Your copywriters pour all their creativity and time into creating unique copies for your website, yet the conversion metrics do not convey good results. Your bloggers write about critical topics on your website’s blog, but that is hardly garnering any engagement from the audience.
Are you wondering what went wrong?
If you are uploading content without having identified a target audience, then your efforts are more of a shot in the dark. Creating captivating content is just a small part of content marketing. The content is of little value if it’s not reaching the right kind of people- the people who are likely to respond to your call of action because your product or service addresses their pain points.
Identify Target Audience Before You Create Content
Identifying the target audience is actually the foundation of a content strategy, so if you skip this step you are building your entire strategy on shaky premises. Catering to masses or many groups is not a great idea either, as the marketing budget is limited and one has to ensure the maximum returns. So before you hire copywriters or content creators, you should sit down and assess who your target audience is.
Let’s understand the basic steps using which you can identify the target audience for your content marketing strategy.
Assess Your Existing Customer Base
Assess Your Existing Customer Base
Finding information on existing customers is a lot easier than making estimations about your potential ones. And these days most companies have a data management system in place. You can easily pull out information about your customers- which gender and age group predominates your customer base, which geographies your product sells more, how often do your customers make a purchase, how much money they spend on each purchase, etc.
Try to separate your customers into segments based on their common characteristics and observable trends. You will find that one or two segments make up the most of your customers.
Run Surveys
You can survey your existing customers, or people who visit your blog or websites, to understand why they come to you. Surveys are a great way to know more about them, and why they prefer your product or content. Its also easy to segment customers based on survey results.
Identify The Benefits of Your Product
Take a long, hard look at the product or the service which you want to sell. Don’t think about its features. Rather, think about all the benefits it offers to its users. Your product or service is a solution. And if it’s a solution, there ought to be a problem that it solves. So ask yourself, who are the people with this problem?
For instance, if your product is app that gives restaurant listings based on food preferences. Now who are the people who get picky about restaurants due to their food preferences? A teenager who cares little about what kind of food is on the plate is will not benefit from your app. A vegan who wants to dine at restaurants that serve vegan food would appreciate it a lot. Individuals with food allergies make up another possible group.
Study Your Current Audience
If there is an existing website or social media handle, a look into its audience make-up will help identify the right group of people to focus on.
Use Google Analytics
With Google Analytics, you can identify the characteristics of the audience on your website. You can find not just the origin of your website traffic, but also the markers of the individuals who ended up signing for a subscription or making a purchase. If your website is still in the pipeline, you can analyze the website of your close competitors.
Google Analytics is a mine of information. There is a demographic section in Google Analytics which is very useful for content marketers. It tells you about the audience’s age, location, and also whether visited your website in their phones or their desktops. Affinity is another interesting section; it tells you about the interests of the specific audience. You can also enable ‘Convertors’ segment to know more about the audience who actually made purchases on your website.
Check Social Media Analytics
Similarly, when you create a business page on Instagram or Facebook, you can check insights about your existing audience. These details are quite useful as social media promotions like Facebook Ads can be made more specific by mention location, age, interests, etc. for the advertisement audience.
Utilize Hubspot to Understand Audience Behavior
Tools like Hubspot reveal more interesting things about your visitors. You can find how far they scroll down your pages, the links that are getting more clicks, whether they subscribe to your newsletters, etc.
Select one or two segments as target audience
The pool of existing or potential customers might be quite heterogeneous. But if you observe closely, one or two segments would offer more value to you in terms of loyalty and returns. It’s better to gear your content to suit these lucrative segments, rather than pleasing everyone.
It’s important to narrow down and choose a target audience as it keeps your content focused in one direction. You will spend your money and efforts in appealing to a more profitable set of people, and it will also lend your blog or videos a personality of their own.
Build Persona
Once you have identified your target audience, you can create a customer persona who reflects the main characteristics of the target group. Create two-three personas to divide your target audience into sub-groups.
Building a persona is facilitates efficient communication with your marketing and content team. Your copywriters and bloggers could keep these personas in mind and work on their content accordingly.
Your content strategy becomes more focused when you know your target audience well. But remember to monitor your progress, as the composition of your buyers and their preferences can change over time. Keep your hand constantly on the pulse of your target audience so that your content marketing efforts keep pace with their changing needs and preferences.