Content Marketing: How to Identify Your Target Market
Studies show that the cost of content marketing is 62 percent lower than traditional marketing and brings in roughly 3 times more leads. It’s a powerful strategy but it only works if you target the right people.
Let’s look at how to identify the right audience for content marketing for small business.
Why You Need to Identify Your Target Market
Content marketing is all about giving your audience content that’s relevant to them. It needs to solve their problems, answer their questions, or provide information that they’re looking for.
Without a good understanding of your niche audience, it’s a complete gamble when you create content. It might be useful for your audience and it might be completely irrelevant to them.
The trouble is, if you don’t meet their needs with every piece of content, you’re going to lose some or all of them. They’ll find their answers somewhere else and once they’re gone, it’s hard to get them back.
What You Need to Know About Your Audience
There are several things you need to know about your target market if you want to tailor your content for them, including:
- The demographics of your audience
- Their most pressing problems
- What they’re interested in learning more about
- Whether they’re at the research stage or the buying stage
Your market’s demographics should inform the format and style of your content. Something that appeals to a single 25-year-old that lives a nomadic lifestyle will be a lot different than what appeals to a married 45-year-old with a mortgage and two kids.
If you create content that targets your market’s most pressing problems and what they’re most interested in learning more about, you don’t have to “sell” them on reading, watching, or listening to it. They’ll do that on their own when it’s good content.
The stage they’re at in the buying cycle is also important. The content you create for someone who’s researching your market will be different than content for someone who’s ready to buy.
You can offer both types of content but you need to make sure people see the right thing at the right time.
How to Identify Your Target Market
There are several ways you can gather information about your target market. The easiest is to work with what you already know. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know a lot about your customers already. Use that knowledge to build a profile of your typical customer.
You can also ask your existing customers for feedback. Ask them what they’re interested in learning more about, what their most urgent problems are, and anything else that will help you flesh out your target market profile.
You can also “spy” on your competitors. Sign up for their email lists to see what kind of information they send out. Subscribe to their YouTube or Instagram channels, follow them on social media, and watch what they do on any other relevant platforms. See how the market reacts to things they offer and take note of the successful content.
The Easiest Way to Implement Content Marketing for Small Business
Content marketing for small business is an effective strategy for reaching new customers but it can be time-consuming. Creating content requires work but you also need to stay on top of the latest changes with the various content platforms. And like anything high-tech, things change often.
If you’d rather focus on your business and leave the online marketing to experts, Nobox Creatives can help. We offer a range of online marketing services to help you grow your business. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can help you reach new customers.
