A big part of successful content marketing strategies involves knowing your audience. Depending on the goals you establish, you will need to put together either an audience profile or specific buyer personas that will guide your content ideation and creation moving forward.
Try and gather as much detail about your target audience as possible. Social listening will help you hone in on their characteristics and interests, so that you can ensure your content resonates. Ask yourself these three important questions:
- What types of content do they share (format, tone, source, length)?
- Where online does my target audience spend most of their time (social networks, blogs, forums, etc.)?
- How can I best reach my target audience (organic social media, advertising, search)?
If your content marketing goal focuses on sales or leads, you may want to create specific buyer personas (or adapt existing buyer personas with content in mind). This will involve profiling your customers to know what a buyer will look like and the specific types of content that will reel them in. Will they be a director, or just a regular employee? Will they work at a small business, or a large enterprise? Will they be on social media, or will you only be able to reach them through email. What are their goals, and does your content offer insight that might help them achieve those goals? What about removing their pain points? These are all questions you will want to answer before you start creating content.
Content Marketing Strategy Tip: For many businesses, traditional advertising has an efficiency problem. Social media advertising combats that inefficiency by providing you the ability to target users based on a very specific set of traits or interests. This is very valuable to an organization trying to market content to a niche audience or groups of buyers. Worth noting:
- Twitter is strong for targeting specific networks
- Facebook is great for targeting people by interest or demographic
- LinkedIn lets you target people by career and industry