How to create content tailored to your audience

By Emily Grote

It’s not rocket science that content tailored to your audience will always perform better, as it engages with the people you want to target. But it’s not always figuring out how to create exciting content that resonates with your audience.

Here are my top tips to create written content that engages, informs, and entertains your target audience.

Find your tribe

You can’t create content for everyone, as we all have different passions, lifestyles and interests. So, the first step of any content strategy should always be defining who you want to target.

This involves pinning down a group of people whom you want to create content for.

From the basics like age, gender, interests, location to anything more specified like what newspaper they read – basically, it’s who you want to be using your brand’s product/services.

A good way to do this is by creating an audience persona, which is a detailed profile that represents someone from your target audience and goes into depth about their characteristics and online habits.

From there, you can outline the broader group of people that make up your target audience.

Discover more about your target audience

To create content that engages your audience, you need to discover what motivates them, what grinds their gears and what makes them cry with laughter!

In other words, you need to do some desk research about your target audience to understand them better and be able to empathise with them.

To streamline this process, it’s a good idea to do a user journey map, to chart the course of your audience’s journey and understand their thoughts and emotions along the way.

This will help you create better content as you understand what they want to see at each point of that journey.

Get to know where your audience is

It’s no use creating amazing content if your target audience isn’t going to see it.

So, you need to find out where your audience ‘lives’ on the internet, so you can know where to showcase your content.

Are they Insta lovers, Pinterest pinners or will they be trawling Google for bargain deals?

You need to discover what platforms they use (it’s usually more than one!), so that you can prioritise them in your content strategy and use those platforms to directly link to the blogs on your website.

Learn from your competitors

Do your competitors have the same target audience as you? Use it to your advantage!

Check out their content, to see whether it resonates with your audience or not. Pick the best ideas and content types to use in your own strategy.

For example, if one of their blogs is in a ‘checklist style’, or has an enticing feature image, and it has a lot of comments or shares, then that’s something you could try on your website.

It’s also worth discovering what doesn’t work on your competitor’s site so you can avoid making the same mistakes as this will help you stand out from the crowd.

When you’ve done all these things, it’s a good idea to collect your ideas into a content plan, so that you can create engaging blogs using all the tips and tricks you’ve learnt about your target audience.

In short, the most important things you need to remember to create engaging content tailored to your audience are:

• Empathise with their wants, needs and struggles,
• Carry out thorough research about who they are, how they use the internet and what they want to see, read and buy
• Be consistent with your tone of voice and blog strategy- that is how you build a dedicated following!

If you need any help creating and implementing a content strategy that is tailored to your customers, then feel free to reach out and we can chat about your target audience and what makes them tick.