Visualize an Audience of One

I assume you know that one of the best ways to promote engagement with members of your target audiences is to frequently — and, ideally, regularly — produce and share potentially useful content on your various web properties.

Or at least that’s what I have been telling you over and over again.

Producing content can be hard.

This potentially useful content usually takes the form of either a text-based blog post or a YouTube video or some combination thereof.

But producing potentially useful content can be hard. It can be hard to get started. It can be hard to finish. Writers block – or videographers block – can take hold and paralyze you.

Creating content starts with an idea. Whether you’re trying to promote interest in an online course you’re developing or simply to enhance your reputation as a subject matter expert so that people will be more inclined to hire you, creating potentially useful content starts with an idea that you believe people care about.

And the hard part isn’t coming up with ideas.

Coming up with the idea is (usually) the easy part.

You might be a management consultant who is also a professor in a university’s school of management. Surely your students raise questions or engage in discussions that suggest topics for a blog post.

Or you might be a web developer who participates in online tech discussion forums where people post questions about how to use this or that technology. Speaking from experience, I can attest that many of my blog ideas come from that source.

No, coming up with ideas isn’t the hard part.

The hard part is composing the blog post or video in a way that resonates with members of my target audiences. And the reason this is hard is that my target audiences are heterogeneous. And I’m sure yours are, too.

Here’s just one example.

Recently I worked on a screencast demonstrating a simple method for optimizing HTML tables for smart phones with minimal CSS. As I proceeded through various takes, I wrestled with questions like these:

• When I show the HTML markup, do I have to explain what all the table-related elements (thead, tbody, th, tr, td) are?
• Will some people not even know what CSS is? If they don’t, should I give them a mini-tutorial?
• When I talk about using the ::after pseudo-element to append content to something that actually exists in the source HTML, do I have to explain how pseudo-elements work?

That may sound Greak to you if you’re not a web developer. But I’m pretty sure the types of questions I wrestle with have analogues in your business.

So what’s the answer?

To paraphrase Abe Lincoln…

You can engage some of the people all of the time, you can engage all of the people some of the time, but you can’t engage all of the people all of the time.

You’re not going to engage everyone with every blog post or every video. You’re just not.

Visualize an audience of one.

My suggestion for overcoming writers’ block (or videographers’ block) is this:

Visualize just one person when writing that blog post or recording that video.

Pick someone you know. Let’s call this person “Pat”.

Talk to Pat, knowing what Pat understands (and doesn’t) about the topic. Visualize Pat reading your post or watching your video on a smart phone. Think of — and include — things that will resonate with Pat.

When you have to make decisions about how much background or detail you need to provide or withhold, visualize Pat.

Obviously, Pat isn’t the only member of your target audiences you’re hoping to engage. That’s okay. There’s probably more than one “Pat” in your audiences.

People who share Pat’s level of interest in and knowledge about your topic are likely to be engaged. People who share that level of interest but lack the knowledge may be intrigued and thirst for more.

And everybody else might simply ignore that blog post or YouTube upload when they’re notified of it. But heck… it’s not as if that hasn’t happened before.