When Your Audience Hates Your Content Marketing Plan was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Any good decision-maker knows that it’s not what he or she likes when it comes to making sound business decisions. Sure, we know what’s in our gut, and we should trust that voice, but decisions are to be made with trusted data, too — whether it’s counsel, research or something else.

Businesses and their marketing tends to have a bandwagon mentality. We see and trend or a buzzword or a way of doing something, and if enough people talk about it, then it it so. This is why I love it when a target audience reveals something totally unexpected about what we’re doing — that we’ve got it all wrong.

Over the weekend, the Content Marketing Institute published a slide from recent research at ExactTarget. The slide shows the differences in what marketers want for their target audience and what the target audience wants from their brand. Check this slide out below, taking note of the data on email marketing, content about products and content about related topics.

While those initiatives were among the top by marketers, the audience was singing to a different tune. Plus one for email being both a top marketing initiative and the desired form of communication from the audience  But, at least for this audience, content about products and related topics were not on their must-read list.

And even though the survey choices seemed a bit misleading (some are related to content and some are related to channels the content is featured in), it got me thinking about what people want in content from a brand.

To me, the data paints a story:

1. People don’t have time to go searching for the content they should care about — they want the brand to do the work for them.
2. People want meaningful, personalized content delivered right to their “front door.”

So what does that mean to our content marketing? The more we can learn about our customers over time, the more data we can gather — whether it’s transactional data, survey data, interviews with our audience — the more we can tailor the content they really want and deliver it to them with a bright shiny bow.

When you think about all the noise we have to sift through every day, it’s mind-numbing. Don’t discount how special it is when you get that opt in from someone to receive communications from your company. This person is saying, “I trust you, and I’m willing to hear what you have to say.” So you better deliver the very best you can.

So how do you do that? Use as much data that is available to you to start understanding your audience. In an interview with Sundeep Kapur late last year, we talked about some of those tactics.

But here are a couple more tips for you:

• Explore the conversion process inside and out. Get to know what that process actually looks like from initial inquiry to the close. No business is going to have the same path, so I can’t tell you to just go talk to sales or just go talk to marketing or just look in your analytics. But if it’s helpful, start from the end and go backwards. Whether you have a CRM tool or just Sally the office assistant — start mining data, start having conversations to understand what the engagement and conversion cycle. The information you uncover in this process will reveal a lot about your audience and the opportunities for improvement in customer service, marketing and more. These are the opportunities where content can really matter.
• Understand the audience to the best of your ability. Who are these people? Why do they buy this product or sign up fro this service? Who is the extended audience — who is influencing the primary target’s decision? Who is funding it? Is it a personal purchase? Do they need a family member to make the decision for them? Does their company pay for it out of an annual budget? When you understand the circumstances around the conversion, your content can better speak to all of them, and better offer a solution in the form of content that matters.

Above all, I think what this particular data from ExactTarget illustrates is that we need to get personal and get to the point. Don’t make your audience work too hard for the content that will be meaningful to them

Bruce Clay Blog

Your Brand, Your Audience and “Design Thinking” was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

Jess addressed an issue yesterday that all businesses face at one point or another: getting into your customer/user’s shoes to make sure what you give them is what they need.

In 3 Ways to Align Your Blog Content with Your Target Audience she writes:

When you understand what challenges your audience faces at what stage, you can begin assigning topics to keywords and building that content into your editorial calendar to offer content to this type of persona.

She’s talking about a blog or website content specifically, but the challenge of empathizing with those using your product or service has a broad reach. It reminded me of a segment I saw last weekend on 60 Minutes, the weekly TV news magazine.

I think every product manager, small business owner, and marketer will enjoy this interview with David Kelley. He’s a designer who’s teaching “design thinking” at Stanford and was the inventor of the first computer mouse (technical revolution) as well as the stand-up tube of toothpaste (everyday useful).

Reporter Charlie Rose starts the segment calling design thinking an “innovative approach that incorporates human behavior into design.” Call me crazy but if you’re not considering human behavior as you design — be it products, services, software, an ad, a website or a content piece — then what are you doing?

