Understand Your Audience for Successful Content Marketing

The Content Marketing Institute came out with a study that explores how to be successful at content marketing.

According to CMI’s study, “the 39% of B2B small business marketers who have a documented content strategy are more effective in nearly all aspects of content marketing than their peers who either have a verbal-only strategy or no strategy at all.”

You need a plan. But before you create a  content management plan, you should figure out how you’re going to analyze your success. Are you going to analyze success by how many clicks you get? By how many new readers? How are you going to gather this data?

Then you should consider your audience. Do you want to segment your audience and market towards a specific subset? Do you want to try to target your audience as a whole? You should create a general profile of your audience. Include their age, sex, level of education, marital status and job status.

Once you do that, you can start thinking about what your audience needs. Do they all share the same needs? Does every person want a solution to a particular problem? Can you offer that solution? Dig a bit deeper and think critically about your audience. What do they believe in? What do they do when they first wake up?

Obviously, not all of these questions will be important, but they can help you create an idea in your mind of what your audience needs. Naturally, once you figure out the profile of your audience, how you’re planning on analyzing data, and what your audience needs, you can begin to plan your content marketing strategy. Your strategy will help you figure out the best time to release a new product, talk about a benefit of your service, or unleash a new business plan.