You Ask, I Answer: Content for Influencer Audiences?

We continue with our uh influencer marketing questions from the B2B Influencer Marketing Summit from SAP and Analytica, which I recently attended and was a panelist at. As a reminder, I'm doing this series because it was a four-person, 30-minute panel. So we didn't have time to really dig into uh any of these questions. And uh you've been here for the first four, you know that each question can be answered in about 10 minutes. So uh it'll be a very long panel if every panelist was giving a 10 minute answer to every question.

Today's question is what kind of content best resonates with your audience? I don't know. Um I'm being a bit facetious here. Generally speaking, this question is going to be a bilateral question. Knowing what the audience wants and then knowing what you're able to create, right?

For me, I find it easiest to create this, right? Video content with an audio component and then using AI to transcribe into text for people who want to read rather than listen or watch. And it's interesting looking at the data, looking at the analytics around the audio files, the YouTube videos, the newsletters. About 50% of the audience still prefers to read things like my my weekly newsletter, the almost timely newsletter. And about 25% prefer to watch a video, about 25% prefer to listen to audio.

And so, in terms of a content strategy for B2B influencer marketing, it really comes down to what are you capable of producing? If you can only produce text and blogging is what you do, that's what you do. I would suggest that if you're really good at blogging, it's not rocket surgery to you know get out your phone and uh record yourself, essentially reading reading aloud your blog, because video in particular contains the most information density and is a format that is easily distributed thanks to services like YouTube. So if you've got the script, which is the blog post, you may as well just read it out loud. And of course, it's trivial to extract the audio from a video.

Now you have audio for a podcast or or something similar. Um that content resonance, what kind of content resonates, is highly dependent on the audience's preferences. That's format topic-wise, topic-wise, this is where you got to do some research. Um at least as of the time of recording, you can still get access to things like Twitter profiles in in at scale. Um, you can with certain tools get a collection of say Instagram posts or um you can see performance of your content on LinkedIn.

It is your obligation as a marketer, both as a brand as an and as an influencer, to analyze that data and see what are the topics uh that you're covering to begin with, and then what kinds of content performance do you get on those topics? I will say, like I I look at the different topics I cover, and right now the topic that gets the highest engagement, the most discussion is all about AI. I mean, we can talk about data science and R and Python and stuff, and nobody really wants to talk about that. Right now, it's all generative AI. As of the time, you know, this is April 2023 when I'm recording this.

That's the that's the area of focus that people care about today. Audience preferences are notoriously changeable, right? They are notoriously um fluid, and what is of interest to people today will not be of interest to people tomorrow. What is of worthy of discussion is going to be different depending on where people's attention is. When you look back the last few years, obviously the pandemic and the future of work was hot for a while.

Cryptocurrencies were hot for a while. NFTs were hot for a hot minute. Generative AI is hot right now. Who knows what's next? The question that influencers have to ask themselves is well, what can we credibly cover?

And the question that brands have to ask is are these topics that we have a point of view on as well that would be worth collaborating with an influencer about or not? So for my audience, again, the pillar content for me is the weekly newsletter, the almost timely newsletter. The um the general content are these daily videos uh that go with that. And then the the big rock content are things like books or keynote addresses and stuff. But topic wise, today it's all about AI.

Who knows what tomorrow will bring? Uh and I would love your thoughts. What content resonates with you? What format? What topics, what do you want to hear more about?

Uh be happy to hear your point of view on this as well. Thanks for tuning in. We'll talk to you soon. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.