Who are you writing or creating content for?
This is a crucial step that is often overlooked. You don’t want to waste your time writing for an audience that doesn’t care what you have to say. Here’s an example of what I mean.
I’m a digital marketer and web designer so these are my core areas of knowledge. My instinct is to write techy articles about analytics, building websites, coding, and the latest design tools. While this will appeal to other people in my industry, they are not my customers or ideal audience. Other marketers and Web designers are not paying me to do what they can already do.
My target audience is going to be business owners, entrepreneurs, and people who represent my ideal audience. The content I create should add value and be relevant to the needs of that target audience. Knowing my target audience is going to drastically change what I write about and how I write it.
If you are going to increase your website traffic you want that traffic to be your target audience!
To reach your target audience you must know:
- Who they are.
- What content will help them.
- How that content will improve their life.
Start by asking yourself the following questions:
Who are my current customers?
If you’ve been in business for a little while, you should be able to see a trend of who your current customer is. This will give you a great starting point to identifying your customer’s demographics.
What industry are they in? What is their job title? What’s the typical age group of my customers? What are they interested in? Where do they hang out online or in real life?
By thinking about these questions, you can start to put together pieces of the puzzle with to discover who your ideal customer or niche is.
What problem does my product or service solve for them?
Your product or service exists for a reason. What is that reason and who would care about it?
Who has the problems that you have the solutions for?
The content you create needs to always revolve around how your product or service can solve their problem, or add value in some way.
Who is my competition and what makes me different?
What do your customers gain by choosing you? Knowing this can give you a competitive advantage and allow for opportunities to highlight these advantages in your content.
Now that you have answered these questions, you should have a better understanding of who you should be writing for.
The next step in defining your target audience is to create a persona for your audience.
The main benefit of doing this is to give you a visualization of your audience. So as you create content, you can refer to this persona and it makes it easier to write directly to that “person.”
An easy way to develop your customer persona is to use this free persona creator from Xtensio.
Have fun and let me know if you have any questions along the way!
