This week we're diving deep into the 'A' of BATON - Audience.

How to actually get your great new business out there into the world so people can see it and (in turn) become customers.

We are still following my BATON framework (Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network)

• Business: what value are we going to provide and to who?

• Audience: how will we let them know about the value we have?

• Tribe: how do we get permission to offer our value to prospects?

• Offer: how do we package up our value and sell it to customers?

• Network: how do we scale what works into a business?

In the last Playbook we covered Business. We’re now building on that all this week.

Let’s get started

Content Pillars

The Value Proposition

Let's start by looping back to our fundamental truth: businesses exist to provide value.

Think about it this way: Your customers are at point A, and they want to get to point B.

Your business? It's the bridge that helps them make that journey. We solve problems to provide value to our customers.

But here's the kicker: To succeed in business, we need people to KNOW about the value we can provide for them. You can have the best damn product in the world but if no-one knows about it our business will fail.

This is what kills so many entrepreneurial dreams. Great product, zero marketing.

That's where the Audience element of BATON comes in.

Expert Marketing Approach

Now, you might be thinking, "Kyle, do I need to start doing TikTok dances or cool trick shots to build an audience?"

Yes! Buckle up cowboy.

Ha. No! Imagine if that’s where I went with this.

Instead, we're going to start as we mean to go on: by solving problems and providing value. For free. Yes, you heard that right.

Think about all those social media posts, blog articles, and videos that businesses make. It's all FREE content. And it helps people solve problems. This, my friends, is content marketing. They aren’t pushing all that content out of the goodness of their hearts.

It's how we build out an audience, prove our worth, build trust, and let the world know what we have to offer. Only then do we move them towards the sale.

(Quick note: Yes, there are alternatives to content marketing. In particular advertising. I’ll cover advertising in the Network (N) stage of BATON. Advertising is an accelerant. For now, we're focusing on organic growth. And that means content.)

So, how do we get started? We're going to answer questions. We're going to show our expertise, prove our knowledge, and become known in our sphere as the go-to expert.

This idea comes from the excellent book "They Ask, You Answer” by Marcus Sheriden. It’s also just what I’ve done in content marketing for years (myself and for clients) and I know it works.

What questions do we answer?

Enough chat. Let's get practical.

Head over to https://answerthepublic.com and plug in a keyword connected to your business. For me, it might be "AI", "AI education", or "ChatGPT". The free version is enough to get started with.

You'll get an image that looks something like this

Beautiful! It show us lots of questions that people ask about “chatgpt”.

It’s also quite impractical. We want the List, not the pretty image. This gives us a list of questions that people actually ask.

With a free account you can export data. Or copy/paste it off the page and use AI to strip out the questions (removing formatting) like so:

Now, let's combine our list of question topics with this prompt

You are an expert content strategist specialising in creating comprehensive content plans for businesses. Your task is to analyse a list of questions and generate 10 potential content pillars based on these questions.

I have a list of questions from Answer The Public related to my business area. Please analyze these questions and generate 10 potential content pillars based on them. For each content pillar, provide:

1. A name for the pillar
2. A brief description (1-2 sentences) explaining what this pillar covers and why it's important
3. 3-5 example topics or questions that could be addressed under this pillar, based on the provided questions

Here's the list of questions:

[INSERT QUESTIONS HERE]

Please format your response as follows:

Content Pillar 1: [Name]
Description: [Brief description]
Example Topics:
- [Topic 1]
- [Topic 2]
- [Topic 3]

Content Pillar 2: [Name]
...

Repeat this format for all 10 content pillars. After providing the 10 pillars, please give a brief summary (2-3 sentences) of how these pillars cover the main themes from the questions and how they can be used to create a comprehensive content strategy.

This prompt will convert the list of commonly asked questions into broad content pillars. Here are content pillars 3 and 4 from my example for instance:

These content pillars are basically the buckets of content we’ll be testing out.

We will not end up doing them all - we’ll instead be testing them and seeing which resonate best with our audiences (and customers). More of this as we progress with the strategy!

Speaking of…

What's Coming Up

Here's what we'll be covering this week

Part 1: Answering Questions → Content Pillars

We kicked things off by getting inside your customers' heads. What problems keep them up at night? What questions are they frantically Googling at 2 AM? We’ve turned those queries into solid gold content pillars which we’ll be using as the core of our strategy.

Part 2: Channel Choice

Next up, we're playing matchmaker. We'll figure out where your dream customers are hanging out online and how to slide into their feeds (in a totally non-creepy way…promise). Spoiler alert: We're talking short-form video and snappy tweets. It's like speed dating, but for your content.

Part 3: Levels of Content (5-3-1 Method)

Ever heard of content inception? In this part, we're going deep. I'll show you how to take one killer content idea and turn it into multiple pieces that speak to your audience at different levels. We’ll have a casual chat, a deep discussion, and a TED talk all from one concept.

Part 4: Content Strategy (30 Days of Doing the Damn Work)

This is only going to drive your business if you do the work. We’re going to make it as frictionless as possible with a 30-day content plan. By the end, you'll have a month's worth of content locked and loaded. We don’t want to be thinking “what am I doing today” ever.

Part 5: Adaptation, Winners/Losers, Optimization

Last but not least, we're putting on our data scientist hats. Well, the AI will be wearing the hat don’t worry. I'll show you how to analyse what's working, what's flopping, and how to pivot. We'll turn those insights into action, doubling down on the winners and quietly ushering the losers off stage (to shoot them in the back of the head).

By the end of this week, you'll have a solid plan to start building your audience by providing real value. No trick shots required (but still encouraged, for my entertainment).

Premium subs, see you in the next Part. If you're not a premium sub yet, what are you waiting for? Don't miss out on the full audience-building blueprint!

Keep prompting,

Kyle