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| Photo credit: Vicki Lam |
Think of content marketing as a conversation: spend time getting to know your audience beforehand so you don’t look unprepared
I’m sure you’ve heard it before: know your audience. But how does this help marketers, especially those responsible for creating content? That’s simple: in just about every way possible.
Whether you’re creating the content yourself (as a writer, video producer, designer, etc.) or directing the effort of others (freelancers, agencies), it’s critical you appreciate the value of understanding your audience — upfront. And I mean, understanding them as completely as you can.
If Abraham Lincoln were here, he’d probably say something wise like, you have to know where the target is in order to hit it. With apologies to Mister Lincoln, here are three ways that knowing your target audience can help content marketers:
1. Creative inspiration
Creative people need inspiration. They thrive on it. Given something that inspires them, creative people can deliver great things. But the opposite is also true — without inspiration, creative people are handcuffed and can only deliver what the person or group requesting the work thinks they want (which is usually not what the audience wants at all).
2. Message resonance
How can you know if the message you’re sending will resonate with those you want to reach? Only if you know who they are and what they want. This doesn’t have to be creepy where we need to know an audience’s innermost desires. But, if we’re trying to change behavior (getting someone to want what we have, buy what we’re selling or agree with our position on an issue), we need to know what will appeal to them.
3. Getting invited in
Back in 1970s America, brands could simply create a TV commercial and broadcast it out to the entire country. They could buy time on all three major networks at the same time (a media buying tactic called roadblocking) and people simply couldn’t avoid it.
This no longer works. Not only is it cost-prohibitive, people are now bombarded with more than 5,000 messages a day, so they have learned to ignore most of them. And technology (like TiVo and Netflix) helps them do it. In order for your message to break through and inspire someone, it has to be more targeted, reaching a specific group of people with a relevant message delivered in the way they prefer.
In reality today, your message has to be good enough to be invited in.
Of course, in order to do any of this you need to understand as much as you can about your audience. What do they like to do, watch, read? Who do they listen to, who is influential to them? What brands do they buy and what does that tell you about their world? And, perhaps most importantly, what do they need that you can provide for them better than anyone?
To paraphrase Mister Lincoln’s famous quote about the importance of sharpening one’s axe before chopping down a tree, if you have six hours to create a message, spend four hours learning about your audience.
