Fish Need Content Too

Well, not exactly. But a discerning fisherman knows that tactics must be adjusted to conditions, and one lure doesn’t fit all fish.

I just returned from our annual fishing trip in a remote corner of Canada with my three sons. No fast food, no malls, no traffic –not even cars. To get to Pipestone Lake, you go by either a pontoon-plane or, as we do it, portage in by boat. Spending a week on crystalline water surrounded by majestic pines, white birch, towering granite cliffs, and the occasional bald eagle, bear or moose makes a great setting for unwinding – and thinking.

And a lot of our thinking this week was about strategies for catching fish. For we arrived at our lodge slogging through a torrential downpour. Nearly a week of rain left the lake more than a foot-and-a-half above normal and caused widespread flooding across the area. Aside from the high water, the rain and colder temperatures dropped the water temperature by over ten degrees in a couple of days – a change in the environment that does not bode well for fish and their eating habits. Pipestone Lake is part of an expansive chain of lakes with thousands of acres of water to navigate. So while there was nothing we could do about the weather or the high water, we could adapt our fishing tactics to what we thought would best fit the conditions: which species would be our best bet – northern pike, walleye, muskie, bass or lake trout? And where to fish for them – deep or shallow, along the shoreline, in the channels or over weed beds? What lures to use, and so on.

But a week isn’t long enough to fully disengage from Silicon Valley, so I found my thoughts drifting to content discovery and curation. And it occurred to me that the challenges we were facing in Canada – matching fishing strategies to the prevailing conditions – was a problem that businesses – and marketers – face everyday. Of course, rarely would a content marketing plan revolve around floods or water temperatures. But certainly the variables that influence the success or failure of a content marketing plan are more complex than weed beds or fishing lures, and the content appetites and consumption habits of a brand’s target audience are arguably less predictable – and more dynamic – than the diet of a northern pike.

The savvy marketing professional understands that they have neither have the bandwidth nor the budget to create enough original content to saturate all of the haunts of their intended audience. And they realize that even if they could, buyers are increasingly more discriminate in recognizing self-serving product propaganda from unbiased content that educates and elucidates. These audiences are all over the web: social networks including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and many more, and multiple web site or micro-sites, and mobile applications, or email newsletters and digests – and, well, you get it – the list is exhausting. Exhausting not only in number, but in diversity. So it’s not simply a case of writing a blog and pumping it out on all of your content channels; the bait that works trolling for lake trout in 60 feet of water would be a horrible choice when trying to catch a bass under a brush pile on the shoreline. Just as using the same content on Facebook and LinkedIn – one an appropriate venue for culture or lifestyle content about your company, the other an excellent choice for content about business trends and developments – would not be a great choice. And then, to make it even more challenging, these audiences habits and preferences are changing, just like the weather. But a successful brand tracks and adjusts to these changes.

Trapit provides this savvy marketer access to the range of high quality content, relevant, third-party content to cover the broad demands of all the channels where the target audience frequents. Flexible, and easy-to-tailor discovery to find the appropriate content for specific venues. Check it out – just click on the “Show me Trapit!” button below.

And by the way, in case you’re interested, we found success fishing for muskies lurking under fallen trees along the shoreline. And going deep for lake trout along underwater ridgelines. I wish your own content marketing strategies equivalent results!

–Gary

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Image credit: My son Tom showing the results of a successful fishing “content” plan

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