How to Reach Your Target Audience Through Content
If you’ve ever had a crush, you know it is vital to grab their undivided attention.
Easier said than done!
You get your ducks in a row and devise a killer strategy (or so you tell yourself).
You try everything; eye contact, awkward smiles, and hit the gym to get the proper posture.
Heck, you even write them a letter!
Your target audience in your marketing efforts is a lot like your crush. You create a marketing strategy, put some heavy Benjamins on it, and deploy your entire arsenal. Like your crush, your audience ends up with your competitors!
Well, let’s change that, even if we have to use…
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Target Audience Definition?
Suppose you are among the over 80% of marketing teams who use content marketing in their marketing strategies. It's best you know what exactly is a target audience.
A target audience refers to a group of people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and would therefore be ideal customers.
They are a specific group of potential customers that you want your business to reach out to. You will want to focus your marketing efforts on reaching this particular niche market for your business to thrive.
If you'd like a more "layman" definition, here's our exclusive guide on target audience definition: who, what, and why.
And if finding your target audience sounds like the hardest job on the planet, you'll appreciate this guide on how to find your target audience without missing a beat.
Types of Target Audience
There are four main types of target audience, and plenty of examples to go with them:
1. Niche
A niche target audience has been segmented into a specific group. These groups are often based on a particular demographic but can also be defined by other factors, such as age or income.
Example: If your business caters to middle-aged women with children, you could use the term "women with families" to describe your niche target audience.
2. Broad
The broad target audience is often used for generic products and services. For example, toothpaste, grocery stores, car insurance—you get the idea.
While this audience has a lower purchasing power than others, it’s still an effective target for your brand or product, cost-effective, and effective in boosting brand awareness among your potential customers.
3. Micro
With a micro-targeting approach, you can segment your audience into smaller groups by using multiple factors.
Micro-targeting allows you to tap into the most likely audiences to engage with what you're selling and make them feel like they're part of a special club.
4. Macro
A macro-target audience is a large group of people interested in the same thing. They can be defined by their interests, demographic characteristics, or lifestyle choices.
For example, most people who enjoy eating out at restaurants also watch cooking shows on TV. Many more consumers are interested in food but don't have time to cook it themselves, so they will watch these shows instead. In this case, the macro target audience is "foodies."
Define Your Target Audience
Defining your target isn’t rocket science.
With the following easy steps, you’ll be on your merry way to defining your target and getting it right:
1. Create customer personas
A persona describes a specific type of reader/customer who makes up your current audience.
They can be as detailed or general as you need them to be but can include the following information:
- Name
- Age
- Gender
- Job titles
- Income level (or other financial indicators)
- Location
- Education level
- Demographic traits, such as male or female
Use this information better to understand your readers/customers’ needs, which will help you create products tailored specifically for them.
For example, if you want to sell dog toys online, finding out what types of dogs they own would help you determine which toys are best suited for every kind of dog.
2. What exactly are they searching for?
Unless you are a mystical visitor whisperer, here are some tools that can help in identifying what they're searching for:
- Social listening tool to find out which words and phrases your target audience uses most often when talking about your brand on various social media sites.
Some of these tools include HubSpot Social Media Management Software, Hootsuite, and BuzzSumo, to name a few.
- Keyword research tools like SpyFu or Google Keyword Planner will tell you which search terms are most popular with visitors.
You can now identify potential buyers/readers by what they're interested in learning more about (and possibly buying).
- Customer survey tools such as SurveyMonkey or Google Forms allow you to get direct input from customers on who they are and why they buy from specific brands.
You also identify gaps between what customers say they want versus what they get from similar brands that don't meet those needs well enough.
3. What channels and media do they favor?
Where do they source online information and entertainment, or just hang out and have fun?
What do they read?
What social channels do they use?
What do they watch on television or listen to on the radio?
For example, say your target audience is young professionals in New York City interested in food. Some might be following celebrity chefs on Instagram or watching cooking shows like Top Chef at 8 pm every Wednesday.
Knowing this type of thing will help you better understand how and where to reach this particular audience with relevant content—and give you added insight into how best to create such content!
4. What solutions do you offer?
Before you even define your audience, you need to know that it's not about you or your brand.
