For every person creating content for their business, there will come a time when they feel they’ve run out of ideas.
They have shared every product and service data point. They’ve posted about their business mission and their team. They feel like their marketing efforts have reached the end of the line.
This is normal. And it’s usually the point where you see people stop creating new content.
It’s also the moment that separates those who are serious about succeeding with content marketing from those who aren’t.
When it comes to growing your reach through content marketing, it’s easy to think that missing a week, or a month won’t affect your audience.
But here’s the problem: your website is the place where customers come to buy. It’s more important than all the other marketing channels because you own it.
If you let your website go dormant, it will begin to look stale. Worse than this, the Google crawlers will reduce the time spent crawling the site, and begin to lower the ranking.
So what do you do once you’ve run out of new data, actionable insights, or stories to share with your audience?
The solution to this problem is simple: go granular with your marketing.
What Does ‘Granular’ Mean in Marketing?
Another word for granular is ‘detail’.
In business, the term ‘granularity’ refers to the level of detail considered in a decision-making process. Granularity in data is used to characterize the level of detail in a set of findings.
When you look at the sand at the beach, it’s made up of tiny parts. But you only notice the individual grains of sand if you get very close.
Granular marketing is the same. It’s made up of thousands of articles, videos, and audio recordings that share every detail, data point, and phase of the customer journey.
Granular marketing is the key to success in content marketing. Websites like Hubspot have built an entire empire on the back of granular blog posts about every single detail and data point in their niches. This is a genius marketing strategy, but it means going beyond the average.
The sand at the beach is actually billions of tiny individual pieces. The same is true of any marketing target market.
The Value is In The Details
The only way to impact your audience is to keep sharing valuable insights that they can use. When you really get into the details of your business you will notice there are hundreds of insights you can share.
By taking a deep dive into the topics, areas of interest and specialties your company is known for, you will do even better at attracting a bigger audience through your content marketing.
For example, if you are writing a blog post about ‘The Best Social Media Platforms in 2022′, this would be a general approach. It might attract some interest, but it doesn’t really target anyone specifically.
However, a post titled ‘The Best Social Media Groups for Dog Lovers’ then this is more targeted and appeals to dog lovers.
Better yet, you can share specific social media sites or websites that focus on just one breed of dog. Or run Google ads that target specific breeds. The more granular content ideas you target and share, the more people will find your website through search. Better yet, they will be much more engaged and trusting of your marketing because it so specific to their type of dog.
Granular content serves niche interests and is much more likely to be shared on places like Quora, Facebook Groups, Reddit, and linked to in a blog post.
Granularity Helps Target the Right People
Very often, the biggest fear about creating granular content marketing is that it might scare off the more ‘general’ visitors to their site.
It’s a reasonable fear.
But it’s not how marketing works in 2022.
If you map the customer journey that most of your target market takes, you’ll likely notice they are not just generalists.
In fact, they looking for specific insights, metrics, and data to make their decisions. Very few people will buy from a brand without researching the details today.
Revisiting the example from before, it’s true that non-dog-lovers may avoid reading your article, but that’s actually a good thing.
Granular content posts will filter your audience for you.
Those people not in your target market won’t bother reading your post. That means you are only targeting those people who are in your target market. Paid advertising cannot filter it’s target audience as well as content marketing efforts.
Best of all, Google rewards those businesses that provide detailed, valuable information to the world.
In this way, granular marketing does more than provide relevant insights and data to your business prospects. It helps search engines better understand how to rank your content. The more relevant your content is, the more organic traffic your business will receive.
You Gotta Know Your Stuff
Creating granular marketing content is like teaching. It requires a lot of research. It requires sharing specific answers. It requires thinking about your target audience and how you can better help them solve their problems.
If you want to be gain credibility and be the go-to business in your niche, you must be an expert. Niche audiences will quickly pick out holes in your content which can damage your authoritative voice.
On the other hand, if researched correctly, granularity in your content makes your business a clear authoritative source that will attract a loyal community. The better you answer their detailed questions, the more they will trust you and share with others. Investing time in your content marketing or hiring a content marketing specialist is a great way to stand out from the crowd.
(Remember: competitors in your niche will see creating granular content as too much work. This laziness means more opportunity for your company to corner the market, and increase your Google rankings.)
Granular Marketing Helps People Make Decisions
Overall, when people are experiencing a problem in their life, they go to the internet to look for an answer.
People do not search for general answers, they seek out specific answers to the problems.
Those businesses that take the time to really answer the questions in detail will win the most attention.
Granular content marketing shows not only authority but also an authentic passion that your audience will feel. The more you ‘nerd out’ about a topic, the more the readers, watchers, and listeners will want to keep learning from you.
Before you get all caught up in attribution models, customer segments, data analytics, or whatever marketing trend sounds cool, remember that your target market is hungry for details.
Marketing effectiveness comes down to understanding what your customers want to know and sharing it with them.
Look for ways to be more granular in your marketing and watch your audience grow.