When you're creating content, no matter the topic, the main factor to consider is your target audience. Whether you sell lawnmowers or provide a cleaning service, knowing your audience will help you to maximise engagement and sales. This blog post will cover why knowing your audience matters and give you for 4 simple steps to help you go about defining your target audience.
Why does your target audience matter?
Setting out to create a content strategy without understanding your audience, is like setting out on a road trip without knowing your destination. You're out there making an effort but your not working toward a specific goal.
With content marketing, your main goal will be to create interesting and engaging content for specific people who will take action to buy, use or promote your products and services. Starting your campaigns with a good understanding of your audience is one of the best ways to ensure success.
The first thing to do is figure out who your audience is. One way of doing this is using some of your existing data to create a generic person to base your strategy around.
For this example, let's say our customer is a 37 year old married mother of two in Surrey, that runs her own business and has a total family income of less than £40,000 per year. Whilst this profile only has a few details about the life of our customer, it gives a starting point to work from. From here you can start to add context to this by thinking about the profession of the person and their likes and dislikes.
What is their most pressing problem?
Whilst this is likely going to be your main USP, understanding the kinds of things that are keeping your target audience up at night, will give you a better idea of how to start a conversation about how your product or service can help to reduce or remove their issues.
As you develop your strategies, do your best to understand what it is that is driving your audience to you and the terms they themselves would use.
How does my product or service solve their problem?
Its important to let your audience know what your company does, but it's even more important to let them know how your product/service will help them. If you've done your research, you'll already know what their problems are and you will be able to address these issues and how you can help.
If possible, talk to previous customers to find out the specific benefits of your product/service that were most important to them.
Where does my target audience get their information?
Choosing the channels that you will use to market your business is critical to marketing success. Understanding the ways and means your audience has for finding out information, will give you the relevant knowledge to decide how and where to focus your marketing efforts.
For example, if you know that your audience reads blogs, uses Facebook and Twitter or subscribes to email newsletters, these are areas you need to focus the most time and energy. Whereas if it's likely that your audience will engage with more professional content on LinkedIn or on business directories and forums, these areas will be better suited to your audience and will ultimately mean more engagement and sales.
Getting to know your audience in depth can take some real time and effort, but understanding your target audience will make it easier for you to create useful and helpful content that builds trust and increases engagement with your brand.