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What’s next?
🔎 Identify your audience
“Oh, we have a pretty good idea of who our audience is.”
Says every marketer ever.
But is it true? Not in my experience!
Typically, when I ask a new client to share their audience personas, they give me titles and firmographics.
Oh, and everyone is targeting the C-suite.
You need more than this for great content!
You need to understand your audience. At a minimum, you need insights into what they’re trying to accomplish and what’s keeping them from getting there.
As Dan Kennedy explains in The Ultimate Sales Letter, "To persuade someone, to motivate someone, to sell someone, you really need to understand that person."
If all you have is that you’re targeting CMOs in the technology space, your content will sound just like everyone else’s.
That’s why the first step in documenting your content strategy is documenting your audience.
In this lesson, we’ll explain:
- The most important information to capture about your target audiences
- Why this information matters for your content
- Where to find the insights you need
- How to document these insights
By the end of this lesson, you’ll have:
- A matrix that outlines the key insights for each of your target audiences/personas
Let’s get started.
Audience Template
There’s lots of information you could collect about your audience. The more you know about these people, the better off you’ll be.
But when you’re just getting started, it’s most important to have a firm grasp on:
- Who your audience is
- Their role in the buying process
- What they are trying to accomplish
- Their pain points/challenges
- What topics they care about
- Where they get their information
When you have these insights, you can use them to create content that helps your audience:
- Better understand their challenges
- Overcome those challenges to accomplish their goals
At its simplest, that’s what content marketing is all about—helping your audience to overcome their challenges to achieve something they’re looking to accomplish.
We’ve created an easy template to help you document all of this audience information in one place. (We’ve filled out an example based on our example of a content marketing agency that’s looking to engage marketing roles.)
Here’s how it breaks down.
Data | Persona 1 | Persona 2 | Persona 3 |
Description
Who are they? What roles are they in? What industry do they work in? | |||
Role in buying
Are they a primary or secondary audience for your content? Who is most important? | |||
Job-to-be-done
What are they trying to accomplish? | |||
Pain points
What is getting in their way? | |||
What topics do they care about?
What other professional subjects interest them? | |||
Where do they get their information?
ie. Twitter, LinkedIn, industry publications, etc. |
Description
What’s in a name? When it comes to content, not much. But it’s important to be able to describe the kinds of people you’re creating content for. This will help in your information gathering, as well as your distribution efforts (if you get into paid advertising or anything else that requires targeting).
One logical place to start is common job titles for each persona. What kind of professional roles does your product or service serve?
For example, if you’re an agency selling content marketing services, the roles that might be interested in your services (and your content) may be VP of Marketing, Director of Marketing, and Director of Content Marketing.
If your business offers a global payroll service, you might be looking to engage Human Resources, Payroll or Finance roles. Don’t forget to nail down what level these people work at—a CFO has much different needs than a controller, for example.
This is also a good place to specify the industries your audience works in. That content marketing agency, for example, may focus specifically on creating content for B2B SaaS companies, or they may offer services more suited for consumer-facing brands in retail and CPG.
Role in buying
We’re talking B2B here—in all likelihood, there’s more than one person/function involved in making a buying decision for your product or service.
But you have limited focus, resources, budget, etc., so it’s important to note which personas are a primary focus for your content efforts, and which are secondary. Ask yourself:
- Which personas will be using your product/service to alleviate pain points?
- Which will become champions for your product/service within their company?
These people should be your primary focus. People that have to approve the purchase (e.g. bosses, IT, procurement, etc.) are important but typically secondary to your primary audience.
What they’re trying to accomplish
People buy products and services to get things done. These “things” are sometimes called their “jobs-to-be-done” (or “jobs” for short).
When it comes to your personas, what are they trying to accomplish in their roles that your offering helps them with?
For an agency selling content marketing services, jobs may include:
- Building an addressable audience
- Generating leads for sales
- Generating pipeline/revenue
Jobs-to-be-done for a recruiting manager may include:
- Finding high-quality engineering talent
- Staying in touch with potential candidates for the future
The content you create for your various personas should ladder up to what they’re trying to accomplish—the jobs they’re trying to complete.
Don’t forget—these jobs should be related to something you offer. It doesn’t help much to know that your VP of Marketing struggles with paid advertising if your content marketing agency is only focused on content production.
What’s getting in their way?
While a job-to-be-done is something your persona is trying to accomplish or complete, a pain point is a specific friction that gets in the way.
That Director of Marketing that’s trying to generate pipeline might face pain points like:
- Don’t know what topics to cover
- Content is reactive and ad hoc instead of strategic
- Lots of content, but no conversions
- Hard to measure performance/tie content to outcomes
What topics does this role care about?
