Foundations: How Should You Share?

Now that you’ve determined your ICP and have validated both it and your content ideas through customer research, you can begin creating that content.

In addition to helping you understand the impact of a problem to a particular organization, customer research also gives you insight into how they communicate about that problem - the specific words and phrases they use to describe and talk about it.

As mentioned in the first part of this series, you want to reduce the number of assumptions about your ICP as much as you can - and that includes how they describe their pain points, or the particular benefit they’ll gain through their problem being solved.

Using the language of your customers in your content demonstrates to your audience that you’re able to provide an answer to the specific problem that they’re trying to solve, and in a clear, easily-understandable way.

Creating content is difficult in and of itself, requiring a craftsperson’s approach. Regardless of the format, it is the communication of thought. The thinking you’ve done about your ICP and their problems, and the research you’ve done to uncover customer insight, is incredibly valuable preparation, but it won’t necessarily make the writing or filming easier or less time-consuming.

The other side of this is that perfection cannot be achieved. When you are satisfied enough with what you’ve produced, you need to have the confidence in yourself to send it out into the world. You’ve worked hard to create something that has value, and that value has been validated by the people it is meant to help; it won’t help anyone if you keep it to yourself.

It’s also worth remembering that content can be updated, iterated on, and improved. If something you created doesn’t resonate with your audience, use that information and refine what you have - whether that means changing the language, framing, or examples.

Distributing Your Content

It took a lot of effort to create that content, and you want to help as many people as possible with it. However, you can’t assume that your ICP will see it just because you published it.

There are many reasons why we resist distributing our content: fear of being judged, worry that we’ll annoy people, or the negative perception of self-promotion.

But, having created something that we know is genuinely helpful to our ICP, we need to give ourselves permission to advocate for it.

In This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See, Seth Godin wrote,

“When a human being extends emotional labour to take responsibility - “Here, I made this” - then the door is open to connection and growth”.

A logical place to start is with the people you spoke to for customer research. Ask for their perspective on what you created, if they have any suggestions for how to improve it, and, if they found it valuable, to pass it along to someone else it might help.

Next, look at other companies in your ICP, try to find employees in similar roles as the customers you spoke to, and send them an email introducing yourself. People can be very defensive of their inboxes, so it’s unlikely to expect a response every time, but if you make it clear you’re not trying to sell anything and are just offering help, you might find yourself surprised by the number of responses you get.

Lastly, understand where your audience is online, and join those communities. Be willing to put in the effort to actively participate, and freely share your knowledge and expertise in addition to your content. Non-algorithmic platforms, such as Reddit, are excellent distribution channels, as the community decides what is valuable, and therefore what gets promoted.

The goal of distribution is not to popularize your content and gain a bunch of pageviews; it is to slowly begin to build new relationships with people in your ICP who would have never known about you otherwise.

So, when they have the problem that you’ve created content about, they’ll think of you.