No matter how many pieces of content you've created, or how good you think you are at doing so, I would advise you to always take the time to think about your target audience before creating another piece.
You see, it's very easy to slowly but surely stop talking to your audience and start talking to yourself. After all, you're the person you know best, and therefore, you're the easiest person to speak to.
And creating content for yourself is going to do about as much good as talking to yourself would.
In an effort to assist American small business owners to improve their communications, the National Criminal Justice Reference Department of the Federal Government put together a “Communications Toolkit” that listed “Know exactly who your audience is and look at everything from that group's point of view” as Principle #1 in their list of social marketing principles.{12}
There honestly aren't many areas in which I can truthfully say I agree with the government, but this is one of them:
It is crucial that you understand who your target audience is and then look at the world from their point of view. You have to have an intimate understanding of the people you are trying to reach in order to motivate them to take action.
This just makes sense from a content marketing standpoint.
If you don't have a solid picture in your mind of who your target audience is, you're not likely to speak to them in any meaningful way as you create and distribute your content.
Don't waste your time.
Instead, before you sit down to write or flip on the camera, ask yourself these questions:
What do they already know?
This question speaks to the knowledge level your target audience is already at when they begin to consume the content you're creating.
It will help you determine how much background explanation may be necessary, how deep you can delve into the topic at hand, and what sort of terminology you can and can't freely use.
It also helps you to get a feel for what they expect from your content.
With this information at your fingertips, you can begin to determine where the gaps are in your audience's understanding, and fill those gaps with your content.
What do they care about?
There may be plenty that they don't already know about the topic you want to discuss. But if they really don't care to learn about it, you have two choices: you can either discuss some truly compelling reasons why they should care, or you can scrap the idea and choose something that your audience will actually want to consume.
Without taking this into consideration, you run the risk of alienating your audience, and eventually losing them completely.
In content marketing, hatred is not the opposite of love.
Boredom is.
What pain points do they suffer?
This is sales terminology, but it applies equally well to content marketing.
Generally, people are going to be interested in relieving their pain – whether physical or metaphorical. If you can determine what makes your audience angry, frustrated, scared, stressed out, miserable, exhausted, guilty, envious, insecure or confused, then you know what's going to interest them.
The next logical step is to create content that will in some way relieve that pain, whether you're offering a legitimate solution to a problem, a better understanding of the problem and how it affects them, or just a means of forgetting about it for a few minutes.
An important caveat, though: Don't assume you know your audience's pain. Do the research, ask the questions, learn from them. Few things will piss someone off quicker than being left behind while you jump to conclusions.
What questions do they have?
Directly related to the audience's pain points is the list of questions they likely have about your product, service, or topic.
In many cases, these questions will seem elementary and silly to you, but that's because you're immersed in your topic day in and day out. To the casual reader, something that's second nature to you could be a revelation.
If you have access to customer service representatives that work with your target audience, you have a prime source for content topics because they're being asked questions all day every day.
But even if you're on your own, just thinking logically about your topic from the viewpoint of someone with little or no knowledge should help you generate a long list of legitimate questions one or more members of your target audience likely has rolling around in their mind.
What do you want them to do when they're done?
This helps you to consider where your content will reside along the conversion funnel you've set up as part of your overarching business strategy.
One of the dumbest and most costly mistakes content marketers make is to finish a fantastic piece of content and send it out into the world without including a clear call to action.
Believe me, no matter how beautifully written or produced, and no matter how clever or insightful your content is, if your audience doesn't know what to do with it, they'll do absolutely nothing.
Is the piece purely informational? Then perhaps the only goal is to interest them enough to click through to a different article or to learn more about you as a content provider.
Is this a lead generation piece? Then you're going to need to include a call-to-action that will result in your obtaining their contact information.
Is this a sales letter? Then ultimately, a converted sale is the goal and your content needs to reflect that so the audience knows what you want them to do next.
Targeting 101
The very best archer in the world is going to miss 100% of the time if he can't see the target.
That seems embarrassingly simple, but it's true.
If you're going to "hit" your target audience, you have to see them very clearly so you can accurately line up your shot.
So, let's discuss some details regarding identifying and targeting your audience:
Demographics
One way to target specific groups or individuals within those groups is by means of demographics.
Demographics refer to grouping people by age, sex, nationality, level of education, where they live, where they work, etc.
The use of demographic information to make general decisions about people might rub some the wrong way. It's not politically correct.
But from a marketing standpoint, it's just common sense.
Upper middle class white males aged 55-65 living in Florida are likely interested in different products and services than poor Asian females aged 12-15 living in Vietnam.
