How To Match Your Content To Your Audience

How To Match Your Content To Your Audience

I was on Linked In recently reading and responding to an inquiry a nonprofit manager was asking in one of the groups I belong to on how to get the word out about their nonprofit.

As you would guess, many gave a laundry list of “do this, do that” answers.

While there were some great ideas provided, it was a data dump to the point of information overload. Even the master marketer would have been overwhelmed at how the message was packaged and delivered. Gauging from the individual’s “level”, it appeared she was at the beginning stages of how to promote and most of the info she received was very advanced. It was clear she received the wrong content at the wrong time.

So, the question today is how do we as marketers ensure that we our delivering the right content to our audience at the right time?

Make sure you match your content to your audience.

1. First, we need to determine whether our audience is at the crawl, walk or run stage.

This is easy to do with our lead generation programs. Do you have your event trigger trees set up so when someone looks at one piece of content, you are suggesting the next piece of content? Is your trigger schedule in the right order? Check your stats. If it isn’t, run some tests to change up the order and see what results you receive. Perhaps you have to change up your content altogether to generate more interest. Testing your content will give you answers on what works and what doesn’t. Or, if you do not have lead generation software, what is your Google Analytics saying about specific pages? Do you see a big drop-off after the home page? It could be they lose interest because there is no or limited content they find valuable, content is of no interest, or they may not understand the content. Again, creating content and testing that content to see what is working will help.

2. Once we know what stage our audience is in, we need to help them navigate through the content and we need to ensure we are in synch with our audience’s needs.

We can do that a number of ways. We can help them navigate through the website with event triggers, surveys, etc, to ensure we are on track with each other. We can, after research of our audience in social media (remember we do that by listening to, interacting with and helping our audience), push out appropriate content to our audience via the social channels they visit, and try to pull them to our website where even more valuable content exists. We can create blogs, with appropriate key words (that match our content) to help our audience find us. But we’re not done.

3. We need to maintain this level of value and be consistent with our content.

This means continuing to understand our audience’s wants and needs and giving them the content they want that will help them. That comes from asking questions, surveying the audience, running tests to see what works and what doesn’t. Are “How To’s” best? What about case studies? White papers? Recent third-party research conducted? Tying content to current events? Is long or short copy best? What about frequency? How often should new content be delivered? When should we deliver content? What should our created vs. curated content mix be? These are all areas to test to find the “sweet spot” of value your audience is looking for and how to keep them coming back for more.

What works for you? We would love to know.

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