How do I know what my audience wants to read?

Getting to know your audience is a major component of your content marketing strategy

If content marketing is creating relevant, and interesting or meaningful content, on a consistent basis, how do you find out what kind of content that is for your business?  How do you find topics that your current and prospective clients or customers will want to read?

This is where the rubber meets the road in content marketing.

It’s not just enough to write a bunch of content that you think your audience will find meaningful, helpful and interesting.  You need to get closer to them and actually test it out.  Doing that is beneficial yet can be somewhat difficult if you’ve never done it before.  That’s where working with a professional content marketer like myself comes in quite handy.  But let’s talk through it more before I make too much of a sales pitch.

In order to know what your customers want or like to read, you first have to get to know your customers; and I don’t mean in a “women, age 25-65” kind of way.  In order to know who your customers are, you need to have a concrete understanding of your products or services: what they are, what they do, what pain points they alleviate, or opportunities they create and for whom do they do this?

When a client comes to me for their content marketing needs, I ask them a series of questions – every question in this series is “Why?” OK, almost every question.

Why – would I pay for your product or service?

Why – would I choose your product over another?

Why – does it fill a need for me in my day to day life?

Why – might I have this need?

Every time I ask the question “why?” we uncover another key piece of information, we go another layer deeper into the insights for this business.  Often, clients haven’t had the time, or the knowledge to think about these types of questions and so we explore the answers together.

It’s not enough to know what your product is or what it does.  You need to dig deeper than that, to really explore into the customers life, and visualize why they use your product or service.  Typically you’ll find that you have more than one customer – meaning your content has more than one audience.

Examples are great tools, so let’s look at one here.

You’re a small business owner and are starting your own in home cleaning service.

What are you selling? A clean home. But this won’t do.  It’s too simple to help us understand anything about your audience.  So I ask you “Why would I pay for a clean home?”

Maybe: I’m a busy working mom and I just don’t have the time and energy to clean.

Maybe: I’m taking care of an elderly relative and I’ve either contracted you for my or their home because my waking moments are spent with them.

Maybe: I’m a bit older and my house is just a bit too much for me to manage on my own, safely.

OK, now we are getting somewhere here.  Just by asking a single question, boiling it down to just one word, “why”, we have identified three potential audiences.  And there are still more out there, the flight attendant or traveling business person who finds it easier to hire some help, the work from home mom who hosts parties at her house and likes the comfort of having a professionally cleaned home.

Let’s stick with the first three audiences for ease of use here.  Take the first one, the busy mom who doesn’t have time to clean.  Why does this woman pay for your services?

As a mom, she trusts you to be around her family.  But why does she? Because you have the professional certifications or accolades to prove that you’re a professional,  and the customer testimonials to back up your claims.  IE her family is important to her.

As a professional or working woman, why does she trust you and pay for your services? Because she is making an investment in her family, paying someone to take the time and care to do it right. IE she values professionalism and quality.

Just by these two questions we now can make some more assumptions about her and start to think about content she might like.  Because her kids are important to her, spending time with them is also important to her.  You could write a monthly post featuring what customers are able to do with the time they didn’t spend cleaning their house – like taking the kids to the park.  You could also write a monthly blog post about the health benefits of a clean home, and the safe cleaning products you use, highlighting the peace of mind mom’s who use your services attain.

Let’s take the second example, the adult caring for a family member.  Why would he or she pay for your services? Because you are taking one more thing that they previously had to worry about off of their hands.

Why would they choose your service over another? Being a small business allows you to spend more time with your family, and work around their schedules, meaning you understand the importance of family and being a caregiver.  This enables you to go the extra mile for these important people during a difficult time.  Now you have the ability to create a monthly post on tips for safely cleaning for a loved one, and another monthly post about how taking care of yourself is just as important as taking care of them.

By asking a few simple posts, we’ve come up with four potential monthly blog post topics.  You can rotate these topics and a few more to publish weekly blogs that are interesting, relevant and consistent for your target audiences.  Once you write these posts, you can share them across your social media channels and even create targeted email newsletters, sending the relevant posts to the corresponding audience.

Once you start to implement this, you can go back and look at the engagement your social media posts received, the newsletters that were opened, which posts performed the best and which didn’t go over well with your audience.  Then you can make more informed decisions about the type of content that you feature on your site and share with your audiences.

If this sounds like a lot of work, or something that you want to do but that you don’t have the time to do, contact me, and let’s talk.  I’ll get to know more about you and your business, walk you through some essential branding exercises and together we can get started on implementing your content marketing strategy.