How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business – Part 3: Target Audience
Learn how to create an effective content strategy for your business with this free video course. Part 3 of 12.
This is Part 3 of our free How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business video course.
This lesson looks at ways and methods to identify the demographics, interests, and pain points of your target audience, create user personas for your business, and understand the buyer’s journey and what types of content will be most relevant and valuable to your audience at each different stage of their journey.
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Watch the video lesson below or refer to the video transcript:
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome back to our video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.
So far, we’ve looked at what a content strategy is, why your business needs one, and the benefits and importance of having a clear and defined content strategy in module 1.
We then looked at the main challenges of managing content effectively and what we need to put in place before we can develop an effective content strategy. That was module 2.
This is module 3, and this lesson is all about identifying and understanding our target audience.
Understanding our target audience is essential to develop an effective content strategy that will help our business succeed.
By identifying key characteristics of our target audience such as demographics, their interests, and their pain points, we can then create content that will speak directly to their needs, desires, and motivations.
So, how do we identify our target audience?
First, let’s look at what we are trying to understand about our audience.
Demographics relates to a market or a sector of the population.
Understanding our audience’s demographics lets us tailor our content strategy and content to better meet the specific needs of our customers.
Demographics relates to attributes like age, gender, income, education, occupation, geographical location, maybe even their family structure or lifestyle, if that’s important, and psychographics.
Psychographics is similar to demographics, but it deals with attributes that are harder to observe, such as mental and emotional characteristics and motives, whereas demographics are more visible and easier to determine.
So, things like your audience’s values, beliefs, and attitudes are psychographic attributes, whereas age, income, and occupation are demographics.
Now, the next set of information that we want to identify relates to our target audience’s interests and hobbies.
Understanding our target audience’s interests and hobbies can help us create messaging and advertising content that will fit their preferences and resonate with our audience, keep them engaged longer with our business or website, and create a more personalized approach that will help to increase our chances of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.
To identify the interests and hobbies of our audience, we need to know things like:
What do they like to do in their free time?
What are they interested in learning more about?
Here are some examples of questions we can ask to uncover these answers:
- “What are some of your favorite hobbies or activities outside of work?”
- “What are some of the books, movies, or TV shows you enjoy?”
- “What are some of the websites or blogs you like to visit?”
- “What kind of music do you like to listen to?”
- “What kind of events or activities do you like to attend?”
- “What kind of sports or fitness activities are you interested in?”
- “What kind of hobbies or activities do you enjoy with your family?”
- “What are some of your favorite travel destinations or dream vacation spots?”
- “What are some of the volunteer or community activities you’re involved in?”
- “What are some of the causes or social issues that you care about?”
Another area we want to identify about our target audience are their pain points.
Their challenges, problems, and frustrations.
So what problems are they trying to solve?
And how can your product or service help to address these pain points?
Understanding our audience’s pain points lets us tailor our content to address their specific needs, desires, and concerns.
Now, how do we gather data about our target audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points?
If you visit the page listed on this slide, you will find more detailed information about each of these sources and links to tools and resources that you can use to gather this data.
Another way to identify your target audience is to create user personas for your business.
A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
User personas provide a detailed and specific picture of who your target audience is, what their needs and goals are, and how they think and behave.
You create a user persona from the data and research gathered about your target audience.
And these allow you to address your ideal customer when creating your content.
And there are a number of free user persona online generators that you can use to create user personas.
Visit the URL on the screen for a list of free tools.
The other important area that will help you identify your target audience and their needs, is understanding your customer’s buyer journey.
The buyer journey is the process that a potential customer goes through before making a purchase.
The stages of the buyer journey are typically divided into Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention.
In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a problem or need that they have.
In the consideration stage, our potential customer is actively searching for a solution to meet their needs and is considering their options.
In the decision stage, potential customers have made a decision to solve their problem, and they are now looking for the best solution, and they are ready to make a purchase.
In the retention stage, the customer has already purchased the product or service and is now using it.
Since they have already purchased, this stage is not typically considered to be part of the customer’s purchasing journey but your content strategy still needs to accommodate this audience group in terms of retaining them and building customer loyalty.
Visit the URL on the screen for more details on understanding your customer’s buyer journey, the types of content you can create for each different stage of their journey, and useful tools and resources that will help you save time.
So, to summarize what we have covered in this lesson, let’s look at the action steps that we need to take to identify our target audience.
One, gather data about their demographics, interests, and pain points. There are various methods you can use to do this,
Two, create user personas. There are free online user persona generator tools that you can use, and
And three, understand the customer’s buyer journey and the best content types to help them at each stage.
For detailed tutorials covering each of these areas and links to tools and resources, just visit the URLs shown on your screen.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at setting content goals to create an effective content strategy.
Thank you for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next lesson.
- Go to Lesson 4.
- Return to the video course outline.
Tutorials
See the following lessons and tutorials for more information about the topics covered in this video lesson:
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Image: Robin Higgins. Music Bensound.
