The second in the series of “10 tips to make content convert” from the Content Marketing Show 2013.
The importance of understanding your audience can never be underestimated. The secret to creating successful content is knowing who your audience is, and what they want to read. It sounds obvious but it’s amazing how often this basic requirement is overlooked.
It’s certainly not rocket science, but miss this key requirement and your content will bomb…. get it right and your audience are putty in your hands.
Do your research
As time consuming as research can be, it offers an invaluable window into the minds and habits of your target audience. It makes good business (and conversion sense) to discover the interests of the people you are targeting. By utilising tools such as Followerwonk, Facebook Ad planner and good old fashioned Google searches, means that a lot of this information is at your fingertips. NB: I may put together a blog detailing some of the techniques using these tools.
Create personas
Assigning characteristics to personas offers an extremely powerful method of visualising your target audience. Make sure you read this great article detailing 6 Core Marketing Benefits of Personas from Lauren Sorenson of Hubspot.
Talk to people
Get back to basics. If you know people in the space you are advertising, speak to them, find out what makes them tick and what interests them. Go to your audience – fish where the fish are! Attend events or meet ups and engage with the people you ultimately want to reach and pick their brains.
Hang out in forums
Spending 15 minutes a day in the forums of your target audience is a huge win. Not only will these forums contain pages and pages of historical conversations for you to trawl through, but there is also a ton of fresh and topical content which allows you to keep up to speed with current discussions and new trends.
In short, the more time you spend researching your target audience, the far better the chance of creating relevant and current content that will captivate readers. After all, an engaged audience is far more likely to convert than a disengaged one.
10 tips to make your content convert
Over a series of posts I will be sharing 10 tips that you can apply to your content to make it convert.
Tip 1 – Define your objectives
Tip 2 – Understand your audience
Tip 3 – Use the language of your customers
Tip 4 – Concentrate on headlines
Tip 5 – Anchor products into content
Tip 6 – Calls to action and triggers
Tip 7 – Visual impact
Tip 8 – Add value
Tip 9 – Never stop testing
Tip 10 – Play to win
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