Success in Content Marketing is Greatly Increased when You Know Who Your Target Market is.
Higher engagement, increased social sharing and greater client retention are all end results of a successful content marketing plan, but none of this will happen if you are not aiming your content at your ideal target market.
Many successful companies are able to elevate the success of their content marketing plan by thoroughly understanding who their target market is.
No doubt you have received a well-timed email or blog post which really ‘talks to you’, ‘hits your senses’ and makes you feel like the company ‘really understands your needs’.
Once you and your content team have identified who your target market is, your emails, blog posts, videos and all inbound marketing strategies, will begin to resonate more and more with your ideal audience.
How to get to know your target market
Having a template which asks the key questions about your target market is essential and allows you and the marketing team to have these on file. Every time you need to create a blog post or send an email, it is then very easy to pull out the file and ensure your message is going to resonate with your target market.
Creating persona’s as part of your content market plan
We like to refer to your target market as your personas. Initially, the marketing manager or content marketing manager will build out the handful of personas your company will be looking to reach and being to educate the rest of the team as to who they are.
Here is an example of a persona for the financial planning industry.
Business type: Financial Planner
Many financial planners tend to target the baby boomer generation and as such one of the personas can be called:
Richard the retiree
Richard worked up to the age of 65 and retired 7 years ago and his goal is to live a comfortable life in retirement and generate a consistent, safe return on his liquid assets. Richard values steady, reputable, quality investments and is giving a very wide berth to get-rich-quick schemes. Some of his challenges are being able to sort through the incredible plethora of investment options available and knowing who to trust. His biggest fear is losing a large chunk of his investment portfolio in a GFC style melt-down as he doesn’t have the capacity to build his net wealth up again.
As you can see, we start to form quite an accurate picture of who we are targeting when crafting our messages, allowing us to talk to Richard the retiree as if we know him personally.
To take it one step further, we highly recommend you attach an actual photo of a 72 year old retiree so you can really get in the zone when writing your next
piece of engaging content.
As you begin to think of ideas for your next content piece, you bring up the customer persona (some call this an avatar), and you simply get into the zone as if you were talking to Richard one on one.
17 questions to clarify who your target personas are
Here are some of the questions you might ask when building out your target market and customer personas/avatars.
- How old are they? Married? Single? How many kids do they have? Where do they live?
- What is their current occupation? How much are they earning? What level of education do they have?
- What do they want to achieve in life? What goals do they have? What do they value the most?
- What challenges are they currently faced with? What are their pain points?
- What are they currently reading? Who do they trust? Who is in their centre of influence? What groups do they belong to?
Another key question to ask and which is often overlooked is…
What are the top 2 outcomes they are looking to get from your company?
This will help you communicate the right subtle call-to-actions within your content pieces. Often this is a powerful strategy which will help your message hit the right buttons with your target market and have them calling you for more information.
So who are your target personas? How many customer avatars has your organisation developed? We would love to hear some of your thoughts and sample avatars. Feel free to post them in the comments section below.
