How to do content marketing if you have no audience

Helloooo content connoisseurs.

It’s Perrin from Content Bites.

Content marketing is easy if you have a big audience. But what if you’re starting from zero? Is it even worth it? And if it is worth it, how the hell do you even do it? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.

• Appetizers: Links from CMI, Ann Hadley, Backlinko and more

• Main course: How to do content marketing if you don’t have an audience

Real quick: I’m trying a slightly different format for this newsletter:

• It’s a bit shorter

• Instead of a shorter, flimsier case study in each email, the best ones will just get their own email.

• The cool links and resources are up front

There’s a poll below, to let me know what you think.

Let’s dig in.

Appetizers: Content marketing links

• B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends: Outlook for 2024 (link) ← really important one to read if you’re a B2B person

• The Benefits Of Content Marketing: How It’s An Unfair Advantage

  (link)

• Social media listening examples that will help you unearth better insights (link)

• The Local Business Content Marketing Guide (link)

• Content Marketing Checklists To Maximize Reach (link)

Main course: How to do content marketing if you have no audience

I had a zoom call with a really cool reader the other day.

This reader also had a really cool business, and we were talking about content marketing.

They brought up a super, super important — critical even — question: content marketing is great and all, but how do you do it if you’re just starting to build an audience?

She was spot on. It was the perfect question to ask.

Content marketing is always important to some extent. But when you’re an established company with an established audience, it because a lot easier because your owned channels are a lot bigger.

Simply posting your content on your own channels can be a really effective form of distribution.

If you’re just starting out, you probably don’t have that.

So you can’t really afford to just post on your own channels (although it’s still important to grow those channels).

At that stage, content marketing is an entirely different beast.

It’s more difficult, the “ingredients” are different, and for most bootstrapped founders, the stakes are higher because (and believe me, I’ve been there) we’re slugging it out in the trenches trying to make something — anything — work.

So, thank you, mystery reader, for raising this question. It’s an important one.

This issue is for you.

First things first: Is content marketing even worth it if you have no (or a small) audience?

The short answer is: yes. 

Now the long answer. Content marketing is usually necessary for any business because you want to start building an audience as soon as possible…

…but it’s typically not the most optimal way to produce the quick, critical sales you need at the start of a business to prove the concept and generate your first dollars.

If you need to generate sales, the fastest way to do it is usually with paid advertising. Obviously, advertising costs money to get right. And sometimes it costs a lot of money to get right. And sometimes it doesn’t work, and you just lose money lol (I’ve been there, too).

But paid advertising is fastest.

The major advantage of content marketing is that, by and large, it’s (mostly) free.

It’s free, but if we’re starting from scratch it’s slow… usually. At least the way most people do it.

And if we have no audience, then it’s slow and has a small impact. And that’s usually why it feels futile.

The trick of content marketing when you don’t yet have an audience is to (1) speed it up and (2) get your content to more people than you have in your audience.

In other words, if we’re just starting out, just posting content isn’t enough.

Instead, the name of the game is: eyeballs at all costs.

We currently don’t have eyeballs, and it takes a long time to build our own audience.

So we have to go find eyeballs.

And that means we have to leverage other people’s audiences.

This is BY FAR the most important content marketing concept for new businesses. If we have no audience, there’s literally NO other way to do effective content marketing.

How do we do that?

There are lots of ways, but I’m going to give you four of my favorites.

Quick mise en place: you gotta have at least one piece of content, and it needs to be good.

Welcome aboard. This is Captain Obvious with your pre-flight announcement.

To do content marketing at all, you need, well, some content.

If we’re just starting out, we’re going to spend more time promoting than creating, and we also won’t have much promotion leverage.

Our promotion will be tough, and it’ll be a lot more manual.

So we need our content to be good, and we need it to drive sales.

Generally, the best kinds of content for that are:

• Ultimate guides to types of products (e.g., Ultimate guide to VPNs in a Post-AI World)

• “How to” content about solving the problem your product solves (e.g., How to Make Sure Your HVAC Unit Survives the Winter)

• Case studies (e.g., “How XYZ Did ABC with 123”, highlighting your product as part of the solution)

• Any way to tie your product to something celebrities use (I.e. “Keanu Reeve’s Insane Skincare Routine”, highlighting your product as something similar to what they use)

It can be anything, but those tend to work the best.

You also need strong conversion points. Just make sure people have a way to buy, give you their email, etc.

Tactic #1: Content partnerships.

Content partnerships = finding people who already have audiences and collaborating with them to create content that they will THEN share with their audience.

This is not influencer marketing.

We’re not paying people (although if you have the budget, it can be a good way to sweeten the pot).

We’re just reaching out and offering to help them by collaborating on some content their audience will love.

Here are the (very) simplified steps:

1. Find someone with a hyper-relevant audience

2. Reach out and offer to collaborate on some content

3. Create the content

4. You both share

Importantly, you should make it clear that you’ll do most of the work. All you want them to do is share the content.

You should also make it clear that you can create content that will help you both sell more stuff.

I created a spreadsheet to help you research content partners. You can get it here (it’s a view-only Google doc, so File > Make a Copy).

