How To Find Your Target Audience And Create The Best Content That Connects

 

How To Find Your Target Audience And Create The Best Content That Connects

By the time you’re done reading, you’ll understand:

• How to define your target audience and understand your target market to create a clear picture of exactly who you are (and aren’t) writing for.

• Pick up tips, tactics, and strategies for gathering audience data.

• Use your improved knowledge of your audience to create content that connects with their needs and interests.

Be sure to download the free audience survey and audience persona templates. These items will help you apply the knowledge you’ll gain in this post.

Why Define Your Target Audience?

Content marketers often apply "the Field of Dreams" approach to their work.

It's true that great content tends to naturally attract an audience. It does not, however, guarantee that it will be the best audience for your brand. That means visitors that are likely to:

• Connect your content to your product.

• Buy your product because of your content.

Defining who your real audience is will help you focus not only on creating great content but on creating the right content. It makes it easier to create content that establishes you as an authority in your industry, rather than creating content for its own sake.

How To Understand Your Target Market

Start by asking yourself some simple questions. These can include:

• What problems does my company's product or service solve? If you've been in business for any length of time, you should have some understanding of why your product or service exists. Your content should be related to that purpose, too (that means resisting the urge to share irrelevant memes just because they're funny—if it's not connected to your mission, it doesn't belong in your content marketing).

• Who are our current customers? If you're not sure who buys your product or service, someone in your organization almost certainly does. Consider asking your company's executives or sales teams for this information. It may also be necessary to segment your types of customers. For example, you may categorize customers based on location, budget, or needs. HubSpot has created a fantastic introductory guide to this process.

• Who is my competition? It's likely you know who your obvious competitors are. However, some quick searches on Google and social media (particularly on Facebook and Twitter) can often reveal upstart competition you may not have been aware of. Try searching a keyword or two that are related to your industry. See which businesses come up. Browse their "About Us" pages and feature descriptions. This is an easy way to develop an idea of who your competition is and fast.

• What do customers stand to gain from choosing us (instead of a competitor)? What features do you offer that no one else does? Is there something you can do better than anyone else?

By the time you've answered these questions, you'll have defined an understanding for each of the following:

• Why your content deserves to exist.

• Who is going to read it.

• What your competition is doing (and how you can do it better).

• Why your audience should choose your content (and product) instead of your competition.

This isn't intended to be a deep, detailed process. Consider this a simple starting point.

Creating Your Target Audience Definition

Before you can create content that resonates, it helps to know your intended audience (as well as who they are not). An audience definition should ideally connect these three things:

• Your product or service

• Your main audience demographic

• Your content's mission

Here is what a simple audience definition could look like once you're finished analyzing your audience:

"[INSERT YOUR BRAND] creates content to help and inform [INSERT DEMOGRAPHIC] so they can [INSERT ACTION] better."

The Method CoSchedule Uses To Create The Right Content For The Right Audience

Let's take a look at two additional methods we use here at CoSchedule for understanding our own target audience. We're pretty zealous about understanding our audience because we want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to help our readers.

We look at it in two ways:

1. As we build our product, we want to make sure that we build features our customers will actually use. This requires that we understand their problems and frustrations, particularly ones that we can solve.

2. As we create content, we want to make sure that we create content that our audience will truly find useful. We don't just want clicks, shares, and page views. Rather, we strive to be a trusted resource readers can count on.

To accomplish these goals, we need to understand our target audience. It's as simple as that.

How do we go about it? First, we find our content core.

Finding Your Content Core

The purpose of the content core exercise is to understand the difference between what you do, and what you need to talk about.

One of the big mistakes that early content marketers make is to talk about themselves and their product, rather than the things that their users really care about. This is a huge misunderstanding of what it means to find your target audience.

Of course, your product is helpful to your customers, but that doesn't mean that it will also be helpful to your blog audience, that group of potential customers is probably interested in a much greater variety of topics.

Visually, the content core looks something like this:

At the center of your content is what you do. At CoSchedule, we make editorial calendar software, so this is a combination of social media and content scheduling topics. For our customers, we solve problems such as:

• Providing a single interface for planning and executing content marketing efforts.

• Displaying an upcoming publishing schedule on a visualized monthly calendar.

• Allowing users to reschedule content via simple drag-and-drop.

• Facilitating team communication and an effective workflow.

• Providing a tool that helps them save time and grow their blog traffic.

These are things we should certainly write about on our blog. However, it's not all we write about. We also spend our time writing about the ideas that surround these topics. This is the big idea behind "expanding our content core."

As we move away (ever so slightly) from our content core and focus on what our target audience really wants to hear about, we improve the effectiveness of our content marketing and better focus in on our target audience's needs.

At the same time, this method will also help us keep the topics we are writing about connected to our true topical focus.

At CoSchedule, this brings us to topics around how to plan, organize, and execute all things content marketing.

These topics tackle the problems that our product already addresses, but in a way that is specifically geared for what our target audience cares about. The question is: What do your readers really care about? There are several easy ways to find out.

Tactics To Find Your Target Audience

Before CoSchedule ever launched, we began trying to understand who our target audience was. Here are some of the tools and tactics we continue to use to keep our understanding sharp.

 Create Reader Personas

In an early planning meeting, we came up with a few Lean UX-type user personas that were designed to help us solve problems our CoSchedule users actually needed to solve.

This was conducted as a team exercise and was tremendously useful in our process. Looking back, we weren't always right about what our users cared about, but it was a solid place to build from.

These reader personas seek to document the real motivations and curiosities that empower your readers. By identifying them, you'll be able to find your target audience better when the time comes.

An audience persona is the first step to visualizing your audience as you write. When you picture an individual, you can properly tailor your content to them.

When you follow this type of writing process, the person reading your content will often feel like you are speaking directly to them.

Here's what you need to know:

A great audience persona covers these details:

• Who

• What

• When

• Where

• Why

Specific details are necessary for every aspect. When possible, include things like:

• Gender

• Personality

• Family life

• Job title

• Job function

• Employer

• Location

• Income

• Needs

• Pain points

• Challenges