Targeted Content Marketing: How to Know What Your Clients Don’t Know

As more and more businesses embrace content marketing, the amount of content online is growing. In the contest for consumer attention, most businesses focus on gaining the most clicks. However, content marketing success demands conversions and conversations. Audience engagement is at the heart of effective content marketing.

It can be tough to consistently create content that keeps your clients and prospects engaged. Your audience keeps evolving, and so do their needs and goals. If you create content that they’re already familiar with, they may quickly lose interest. On the other hand, if your content is too inaccessible or unfamiliar, it’ll turn them away. It can be tricky to know what your clients don’t know. 

Understanding exactly what content to create is especially challenging for highly technical professions like lawyers and financial advisers, as well as thought leaders and CEOs in every industry. Property developers are another group that may find themselves struggling to create content that guides their audience without intimidating them. For example, most people who buy off-the-plan are usually doing so for the first time. It can be a challenge to lead them through the process step-by-step without coming off as patronising.

Taking the time to understand your client base can help you create targeted, engaging content that meets their goals and solves their problems. This can position your brand as a reliable expert and build long-term relationships with your client base. Here are a few ideas to know what your clients want to know:

Create customer personas

Building customer personas can help you direct your content marketing efforts towards the clients you want to attract. 

A customer or buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. It is created using market research and real data about your existing customers. This data includes demographics, motivations, behaviours, interests, and goals. 

By using personas, you can pick out focus areas for your content marketing efforts. While demographics may form the bulk of your customer personas, don’t forget to look at your target clients with empathy. Try to really understand their problems and how your brand can solve them. Present relevant and practical solutions in your content. This is a powerful way to make your client base care about your content.

Understand the customer journey

Your client base interacts with your brand at different stages of decision-making. This includes coming across your brand on a search engine, comparing your services with other options, or setting up a meeting, among others. The full set of experiences a customer goes through while interacting with your brand is called a “customer journey”.

Understanding the customer journeys of your client base can help you tailor your content to each stage of their decision-making. It can also help you understand their pain points and cater to them effectively.

Use data to inform your strategy

Collect and monitor data from various sources to refine your content marketing efforts. Social listening and tools like Google Analytics can provide valuable data around the following aspects:

  • The types of content your client base shares
  • The content formats, styles, and topics they engage with
  • The platforms your client base is most active on
  • How your brand is perceived

Customer feedback and competition analysis can also be valuable sources of data. With specific questions, you can get clear insights into the pain points of your audience and understand what your competitors are doing better. Sometimes, understanding what your audience wants is as simple as asking them!

Data from Social Listening and Google Analytics can also provide clues on what is not working. It can help predict and identify problem areas or pain points in the customer experience. Use these insights to inform your content marketing strategy.

Write what you would read

This is an often-neglected aspect of creating good content. Before you begin creating content, ask yourself the following questions:

  • What makes you click on a piece of content?
  • What newsletters or blogs do you subscribe to, and why?
  • What types of content do you remember? What makes them memorable?
  • What types of content do you share?

Exploring these questions can help you understand what makes content attractive, memorable, and shareable. Good content often creates a connection, is easy to understand, and most importantly, helps you solve a problem. Try to create content that ticks these boxes. 

It can take a lot of time and effort to create effective, high-quality content on a regular basis. That is why several businesses come to us. We create content that is easy for clients and prospects to understand and engage with, while still being technically accurate. If you’d like to create effective content for your brand, get in touch. We’d be happy to help.