Before creating your first piece of content for your business, you must understand your target audience as well as your competition.
It’s virtually impossible to create content that generates leads if it doesn’t address customers’ needs and wants.
To achieve this, Aaron Branch, CEO of the 7 figure per year agency, Social Agendas, and author of The First 365, advises on performing audience development and personal research.
Some critical factors to help you identify your target audience are:
Demographics: Know your target audience’s gender, age, ethnicity, job title, location, income, etc.
Psychographics: find out what their interests, hobbies, habits, and beliefs are.
Pain Points: What challenges do they face that your brand, product, or services can address? What makes them search for your products and services? For instance, Zak Loyd and Aaron Branch co-founded DelivrMe, a delivery service that focuses on quick and efficient services. The pain point addressed was a long waiting time for customers’ orders.
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Seeking Information: which platforms or sites are your target audience seeking or getting solutions to their pinpoint or problems they are facing?
Content Presentation Preference: What content structure or format do they prefer?
Solutions: How can your content help your target audience find and use the information they need?
Types of Audiences
For your content marketing strategy, you need to have in mind two types of audiences, namely:
● Primary audience
● Secondary audience
Primary Audience
For your primary audience, create content made up for people who are most likely to purchase your products. Your content must be targeted to them.
Secondary Audience
These require a little bit more convincing before they can become your primary audience. You need to be a little mild and creative with the content you put out for them, e.g., “the importance of using *insert your product name* for *insert a problem.”
When you strategically identify the people to target your content, you can quickly formulate the suitable topics, ideas, and keywords you will incorporate into your strategy.
Understand Your Competition
Aaron Branch says that it’s just as vital to analyze and understand your Competition to create compelling content along with understanding your audience.
Study the ground to figure out what works and what doesn’t
You’ll also see what available opportunities and challenges are unaddressed, as well as what issues you may face in your content marketing strategy. There are several ways to analyze your target audience and competition in the market. Still, you can reach out to Social Agenda, the company which Aaron Branch founded to ensure the success of your brand’s ad and marketing campaigns.
Some Factors to Help you understand your competition’s content strategy are:
Customer feedback – Pay attention to any relevant ideas, comments, complaints, solutions, and even compliments they receive from your ideal audience.
This helps you identify content gaps and opportunities for content development.
SEO strategy – look at their captions and keyword placements, among other SEO practices. See how much they manage to reach with the applied SEO method. This will enable you not to copy exactly what they’re doing but to have a deep marketplace understanding, which better-informs your content marketing strategies.
To learn more about content marketing and advertising, head over to Social Agendas.
