Content marketing is one of the cornerstones of success for online businesses. After all, the internet is merely a tool that can further communication through various forms of content. Unsuccessful bloggers and content developers, however, forget that proper communication can only exist between two people and start to write for machines.
To communicate more efficiently with your content, you need to understand and empathise with your audience. Keep in mind that knowing your audience is one of the fundamental steps of content marketing.
Understanding your audience is crucial for the success of outbound content strategies as well as inbound. Blogging, for example, requires you to fully define your audience to determine the type of content that piques their interest and maximises engagement. Apart from that, here are the top reasons why understanding your blog audience is crucial for content marketing.
Establishing an “Emotional” Connection with Readers
It is a known fact that emotions drive actions. Using emotions to establish a personal connection with your blog audience will also foster trust and loyalty. It will also help you garner a positive reaction, increase engagement, and stimulate the number of re-shares of your content in social media.
To connect with your readers emotionally, you must first identify their problems or pain points. Doing so will allow you to create relatable content that they can appreciate. Just remember to offer practical tips and insights based on data or firsthand experience. Get personal and don’t be afraid to use a humorous tone whenever necessary.
Since it is a blog, it is also preferable to show real people’s names rather than crediting a post to a nameless entity. For example, use “written by John Doe” instead of showing “by Admin.” Remember that the audience wants to network with people—not associate themselves with brands.
Maximising Conversions
When there’s conversion, there’s always some level of trust that fuels the decision. As stated above, understanding your blog audience and getting in touch with them personally is a great way to build confidence. However, trust alone is not enough to secure conversions and put money in your pocket. You must also optimise your content strategy for conversions from start to finish.
Keep in mind that blog content must flow. It should capture the reader’s interest, warm them up for the takeaways, and guide them along with the appropriate action. If you fully understand your audience, you can come up with powerful calls-to-action that gives them that extra “push.”
Another strategy is to, again, tap into their emotional fuses and introduce urgency to increase conversions. For example, use phrases like “limited time only” or “get them while supplies last”. With this approach, you can increase the perceived value of your services or products and therefore inspire more readers to become buyers.
Obtaining a Deeper Market Understanding
Remember that understanding your target audience means delving deep using analytics and market research tools. In the process, you will uncover critical information about your target market to shape your content strategy such as profitable keywords, traffic sources, and other demographics. This information will also help you develop robust strategies for search engine optimisation and social media.
If you are still “poking” for a profitable niche, understanding your blog audience is also a great way to find the products they will be most interested in. You can only check the keyword pool and look for phrases with strong commercial intent.
Additional Strategies to Get-To-Know Your Audience
Aside from using analytics and researching keywords, there are several other ways to reconnect with your audience and develop a better content strategy in the future:
- Use the Search function in social media websites to look for questions and problems that your target audience has
- Use a content research tool like BuzzSumo to find content ideas that click
- Look for QA sites like Quora and Yahoo! Answers to identify your audience’s problems
- Perform a hashtag search using keywords to learn more about your audience’s interests
Conclusion
Once you understand all the lessons listed above, only then will you be ready to write for people. Just remember that communication needs understanding and empathy to be effective. It does not matter if it is through email, a blog post, or a paid advertisement. At the end of the day, content should be made by people for people.
Article reposted with permission from Business 2 Community.