The Thousand People Who Matter

In most areas of B2B fintech or specialized institutional banking services, there are rarely more than a thousand key decision makers and influencers who can make a difference to your business. This is the case for most specialized B2B segments. Relevant audiences are relatively small.

Potential audience size ties directly to content strategy. B2B financial innovators should focus on getting the highest-quality bespoke content into the hands of people who make buying decisions — no more and no less.

Putting this principle into practice means writing content that explicitly addresses this audience, building a list of people in that audience, and getting your content into their hands. Those elements should be the sole aspects of a content strategy.

Make no mistake about this simplicity. It takes real work.

At the front end, it means content development that radically focuses on this narrow audience’s needs. What are their goals? What are their challenges? What do they need to know, feel, and do to make a buying decision? And since that’s a dynamic process, which part of the buying journey does each piece of content support?

All too often, generic content marketing best practices dilute that strategy. Content development goes off track when it means writing for generic audiences or search algorithms. The distortions of generic tactics divert vital time and energy away from truly targeted strategy.

Think about those thousand executives who might ever engage your services or onboard to your platform. How do they find and consume information? What don’t they do? They are most likely not poking around on Google looking for someone who can help them with high-priority business challenges.

If your audience isn’t looking for answers about how to get stains out of their shirt, don’t talk to them as if they are. Instead, go deep and deliver what they need from the frame of reference that they have.

Similarly, targeting and distribution need to focus all of its efforts on getting relevant content directly into the hands of these thousand people who matter to your business.

In most cases, your efforts should concentrate on sending content directly to their inboxes and earning permission to be there time and again. It can mean putting it in their hands at events (virtual today, but soon — one hopes — in person again). In other words, list building and distribution should be as intentional and focused as content development.

Adopting this mindset of “the thousand people who matter” transforms your content strategy, keeps you above the fray, above the noise. Take the time to focus on them and stop doing anything that doesn’t directly address them. You’ll see improved results and stop adding to the world’s unnecessary content glut.