It's about your readers/customers. As such, put yourself in their shoes and answer these questions and more:
- What problems do you solve for your audience?
- How does your product or service help your audience?
- How does your product or service make their lives cooler, easier, better, faster, and more pleasant than they would otherwise be?
- What benefits do you offer them in exchange for their time and money?
Learning all this will enable you to create the kind of content your audience can fall head over heels in love with.
5. Conduct an in-depth competitive analysis
Analyze your competition by looking at the websites getting the most traffic and comparing them with yours.
- What are they doing differently?
- Are their products better than yours?
- How do they market themselves online?
A deep analysis, including keywords and phrases visitors use, will give you insights into their success and tips on improving your content to reach a wider audience.
It also helps determine which SEO strategies may be worth trying (and ones that aren't). If a competitor has developed an effective system for targeting keywords, it's likely worthwhile for you.
6. Deploy Google Analytics and Facebook Insights
Google Analytics and Facebook Insights help you with deep and precise audience data.
These tools will provide you with vital visitor data, such as geolocation, how they interact with your site, age, and other demographics. They are free to use and allow conversion tracking (i.e., measuring how many people complete a particular action on your website).
The tools provide all these insights via an easy-to-use and interpret dashboard and dazzling visuals, such as graphs.
7. Contract a marketing consultant
Sometimes reaching your audience might be a bit challenging.
Whether you are in charge of content management or have an in-house content creator or outsource a digital marketing agency, a marketing consultant is vital.
They’ll provide deep audience insights that’ll help develop an effective marketing campaign.
Types of Content Marketing
When you're creating your content marketing strategy, it's crucial to have various types of content.
Here are some examples:
- Blog posts
- Infographics
- White papers/eBooks/reports
- Videos or animated GIFs (for example, explainer videos) or short-form video series (maybe 2-3 minute episodes) on specific topics in your industry
- Podcasts that are either long-form (20+ minutes) or short-form (2-3 minutes)
- Social media posts with quotes from experts within your brand's industry
- Photos taken at events, conferences, etc., or photos related to a new product launch article.
- Press releases (helpful in announcing new products).
How to Know You Are Doing It Right
Failing to measure the success of your efforts is like winking at your crush in the dark; you won't know whether they notice or if they respond.
With 25% - 30% of your marketing budget developing a digital marketing strategy, measuring success is a necessity.
1. Social shares
Social shares are a great indicator of how well your marketing content resonates with your online audience.
The more people who share your content, the more people will see it, and the better chance you have of building a personal brand as an expert in your field.
You can use Google Analytics or any other social media management tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to track social shares.
2. Conversion rate
Your goal could be getting your target customer to sign-up, purchase, or download your whitepaper.
Whatever the desired action is, this is what your conversion rate measures: how many people are doing that thing compared with all visitors to your site.
A conversion rate of 10% means that 10 out of 100 visitors did what you wanted them to do, and so on.
3. Leads generated
Leads generated tell you how many people have requested more information from your brand.
You get leads by developing effective outbound and inbound marketing strategies.
For example, if your company publishes ten blog posts per month and each post converts at a 4% rate, 40 new prospects will contact you each month.
4. Sales driven by content.
Sales driven by content creation is the most important metric of all.
If your content marketing efforts aren't producing tangible results for your business, you may want to rethink how you approach content.
5. Rankings
If your pages don't have top rankings for their target keywords, you're missing out on a ton of traffic.
Also, ensure that your visual content is ranked highly, for instance, on video streaming sites such as YouTube and Vimeo and social media sites.
6. Site traffic
Site traffic measures how many people visit your website.
Google Analytics and website statistics provide marketing analytics such as how many visitors your site receives, their location, what keywords they used, what pages they view, how long they stay on each page, and much more!
The volume of visitors gauges customer engagement and whether your marketing content resonates with people who aren’t already familiar with your brand.
Remember, high-quality content gets you more site traffic!
Reach Your Intended Audience With Zoey
If you try to sell to everyone, you’ll sell to no one!
At Zoey, our content marketers are all about reaching the right audience. If you need help creating valuable content, we have an expert digital marketer ready for that role. To know more about how we can optimize your content, contact us or view our vast professional services.
Photo by Duy Pham on Unsplash. Thanks, Duy:)
