Content Marketing Step 1: Know Your Audience

Know your audience.

Wedding-guest-list

Having pulled together four weddings in the last three years, please understand that I’m still in recovery mode. So the best analogy I can come up with about knowing your audience is related to wedding analogies. When you’re putting together your guest list, travel arrangements and seating at the reception you have to take all kinds of things about your guests into account to make the event go smoothly. Time of day and length of travel will influence your menu selection and other entertainment options. Knowing and serving this audience requires some real tact and skill!

Like your guest accommodations, the overarching goal of your content marketing strategy is to engage your prospects for a good user experience that will hopefully grow the relationship. In order to facilitate engagement, you need a process or approach to building your content marketing strategy. In our last post we talked about these four key elements to building your process:

1. Know your audience
2. Conducting a content audit
3. Mapping your content to your prospects buying cycle
4. Creating an editorial calendar

Let’s look more closely at how you put together intelligence about your audience.

Know Your Audience? Questions? Questions? [Research]

 The more information you have about the audiences you are trying to reach, psychographics as well as demographics, the better.  Here’s a list of questions you need answers to:    

  1. Who are your ideal customers and prospects?
  2. What are their biggest concerns, needs, and interests?
  3. Where do they spend their time – on search engines, social media, or blogs?
  4. What kinds of content do they prefer?

A quick look at your website Google Analytics can give you some valuable clues.  Looking at the sources of traffic on your website, where are they coming from?  To do this go to Traffic Sources >> Overview >> Sources.  Look at Direct Traffic, Referral Traffic, and Campaigns.

To get a window on concerns, needs and interests, look at the keywords they’re using to find your site.  What can their search behavior tell you? Where did they come from?  Where do they go when they leave your site?

To find out where they are on social media take a look at your own website’s Traffic Sources >> Overview >> Sources >> Social.  This can be a good place to start to see which sites they’re coming from to get to your site.  It’s also a window into how effective your Twitter, Facebook, Blog and Email outreach efforts are.

To understand what kinds of content they prefer, take a look at your email/newsletter opens and click throughs.  Take a look at your Google Analytics >> Traffic Sources >> Search Engine Optimization >> Landing Pages.  Also look at the Visitor Flow under Audience in Google Analytics.  If you have a blog, see what posts are getting click throughs and identify your most popular content.

Personas: The Public Face

 The Google definition for persona is “the aspect of someone’s character that is presented to or perceived by others.”  Now that you have gathered some of the intelligence from above, how can you develop this into profile “types” of your ideal audience?  Give them names and create a detailed picture of their behaviors, likes and dislikes, etc.  For more details about developing your personas take a look at our previous persona blog series:

So you’ve got some homework to do on knowing your audience!  Let me know how it goes 🙂