As a Thought Leader trying to grow your audience, you may be trying to target your audience with an ad campaign or some other effort to target who you would like to put your thought leadership content in front of.
Today, I want to go over a couple of things that will help you do that.
When you think about the kind of people you want as followers, you might start thinking about what you want them to be like. What kind of people you want them to be.
I’ll give you an example: for my business, The Educated Authority, I need people who are willing to study and learn. In fact, if they aren’t willing to study and learn — maybe they feel like they already know everything or they’re too intellectually lazy to learn anything — from a thought leadership business perspective, they aren’t any good to me at all. They’re worthless.
I need people who want to learn, and enjoy learning about things they’re interested in. And not just willing to learn from me, but to actually be a student of their own industry.
I could have a list of a million followers, but if they’re not willing to invest time and money in continually learning, I really have no following at all.
What I’m doing there is selecting a follower by something called psychographics. And like the word “psychology,” it has to do with how people think. And it’s important that you spend some time on identifying what your ideal follower would be like.
That said, although psychographics are extremely important in attracting the right kind of follower, you can’t run your business by psychographics alone.
The opposite of that is what people are like on the outside, their demographics. And this is the kind of thing that’s more identity-based, as well as possibly their careers. And demographics are pretty easy to take to a list broker or someone planning an ad campaign and tell them exactly the demographics you want to talk to.
So how do we balance between the two?
I suggest that as much as you can, you target market by demographics, and then you filter and indoctrinate by psychographics. You draw a huge crowd with demographics, and then from there you can pull out the best people for your business.
Your thought leadership content should repel the people who are psychographically wrong for you, and at the same time, your content will create an even tighter bond with the right people — the people that have the values you need in your ideal follower.
And that’s the real trick of thought leadership content. Not only do you establish authority, inform people, and entertain people, but it also has to run off the wrong people and make the right people fall deeper in love with you.
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