The Next Generation of Connecting with Your Audience

By Chris Maddock - Nov 13 , 2010

It’s deeply human to give those who you’d serve, impress, or find favor with the things that that they want.  If you want to sell something to someone, or merely keep them around – discover or anticipate what they want and talk about it.  Find agreement; sympatico; a connection. Which is not to imply that actually doing so is easy.

The concept is a priori. Even deep in the web’s shadowy past, sites tried  to offer visitors the things they wanted.  They tried speaking  the same language as their audience and  attempted to prove that they knew and had what was needed.

When I started writing websites, much of the energy put into trying to connect with an audience meant offering the correct ‘tabs’ or writing  content that attempted to appeal to disparate needs all on the same page.

With the broad adoption of search engine optimization efforts in last few years, a second iteration of connecting with an online audience has become commonplace: writing keyword specific landing pages to address exactly what a person has been searching for.  I’ve written more about this

Well thought out tabs, and even page content written to appeal to differing user needs, are both attempts to provide targeted content. But both are passive. Getting targeted content means  a visitor has to take another action and actively find what they want.  The same is true for landing pages.  They rely on someone seeking out specific content.

All of these examples lack the kismet that happens when,in real human relations, someone seems to ‘get’  another and both parties vibrate on the same  wavelength. They lack real human connection.  Which, for any pay or subscription site, is truly the holy grail: to treat their visitors the way the an intuitive or observant person would.

But that type of real connection has become possible. It allows a website to utilize knowledge of a visitor’s past behavior to deliver the content that’s most relevant to them now.   This type smart-robot content can let you know when someone has been searching for digital SLR cameras web-wide, or has  done so on a prior visit to your website.  Like a real person trying to make a real connection, it can then serve content that makes sense:  content about digital SLR cameras, replete with new examples, information or offers.

I think we’ll look back at this point in time as not only the year(s) we stopped  watching movies the ‘old-fashioned’ way, but the time  at which the web started treating people real. Question is: how long will it be before your website does? In the meantime, check out getsmartcontent.com to learn more about targeted content, and please let me know if you have any questions.