Key to Success, Knowing Your Audience

byDonnieK2

1.7K followers

7 years ago

We’ve all been there before, at one time or another. You pour hours and hours of your time into writing a great piece of content, in the hope that it will drive scores of new readers to check out your site and maybe become new customers. Then, for some reason, it falls flat. Few people read it, and even those who do, don’t seem terribly interested in engaging with your business.

Empathizing with your client
It’s what they always say about writing – before you put pen to paper, you’ve got to understand your audience first. Content marketing is absolutely no exception to this. In fact, it’s especially important in marketing because you depend on your audience for cash money.
(Getting to know the audience for your content is a complex, multi-step process).

According to SEO Hacker, the key is to develop a sense of empathy for the people you’re targeting at your business.

Conducting thorough market research
No one’s born with the ability to understand audiences and know what they want. This knowledge never comes easy – if you want to know about your target consumers, you’ve got to dig in and do your research.

Forbes notes that this is true of both SEO strategy and content marketing. In both cases, research is the foundation. Jayson DeMers, founder and CEO of AudienceBloom told the news source that whether you’re coming up with a keyword strategy or choosing a topic for a long form piece of writing, either way, you begin by thinking about what topics people are interested in.


Engaging your readers emotionally
What you really want in content marketing isn’t just clicks and retweets – it’s genuine engagement with your stuff. You want people to read your blogs, yes, but you’re also going for an emotional response. You want them to feel something.

Convince and Convert asserted that this is a vital part of building a community in content marketing. You’ve got to incite people to share their feelings and opinions. Ryan Kettler, director of communications at BoostSuite, explained that one way to do this is to prompt them with the way you write.


Moving from clicks to conversions
In the end, of course, your goal is to get people to become paying customers. After all, you want your company to make money off of content marketing, not flush cash down the toilet. This means you need to turn the initial leads your content generates into real conversions.
(Sometimes, readers need a little extra push to actually take action).
The Content Marketing Institute noted that sometimes, readers need a little extra push to actually take action.

How you can reconnect with your readers
Before you can find success with content marketing, you need to start from the beginning. That means understanding your audience. In other words:
• Develop a sense of empathy for the people you’re writing to.