Targeted Content: How To Write For Your Audience
One of the most important components in all of marketing is the ability of a brand to communicate its mission and values to its customers in a clear and effective manner. In addition to making this clear on their company website, most businesses also take part in various types of targeted content marketing, which ensures their messaging reaches their intended audience groups. But how can you make sure your content is going to resonate directly with the reader?
There are quite a few targeted content marketing tactics and strategies that writers use to make sure that products, services, webpages, and other information and media are easily accessible to the necessary eyes. Not only do precise language choices and calculated phrasing help to attract the right queries, but relevant and applicable topics and information help to satisfy user intent, which — in today’s marketing landscape — is the most critical measurable for search engines like Google, social media platforms, and others.
How do You Target Your Audience in Writing?
While targeting your prospective audience sounds simple in theory, the practice itself actually requires a thoughtful approach that relies on technological tools to reveal user intent, which the content should then address directly. Here’s a simple outline of how you derive that approach:
1. Conduct Research to Understand Your Audience
The primary way to identify your audience is by narrowing down their demographics and behaviors, taking things like geography and psychographics into account in order to build profiles for the different groups you’ll be targeting. This will help you focus on the purpose, goals, and challenges that your readers are facing so you can address them specifically.
2. Decide on Writing Style and Presentation
Depending on the type of business you’re writing for, each brand will aim to establish its own tone of voice that uniquely registers with its intended audience. Since this will vary significantly depending on the nature of each business and the goals of its respective customers, you shouldn’t shy away from being detailed and technical about the products or services they offer. Many interested parties usually appreciate in-depth information that shows a company’s prowess in the relevant industry.
This also includes understanding the style of content readers prefer, whether it’s long or short-form articles, multimedia including infographics and video, or other interactive formatting that helps to keep users engaged. You also want to ensure your content transfers over cleanly to mobile devices.
3. Develop Topics of Interest to Relevant Customers
In reference to applicable writing topics, you always want to consider what exactly your targeted customer base is interested in, whether it’s increasing their own personal knowledge, learning about industry insight and expertise, or product specs and case studies.
While outlining what a company offers and hopes to accomplish through its services, it’s also incredibly helpful for content to touch on an array of relevant adjacent topics that help keep readers informed of past, present, and future topics and context regarding a company’s role and aspirations in a particular market.
4. Use Segmentation to Target Different User Bases
A strategic way to maximize the efficiency of your content production is by separating different user bases into segments to ensure each audience is being catered to at their desired knowledge and interest levels. This means dividing groupings by things like new or existing customers, subject matter novices or experts, and even focusing on individual product categories and buying journeys based on an existing customer’s history with the brand.
Creating Engaging Content for Your Target Audience
Content on a webpage is only as effective as its messaging and relevance, so it’s crucial for a brand to contemplate which subject matters and topics are most sought after by its various customer pools. The following are tips to remember in order to write applicable and valuable content.
Craft Relevant and Engaging Headings
It’s not just readers who are drawn in by blog titles and paragraph headers that match their queries and interests. The vast majority of digital content used in SEO, paid search, email, and even social media marketing rely on precise wording that’s familiar to their targeted audience. This helps businesses hone in on the right audience and reach them in a format where they’re able to engage with the content in a productive way. It’s also crucial that your content adheres to these headings because any misleading or unhelpful information can cause a loss of interest.
Incorporate Conversational Tone or Storytelling
Sounding too technical or robotic are examples of common issues that occur when writing targeted marketing content. Sometimes, these topics can come across as high-brow and are too cut and dry in their delivery, holding the reader back from connecting to the brand due to the lack of clear messaging. Other times, writing that’s too flowery and vague may sound pleasing to the ear, but fails to address any of the relevant concerns and interests of the audience.
The way to bridge these gaps and capture the user is two-fold. The first step is composing content in a more conversational manner that evokes curiosity and encourages further discussion, and the second is to incorporate storytelling into your content strategy. This can include customer testimonials, case studies performed by the company, or just more personal language that draws in readers and keeps them thinking with open-ended concepts or hot-button topics.
Focus on Value-Added Content
While some companies try to display expertise in every subject matter pertaining to their industry, the fact of the matter is that customers will always have options, so concentrating on the most viable audiences shows that you not only understand your user base but you’re also making an effort to address their needs and goals. This means refraining from mass-producing content for the sake of being relevant.
