It’s a fact, you need to know your audience for your content marketing strategy to be effective.
Unlike traditional forms of advertising, such as newspaper or billboard ads, which target a wide audience, content marketing takes a different approach.
It focuses on delivering your marketing message to the individuals who are most inclined to find the information, and eventually, your product or service, appealing.
What Are The Types of Audiences?
Not all audiences are alike. Knowing the differences can help you better write to their specific needs. Jharaphula breaks down internet readers into six distinct groups.
1. Friendly audience.
These are your loyal followers. Your marketing to this group doesn’t have to focus on the value of the brand and, instead, can focus on sharing news about things like new products, VIP sales, and upcoming events.
Interactive content works best with this group since these people are the ones most likely to share a post, leave a comment or reply to a question.
2. Apathetic audience.
This group is interested enough to follow your content but rarely responds to posts with questions or comments.
These are your lurkers.
3. Experienced audience.
This is the group on which you want to focus the majority of your marketing efforts.
They have likely been following your content for a while, but require a connection with your company to take that final step to become a regular customer.
4. Uninformed audience
This audience has little idea or has already developed an opinion about your company or product. This can be an untapped market, especially if you are looking to add to your customer base.
Just be aware that this audience will require more time to make a buying decision since they first need to familiarize themselves and feel comfortable with your brand and product line.
5. Hostile audience
These are people who have a negative attitude towards your company or product. Maybe they had a bad customer service experience or their neighbor or brother-in-law has shared a bad experience with them.
These can also be people who have no need or desire for your product.
For example, vegetarians would be a hostile audience for a meat distributor. Your marketing dollars would be better spent focusing on other groups.
6. Opportunistic audience
The opportunistic audience is looking to make a profit from your content or product. This could be a good thing, depending on what you are offering.
For example, if you are offering a sales opportunity or wholesale pricing, this is the group to target. Just be aware that they are looking for a way to make money from their transactions with you.
How to Define Your Content Marketing Audience
Once you know what type of audience you are going to target with your marketing efforts, it’s time to further define your content marketing audience.
Use your own customer data and your keyword research to see who is looking for (and buying) products such as yours. Look at age, geographic location, gender, education, and income.
You might even consider their politics, since this influences where they choose to look for information online.
Keep in mind that the more specific your audience, the more successful your content marketing will be.
There are several good online tools to help you with your research. Google Analytics can provide good information about who visits your website, their age, and gender, where they live, and how they arrived at your website.
SEMrush also offers a useful research tool as does Audiense.
The Connection Between Target Audiences and Content Marketing
Successful content marketing depends on finding a niche audience for your content, and your products and services. The more tightly-defined your audience, the more successful your SEO efforts can be.
For example, there is a lot of competition for people looking for information on “gold jewelry”.
However, if you further define your market to target those looking for “gold earrings for teenage girls”, you’ll likely be able to attract more readers for your pages, and ultimately get more sales.
Successful Content Marketing with WriterAccess
WriterAccess makes it easy to connect with more than 15,000 talented writers who can help further your content marketing efforts.
Armed with your clearly defined target audience, our talent pool can craft well-written, targeted, and optimized articles, blog posts, social media posts, ebooks, and white papers.
Working with a content marketing partner, such as WriterAccess offers a number of advantages.
For example, you don’t have to add a staff member to produce your content. You pay our writers for the work they produce. This not only saves having to pay a person during slow content periods but also having to pay for benefits and taxes associated with a staff person.
When you work with WriterAccess, you also have the trusted and reliable WriterAccess name and reputation behind your writer, giving you peace of mind you may not have if you hire a freelancer on your own.
We’ve vetted and tested our writers, so you don’t have to.
WriterAccess track record is pretty impressive. To date, our writers have completed more than two million projects for customers with a 99.97% success rate.
We make it easy to give us a try. WriterAccess offers a two-week trial period, and we invite you to visit us today to get started.
