The second in the series of “10 tips to make content convert” from the Content Marketing Show 2013.

tip-2-understand-your-audience

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.

Main Article

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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Justin Taylor

Justin's path into design and marketing has been anything but conventional. A random selection of career decisions saw him designing rave flyers, t-shirts and (although refusing to divulge his stage name) he allegedly did a summer stint in Gt Yarmouth as a magician before finally settling on a career in marketing.