Like most large companies, yours probably has a broad range of market segments. So, how do you create content for multiple audiences?
Content planning for an enterprise-wide audience can be complex. In fact, marketing to multiple audiences is one of the top challenges for tech content marketers, according to a Content Marketing Institute report.
The report found that 68% of technology content marketers say their organization is challenged with creating content that appeals to multi-level roles within their target audience.
Image via Content Marketing Institute
Can you create content that appeals to all of them, or should you segment them for a more personalized experience?
The answer? Focus on their needs. When you do that, you can simplify the process of marketing to multiple audiences.
Use Buyer Personas to Define Your Audience Segments
Dig into your audience data to discover their interests, pain points, and the questions they might have. Create buyer personas so that your creative teams can put a human face on each customer segment.
Then, brainstorm the types of content that will answer their questions, pique their interests, and solve the challenges that face them. That way, you’ll deliver relevant content that will build trust and position your brand as an authority in its field.
When your content becomes a perfect match for their needs, you’ll see more return traffic, more conversions at critical points along their customer journeys, and ultimately, more sales. Even better, you’ll deliver the kinds of personalized experiences that make them realize that your business values them as human beings as well as customers.
Segment Your Content Distribution by Persona
While you can’t define who clicks on a link to your content in organic search, you can direct relevant pieces of content to only those segments in your audience who would be interested through email segmentation. For that reason, it’s critical to get your prospects into your email lists as early in the buyer’s journey as possible.
Additionally, you can target each segment on social media by filtering the audience who sees your boosted posts. Use the same filtering technique on paid search.
On your own website, you can add links to related topics on a sidebar so that people who want more information on a topic that they want to learn more about can find that information with a single click.
When you segment your content by their needs, your teams needn’t worry about whether to create a single piece of content that will address all your target segments. If you tag each piece of content with audience metadata that links it to its relevant audience(s), your content automation program can send each segment only content that appeals to them.
Then, if all your audiences’ interests and needs align, your automation solution will send the same relevant content to everyone on your list. When they don’t align, only the audience segments who need to see that content will see it.
For example, if you sell both commercial and at-home printers, a blog article about how to design an effective marketing brochure will only go to your B2B and non-profit prospects. However, a blog post that teaches your audience how to get more usage out of a printer cartridge will appeal to home users, non-profits, and business owners alike.
Segment Your Blog Content by Category
Listing links to content that people usually search for as a sidebar to your blog steers audiences to the content that interests them most. Using your content platform’s metadata management feature, you can include static content under these categories as well.
For example, the screenshot from our website shown here on the right provides links to various topics we cover. While existing customers might be interested in product updates and fixes that we’ve applied to streamline their Divvy user experience, prospects would be more likely to be curious about our expertise and the capabilities of our content operations platform to meet their needs.
Segment Content by Your Audience’s Place in the Buyer’s Journey
Audiences don’t only differ by their industry, demographics, and needs. Depending on their place along their buyer’s journey, even prospects in the same vertical with similar personas vary in their needs.
A customer journey map can help you create content that meets those funnel-specific needs. For instance, a B2B buyer might not care much about your product’s price at the beginning of her journey. She’s just looking for information that can help her identify and solve a problem she has.
However, as she moves along down the sales funnel, she’ll likely want to compare her shortlist of vendors. One of the factors she’s probably considering is your pricing structure, so a point-by-point comparison piece, including the price, might be a good choice at the comparison stage.
Again, with a robust content metadata solution, you can categorize each piece of content by the audience’s place in the buyer’s journey as well as the other categories we’ve discussed.
Segment Audiences by Content Type Preferences
You’ve heard all the stats. 65% of the population learns best by seeing. 69% of your audience prefers to watch videos about a topic rather than reading about it. And so on.
But how about the remaining thirty-something percent of your audience? That’s where segmentation comes in. When your analytics show you that a prospect — or a segment — of your audience converts better with videos, you send them videos.
Yet the opposite needs to happen, too. Identify those people who prefer to read and hear, and then send them content that matches their content type preferences. It’s all about delivering a stellar experience for everyone in your audience.
But What About Static Content?
Unlike blog posts, email newsletters, and social media posts, your static content usually needs to reach all your segments at once. At the very least, your home page does.
There are several ways to make your home page and other static content appeal to multiple audiences at once. First, you could look for a unifying factor among your target audiences’ demographics, pain points, or interests and write home page content that focuses on that factor — using keywords that will attract all the audiences as they search.
Or, you could use that unifying factor at the top of the page and then use vertical-specific links to pique the interest of those looking for more detailed information, each leading to a vertical-specific page, as this example does:
Image Source: Rivmedia
When a visitor clicks on one of these icons, they find what specifically your company can do — and has done — for others in the same field.
Simplify the Content Planning Complexity
Hitting the mark in today’s digital marketing universe is as complex as three-dimensional chess. But it doesn’t have to be.
With careful planning that leverages all that today’s marketing technology offers, including robust content metadata management, you can simplify the process considerably. DivvyHQ’s content marketing platform has all that and more — including a content calendar specifically designed to simplify content planning across all channels, enterprise-wide.
But the best part? You can try it for 14 days — absolutely free! Start your free trial today!