Content marketing can expand your audience and offer a remarkable ROI. However, you’ve got to know who you’re writing for to maximise those benefits.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), 86% of B2C marketers say content marketing is an important strategy. The same organisation says that 91% of B2B marketers use it.
Why?
The CMI says that content marketing has resulted in an increase in leads for 72% of the people it surveyed.
Simply put, it works.
But to make your content marketing strategy as effective as possible, you need to understand your audience.
This article looks at why that is the case and what you can do to learn more about your audience.
Why Do You Need to Understand Your Audience?
Creating a piece of content requires an investment of time and, often, money.
If you’re creating a written piece, you may spend hours on the writing alone. Before that, you had to come up with the idea and do all of the research. For a video, you have to invest time into filming and money into the equipment that makes filming possible.
That’s without mentioning the money you may spend on ad campaigns to promote the piece.
Now, imagine that this piece of content goes to an audience that doesn’t want it.
You’ve just thrown all of that time and money down the drain.
The content won’t perform well, which means it doesn’t get the leads that you expected. You also can’t count on organic sharing to bolster those numbers.
If the person who received the content didn’t engage with it, they’re certainly not going to share it.
You need to understand your audience so that you maximise the return on what you invest in content creation.
That’s something that many marketers don’t realise. They may pump out dozens of pieces per week. But if those pieces don’t go to the right people at the right time, they don’t generate returns.
A great piece of content addresses the specific needs or an audience segment. It provides that audience with something valuable that encourages them to take the desired action. In some cases, the piece may simply move them through your sales funnel. In others, the piece will encourage the sale or get the reader to send across their details.
You’ve got to establish the audience before you create the piece. These are the five tips that will help you to do it.
Tip #1 – Use Existing Content for Research
It’s likely that you already produce content with the intention of generating leads.
That’s a great place to start for your research. Examining the pieces that worked before tells you about the subjects that your audience engages with. You can build from that to work out what problems your audience has.
That information helps you to form your customer avatar. Once you know exactly what problems your audience needs to solve, you can create content that targets those issues.
You can use your CRM to help with this task. For example, you could create a tag for each content piece that you create. When a new lead comes in, tag it based on the piece that brought it in.
Over time, you’ll see which tags get used the most. Those are the pieces that connect with your audience, which means they can show you what people want from you.
Automation Agency can help you to set up a tagging system in your CRM. Just send a task to our Automation team to get started!
Tip #2 – Use Facebook Insights
Every business page owner on Facebook gets access to the platforms analytics tools. There’s no cost involved with accessing them and they provide a lot of information.
For example, you can see stats related to each piece of content that you post. Facebook Insights tells you how often it got shared and how many comments it received. However, it also shows you some information about the people who engaged with the piece. You’ll get information about age ranges, location, gender, and other demographical data.
This is all information that you can use to build your customer avatar. The people who engage with your content are the people who connect with your message.
Once you know the makeup of those people, you can start to craft advertising campaigns that target them.
This is where Facebook’s advertising tools come into play. You can use the Lookalikes tool to target new prospects based on the information you collect from Facebook Insights. Furthermore, you can create custom audiences based on the data.
You may then be able to integrate those custom audiences into your CRM so that you can use them in other marketing campaigns. That’s a task that Automation Agency can help you with too. Just message the Concierge Service once you’ve built your custom audience.
Tip #3 – Check Out the Competition
Is there a business in your niche that’s performing better than you on the content front?
There’s nothing wrong with taking a look at the content they’re sharing. Examine their social media profiles to see which posts encourage the highest levels of engagement. Follow some of their ads to see what lead magnets they’re using.
All of this is information that tells you what customers in your niche look for.
The important thing here is that you don’t copy the competitor’s strategy.
Instead, use their content to provide you with some insight into the problems that their customers have. Then, use your content to show how your service solves that problem in a unique way.
Tip #4 – Encourage Customer Feedback
How do you know if your content’s connecting with your audience?
Just ask them.
For example, let’s say that you create a lead magnet to get more email addresses to add to your list. Typically, you’ll follow this up with an email campaign where you send content that’s designed to move them through your funnel.
Many marketers just look at the stats to see if those pieces work. They examine whose opening, replying, and converting. This is all valuable insight.
But it’s not the only insight you can get from your email campaigns.
Consider adding a feedback email into your sequence. This email would trigger after the lead receives several pieces of content and would ask them what they think of what you’ve sent.
Are there any problems that you haven’t covered?
Does the content provide them with useful information?
These are questions that help you to get to the heart of what your audience wants from you. And again, you can use that information to inform your future content marketing strategy.
If you need help to create an email automation, just send a task to our Concierge Service. We can also help you use tags within your CRM to separate the responses to your feedback emails. This allows you to get to important information without having to scour through hundreds of responses.
Tip #5 – Build a Survey
Building from the email feedback idea, you can also use quizzes to find out what your audience wants.
We go into the details of the do’s and don’ts of creating a quiz to use as a lead magnet here. The idea here is to build a quiz that points the taker in the direction of a landing page. They then send you their details to receive a piece of content and you plug them into an automation.
We can help you to create the quiz and landing page. Send a task to our Concierge Service to get started on that.
But it’s also important to think about the content of the quiz.
Again, the goal is to figure out what your audience wants. If you’re sending it to potential new prospects, use your questions to focus on the issues they have. You can also send surveys to existing clients. These are essentially quizzes that tell you what your existing customers think about your service.
Both provide insight into your audience’s needs.
Learn About Your Audience
Each of these tips has the same purpose.
They allow you to find out what your audience wants and expects from your company. Using that information, you can adapt your content marketing strategy to serve those needs. Plus, you can start targeting new people who have the same needs with your content.
Automation Agency can complete several tasks to support this research. These include creating quizzes, lead magnets, and email automations. We can also help you to integrate your Facebook custom audiences into some CRMs.
Send a task to our Concierge Service if you’d like help with any of those jobs.
And if you’re not a member yet, check out our Right Fit Chatbot. It will help you to figure out if we’re a good fit for your company.
