In the 2nd episode in our series about Content Marketing I’ll be looking at why identifying your target audience can make your business more relevant, improve customer relations, and even increase your business’ conversion rate.
There are many reasons why identifying target audience is highly important.
1. You can be More Specific with Marketing
2. It makes your Content more Relevant
3. You can Better Identify your Company’s Voice
4. You’ll Create Content that Increases Customer Engagement
5. You can Discover where to Market
How to Write Content for your Target Audience: Research and Planning
Don’t Hesitate to Ask
Asking for ideas, when researching, is a great way to involve your customers and build relations. That way you’ll be able to create the content that your target audience wants to read.
Use Social Media
Find out where your customers like to hang out. Check out their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles, Twitter pages and Pinterest boards. See what they’re talking about, what groups they are part of, and what their interests are. This will give you valuable insight into what your audience is interested in, and therefore, what type of content they would enjoy reading.
Share Relevant, Useful and Valuable Information
Once you know more about your clients, create content that would be valuable to them, in a format which they would appreciate. For example, if you sell baby clothes, your target audience would be parents. Create content that would not only be relevant and useful, but in the correct format too. A parent would be too busy to read a long guide, but a short three hundred word blog post would be perfect.
Create Relevant and Attention Grabbing Titles
Whether you’re writing a newsletter, article or a blog post, your title needs to be strong. Good titles are short, engaging, and tell readers, concisely, what the article is about. Identifying your business’s target audience allows you to write content that speaks to your potential customers. This improves customer relations and increases your conversion rate. Start researching your target market today, and begin writing content your audience wants to read.
How to identify your audience
Twitter is a great place to begin. Your followers are, for all intents and purposes, your audience. However, not every follower is a potential customer, so the best thing to do is keep an eye on your notifications. Check who’s re-tweeting and favouriting your tweets. Which tweets are getting the most attention? Is there any discernible patterns? This will provide insight into what content is popular and you can start to think about creating more like it.
Pay attention to new followers too and check out their profile. Do they look like a potential customer? If so, what are they sharing? You’re more likely to get their attention if your content resonates with their interests.
There are tools available that will help you manage this process, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Mention, to name just 3. These tools act as great aids when you need to filter large chunks of data to extract value. But remember, nothing works better than the human eye!
If you don’t have many followers on Twitter the above approach probably won’t work for you. If this is the case, you can turn to your competitors. Choose your 3 most direct competitors and look what they share and who’s re-tweeting. Is their audience the same as your own customer profile? If it is, Bingo! You can see exactly what works in your sector.
Followerwonk is a great tool for carrying out competitor research on Twitter. It displays some really interesting data such as when your competitors are most active, where their followers are located, how many new followers they have gained, and how many lost.
Of course, Twitter isn’t the only way to identify your audience, nor is it the only social media platform, but because it has an open API most content marketing tools incorporate it and build apps for it, making it probably the most accessible social media platform online.
For this reason, I would definitely recommend starting with Twitter to identify your target audience as it’s easiest of all social media platforms to collect some valuable insights.
Once you’ve created your own audience profile and created some content for it, put it to the test and see how popular your content becomes.
In the next lesson, I’ll be looking at the most effective ways of getting your content in front of your target audience.
We will send this and future lessons in our newsletter so please feel free to sign up here: Newsletter Signup.
Also if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to call or email us:
Email: jan@janklin.com
Tel: 01928 788 100
