Do You Know Your Audience?

Companies that use content marketing to reach their audience understand that the goal is to educate and inform about a product or service. Those that do this effectively have one thing in common: knowing the audience. That’s the key to planning and creating relevant content that customers and prospects are eager to get. Companies that struggle with creating strong content marketing programs often can trace this trouble to a lack of understanding of the target market.

There are two elements to knowing an audience:

1. Understanding who the individuals are.
2. Recognizing what they want from you.

Understanding the individual
You market your product or service to a company consisting of individual people. So you need to know who in the organization you’re marketing to—by title or responsibility. These individuals may be business line managers in IT or HR, for example, a VP or other executive level manager, or someone in a purchasing department.

Unless you sell primarily to small companies, it’s typical for several people to be involved in purchasing decisions. You can aim to reach all them if you understand their roles in the process; or you can direct your efforts toward reaching a single individual with primary purchasing responsibility.

Recognizing their needs
Once you’ve identified who in an organization you intend to market to, it’s important to understand their goals and motivations so you can help them address challenges and find new ways to move their business forward. Think about things such as: what their job entails, what their workday is like and the pressures they face, what issues most trouble them, and outside influences affecting their industry, company, or even their individual responsibilities. When you understand this, you can target your content to addressing specific needs.

Depending on the product or service you sell, you probably have several target markets. Focus on creating content for each. This could mean creating new content or new approaches for some of your markets. For many, though, it might simply mean changing the language, examples, or format of some of your materials. You don’t have to recreate the wheel, but you do have to ensure the content feels relevant to the people who are consuming it.

By the way, you don’t have to conjure this information from thin air. Talk to your sales team and find out what they’re hearing on the front lines, mine the data from your customer service center, reach out directly to customers and prospects via surveys or social media sites, and talk with customers and others at events and conferences and ask what they want.

The bottom line
Creating an effective content marketing program is easier when you know your target audience. So, if you’re having trouble creating a program, it might mean you don’t know your audience well enough.

-September 2010