it was just one book, now it’s three. I get all of them. Every year. Without fail.

If that’s not a genius marketing strategy, I don’t know what is.

I pre-order it as soon as it is available.

I’m a member of the Facebook group.

I have been to get-togethers with other local entrepreneurs where we’ve sat around with our planners planning stuff.

Leonie has built a fabulous community that is specific to her ideal client, which is creative entrepreneurs building a business, but is focused on one small product, rather than her academy training course.

The majority of her marketing isn’t geared towards getting you to buy into the academy, it’s geared towards getting you to buy a planner. That’s a much easier sell!

I think they cost me about £30 this year for the whole lot, but you can get them individually for about £10-£15.

It’s a very small investment to make, and with that investment you not only got a really powerful tool to help you in your business, you got this massive community of like-minded individuals who can support you, and travel with you on your journey as you plan your business.

That’s really what’s made Leonie so successful, her huge dedicated tribe of planner addicts. But a side-effect of all of that, is that a lot of the people buying her planners go on to do the academy, and that’s a big-ticket item.

As a business model this works really well. If you can find a product, especially a low-ticket item that you can get people really fired up and interested in, and that you can build a community around, your content should be geared to that product and helping people with related subjects. You can get people doing group activities and having conversations about it.

If you can do that, you will build a tribe a lot more quickly than you would if you were trying to get people interested in an abstract concept, or a very expensive item that they’re not sure they’re ever going to be able to afford to buy.

Tie Your Content To Your Geographic Location…

Number six is geography. I don’t mean that in the boring sort of schoolroom sense of what you learned in school. I mean that in the literal sense. If your business is local, so specific to a very small area or a particular region, then the easiest way to focus and build your tribe is to target people in your specific area. Now you need to be a bit clever with this one, because if you’re not careful you end up with a group of people who are all from one area, but they’re not all interested in what you have. So I don’t advise you using this one on its own, I advise you tying it in with one of the others. But you can still very easily target people who are specifically interested in what you’re doing, but are also in your geographic region. And the way to do this is to actually tie your content into local events, local places, local things that are of interest to people.

For me, I don’t actually do this at the moment because I don’t work locally, I work internationally, but if I were going to do it, I’m just down the road from Knutsford, and Knutsford has a phenomenal number of things that happen like the flower show, it’s got Tatton Park, it’s got farmers markets and all sorts of things like that. So if I were ever to niche down and target just local people to me, I would tie all of my content into what was happening locally, and news events and things like that. So that when people were searching for non-business topics, they ended up reading things that were tangentially related to business because they were looking for news about the local area.

The good thing about that is that people will automatically filter themselves out, so it can be a bit of a spray and pray technique, geography, but once you’ve got people who are in your local region interested and looking at your website and reading your stuff, they’ll very quickly realise what you do, or at least they should if you’ve got your branding right, realise what you do, and if they’re not interested in what you do they will just count themselves out. They’ll take themselves away, and that’s done in a very nice, non-negative manner. It’s just a case of, “This is me, this is what I do and this is what I’m going to be talking about” and they’ll automatically go, “Oh well, I’m not interested in that” and go. So you won’t end up with a load of people who are local to you but not interested in what you’re doing, because they will automatically count themselves out, but they will only do that if you tie the two together, okay? So you have to tie what you’re doing to your geographic place.

Target Demographics…

Number seven is demographics, and this works a lot like geography in the sense that you have to tie the demographic or demographics that you’re using to something that is very, very specific to what you’re doing. Probably the best example of how people do this is to say that they’re going to target female entrepreneurs. So that’s a very specific demographic in the sense that one, they are entrepreneurs, and two, they are female. Now you might niche that down even further and say, “I’m going to target female entrepreneurs between the ages of 20 and 40.” Or 40 and 60. You might decide you are only going to target a particular nationality of female entrepreneurs between those ages, because your product or your service is of particular value to them.

This is one of those things where you really have to know who your ideal client is. You need to know exactly what kind of things they’re interested in so that you can target them based on their interest, but you must, must, must, must, must tie it to what you do, okay? You really must.

Target Generations…

The last one is generations, and no I don’t mean the really crappy Star Trek film. Hello. Yes, yes, [Creambum 00:20:30] we don’t like the ice cream then do we? No.

Generationally speaking, people have very different attitudes, very different values, very different lifestyles and stages of life, and if you know that your ideal client is in a specific generation. So for example, the majority of my clients are millennials, like me. So that makes it very, very easy to target them because there are certain things I know about millennials that can be targeted. Like we are very interested in technology. We tend to be liberal and very tolerant. We really like our music and our pop culture, and we also tend to be quite interested in clothes. I don’t know why, but we are. So if you’re targeting millennials, and for the record that’s anyone born between 1977 and 1995, you can use that knowledge of how millennials think and what they like to actually target your content to them and build your tribe around the specific things that they are really, really interested in.

Now the topic of how to target generationally is absolutely massive and there is no plausible way that I can go through it all now, but really what I just wanted to do was demonstrate how you can draw distinctions between age groups. You can actually tailor your whole brand and not just your content, but your whole brand to target your ideal client. So you can see the way I am, is clearly targeted at my generation. That’s not to say that I don’t love working with people from other generations, I do, it’s just the majority of my clients are from my generation, so my branding and my content is aimed at that particular age group, at that particular generation and the demographics that go with them.

And Finally…

There you have it, there’s my eight ways to grow your tribe using your content, and I hope you’ve enjoyed that and you found it useful. If you have any tips of your own on how to grow your tribe, I would love, love, love to hear them, and if you have any questions then do please comment below, or email me, or head on over to the website and have a look at the other content that I’ve got there because that might help you out. Also do please like and share this post and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel to ensure you never miss a post…

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