MARKETING // EDUCATION // LIFESTYLE // BUSINESS // DESIGN
Content Planning: How do You Find Out What Your Target Audience Wants?Placing the right text in the right place and at the right time is an important success factor in content marketing. But how do we know what our target audience wants? How do we know what information they are looking for? Which blog content they are interested in? Blogging is about publishing helpful, interesting, entertaining, or inspiring posts that are useful to your audience. It's not just about your products or services. Let's face it: what interests us may not necessarily grab someone else’s attention. Your Audience's IntentionLet's say people want to read your articles because they’re interested in the subject and need more information about it for work or study. Some of them may come specifically for your latest e-book, while others may find your content by chance and want to look around. Ideally, you should target your audience based on your topic selection, the structure of your articles, and general content design. As regards inbound and content marketing, we talk about different information about our target group (s). In addition to finding out your TA’s intention grabbers, you should also be interested in their problems, challenges, goals, and motivations. Below you’ll find some useful resources that can help to consider your blog in the context of readers' interests. 1) Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics provides us with extremely valuable information about our target audience through the demographics and interests map (which should be activated first). For example, you can read "affinity categories" and identify "segments with willing buyers." Google Analytics can do even more: regularly review the most-read articles in a given timeframe (depending on your posting frequency).
Below is the information you should be interested in:
Other information that affects your individual blog posts includes:
Those aspects are not available in Google Analytics but play a pivotal role in your content marketing. 2) Social Media InsightsTo find out more about my target group, I should be where my target group is and listen to them very attentively. Facebook groups and Google+ communities are always good places to search for information like this. Besides, most social media platforms have some nice analytics tools (e.g., Facebook Insights or Twitter Follower Dashboard) that can provide you with even more data. You may want to pay attention to the biography of your followers, their activity times, their shared content, and, of course, their followers. Tools like Social Rank or Social Mention provide even more detailed information about interaction rates or influential followers. 3) Automated EmailsWhenever someone signs up for the newsletter, they usually receive an automated email with a confirmation link first. In this email, subscribers may be asked to share their current challenges. That increases the chances of getting valuable feedback and at the same time, creates an added value by the dialogue opportunity offers. And if somebody thinks nobody answers such questions, they’re wrong. Yes, it may be hard to believe, but why not? If you've already signed up for a newsletter, then you can use the same opportunity for engaging in direct dialogue. 4) Other optionsHere are several additional options that will help you refine your content and make it more reader-oriented.Customer FeedbackIf you already have customers, ask them to share their opinion about your products with you. Are they useful? Are clients satisfied? Do they help in problem-solving? How could you improve the customers' experience? Get inspired by your competitors’ testimonials. You are certainly not the only one in the market, so you know everything about conducting the rivals’ analysis. But have you ever tried to treat the competitors as your customers? What do they say about your products? Can you get something useful out of it? Reader SurveysWe want to get more information about our readers, so why not just ask them directly? It’s easy to conduct regular surveys on a blog by using a sidebar widget or a content gate. You can also publish the results and verify them by having a discussion in the comments. Communicate with your target group by holding webinars or getting in touch with them using Hangout or Skype. Read Book Reviews on AmazonReviews reflect the author's own opinion much better than commentaries. Search for relevant books on Amazon and read through reviews there — and not only 5-star ones! What did the readers like? What problems has the book solved? Or, why were the readers disappointed? And finally, don't focus on who your target audience is. Instead, try concentrating on what you find most useful for you the subject matter.
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