5 Pillars of Audience-Centric Content
Are you struggling to create content that resonates with your target customers? Abhishek Talreja, founder of Prolific Content Marketing explores five unique strategies to create audience-centric content, geared to get results for your business.
In today’s times, almost every business is producing content. If your branded content isn’t fetching you a growing audience, it’s failing at the very purpose of content marketing. Attracting and retaining audience attention remains one of the biggest challenges for content marketers.
It’s critical to work on creating a content strategy that meets audience needs and is tailored to build strong customer relationships. A majority of the online users recognize the branded content they’re consuming as content marketing.
Hence, there’s a dire need for marketers to understand that branded content should be free of any agendas and biases.
It’s essential to craft a publisher mindset to make sure the audience is enjoying your content and looking forward to each new piece.
Struggling to find the content sweet-spot that’s aimed at appeasing your audience? Here are 5 effective strategies.
Learn More: 4 Unique Strategies to Level Up Your Content Marketing Game
1. User-Intent Mapping
One of the key goals of content marketing is to get organic site traffic through search rankings. Search engines rate content, based on its relevance to the audience’s needs and preferences. Content that meets user’s purpose is likely to get more clicks and engagement.
The result: positive signals to search engines, more site traffic, and higher conversions. In such a scenario intent-based content takes over surface-level keyword-based content – there’s a fine line between the two. A user-intent-analysis helps marketers to understand the objectives behind online search queries.
Searcher objectives can vary based on the stage they are in the buying cycle.
For instance, an awareness stage searcher may be looking to learn more about a topic while a retention stage user might be looking to know more about a product or a company. Take a look at these examples:
In a world where the audience has ample choice, delving into searcher-goals becomes critical to understanding content expectations and delivering on them.
2. Audience Behavior Data
In a competitive environment, marketers need to constantly analyze what content is going down well with their audience.
For instance, companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify are using artificial intelligence to offer personalized product and content recommendations to their customers.
Netflix’s recommendation system saves the company an estimated $1Billion per year through reduced churns.
Hyper-personalized content delivers the right content, to the right people, at the right time. AI systems are helping marketers track audience behaviour and analyze past content performance to create smarter, more personalized content. Businesses are using machine-learning and deep-learning to derive programs that automatically evolve in their understanding of the audience.
Content personalization helps save the audience time and effort, otherwise spent in finding the best pieces of content.
3. Focused Audience Persona Development
In the pursuit of building a subscriber-base for branded content, marketers need to know exactly who they’re targeting.
In-depth persona-development goes beyond demographics and tries to discover the interests of prospective followers. Persona-building needs to incorporate audience aspirations, online behaviour, key challenges, and expectations.
A narrow audience lays the foundation for building a content property with a loyal fan base. While there may be multiple audience segments to target, prioritizing one segment has become the key to achieving audience affinity.
For example, RedBull, the energy drink producer, is a classic example of a brand targeting a niche audience that’s deep into extreme sports and adventure. FreshBooks, the online invoicing tool, is another good example. The company targets small business owners and freelancers looking to get insights on running and growing their business.
Marketers need to understand the audience milieu and culture in the process of creating befitting content. It’s essential to craft experiences that add value, become irreplaceable, and influence decisions.
4. Social Conversation Monitoring
With a large percentage of online users active on social media platforms, marketers can discover a wealth of information from these channels.
Plus, a big part of going audience-centric consists of learning about your audience’s favorite online channels, that is, platforms where they’re most active. The natural next step is to tailor your content to the online channels that are most important to your business.
For example, a brand focusing on Instagram will look at creating attractive Instagram Stories and IGTV videos. Similarly, channels like LinkedIn require you to publish expert articles and long-form status updates.
Channel specific data helps uncover the nature and context of conversations related to a niche, helping marketers to align content to current industry trends.
Social monitoring helps analyze audience reactions on different types of content, helping decipher what works what does not.
5. Competitor Content Analysis
Top competitor content is a good indicator of audience likes and dislikes. Marketers can analyze high-performing competition pieces and make a list of success factors.
Improving quality to make content sought-after is one of the prime-goals on the road to making content more fit for a niche audience.
Hence, based on a competitive-analysis, marketers can set quality-benchmarks and work on making content more desirable.
Tracking competitive audience growth through metrics such as blog readership and social followers is a good way to understand what’s helping competitors to make an impact. Studying a competitor’s growth path can bring forth many useful insights for marketers looking to build a growing audience for branded content. And besides, competitive intelligence helps marketers to discover a content voice that breaks through the clutter and makes an impact.
Such intelligence can go a long way in helping to have a long-term and steady vision towards creating authentic content experiences.
Learn More: Brand Suitability Shows How Content Is Still King (or Queen)
Over to You
Deep knowledge of the target audience lies at the heart of creating an effective content strategy. It’s what differentiates successful content from the majority of the pieces that fail to make a mark. Strategic, impactful content is not a result of a marketer’s whims and fancies. Derived from in-depth audience and customer-data, goal-oriented content does what it’s meant to do – builds brands based on a solid base of loyal fans, subscribers, customers, and evangelists.
