Make content for the customers you want and build a brand

1. Where brand comes in

A big brand makes every ad you run do better, which matters if you want real results from ads. Yet you are probably not going to build that brand through paid ads. It gets built by other means: organic content, the subject of this page.

2. When the leads are wrong, look at who the content is for

Next on the organic list is better targeting: content more specific to the avatar. Some of you get plenty of views and poor leads, or an audience with little money. The cause is probably that you make content for people with little money and are then surprised to find them watching. If you want wealthy buyers, make content meant for them.

From social media to interest media. The big change asked for here is to treat the platforms as interest media, not social media. The idea to write down and circle: who a piece is made for decides who it reaches.

An example. To reach men who are 35 years old, make things for men who are 35 years old; the algorithm then puts it in front of that group. A funny meme with no target, one everybody laughs at, earns you an audience of everybody, a very poor way to get leads. At the extreme, a video of an owner in a street slap fight with a grandmother would, on one bet, go viral. What such a video would do for leads is Not established on this page.

Split one market into many small audiences. The algorithms now serve each piece to a narrow pocket of people and use that pocket up fast, so even one trade needs content cut many ways: by demographics such as age and region, and by problem. In one example, realtors split into those who want to grow from a house a quarter to a house a month; those who struggle to scale a team, to find leads or to sell pricier homes; those who want to move their brand up; and those who struggle to make content, to follow up and keep clients for the long term, or to close. Each pocket needs far more content.

3. You get the audience your content is made for

Put the other way round: make things you hate, and people you hate are who you will draw.

One illustration: people sometimes run a channel about saving money, tell everyone who watches not to spend, and are then surprised that nobody in that audience will buy from them.

So stay alert to what kind of audience you are gathering. Ideally, build one out of people you like, so there is no need to act as someone else. Be yourself and make what you want to make; the people eventually shown it will like you.

4. Memes, and where they fit

On memes in general, the view here is that they have a place, but only when a meme is specific to your industry and is not the main pillar of your content, unless you are an entertainer. One owner's example was a meme about a situation a large share of that audience lives with, so they find it funny and share it. Plenty of other memes make no sense for that owner to do, and those are the ones to leave alone.

5. A small audience can pay

This section breaks beliefs about how big an audience must be before content produces leads. Once you see the platforms that way, likes and views should matter to you far less. In one owner's experience, a piece that seems really good usually brings word from respected peers that it was excellent, and it usually turns out to be a middling or weak performer. The right people see it.

Three businesses, unnamed:

Business	Audience and response, as stated here	What it brings in, as stated here
A specialist who teaches one narrow skill to others in her own profession, and does nothing else	Around 9 to 15 likes a post	Over a million dollars. A figure that was 5,000 and is now 7,500 is also given; what it counts is Not established on this page.
An online personal training coach	5,000 followers; a post with "like 45 likes" and two comments; no ads	Just about 2 million dollars
An equipment business	An ordinary recent post with 134 likes	Sells almost all of its stock this way, with word of mouth on top; tens of millions a year, maybe a hundred million

Why they matter. You probably think your content gets no views and is worthless; the claim here is that you are simply wrong. As long as what you make suits the right avatar, the people you get will be deeply engaged, since they can see you are small and real. You need not go hugely viral or collect thousands of likes.

Judge who is watching, not how many. What counts is how good each viewer is for you, not the size of the crowd. The shift is hard to make for yourself, and worth making.

How to check who is watching.

• List top pieces by views beside top pieces by revenue or leads. For one business, the top six on each list did not overlap once.
• Compare where each piece's viewers live, and who they are, with where your buyers are. One clip, watched mostly in the countries the business sells to, earned more than one with far more views, about half of them from outside those countries.
• One team tags each piece's link and counts leads per piece, ranking its outliers by leads.
• In the view here, do not write titles and thumbnails to win clicks: the most clicked packaging draws the widest crowd, and the platform hunts for views, not for viewers worth having. Ask what your ideal customer would click. SOP 220, section 7, flags split tests on click rate.

