Marketing
Should you Market your Brand on Medium?
210 million visits count for something, don’t they?
Social Media Marketing is fast becoming a major part of the marketing strategies for brands, however big or small. If you’re an entrepreneur, I’m sure you’ve had to answer some pressing questions when it comes to the online presence of your brand; what platforms to be on, what type of content to post and most importantly, how to market the brand in a way that your sales effectively increase.
As a reader or writer on Medium, there’s a chance that the thought of marketing your brand on Medium has already occurred to you before. Seeing as Medium still largely remains a rather personal platform where the readership is fond of reading exclusive and first-hand narratives or opinions, many brands have opted not to. But it doesn’t mean you should cut out Medium from the game so soon.
On its Wikipedia page, Medium has been described as an online publishing platform developed by Evan Williams (co-founder of Twitter) and launched in 2012. And in a larger sense, yes, it is a platform that has revolutionised online and personal publishing such that it can be used as a blogging platform and can even be the place to launch your own publication.
But whether it should be an active part of your social media efforts is still a question to address. In this piece, we navigate through whether or not you should market your brand on Medium, the questions to ask yourselves when considering writing for your brand on Medium.
To Publish or to not Publish
The best way to solve this mystery is to answer two questions. I use this method every time I brainstorm about expanding and exposing a brand to a newer platform. These two magic questions are:
What is the Demographic of Medium?
First and foremost, you need to match the customer persona of your service/product to Medium’s general reader-writer demographic. In short, does Medium have the kind of audience that will be attracted to your product?
If yes, it would be a no-brainer to start posting on Medium.
With an Alexa Rank of 81, Medium has approximately 210 million visits as of February 2021. According to Alexa, the majority of Medium users are men with an above-average level of education.
The geographical demographic of visitors of Medium are divided as 27.84% from the United States of America, 6.50% from India, 4.54% from the United Kingdom, 3.87% from Canada and the rest from others. Most of its visitors reside in the US, which explains the popularity of American Politics as a topic.
Next, let's look at the 10 most popular topics on Medium in 2021:
1. Startup (301,000 followers)
2. Life (255,000 followers)
3. Politics (239,000 followers)
4. Life Lessons (227,000 followers)
5. Travel (211,000 followers)
6. Entrepreneurship (205,000 followers)
7. Poetry (194,000 followers)
8. Health (187,000 followers)
9. Education (185,000 followers)
10. Love (170,000 followers)
This brings us to the observation that usually readers love to read first-hand, personal experiences of the writer. And when it's about general topics like Politics, articles about personal opinions and unique perspectives are the ones that gain the most traction.
When it comes to the source of traffic that visits Medium, 66.86% of the traffic comes from organic search and about 6% comes from Social Media sites. Out of the traffic coming from social media, 39% traffic comes from Twitter, 17.57% comes from Reddit and Facebook brings in about 15% of the social media traffic. This data can be extremely helpful when it comes to promoting your Medium content on other social media sites.
The bottom line comes to this: Medium provides an ad-free reading experience to its readers so it’s better to not publish sales-ey content. Visual content and pictures should be kept at a minimum unless they are engaging comics or figures and statistics that are valuable to your written piece.
If your customer persona is above the age of 20, resides in the USA, with an average or above-average level of education, and your content talks about entrepreneurship, business, politics, life and lessons, there should be no reason for you to not choose Medium.
Does my brand solve the problems of the demographic?
The next question to consider whether the selling proposition of your product or service matches the needs or demands of the reader demographic of Medium. Or, does my brand solves the problems of the said demographic?
Because if it doesn’t, you’re probably selling in the wrong place. After all, what good would be a salesman who tries to sell a comb to a bald person?
On Medium, you’ll find entrepreneurs, working individuals, influencers and bloggers, writers and niche and industry experts. If your product’s customer personas are any of the above, you should absolutely go for it.
Want to create your own Website without knowing complex coding? Try TemplateToaster!
Or Follow us on Instagram if you’re an entrepreneur, a blogger, or someone wanting to start.