Today’s internet users are privy to the mechanics of Google and other search engines, so they’ve become increasingly strategic when crafting queries. This has made mastering a subject all the more important, but not just from a surface level. Analyzing broad topics from their outside but then diving into a series of more finite points helps add nuance to the content, and when paired with structured information and various multimedia to help drive home differing points, content becomes relatable for a much larger audience who may even be coming from different backgrounds or experience levels.
Take advantage of Media and Interactive Elements
The reason digital content can be so effective from a marketing perspective is that there is a variety of multimedia you can incorporate to make your information more dynamic and presentable. While value-added content is bolstered by relevant facts and detailed context, visual aids like infographics and videos switch up the delivery, and can even reinforce points that may have been glossed over earlier. The same goes for embedding social media posts, including customer reviews, and adding coordinated FAQs.
Another tactic you can use is implementing a quiz within your content, which can be advantageous for a few reasons. One of those is that the business can better understand and track individual customers’ profiles and point them toward the right products or services that they offer. Another benefit of quizzes is that they can help the customer better understand themselves, prompting them to answer relevant questions honestly to better address their questions about a particular subject. If anything, these can help you better segment your audiences.
How Should an Article be Written for Target Audiences?
Writing for a targeted audience is all about being topical, factual, and logically helpful. You first want to engage your reader with an enticing introduction highlighting why a particular subject matters. Then, you want to outline a cohesive argument and structure the format so that you touch on all the necessary points.
Paragraphs should generally be concise, sticking to about two to three sentences while being broken up into sub-sections in order to maintain focus on the subject matter as much as possible. While a conversational tone is encouraged, incorporating relevant facts and examples goes a long way in validating your writing with substance, allowing your readers to trust the authorship.
Of course, utilizing the best SEO practices is a must to ensure your content is being indexed and served effectively across different SERPs, ultimately getting in front of those customers who are most likely to be seeking out and using your products. Finally, you want all content to have a strong call-to-action (CTA) at its conclusion, prompting the reader to take an additional step if they’ve been persuaded by the messaging.
Analyzing Audience Data to Inform Content Creation
There are a few ways you can leverage digital marketing tools like Google Analytics and others to build more informed content strategies that appeal to more specific audiences you’ve curated. These are the most basic avenues to gain insight:
- Webpage Data – Reading into who’s visiting your site, setting up conversions, and even targeting keywords your users are searching can help your site be found more easily.
- Social Media Activity – Understanding your social media audience can help you gain valuable insights on who’s engaging with what content, helping point you in the direction of topics your users are interested in.
- Search History – Using digital marketing tools like Ahrefs or Google Search Console will provide you with keyword volume that can help you learn what exactly your target audience is curious about.
- Monitoring Competition – In any industry, monitoring your competitors is an important metric that helps measure trends, engagement, and even formatting style that resonates.
- Polls and Surveys – While quantitative data is nice, qualitative data is just as useful, allowing a business to hear directly from readers who can offer insight on what it is they’re looking for exactly, from your product and services to relevant subjects.
- Heat Maps and Site Activity – Finding out where your audience is interacting with your website helps show how intuitive it is, from navigation to the information available on various pages. Focusing on making the necessary info more accessible goes a long way and helps users find what they’re looking for quickly.
How to Create Better Content Than Your Competitor
If you’re feeling compelled to improve the content for a business or client’s website and its accompanying marketing material, using all of the tips listed above is a great way to start leading you down the right path. Ultimately, it can take a while to test different strategies, monitor industry trends and competitors, and find a voice that resonates with your customers, but once you do, developing a true relationship with your intended audience will become much easier.
Performing content upgrades, gap analysis, and tailoring the writing style to meet the unique needs of your respective audiences are all crucial to enhancing the user experience. At the end of the day, the more informative and digestible the content is, the better it will resonate with the reader, making you a more reliable source on that topic. Bonus points if you have numerous resources to peer over, too.
At Lamark Media, we strive to deliver the most constructive content based on analytical data and advanced marketing insights to our clients. Using a variety of tools, we have the capability to help businesses across a wide range of industries reach audiences who are curious to learn, and we provide context on current topics and highlight products and services that are relevant to their unique needs. If your company is looking to implement a full-service content marketing strategy, contact Lamark Media today, and we’ll be excited to see how we can assist you with your efforts moving forward.