As a business, the content you put out is your most significant opportunity for showcasing your value and resonating with your customers. As such, it is essential to have content that appeals to these consumers, answers their questions, and solves their needs.
Let’s discuss eight different ways to identify this type of content. We will also walk you through the various tools and approaches you can utilize to develop relevant content for your audience. These tools will allow you to lay a firm foundation for producing consistent content for your business, even if you aren’t currently making content.
How to identify the right content for your audience
There are many different forms of content that you can make for your audience. You can explore email newsletters, audio content such as podcasts, visual content, or even blog posts, among others.
Depending on your business, some of these content forms are more effective than others. What you choose, all boils down to your audience’s tastes and preferences. For you to identify the right content for your audience, you need to firmly understand who they are and their personas.
Doing this upfront will save you time and the agony of investing in the wrong content type. For instance, let’s say you spend a bunch of time and money establishing a platform for blog posts only to realize your audience prefers video content. It will also allow you to know how to make use of the content you already have, reuse it, and still make it appealing.
But, how do you begin to identify what your audience likes? Here are eight different ways you can do that:
1. Identify your best-performing content
You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. Sometimes you already have what you need to appeal to your audience in the form of old content. It is easy to overlook this approach, but it is highly effective if well implemented.
Analyze all your content, identify what the audience liked the most, and focus on it. This can be infographics, reels, tips, listings, or even tests. To help you identify what is working there are some key metrics that you can focus on when analyzing your content. These can be split into two main categories:
- Engagement metrics: The number of likes, shares, saves, comments, and clicks that your content receives on a given platform. The higher the level of engagement, the more relatable the content was for your audience.
- Awareness metrics: Covers impressions and reach. Impressions are the number of times a post shows up on someone’s timeline while reach is the potential volume of unique visitors that your post could have. If you are running a business, you could also evaluate the number of referrals and conversions that your post or content makes.
You can find some tools for analysis in the sections below.
2. Repurpose the good old stuff
Secondly, you can simply reuse or republish content that performed well before. It worked back then, so it could work again this time around. However, we advise tailoring it and repurposing it for different platforms or tweaking it to different formats.
For example, you can edit a well-performing video into a reel, which is simply a different form of consumption for your audience. Or, you can post parts of a high-traffic blog post as social media content as long as the information is still relevant.
Identifying the right content to reuse or republish ties into the first point discussed above. Using the metrics identified, you can identify a post that had the highest number of comments, shares, clicks, impressions, and reaches, and this can be an excellent place to start. However, it doesn’t end there.
Reinvigorating a piece involves not simply reposting the content as it was, but giving it a new lease of life. This can include reusing visuals in a creative way, turning a simple static post into a dynamic experience, adapting the content for cross-platform sharing, or even creating a series of posts from one idea.
3. Involving your audience
At the end of the day, you are creating content for your audience. There is no better feeling or sense of fulfillment than a customer knowing that their input is valued and appreciated.
Feel free to reach out to your audience for insights. Ask them what they would like to see and implement their feedback into your content strategy. There are a couple of ways you can do this.
- You can hold polls or Q&As on platforms such as Instagram.
- Review the audience’s comments on content that you have already posted.
- Alternatively, you can have simple, quick questionnaires to fill in, akin to communication surveys, sharing their thoughts and insights.
Another effective way to involve your audience, especially as a business owner, is to conduct email surveys. This means leveraging on your mailing list, coupled with email management tools, to schedule your email surveys and monitor customer feedback, archive their feedback, and analyze it later for better content development.
4. Leverage analytical tools
Data collection has never been easier, same with data analysis.
With intuitive tools such as Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Google Analytics, and other marketing tools, you can easily identify what type of content your audience likes. You can also learn more about your audience’s geographical location, interests, gender, and age.
It’s a win-win idea because, with the insights that these tools give you, you can also prepare for, say, a Facebook Ads campaign or other promotions. Shoot two tasks with one stone, so to speak.
These are all crucial factors that can better tailor your content to their needs and preferences. Ultimately, they will yield better engagement, along with an overall effective marketing campaign.
5. Create audience personas
This strategy ties to the point above. Your target audiences already most likely have personas. A persona is a representation that is founded on behavioral data and knowledge gained from understanding their tastes and preferences. Once you have insights into your audience, you can then outline your marketing personas.
Typically, personas make the audience relatable while giving you a better understanding of their interests, desires, fears, pains, and preferences. Additionally, with the data collected, you can further dissect and diversify specific customer personas, allowing you to narrow down on specific niches, and further tailoring your content to your audiences’ preference.
With this information, you can easily develop more targeted information that the consumers will find valuable. This can take the form of identifying the right influencers for a given campaign, segmenting email lists, selecting the right time to launch a marketing campaign, and even identifying the right channels to push specific content. This, in turn, will allow for a better, more effective content strategy for your business.
6. Utilize social media tools
Social media is the best platform to share your content, gather consumer data, and engage with your existing and potential customers. Utilizing social media tools would give you more in-depth insights than analytics tools, some of which we mentioned earlier.
Here are a few of our favorite social media tools:
In a fast-moving world, you need a tool to show you what’s trending on social media news. With this tool, you can see different categories, view different topics, and see exactly what your audience is discussing. This way, you can tailor or optimize your content to align with your consumers’ preferences.
Google Trends allows you to see how a specific search time performs over time. You can specify the location, date range, or even category, and it will show you how a particular term or word is performing. This will allow you to craft your content in a way that would also perform well once posted.
Two more honorable mentions include Sprout Social and Buzzsumo platform. They allow you to see what content or topics are performing better, so you can generate content that fares well once posted.
7. Look at what your peers and competitors are doing
Once again, you do not have to reinvent the wheel. Simply look around you and see what your competitors are doing. If they take a specific approach towards creating content for their audience, it could be working out well for them.
Observe and learn from them. But make sure that you tailor what you learn to your specific business and your specific audience.
You can gather the requisite information by joining forums and Facebook groups. You can also follow your competitors’ social media accounts, check out their backlinks or even attend conferences and seminars to gain the insights and knowledge that you need.
8. Experiment
At the end of the day, everyone is just trying, and so should you. Go all in and experiment with different types of content. You may just stumble upon something that both you and your consumers like, and it will be the beginning of a successful period in your business’ content development approach.
You still need a plan, though. For starters, you can audit your existing content. This can then be followed by setting specific milestones, which you will then monitor to gauge performance. Having this structure would allow for a more successful approach towards content creation. It would also mean that your time and resources won’t go to waste.
Continue to review and revise your content strategy
We have just discussed eight simple suggestions that work for many businesses, but they are not rules cast in stone. Feel free to tweak them to your needs and mold them to the goals that you have for your business. Also, note that there are many more strategies out there that we didn’t discuss in this article, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t find them useful.
Stay curious. Gather as much information as you need, but most of all, implement the lessons that you learn. Without action, this knowledge will be nothing but useless.
Roman Shvydun writes informative articles mainly about everything related to email. His articles have become extremely popular in such areas as Marketing, Business, Productivity, Workplace culture, etc. His articles focus on balancing informative with SEO needs–but never at the expense of providing an entertaining read. See a few more examples of Roman’s articles by visiting the Mailbird blog.