From a content marketing standpoint, the same potential differences apply to what information the target demographic(s) would be interested in consuming, how promotional messages should be approached, and how likely successful conversion is.
Of course, collecting demographic information is an inherently touchy situation.
You can always include basic demographic information as part of any sign-up form you include on your website. But, the more you ask for, the less people are going to fill out your form, so this could be self-defeatist.
Privacy laws and common decency prevent you from demanding demographic information from anyone, so marketers need to be creative in how they obtain the limited demographics at their disposal.
The most common and effective method involves offering free content in exchange for information, such as a white paper in exchange for contact information. Once you have an individual's e-mail address, you can introduce additional non-prying surveys to the e-mail mix to gain further demographic details from your list.
Of course, this method requires that you make some educated guesses as to what initial content will appeal to your target audience in order to write that first white paper.
You may very well need to experiment with topics and offers until you find your target audience coming to you, then begin building your strategy more completely around them.
Psychographics
Now psychographics are a little tougher to pin down in concrete terms, but they're ironically easier to learn from the way people interact with your content.
They're not qualities you can see on the outside, or on a balance sheet. They have to do with how we think.
Personality, attitude, values, interests and lifestyle are all areas covered by psychographic segmentation, and they're definitely a tricky thing to work with.
But, just as is the case with demographics, while individuals will fall outside the bell curve, psychographic generalizations can be incredibly accurate and valuable for the majority.
While a group's psychographic profile may not preclude an entire product or service as cleanly as broader demographic data can, it will have an even greater impact on how you craft your messages, how you tell your story, and how slowly (or not so slowly) you introduce your offer.
The Adzerk blog offered a fantastic example that shows how demographics and psychographics differ from a marketing perspective and how psychographics can help focus your targeting efforts more effectively{13}:
As an example, consider athletic shoes – from a demographic point of view, a broad range of people are in the market for the product, from young to old, both men and women, for all kinds of reasons. From a psychographic perspective though, some customers might care most about performance, while others concern themselves with the fashion appeal of the product, while still others just want a particular brand as a status symbol. For a shoe company to maximize sales, it needs to understand these trends to design the right products, and talk about them the right way.
You need only look at major shoe retailers to see the model in action – endorsements from celebrity athletes for the performance crowd, options to customize the colors and materials for the fashion crowd, and rare, limited editions for the status conscious crowd. From an advertising perspective, the brand talks to one crowd very different than another, so the ads on ESPN are very different than on SneakerNews.com. There’s no doubt that shoe companies fully understand the demographic qualities of each customer base, but in many ways, the psychographic elements are what really drive the products, positioning, and sales.
Interestingly, demographics and psychographics work exceptionally well together because people in the same age group and/or living in the same area tend to develop similar attitudes about certain subjects, have shared the same cultural milestones, and are likely to view your content through a similar lens.
Of course, the last thing you want to do is make any unfounded assumptions about your audience based on some convergence of demographic and psychographic data.
These days, technology has bridged gaps that used to gape wide open between generations, genders, social and economic groups.
Give your audience the benefit of the doubt and let them tell you if you're wrong.
Customer Personas
Combining demographic and psychographic information allows you to create a living, breathing, 3D image of your target audience (metaphorically speaking, of course.)
In the marketing world, this is called a customer persona (or buyer persona), and a well-crafted example is the Holy Grail of marketing departments everywhere.
Tony Zambito, the marketer who originally coined the phrase “buyer personas” explained their importance to content marketing in a recent article on his blog{14}:
Although the buyer persona story consists of a few sentences, it breaks down the complex to a level of meaningful simplicity, which can often be missing in content creation. And, this is what we want. To enable sharpened focus on what we need to understand about buyers at a particular stage. Buyer Persona Stories offers a powerful technique for teams to get on the same page about buyers.
By developing customer personas that match the major groups that make up your target audience, you can create your content with a personal, conversational voice that speaks directly to that one person's heart.
Although you and I know you'll be distributing this content to potentially thousands of people, each one that consumes that piece of content (and that falls into the persona you crafted it for) will feel like it was made just for them.
Exercise #17 – Identifying Your Target Audience
1. Recover your notes from Exercises #10-16 and review them briefly.
2. All those exercises touched on your target audience to some extent. Based on what you learned in this chapter, make any adjustments you'd like to what you wrote previously.
3. Now consider your first piece of content and any ideas you have for future pieces. What can you do right now to better identify the demographic and psychographic characteristics of the target audience you want those content pieces to appeal to?
4. Create one or more customer personas for your target audience by combining what you know about them and what you can comfortably imagine. Then do some Google research to test your assumptions and polish the persona.
5. Read the next chapter.