Understanding your audience is the basis for the right content development, if you know your target audience nothing can go wrong. All the ideas that emerge about what content to create come from what I would call the "3 W's", which refer to who? why? and what?
Answering these three questions simplifies content development by clearly focusing on the target audience.
Who Is Reading You And Why?
Who are the people reading you? By knowing who are the people you are writing for you can better understand how to create content. You should use any type of data available to understand them.
To help your audience you must understand their specific situation. It would be ideal to chat with people or conduct direct interviews to better understand what to develop when content creating, however time, budget and other barriers make it impossible. Luckily, there are other places to find information about what people need, want, like, and are looking for, and as mentioned above all of these tools can be used to understand the audience.
The vision, ideas, and objectives of interest are fundamental to be able to efficiently structure what you have in mind, and this also answers the “why” question. People will read you as long as you write content that is interested in them. Emmelie De La Cruz, who is a Digital Strategist says that "the mindset and goal-setting" are paramount to create interesting content; so it can also be said that these are the fundamental key in persona-focused content.
What should be investigated to reach the audience is:
- What are their goals?
- What do they expect to get from the content?
- What is their mindset?
- What are their interests?
- What are their beliefs?
-What are their needs?
Remember the content must be oriented to those who will read you, that is why it is so important to understand your audience and their expectations.
What Type Of Content Is Your Audience Looking For?
First, it is about what you think is important to say to the audience and what you think is going to be a “boom” for the readers. It is also important to ask yourself if what you are writing is also what your audience is looking for, that will help you properly develop the content. You must always have a very structured work development and this should always be focused directly on your audience.
It may be the case that what you think is important to highlight in the content is not what matters for your readers, so the priority should be to investigate the audience's interests regarding what you are writing.
You, as a content creator, should know what the strengths of the topic are and where to try to cause the biggest impact. It may be the case that in the development of the topic you find out that the information you were supposed to write about is not what the public is looking for, so it is mandatory to immediately make changes to it and make it useful for the audience. Remember you might set some parameters at the beginning so you can make your ideas flow and reach the most amounts of people effectively.
Persona-focused content is about writing content that reflects everything that people are looking for. Any tool can be used to evaluate how to better reach your audience, either by studying the demographics of the people who visit your website or similar websites, using Google “Observation”, analyzing Instagram hashtags, polls or simply by using any available tool to guide you in the development of the content.
When Do They Need The Content?
The needs for today are not necessarily going to be the same ones as next week, so it is extremely important to know when to write about a specific topic and even when content should be written in an “evergreen” manner, SEO localization must be done to develop a project focusing in what is a trend for the moment.
To summarize, to write persona-focused content you need to know who is reading you, what are they looking for and when do they need this information.
Forgetting your audience will only lead to the development of content that is disconnected or disjointed from customers' touchpoints, without clear values, with very complex and dense information that is written from a very internal point of view and lacking sensitivity about the audience.
Comments