The more tactical a piece, the more buyers it draws; the more specific to one kind of buyer, the fewer it applies to. The aim, in the view here, is a piece both wide and deep.

6. The brand in six steps

This is a quick and rough version of building the brand.

Step	What to do
1	Pick the perfect avatar, not your current one: look over every customer you have, find the one who is perfect, pull that one out and think of them by name
2	Work out what they want, what they suffer from and what they need help with (section 6.1)
3	Give them content that moves them toward it: instructions for getting what they want
4	Show that you have what they want and that you resemble them, with any evidence that your claims have come true out in the real world
5	Ask them, with calls to action, if they want your help
6	Repeat all of it as often as you are able, and do not let boredom or negative comments halt you

6.1 Step two: think smaller

The list usually runs to hundreds of items. If they want the obvious, more money for a business buyer or weight loss for someone else, naming that alone is of little value: every business owner wants more money. Ask what the hundred other things are that lead there. How do they start the morning? What can they eat in place of what? How can they get through a first workout without being sore? The list has no end once you reach the small details. Whenever you cannot think what to make, go smaller: work in the margins, zoom in, then zoom in again. That is where the good content is.

6.2 Steps three to six, and where they are carried

• Step three is power, instructions that work when followed: SOP 211 — Build status, power, credibility and likeness through content, section 3.
• Step four draws on that page's other three: having what they want is status (its section 2), being like them is likeness (section 5), and proof is credibility (section 4).
• Step five, the ask on each platform, is SOP 215 — Put calls to action on every platform.
• Step six, the volume, is SOP 214 — Make more and better organic content.

7. Not as good as you want to be

The closing point on organic content: falling short of how good you want to be probably means you are simply not doing enough. The case for more before anything else is SOP 187 — Exhaust more before anything else, and the same thought closes its section 7.

8. Where a service business reinvests

This part is for service businesses. In software, reinvesting means hiring more developers and pushing on. In e-commerce, some of it can go into inventory. In a service business with spare cash at year end and a wish to grow faster, it is two things: brand and talent. Talent, here, means hiring very smart people, smarter than anyone you have now, so they can help you build what comes next. The same pair is on SOP 200 — Treat a supply constraint as demand for talent, section 9; training against hiring ready-made talent is SOP 44.

9. Decide from what you want, not from what is in the fridge

This is offered as the best analogy, one probably good for a lifetime of use. Many of you decide things about your business the way you would make dinner: open the fridge, see what is inside, and ask what you could have from that. Instead, ask what you truly want to eat, then go and get what the meal needs.

Part of why growth is slower than you want is that you cook with four or five ingredients: four or five good people. That is too little for a great dinner. Ask what you really want and you can think far more widely. The reinvestment then follows: the associations you need for the brand, the kinds of people you need to attract, and how you will do it.

10. Brand as achievements far beyond your customer's aims

The closing thought on organic content: in 2025, in this view, brand comes down to content, and to documenting achievements your avatar aspires to.

• The off-road vehicle. A maker shows its vehicle driving through snow and over rocks. Believe it, and you reason that anything able to handle those rocks can probably cope with two inches of highway snow and bring you home safely.
• The mountain jacket. Makers of outdoor jackets give them to people climbing the world's highest mountain. A parent on the school run reasons that a jacket warm enough up there will keep her warm between the car and the front door on a chilly day.

So the achievements must be orders of magnitude beyond what your avatars aspire to, so that they reason back from them to belief: something that holds up at that height will probably hold up for them. The same logic serves anyone selling help to business owners. Seeing a result far larger than their own goal, an owner concludes this person can probably help a business go from $1 million to $2 million, and probably from $10 million to $20 million as well.

The closing routine names their aspirations, then says to put in an unreasonable amount of work and record it. That reinforces that this is exactly what the avatar wants, shows you documented the whole thing, and lets you give instructions they can follow.

11. Brand lifts every other method

Brand raises every other channel at once.

