Semalt: How Better Audience Understanding Facilitates Better Content


Table Of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Importance of Understanding Your Audience
  • How To Understand Your Audience?
  • Conclusion

Introduction

Have you ever read a marketing message, and you felt like the message was designed specifically for you? You can almost bet that the marketer can read your mind because he/she seems to know exactly what you're thinking and speaks your language loud and clear. This only happens when a marketer has a solid understanding of his audience.

Understanding your audience is a crucial key to content marketing success. You can't create engaging content if you don't have an adequate understanding of who your audience are, their likes and dislikes, needs, challenges, motivations, and goals.

When you know your audience, then you would get privy to what they think and how they think it. This is how you conquer the topic of Search Engine Optimization.

Importance Of Understanding Your Audience

If your goal is to increase your brand's equity and ultimately improve your company's bottom line, then you can't afford to undermine the issue of understanding your audience.  

When it comes to creating solid marketing content that resonates with your audience and prompts them to make a purchasing decision in your favor, knowing your audience alone will not make the cut. You need to have an in-depth understanding of who they are and what motivates them. 

There is no disputing that your aim as a marketer is to show your customers who you are, the services you provide, and why you are better than the competition. However, your campaign will be a total disaster if your marketing strategy is centered around you and your needs alone. Solid content is that which is centered around the target audience.

Keep reading to find out more reasons why you need to understand your audience better.

1. It Helps You Define Your Audience

A solid content marketing strategy takes time to create, and you wouldn't want to that time, creating content that your target market cannot connect with. Your target audience comprises people of different ages, gender, geographical location, and educational background. 
 
To know the best language or tone to use in your content, you must be able to define your audience according to their demographics so that you don't make the mistake of using phrases common with youths when targeting adults. Understanding your audience can help you recognize who you are offering your services, thereby tailoring your energy to give them the best that will satisfy their needs and meet your set goals. 

2. Efficient And Effective Advertising

For your advertising messages to be effective, it must be able to attract and sustain the attention of your audience. This can only be possible if you understand your audience. When you know a person well, you know the best way to gain their attention and the words to use or the best tone to convey it. 

As mentioned above, the way to effectively convey a message to youths is not the same for adults. So, to advertise your products or services and get the message down effectively, it is important to know your audience well and design your advertising message in the most appealing way. 

3. Satisfying Services/Products

To produce a product that will sell, it has to be targeted at a certain audience, so it is very important to understand Your audience's needs, tastes, and financial strength to enable you to render the services that will meet all their needs. 
 
You may have great products and services, but if your target demographics can't afford them, no matter how convincing your content is, it may fail to generate the desired results. This is why you need an understanding of your audience to help you segment them according to their needs and purchasing power. 

4. Customer Loyalty

When you know your customers well, you can easily empathize with them, making them more loyal to your brand. You are able to design content that makes the customers feel important and shows that you have their interest at heart. No customer would be interested in your services if they thought your only concern is profit maximization. They want to feel valued; they also want to know how your products and services can solve their problems. 
 
Once you understand your audience's needs and how they reason, it becomes easy for you to win their loyalty, which will positively affect your market reputation.

 5. Increased Turnover

Any company that can satisfy its customers and have earned their trust is sure to increase their turnover. When you have customers that have become loyal to your brand, they will go out of their way to convince others to patronize your brand.
 
Loyal customers can also share your products and services on their social media platforms and invite friends and families to like pages. All these will give your ROI an upward tilt.

How To Understand Your Audience?

Now that you know the amazing benefits of understanding your audience, you might be wondering what you can do to help you understand your audience better. Well, we've got that sorted out too. 
Keep reading to find out how to understand your audience
  • Conduct Market Research
This might sound like a no-brainer, but you'll be surprised to know that so many marketing campaign failures can be traced down to inadequate market research. Many business owners learned the hard way that it doesn't pay to assume the demographics of your target audience. You need to do your research to be certain that your target demographics are indeed the right ones for your brand. 

Research is a vital element to consider when creating your content. It is not something that should be done haphazardly. A thorough market analysis can help you understand your audience's desires, what key messages you should include in your content, and the best way to convey them. It will also save you from wasting time and money in the wrong places.

There are several market research tools that you can use to know your audience better, some of which include American FactFinder, Google Trends, and Google Analytics.
  • Monitor Audience Feedback And Comments 
Feedbacks and comments are very important if you hope to understand your audience better. Pay close attention to how your customers respond to your marketing message, how well and how often they respond? Make room for customers to give feedback on your services and let them know that their comments and suggestions are welcome to serve them better. 

You can learn a lot about your target audience's habits, likes, and dislikes by monitoring their feedback over time. You can also monitor their comments and engagements on your social media pages, blog, and customer support channels. 

For maximum effectiveness, you should seek the services of experts like semalt.com. Remember that this method can be effective only if keen attention is given to all the feedback and necessary adjustments.

  • Conduct Surveys 
This is about the most straightforward way to have a better understanding of your audience. A survey allows you to ask questions about anything you want to know about your target audience to help you craft your content to serve them better. However, you may need to include an incentive to encourage more people to participate in it.

With the advent of tools like SurveyMonkey, it has become so easy to conduct surveys. When creating a survey, you should ask questions that enable you to identify your target audience's challenges, goals, and dreams. 

The questions should be short, and it shouldn't take a lot of time to complete because your audience might likely drop them halfway if they're too long. Including examples next to each question can help your audience know the level of details you want. You can put the surveys on your website, send them via email, or upload them on your social media platforms.
  • Create Buyer Personas 
A buyer persona is simply an in-depth description of your ideal target audience. It provides answers to the five Ws and H of your target audience (Who? What? Why? Where? When? And How?) 

Creating a buyer persona will help you understand who to target with your marketing content, why they need your products and services, what motivates them to make purchasing decisions, and what you can do to convert them.

A buyer persona also gives you an idea of the type of content that will appeal to your target audience. You can tailor your content to cater to your audience's unique needs based on their age, gender, and typical income and education level.
To create a buyer persona, you need to have your audience's basic demographics, such as their age, gender, and geographical location. You should also include details like their education level, typical income, and occupation. An ideal buyer persona should reflect the fears, challenges, and goals of your target audience.

  • Experiment With Products And Service Updates
Another way to understand your audience better is by experimenting with updates to your products or services. When introducing a product or service to your audience, be sure to experiment with little to know if it's acceptable to them or adjustments need to be done before full production to provide the best service.

When you test new ideas with your audience, it helps you know how well your business is evolving with them and possible changes you can make to ensure that your products or services cater to their changing needs.
  • Study The Competition
You can better understand your audience by looking at your competitors (who share the same target audience as you). Identify what they are doing to keep their customers loyal to them, what tone do they use in their content? What types of marketing strategies are they using to attract the attention of the audience? 

This can help you understand how to create content that resonates with your audience. Webmasters like semalt.com can help you conduct a comprehensive analysis of competing websites.  

To conduct a comprehensive competitive analysis, simply follow the following steps;
  • Identify who your competitors are
  • Analyze their marketing strategies and find out if they are achieving great results with these strategies.
  • Examine their content strategy 
  • Find out how they promote their marketing content and the social media strategy and platforms they use.
  • Analyze how well their marketing content can keep their customers engaged.

Conclusion

Good content, especially the converting type, comes off like you are a mind reader. Once your piece moves at the same pace as that of your audience's heartbeat, then you can be sure that it's going to convert. Until you learn the art and science of walking in borrowed shoes, the shoes of your potential audience, then you may never be able to catch up with them soon enough and make them pay attention to you!