Bruce Clay Blog

3 Ways to Align Your Blog Content with Your Target Audience was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.

It’s the question that’s on many people’s minds when they have a blog – who is our audience? What matters to them? If you have a niche blog – one that’s already focused on a particular subject matter – you already know your audience is interested in that, but how do you:

• Continuously hold their attention?
• Give them what they want?
• Draw in new readers?
• Align content with business offerings?

Understanding your audience is at times a guessing game. Your theories about who you’re talking to are made stronger by incremental data gathered over time. But you have to start from somewhere, right?

So before you start tracking your popular content in analytics, you have to think about what’s even relevant to your audience. What to write.

So let’s have a starting point. And that starting point is your business. What are the things your business offers its community? What are the things your brand is known for? How can you align your content to the people who need what you have, in a way that offers value to them?

Today, that’s what we’re going to talk about – a path for creating content for your blog.

1. Segment your audience by your products/services.

You have services and/or products. Who buys them? Start thinking about the differences in your audience by the service/product type (or groups of services/products). When you think about the differences, the persona sometimes becomes very clear.

Ask when they use your products and services and why? What are they trying to achieve? If you have the resources to do a branding exercise, this can be super helpful. But if you don’t, that’s OK, too. Brainstorming on your own or with your team can give you a great starting point.

Let’s use BCI as an example. Our audience type typically varies based on our products and services. We have a category of those who engage in services with us, and then another category of those who take SEO training, use the SEOToolSet and buy our books.

And then we have another audience, our industry. And this category is important to us, too. We also have an audience that will likely never buy from us, but they consume our content, like the blog and newsletter.

These audiences have different interests in the content they want and a whole different set of problems from one another. Some of them may need 101-level content, some may need more advanced content. Some may want tactical how-to info and some may need strategic plans. And some may just want to connect with us on a human level.

Go through this exercise with your business. Write up a persona profiles based on what you know about your audience, and add to it as time goes on. The more data you collect in analytics or by talking to your audience in comments or in social media (where the audience often overlaps), the more defined your persona profiles will be.

2. Know when your audience will crossover to another segment.

There will usually be overlap with your audience. And it’s important to recognize this overlap. Expanding on the BCI example we spoke about in the previous section, we know that sometimes people who buy the book will eventually sign up for training.

When you’re thinking about the behavior of your audience and what they need, think about the stages they go through during the span of their engagement with you. What first might be a book purchase could lead to a training class could lead to services.

It might be helpful to quickly sketch a diagram of the type of customer (segmented by product/service) and what path they are likely to go on during their relationship with you.

For example:

• Reads blog or newsletter > Buys book, attends training, signs up for tools
• Bought book > Attends training, reads blog, signs up for newsletter
• Attends conference training > Signs up for extended training
• Takes training course > Buys services
• Signs up for tools > Buys book, attends training

This type of information can be particularly relevant if you are doing email marketing, but you can also align your blog content with the journey of the customer as well. The types of information they want at different stages of their engagement with your brand varies.

Which brings me to the next point …

3. Know what they are searching for.

Keyword research and audience go hand-in-hand. The information you uncover about who your audience is and what they want fuels your keyword research.

It’s important to know what your audience is searching for because you want to attract new people to your blog with the content you create surrounding the products or services you offer.

Once you have a good list of keywords, segmented by product/service/audience, you want to begin thinking about what sort of content is appropriate for that audience.

This is not only important for attracting new readers to your blog at the moment they are looking for that information, but also because you want to connect with your existing audience and give them the type of information they need.

This is where the personas you’ve already written up can come in handy. And you can also bulk them up in this stage, too. What do these people need at this point in their journey? What are they expecting from your brand? How can you help?

For example, you can make the inference that someone who buys your book (let’s use our book as an example), is a do-it-yourselfer, a small business owner, a budding SEO.

When you understand what challenges your audience faces at what stage, you can begin assigning topics to keywords and building that content into your editorial calendar to offer content to this type of persona.

And don’t forget about the different ways people learn. You can further tailor your content by taking into consideration the many ways people like to consume content.

Did you find this post useful? Do you have comments or ideas? Do tell below!

Bruce Clay Blog