• Outreach. Brand acts as the nurturing: the content you make raises how well outreach works.
• Paid ads, as in section 1.

Even for a big fan of focus (SOP 202, sections 5 to 7), brand lifts so many parts of the business. Customers who come in through it are very warm and pay more. If outreach and ads have been your only lead sources, you have never had warm leads, and they are far better.

12. Two stages: a pulse first, then more

First, show a pulse. The bare minimum that shows you are alive: on the channel that brings you the most leads, one to three posts a week. All you want is for someone to look and decide you are legitimate. That minimum is what is asked of anyone doing outreach or ads.

Then, more. Over time this shifts, because the posts start bringing leads, very hot ones that close fast. You may be amazed that, say, a third of your sales come from those small posts; that is a picture of the moment, not a measured share. Then you get excited and post as much as humanly possible, and that never stops: you keep building media infrastructure. The aim of posting at that pace is to improve as far as you are able, until you can build a machine that goes on scaling.

13. What a brand buys you

You get more leads, and cheaper ones, who buy faster and spend more. They resist price less, and are more likely to buy again and more likely to refer their friends. Brand gives you both pricing power and demand, which together are called the ultimate leverage in business. Brand as an investment that compounds is section 11 of SOP 195 — Put the marketing principles ahead of the tactics.

14. What marketing is for

Why one owner's demand has outrun capacity. It is put down to two things: doing exceptional work, and then telling people what you did. The view here: very simple to say and very hard to do. It usually takes planning over a far longer horizon than most people use, and far more effort put into making the thing good.

Shift the demand curve. Marketing's purpose, in this framing, is to shift the curve of supply and demand. When demand rises, price rises: more people buy, at a higher price. Marketing moves the demand curve in your favor by artificial means, so you enjoy better supply and demand economics because you pull supply toward you. The leverage to aim for is the greatest return on whatever you invest, called the foundation of strategy; and your resources are very limited.

15. Do far more than you do now

After a great many ways to get more leads, the biggest one: do far more than you do now. Some very large creators put out many times the advertising of someone publishing two long videos a month, on that one platform alone. When you do the math, results come out much more linear than you expect. Most people cannot believe they could do a hundred times more than they do now. It is possible, and the very large companies do exactly that. Other people's volume, and what it takes to become known: SOP 187, section 7, and SOP 194 — Count what it costs to become known.

16. The checklist

Step	What to do
1	If content brings the wrong leads, check who it is made for, and make it for the people you want, split into small audiences by demographics and by problem
2	Ideally, build an audience of people you like, so you can simply be yourself
3	In this view, use memes only where they are specific to your industry and not your main pillar
4	Judge content by who sees it, not by its views: top pieces by views against top pieces by revenue or leads, where viewers live against where buyers are, leads per piece, and no packaging written to win clicks
5	Run the six steps: the perfect avatar; what they want, broken small; instructions; show you have it, are like them, and proof; ask; repeat as much as you can
6	When you fall short of how good you want to be, you are probably not doing enough: do more
7	In a service business, reinvest spare cash in brand and in talent smarter than anyone you have
8	Decide from what you want, then get the ingredients, rather than from what you already have
9	Document achievements far above your avatar's aims, and give instructions they can follow
10	As asked here, if you run outreach or ads, post one to three times a week on your main lead channel as the minimum
11	As those posts start to pay, post as much as you can
12	Do far more than you do now

17. Where this sits

• Making sure the right eyes land on a paid ad: SOP 213 — Fix ad targeting and bid for return, not cheap leads.
• What a brand is, scored by reach, influence and direction: SOP 92 — Measure brand as reach, influence and direction.
• Choosing the ideal customer by four tests, and what they like: SOP 94 — Pair the brand with what the ideal customer likes. Making the associations stick: SOP 95 — Climb the three levels of authority.
• Running outreach itself: SOP 217 — Run outreach as an assembly process.

18. What this page does not cover

Outreach methods, and targeting inside paid ads, are not covered on this page.