You’ve probably uncovered a variety of topics your personas care about in the previous few sections. Use your personas’ jobs-to-be-done and pain points to document the kinds of topics they’d like to learn about.
For example, your Director of Marketing is probably interested in topics like:
- Building an audience
- Increasing email subscribers
- Using content for lead generation
- Creating a content strategy
- Editorial planning/creating a content calendar
- Measuring content performance
- Tying content to pipeline/revenue
These topics are going to feed directly into some of your ideas about building your topic strategy.
Where do they get their information?
Everybody gets information from organic search. But are your target personas on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter? Are there specific forums they hang out in? Slack communities? Do they read industry publications? Which ones?
For example, Marketing Directors responsible for content often consume information in channels like:
- The DGMG Facebook group
- The Some Good Content Facebook group
- Industry publications like AdWeek, Advertising Age, Forbes, etc.
- Content-specific publications like Content Marketing Institute, Chief Content Officer, etc.
You’ll publish most of your content on your website, but you need to consider how you will distribute it—so your audience will actually see it. Understanding where they get their information will help you decide where to focus your distribution efforts.
Hint: Trolling these sources can also be a great source of information about your audience, what they’re struggling with, and what topics they’re interested in. Get familiar with them!
Template filled out for our example audience:
Data | Persona 1 | Persona 2 | Persona 3 |
Description
Who are they? What roles are they in? What industry do they work in? | • VP of Marketing, Director of Marketing, Director of Content Marketing
• B2B technology companies | ||
Role in buying
Are they a primary or secondary audience for your content? Who is most important? | Primary | ||
Job-to-be-done
What are they trying to accomplish? | • Building an addressable audience
• Generating leads for sales
• Generating pipeline/revenue | ||
Pain points
What is getting in their way? | • Don’t know what topics to cover
• Content is reactive and ad hoc instead of strategic
• Lots of content, but no conversions
• Hard to measure performance/tie content to outcomes | ||
What topics do they care about?
What other professional subjects interest them? | • Building an audience
• Increasing email subscribers
• Using content for lead generation
• Creating a content strategy
• Editorial planning/creating a content calendar
• Measuring content performance
• Tying content to pipeline/revenue | ||
Where do they get their information?
ie. Twitter, LinkedIn, industry publications, etc. | • LinkedIn
• Twitter
• DGMG Facebook group
• Some Good Content Facebook group
• Industry publications like AdWeek
• Content-specific publications like CMI |
Populating the Template
As a writer or content marketer, you should treat filling out this template as a data-gathering exercise. You don’t need to pull everything from your head (in fact, that’s a good way to get it wrong).
Instead, look to these sources for the information you need.
Customer interviews
The best information about your customers will come from customers themselves. I strongly recommend interviewing some customers. I know, it can feel scary at first. But the rewards are huge and the time commitment is relatively small.
If you can only ask a prospect or customer one thing, ask this:
What was going on in your day that brought you to this product or service?
It places them back in that moment and prompts them to think about their struggle—and that’s super valuable for your content. Remember, you want to produce content that helps your audience to overcome their challenges, so you need to really understand these challenges.
Here are some other good questions to ask in your customer interviews.
Other sources of customer voices
If you can’t get customers on the line to chat (or don’t feel comfortable doing so), the next best option is to find existing sources where these people are sharing information and expressing their concerns, such as:
- Online reviews—read up on what your audience is saying on sites like G2.
- Demo calls—listen in to some live calls or see if your sales/support teams have any recordings.
Your internal subject matter experts
There may be people in your company that have already collected some of this data from customers. Consider talking to people on your team like:
- Product marketers
- Customer support
- Sales
- Founders/executives
Ideally, you’ll validate this internal information with external sources, as well. You know what they say about assumptions…
🏄♀️ 1: Identify Your Audience
Fill out the Audience Template for your own personas.
Aim for 3 personas, max.
I know this might feel daunting. But now you know exactly what you’re going after and where to get it—you just need to take action. If you spend the time to clearly document your audience now, your content strategy will be about 100X more likely to support your goals.
What’s next?
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(Having doubts? Here's a recent issue.)
- 🔎 Identify your audience
- Audience Template
- Description
- Role in buying
- What they’re trying to accomplish
- What’s getting in their way?
- What topics does this role care about?
- Where do they get their information?
- Populating the Template
- Customer interviews
- Other sources of customer voices
- Your internal subject matter experts
- 🏄♀️ 1: Identify Your Audience
- What’s next?