How To Identify, Understand, And Market To Your Target Audience

– Effective content marketing begins when you start knowing who your target audience is and what do they respond to. This is called targeted marketing, where you need to learn how to define your target audience, understand them, pick up insights and ultimately, create content that connects with their interests. So, how do you begin? Define your targeted audience, this will enable you to ensure that you’re creating the right content for the right crowd and help you achieve your business objectives. To understand your target audience, you need to answer the following questions, how can I help my audience? What do I offer that can solve their problems? Who are my current customers? What are they doing? Who do I compete with? What do they stand for? And what is my point of differentiation? By understanding this you’ll be able to know who your customers are and what you can do for them. This is a starting point for you to find the content buckets that are relevant for your brand. The next step is to find your audience’s persona, think of them as individuals, these are real people, create stories about them, visualize their age, what they look like, where they work, what they wear, the clearer the persona, the better understanding you will have of their identity. Gender, personality and attitude, family structure, job title and function, where they live, socioeconomic factors such as income, wealth, their needs and wants, their challenges and their fears, and motivations, these personas can be of great help so that you can judge what content works best. Use your Facebook Insights, you can do this by going to your Facebook page, then click Insights, next up is to click people, here you’ll find everything you need to understand your Facebook audience, which could help you develop their personas. Next step is to do an audience analysis, generate insights on who they are and what they want, find your audience’s most important problems, interests and concerns, focus on where your content can help those key points, use this data to guide you, avoid making assumptions without any factual basis, use this knowledge to create your content. Here’s some of the things you can do, focus on their needs, by addressing a particular challenge you’re telling your audience that you care for them, create content that addresses your customers’ questions, create posts on getting the customers’ feedback, list them down and address them head on. Share product benefits, be direct on what are the benefits of your products and stop using generic benefits like saving time or grow traffic, be specific on the upgrades and the benefits that you provide. Create urgency, write in a more urgent matter, you can use words like right now, today or immediately, this will highlight your call to action faster. Also, when there’s an element of scarcity, if there are only a few left of an item, or if you can only purchase it until a certain date, it can also increase your sales. Be clear on your call to action, make sure that the audience knows specifically what they need to do. An effective call to action is firm, direct and hard hitting. Generating targeted content is so important for your social media marketing campaigns, when you’ve identified your target audience, and developed the persona, it’s time to apply this understanding in crafting your content. Be sure to download my free Ultimate Content Share-worthiness Checklist so that you can understand how to create great content that your audience will love. You can also check out my free guide on Building User Generated Content That Gets Engagement so that you can learn how to gather and build up content made by other users. For other great tips and tricks on social media marketing click here to subscribe.Save