Do You Know Your Audience? Good Content Marketing Should Be Valuable To Your Readers. When you build a website or a blog, the true motivation is to build an audience. Your site can be easy to navigate, quick-loading with the latest technology, but it cannot achieve its goal of building an audience unless you have written good content marketing that resonates with your target reader.
For your content to have this impact, it has to be crafted and curated with your audience in mind. It needs to provide them with information or entertainment that is relevant and valuable.
However, you can't begin to evaluate whether your content is hitting the mark with your readers unless you first look at who your target audience is. For most business websites, this target audience matches up with your target customer. Think about who most needs your product and who is most likely to buy it. You may also want to examine any demographic statistics you can gather from your current site, social media accounts and sales statistics to identify who is already listening to you. Once you have identified your reader base, you can then craft good content marketing that is tailored for them.
Content created with a specific reader in mind is far more likely to resonate with your target audience, because you have identified who you are speaking to, and what their viewpoints and expectations are. Just as in real life, where you might talk to a businessperson differently than a parent and a teenager differently than a retiree, your online voice can become much more relatable to your reader. You also gain an understanding of your reader's needs, allowing you to create content that will be valuable to them, either through providing information or entertainment, or a mix of both.
Once you have established who your reader is, what your relationship to them is, and what they need, you can build good content marketing that they want to consume, and deliver it in a voice that they relate to. As you start to do this, you can evaluate your progress by keeping an eye on your website's statistics. Content that resonates with readers will make them want to share it with their peers, so watch share statistics on social media for this indication. Your website's hits should also increase as current readers return for more, and new readers discover you.
If you find that your readership is not growing, social media attention is sparse, and your audience is general and scattered, it's time to make some adjustments to your content. Good content marketing that resonates with your audience is vital as a brand to build a relationship with them. From this relationship grows trust and a network that builds your customer base and reputation.
Creating content marketing that resonates with your reader is no simple task, but can make a great difference in your marketing attempts. Taking the time to research your target audience, identify your relationship to them and deliver content that is valuable and relatable is an investment in your business and brand. Check out our white paper, "What is a Digital Content Strategy? And Why You Need One!" to learn more.
