Thought Leader Series: How to pre-plan, target and market to your audience

Zac Johnson is a marketing expert who helps online brands and businesses get the most out of their data and marketing efforts. Read more through his blog.

The Internet is growing at a rapid pace and increasing along with it is the amount of content that overwhelms us all on a daily basis. With over 300 million blogs on the Internet and over 1 billion active sites, it's no longer a matter of simply creating content - it's now all about creating the right content for your target audience.

As business, brands and marketers, we know that content is king, but without the right content hitting the right audience, it's all just noise in the background. To find the most success and results with your content creation and online marketing, you need to pre-plan who your content is for, know the value you are providing and how you are going to convert new site visitors into a high-value leads.

Want to create content your audience will love?
Know who it is created for and the value you are providing. 

By the end of this article, you will have a clear focus on why and how you should be creating content while also minimizing wasted time and increasing conversions in the process.

Build a foundation before you build a house

Before you start creating content for your site or marketing campaigns, you first need to know who you are creating content for and why. Here are a few quick questions you can ask yourself before moving forward.

• Who is my target audience/customer?
• Is my target audience in buying or research mode?
• What is the best information I can provide to result in a lead?

A good example of how to look at this would be if you were running an ad campaign for a child's toy. It would be in your best interest to build out ad copy focused toward parents and showing the benefits of the product while also featuring a child happily playing with the toy. The target audience for this campaign would be parents with young children.

Keep this in mind, as we will use it in our next focus point as well.

No matter what you are selling or the message you are trying to deliver, knowing who your target audience is and what they want is to key to increasing conversions, sales and engagement.

Who is your audience and what do they want?

With your target audience and product (or message) in place, it's now time to find to best places for you to advertise or share your content.

Any of the following options would work, but depending on your expertise and budget, results will vary. Again, in each of the examples below, we'll use parents as the target audience.

• Search marketing - Before making a purchase online, most people will look for coupons or reviews. Should you create content based around either of their two concepts, there is a very good chance that your users will already be in buying mode. Search marketing for this model can be done on both an organic or paid method.
• Facebook ads - With over a billion active users on their site, Facebook is one of the best sources for direct advertising to your exact audience. Through the use of Facebook Ads, you can build out detailed demographic ad campaigns and get your message right in the face of parents, moms-to-be, newlyweds, divorcees and every other demographic in-between.
• Media buying - Through media buying, you can serve advertising on relevant websites based on the demographic audience you are going after. A good example of this would be parenting websites and blogs.

No matter what advertising method you prefer, as long as you are putting your content in front of the right audience, you are on the right path for success.

Find your audience and give them what they need

It's easy to create content and get lost within your own details. For times like these, less can be more. Give your audience exactly what they are looking for while also minimizing distractions. In most cases, people simply want results or confirmation on what they are looking for - such as coupons codes or product reviews.

As with all advertising and marketing, the end goal is to always result in an action (click, sale or a lead). Don't complicate the process by providing too much information or ways for the user to click away from your site.

With the above factors in place, you should have a working model for targeting your demographic audience and hitting them with actionable content on a platform or website that's related to your message.

If you are interested in learning more about how content development and inbound marketing strategies support one another, check out another one of our articles, "If content is king, then what is inbound marketing?"

To learn more about how you can improve your inbound marketing efforts, get a free inbound marketing assessment.

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