Before your organization spends $185,000+ on content marketing this year (the average B2B budget), it’s critical to draw a line separating your marketing database from your audience. They’re not the same thing. Content marketing success lives and dies on understanding the difference.

Simply put:

• Your marketing database is what you tap into for demand gen and drip campaigns. It’s the pursuit of turning a MQL into a SQL (cheat sheet for the acronyms) by showing off products, services, events and partnerships. It’s important, but it’s not your audience.
• As Robert Rose points out, your audience is made up of those who have opted in to consume your content. If you stopped talking to them tomorrow by email, social media or white papers they would miss it.

Your audience opted in to email or social media because you intrigued them at one point, but they expect to get value from you again and again in the future.

How to approach audience-building: Think like a media brand – they build audiences using content and earn trust over time.

Similarly, content marketing designed for your audience should build trust by offering valuable information in exchange for the audience’s time spent consuming it. Every time your brand delivers value to your audience you deepen that trust. This trust does many things, but ultimately, it will open the door to sales.

To do this well you need to understand who they are as people, not just buyers of your product or service. Read about building an audience via Robert Rose in this 14-minute read.

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As virtual events become part of our pandemic world, event hosts, sponsors and attendees are eager for ways to bring the surprise and delight of an in-person event to a webinar experience.

GoToWebinar featured a few of our ideas for how to make a virtual event more successful and memorable.

Read our 5 ideas here.

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How brands can start taking action to fight racial inequality

Rooting out systemic racism won’t be solved overnight. For Nathan Young, group strategy director at the Minneapolis agency Periscope, there are three important steps a brand should take right now to start changing things:

1. Talk to your teams. Avoiding conversation will lead to an exodus of underrepresented talent.
2. Increase transparency around diversity data to create accountability.
3. Hold agencies accountable and ask what steps they’re taking to address racial inequity.

A brand — and an agency’s — makeup should reflect the diversity of the audiences it markets to.

Young cites polling data that shows 60 percent of Americans would boycott or switch to a brand depending on its response to issues of race. The number jumps to 70 percent for the 18- to 34-year-old demographic.

Read Young’s piece here.

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This content originally appeared in our weekly newsletter called TARGET:AUDIENCE where we explore ways to find, understand, grow, engage and inspire digital audiences — so you don’t have to. Want this in your inbox? Signup below