Content is like a sword that helps to win the war of marketing. And, Content marketing is a broader approach to marketing which is completely solely focussed on creating meaningful content; both online and offline for a variety of channels such as websites, blogs, videos, podcasts, etc.
The agenda to strategize content marketing is to appeal to a particular target audience and the power of a successful marketing strategy is to determine how deep you know your audience.
Knowing about your audience and how to create valuable content for them is what should be your marketing strategy needs to be.
In our Free Beginner’s Guide for Content Marketing, we have shared in chapters what is content marketing all about, how it can help in your business success, why it is important for businesses to follow content marketing strategies and more?
In this chapter 4 of our beginners’ guide to content marketing, we are sharing what is the role of the audience in the content marketing? How you can study your audience? How to identify your audience for content marketing strategy?
Whether you are a marketer or entrepreneur, you should know these basics if you want your business at top notch.
Here we go!
As a content creator, you may think or likely convinced that you know about your target audience inside and out. However, how often as a marketer you thought and do your data based audience research?
If the answer is “rarely” or “no”, that you need to deeply figure out how deeply you can work it out to club this as the “must to-do-task” into your to-do list to determine the cross-channel audience. This will not only nurture your knowledge while creating content, but it will also help you to make content marketing efforts successful.
Things To Keep In Mind While Identifying Your Audience
Social Media, Audiences and Content Marketing – All are connected
When you create content with the help of content marketing tools, you share your content through social media to reach out maximum active audiences. These three (highlighted ones) are immensely connected with each other and quite dependent on each other as well.
Once you publish your content on blogs or create audios/videos, you need the distribution of the same content through multiple platforms to get deserved recognition.
That’s where social media platforms play its role. Though building an audience online is possible only with a deep understanding of the online communities on each platform separately. As each social media platform as a different role to play in building the audience.
And, these platforms work as a network as the source of a huge amount of granular audience differentiated on the basis of demographics, gender, interests, or education level, etc. Though this differentiation may sound weird in the beginning they can help to steer your content marketing strategy in the right direction.
How does audience analysis can help you plan a successful content marketing strategy?
Audience analysis can play the role of a compass in an ever-changing but challenging content marketing world. As different content and social media trends, such as cinematography or stories, visual content come and go, however, the knowledge of your audience can help you to stay on track and feel connected with your followers.
While studying social media analysis, it allows you to understand which piece of content is well appreciated by them. Also, it helps to experiment which format seem interested to your audience. You can use these insights to plan a long-term content strategy and organize your content-production teams more efficiently.
For example, you are into e-commerce, then your audience would cherish visual content in the form of pictures and videos rather than simple text blogs. What can you do with this piece of information? Well, you will be able to build an effective content marketing funnel.
Knowing your audience allows you to create any form of content for each stage of your content marketing funnel strategy. We always suggest creating compelling visual content as it helps you to achieve the best results and your business objective which ultimately leads to end goal – Conversion as well as the Happy Customer.
How to identify your audience for content marketing strategy?
Conduct Market Research
When you really want to know your audience, all you need is to conduct a complete market research. Ideally, the market research helps to get as many details as possible about the group you’re targeting. This information you can also use later to build personas.
There are many ways to do your research. Like you can make your action plan as per the visual content marketing statistics available on the internet which gives you a binary idea about your market and the way the audience prefer to watch & interact with.
Plenty of marketing tools can help you gather an abundance of data about your target audience. These digital marketing tools range in price but can provide assist you in building a foundation of information, ranging from basic demographic data to specific habits and interests.
Also, you can do brainstorming with your teammates, reach out to other departments like a sales team. They have the practical insight that also helps you to understand the buying behavior of your audience.
Or, sit with digital marketing SEO department, they are very keen on marketing insights that will help to make strategies according to audience behavior. (SEO department will help to provide insight into the words customers use and what concerns are commonly brought up.)
Research Social Networks
Social networks are the best way to read your customer’s minds and behavior. This action plan is termed as Social Listening which consists of monitoring the various social networks to discover that is being said about the brand, your competitors stand in the market and comparison along with topics relevant to your business.
You can even identify trends in your audience’s interests and problems. With the same study, you can identify their preferable platforms to communicate where you can listen to their social conversations as well as determine what type of content will be the most valuable and relevant to them.
Create Your Own Survey
Surveys can be very helpful when you want to gather more information about your audience as per the general demographics. Demographics, such as age, gender, income level, education, employment, etc. helps you to understand your audience at the next level and prepare your strategies accordingly.
Through surveys, you can survey a large population of interest, such as your existing customer base or potential market. The idea of surveying should process through online only.
The audience is more active on online platforms. With online surveys, the data is you obtain is quantified and gives you statistical results about your population. It reflects trends and commonalities (instead of individually) among your audience.
Build & Identify Audience Personas You’re Targeting
Once you collect various types of data from your audience, the next step for you to start building your audiences’ persona. Marketers, as well as content creators who use the study of these personas, achieve 73 percent higher conversions in their marketing strategy.
A persona is more than a buyer’s profile. A buyer persona is the representation of your prospect (ideal customer) based on market research and actual data about your existing customer base.
Building a persona help to differentiate between the real and abstract audience. That will help you create right targeting content for them and engage in genuine conversations with your current and potential customers.
Also, It isn’t enough to just list down the personas and differentiate them into categories. Describe them in detail and describe each one.
You can club basic demographic data along to categorize personas, but also other relevant information, such as the person:
- Interests
- Pain points
- Priorities
- Goals
- Concerns
- Personality traits
The Takeaway
Knowing your target audience plays a huge role in setting up and creating your content marketing efforts for a successful marketing campaign. Analyzing audience data, both across social media channels and with the help of other forms of collecting audience, should be the first step in creating an impactful content strategy that will help you achieve your business objectives.
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