The goal of marketing has always been about making sure that you could garner the biggest amount of eyeballs for your product and your company. But in a world where pretty much everything is at a saturation point and people’s attention span are so helplessly short, can businesses still fulfill the same marketing goals that’s been in place since before the internet was invented? There’s just so many options on how a person could spend their money or time right now that it feels like I’m digging for needle in a haystack every single day.

The late John Lennon once said that “trying to please everybody is impossible — if you did that, you’d end up in the middle with nobody liking you. You’ve just got to make the decision about what you think is your best, and do it”. Sure, every now and then you read stories on how a single social media post or a video went viral and became a huge talking point for everyone but trying to get a taste of those viral phenomenon is like trying to catch lightning in a bottle and in the world of content marketing, it’s better for a business to simply focus on what they do best instead of trying to please everyone.

Making the case for specialization

In the current climate of pop culture, there’s this phenomenon known as selling out; otherwise known as dumbing down or going mainstream. In our cultural lexicon, these expressions mean roughly the same thing, that of someone or something abandoning their principles or integrity usually in pursuit of profit. For example, the case of the rapper Kendrick Lamar, the first non-classical or jazz musician to have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for music, collaborating with Maroon 5, the vanilla of the music industry, could be construed as selling out.

Business owners, I’m here to let you in on a secret; it’s actually not a sin for your business to only appeal to a specific group of people as that is actually your strength. True, Kendrick Lamar is nowhere near as popular as Adam Levine and his bandmates but to the people that actually likes what Kendrick Lamar is doing, the respect and loyalty runs far deeper with Lamar’s fanbase because he’s not trying to make music that sells, Lamar, as an African-American rapper, is making music that, as per the Pulitzer board, “offers affecting vignettes capturing the complexity of modern African-American life”.

Lamar isn’t just making music out of something he intimately knows about, it is also a subject that he cares about deeply and it shows. By creating contents around a subject that you intimately knows and cares about, your contents could reach a level of depth and complexity that wouldn’t be possible had you were only trying to make something that could be popular. If your business has even a modicum of interest of being successful on the long-term, finding a specific niche for your business and marketing efforts could pay off handsomely.

Quality contents helps with your credibility

When you’re knowledgeable on a subject, it’s remarkably easy to tell the difference between someone who actually knows what they’re talking about and someone who’s just making it up as they go along. The average public probably won’t care but when you took time and effort into creating contents that you’re familiar with and highly passionate about, it won’t go unnoticed with other people that shares your passion on the subject and this has the advantage of helping build your business’ credibility around that community.

Proper specialization helps keep set your content apart

As I’ve mentioned at the beginning of this piece, the democratization of the internet has turned this digital space into a vast ocean of contents with the majority of them being generic contents that are virtually indistinguishable from each other. However, by mining your knowledge and affinity you have on the subject, you could offer a deep and complex insight that only someone in your position could come up with. This help adds originality in your content, which is rapidly becoming something of a commodity when it comes to digital content.

You’re ensuring that you’re attracting the right audience

Contrary to popular belief, liking something and caring about something are two completely different things. Just because you came up with a content that everybody likes, there’s absolutely no guarantee that those very same people would care enough about your business to spend money on your products and/or services. By creating niche contents, you’re making sure that you’re attracting the type of audience that belongs to that specific niche, making it easier for them to actually care about what your business is offering.

In the long run, coming up with ideas on new contents would be much easier

Coming up with something to write about is much easier when you’re writing around a subject you care and know about. This has always been true in school and it’s just as true in the world of content creation and marketing. Instead of trying to chase the latest trends and endlessly pivoting from one type of content to the next, it’s easier for your business to pick a lane and stay inside that lane. The challenge here lies in injecting your contents with enough variety so as not to seem monotonous even when they’re covering the same subject.