Talking About Your Work...Like a Human
Since launching this blog, I've learned something. Well, a lot of things. But this one surprised me: I tend to talk about marketing like a marketer. A marketer talking to marketers.
For all my intentions to banish buzzwords and talk like a human, my content is attracting more marketers who love to talk marketing than humans who could use some marketing advice. Take a look at my Twitter & Instagram and you'll see what I mean.
Have you had this experience? Your work is relevant to people who don't do your work. But when you talk about your work, you talk like a jargon-bot and not like a human. So a lot of humans can't connect with it, even if it might benefit their work.
Now, I love talking marketing with marketers. And it's pretty affirming to see that smart marketers find my ideas worthwhile. So creating content that connects with other marketers isn't necessarily a bad thing. But reading Melyssa Griffin's super awesome advice about finding your blogging niche has inspired me to find mine. (If you're in the same boat, I suggest you start here.) And I'm not sure that marketing speak for marketers is going to be the niche I grow into.
How can I talk about my work...like a human?
Well, first up would be to define exactly who this blog is for. My intention was to initially allow this to be a place to work out my ideas about marketing, leadership, and creativity. A well-defined audience could emerge organically over time, or not. Either way, I'd learn and grow as a marketer and writer. But. Eek. Seems I might be saying to my readers so far: do as I say, not as I do.
The audiences who've connected with the content so far might seem disparate -- artists interested in being entrepreneurs, nonprofits interested in marketing their causes better, marketers interested in wonky marketing stuff like keyword research. The challenge now is to find the links between these audiences or narrow them down, and consistently write about these topics the way humans speak about them together.
What do you think, people reading this? What are the pluses and minuses of allowing a blog's niche to emerge over time? Or even allowing a blog to remain a hodge-podge of ideas?