How to Recognize Your Audience and Adjust Your Content Marketing Strategy For Them
Before delivering your message, you need to know who you’re delivering it to. This is a fundamental part of marketing for any business. However, these days recognizing your audience is a multi-step process that involves more than just knowing ages and locations. In an environment where content marketing rules the digital world, you have to dig a little deeper. Because only when you really know your audience can you create the right content for them.
Why is it important to know your audience?
The more you know about your audience, the better your digital marketing efforts will be. It’s that simple. Without a clear understanding of who your audience is, how old they are, where they come from, what their intentions are, what theirs desires are, what problems they have, and what their values and opinions are – your content marketing strategy will suffer.
Knowing your audience will help you optimise your content, create better user experiences, come up with the right keyword list for your SEO strategy, set up your web pages for conversion, help craft the perfect messages for your marketing and advertising campaigns, find key influencers to reach out to, grow your brand’s authority, and ultimately, get your readers to take action.
Different industries have different audiences, each with their own set of preferences. This means some audiences will like consuming content from social media, while others might prefer getting their information from your website. The point is, there’s no all-encompassing strategy that works – and it’s up to you to find out what makes your audience tick.
Ways to recognise your audience
To break it down, here are some points to consider when determining who your audience is:
1. Identify your unique selling points
What makes your product or services special? Why would someone choose you over a competitor? What do you offer your customers? Identifying your unique selling points is the first step in recognizing your audience. It will help you understand what types of people you need to engage with.
2. Look at your existing audience
Examine your current customers and analyze who they are, what they like, and how they make decisions. To find this data, you can:
- Collect emails from purchases and send follow-up surveys
- Invest in solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to collect customer insights and track online behavior
- Collect demographic information at the point of purchase
3. Use Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a powerful tool. You should be using to understand how you get traffic, what your customers are doing online, and how their converting. Among other features, here’s what it can tell you about your audience:
- Age and gender
- Geographic indicators – including where your best visitors are
- How they use technology (from devices to Internet browsers)
- Which online campaigns are most popular
- What people are searching for on your site
- What people click on the most
In short? Google Analytics helps you make better marketing decisions based on data.
4. Scope out your competitors
Check out companies that sell products or services similar to yours. Who are they targeting? Who are their customers? Their strategies can provide extra insights into the audience you’re trying to reach. If you’re lucky, you’ll find a niche market that your competitors are overlooking.
5. Research social networks
If you want to know what your customers are thinking, do some social media research. Monitor various social networks to track what is being said about your brand, your competitors, and topics relevant to your business. This will help you identify trends in your audience’s problems, behavior and interests.
Monitoring social networks will also help you figure out what platforms your audience are most active on – from Twitter and Facebook, to LinkedIn and Instagram – and who the influencers are on each. By listening to social conversations, you’ll get a better idea of what type of content will be most valuable to your audience, as well as a deeper sense of their values, desires and problems.
6. Create solid customer profiles
This is where you transform your research into something tangible. Good customer profiles contain both demographic and psychographic information. This means everything from your customer’s income, gender, age, ethnic background and job status, to their hobbies, behaviors, lifestyle choices, values, interests and spending habits. You might find that you have multiple target audiences, which means you can create customer profiles for each.
Adjusting your content marketing strategy
Once you’ve identified who your audience is and how they behave, you’ll not only find it easier to create content, but also to create the right content. When it comes to content, knowing your audience also goes hand in hand with what your business goals are.
If you’re aim is to focus on brand awareness, you might adjust your strategy to create content such as blog posts, infographics or client case studies. Just make sure your content appeals to all sectors of your target audience – not just those who are currently using your products or services. When it comes to articles, try making them easy to read for different groups, use photos, data, stats, and funny gifs. There’s no harm in letting your brand’s personality show.
For lead generation, you might want to focus on creating eBooks, optimizing your landing pages for your audience, creating how-to guides or video tutorials that focus on specific problems or questions, or getting influencers to promote your products or services.
Whatever content you decide to create and how to deliver it, you should always refer back to your audience research. And remember never to remain static – your audience will evolve as quickly as technology and social trends do. So when thinking about your content marketing strategy, make sure you always keep one eye on the future.
Connect with your audience today
Knowing your audience is integral to creating a successful content marketing strategy. However, recognizing who your audience is takes time, tools, and plenty of research. It’s a multi-step process, but the more you know about them, the more rewarding your digital marketing efforts will be.