I also took the liberty of writing some sample outreach scripts for content partnerships. You can get that file here (File > Make a Copy); these are just samples of the kinds of stuff I use, so please feel free to take the spirit and make it your own.

Quick disclaimer: you’ll probably have to hit up lots of people. Your success rate will not be remotely close to 100%. This is outreach. You should expect something like: 30% replies, 2%-5% “conversion” rate.

So, in other words, for every 100 people you reach out to, you can probably land 2-5 content partnerships.

It’s definitely a grind, but it’s also worth it.

MATH INCOMING.

It might take you 2 days to find 100 people to reach out to. And suppose the average audience size is 10,000 people.

Then, it takes 1 day to reach out to those same 100 people.

Maybe 3 people accept your pitch for a content partnership, and it takes 4 more days to produce the three pieces of content.

Then, everyone shares it.

In about a week and a half, you will have gotten your content in front of 30,000 potential customers.

That is VERY worth it. And if we’re just starting, it’s worth it for much less. It’d be worth it to do 3 content partnerships with people who have a total audience of 5,000.

And here’s the thing.

If it goes well, now you have three new friends who will probably partner up again a couple times per year or something.

Then you can reach out to 100 more people, and so on…

…until you have a little black book of content partners and access to many tens of thousands of people — all without building an audience of your own.

Tactic #2: Promoting in places where the amount of visibility doesn’t depending on how big your following is.

When you have no audience, platforms like Instagram and TikTok can be brutal.

They feel so brutal because the success or failure of any given piece of content depends (most of the time) on the size of the audience you’ve built.

However…

There are social platforms out there where the success or failure of the stuff we post does not depend on the size of our following.

And if we’re just starting out, we’re much more likely to have success posting on these platforms that we will on the audience-dependent platforms.

The best of these platforms are:

• Reddit

• Niche groups (Facebook groups, Discord groups, LinkedIn groups, etc.)

• Niche forums

These are places where you don’t need much of a following to generate serious traction.

All you need is strong content.

If you’d like an example, this is one of my favorites: the Oxen Forge reddit account (they sell woks).

But you can do this with any content. Here’s a (old, dated) case study from the time I generated 11,000 visits in like a week. But all those same concepts still work; for more targeted marketing, I’d just still to more relevant communities.

Tactic #3: Ask customers to post reviews on their own social media.

One of THE best ways to leverage other people’s audiences is to just ask your customers to either:

• Post a review, or

• Collaborate on some content

Happy customers are usually super stoked to even hear from you.

Most of the time, customers aren’t going to have the large, super-targeted kinds of audiences we think of when we think of an ideal content marketing campaign.

But asking our customers to create or collaborate on a bit of content has a couple of unique advantages:

1. Those folks usually have some friends who are like them, so even if the audiences is small, it can convert at a high rate

2. It’s the best kind of content: something from a real customer who’s genuinely had a good result

3. If you have any volume of sales at all, you can get a lot more yesses than other kinds of content partnerships

Interesting stat: in Content Marketing Institute’s annual research this year, something like 78% of marketers found that the most effective kind of content was case studies or customer stories.

So, especially if we’re just starting out… why not just ask literally every customer to help us post a little content.

And if you REALLY don’t want to ask customers to help create full content, you can usually very comfortably ask for a share, and having happy customers share your content is similarly powerful.

To reduce a bit of friction, I added some scripts for this kind of ask in the same script doc from above (scripts #5 and #6).

Tactic #4: Literally just DM people your content.

Another, last thing you can try is to literally just DM people your content.

Seems crazy, I know, so a few disclaimers right up front here.

This is a hyper-manual kind of content promotion, and not at all scalable. And that means it’ll work best for B2B audiences, but I still recommend it if you’re starting from absolute zero because it’s such an effective way to guarantee a small amount of super engaged eyeballs.

The basic process is:

• Find places where (1) your audience hangs out and (2) has some kind of commenting section

• Look for cool people who are engaged in similar conversations as the one your content is facilitating

• DM them and just offer your content as a resource

Example.

Suppose you sell blue widgets.

And suppose you’ve written The Ultimate Guide to Blue Widgets in 2024.

The process might look like this:

• Find Widget-based LinkedIn groups

• Look for discussions about blue widgets, paying special attention to people with problems/pain points

• Connect with those people and DM them your The Ultimate Guide to Blue Widgets in 2024

I added some scripts for this in the script doc, too (script #7).

And look, y’all: there are lots and lots of ways to do content marketing, but if I were starting from scractch

Summary of how to do content marketing with no audience:

• Create some content, usually super conversion-focused stuff

• Secure 2-5 content partnerships using your content to create similar content and/or asking people to contribute to your current content — and then promote to their audiences

• Promote the content in places that don’t require an existing audience to do well: Reddit, niche groups, niche forums

• Ask customers to contribute to your content and/or post their own reviews — and distribute to their audiences

• Literally just DM people your content

If you do all of that, you can usually get a few thousand eyeballs on a piece of content relatively easily, and if you get real crazy, you can often get tens of thousands.

I’m trying a new format for this newsletter. Let me know what you think!

That’s the issue. If you missed last week’s issue, you can check it out here: How I Scaled a Content Team to 150k Words/mo.

Go forth & conquer.

—Perrin