Which Content type attracts your Target Audience? by Faux Digital Advertising Agency

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Tutorial > Content Writing Guides > Which Content type attracts your Target Audience AUGUST 30, 2017

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Social media is feeding its users with an unbelievably large amount of information. What’s also true is that, however, no matter how much a person devours information from an online world, rest assured not everything is read. So why does that happen? I have two words for you – Content Presentation! Relevant and well-Presented Content attracts people. And this is precisely why the world is revolutionizing content. Writers have mastered the art of bending, dismantling and regrouping words to suit all kinds of content. This article aims at understanding the bigger picture and nd out the content you should publish for your Audience. This said, Let’s look at the professional terms one should know the perfect Targeted Audience:

Overview The Real reason why we write Content What is Target Audience? Why picking Target Audience is Important? Di erent Types of Content Presentation Deciding the content that attracts your Audience

The Real reason why we write Content – Inbound Marketing The real reason for writing online can be summed up in 2 words – Inbound Marketing. Here is how Wikipedia describes it: “Inbound Marketing is a technique for drawing customers to you, your products or services via Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Optimization.” Frankly, Inbound marketing is just a fancy way of describing our normal social activities online. It works on a simple principle: The way our pictures and videos get relatives and friends towards our pro le, Companies and business use media/content to attract customers!

But these fancy terms have a bene t – It provides us a set list of “Dos” and “Don’t” used by industries and businesses. Since every business tries to maximize return, they have re ned the process. And a lot can be learned by understanding these terminologies.

Understanding Online Content Publishing with the help of Inbound Marketing:

1. Marketing One should understand that Marketing is just an act of attracting the audience and then converting them into your customers. Previously it was done through TV ads and Roadside billboards, now it’s done Online! Over the last year or so traditional marketing had fallen nearly 160% while in the same time frame expenses for digital marketing services increased over 14%.

2. Customers Your aim de nes what/who you classify as a customer. It is not at all important to have a business outlook to de ne Customers. For a brand like Nike, the aim might be to sell their shoes whereas Hu ngton Post’s aim is to get readers. One has a paying customer and the other does not. This does not mean Hu ngton’s Readers does not qualify as customers. Their source of income is just di erent.

3. Content Marketing Content Marketing is a type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, and social media posts) that stimulates interest in a brand’s products or services. For example – Blogging is a type of Content Marketing. Content Marketing does not cover paid advertisement. It focuses on owning media, not renting it. In fact, approximately 81% of marketers say that they plan to use more original written content in their campaigns in the future. Here have a look at the infographic below by Wordstream:

Complete Guide to Content Marketing Essentials for Writers 2019

4. Social Media Marketing Social media marketing services help in gaining tra c or attention through social media sites. It can be paid or unpaid. Example of Paid Marketing can be – Facebook Post booster, LinkedIn Ads etc. And Free is the normal organic way of status, image, video or link sharing. As per Hubspot data, 60 percent of marketers believe paid social is more e ective than organic.

5. Search Engine Optimization

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine. Please do not confuse this with SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEM comprises of SEA(Search Engine Advertising) & SEO(Search Engine Optimization). While SEO is the free ways of making your website appear on top of Search Engine results, SEA is the where you pay Google and Bing for the same. Marketers see SEO as becoming more e ective, with 82% reporting e ectiveness is on the rise and 42% of this group stating e ectiveness is increasing signi cantly. How important is Google’s new SEO update, Fred?

To summarize these points, blogging is done for Inbound Marketing. And the reason its called Inbound is because it’s based on bringing Audience towards your website/pro le.

What is Target Audience? Now we are starting to get to the main part of the article. And before we go any further, it is important you know the de nition of Target Audience. This how Google’s rst page describes it: “A target audience is the intended audience/readership of a publication, advertisement, or message.” In Marketing and advertising, the Target Audience is essentially the group of people to whom your products and services are aimed at. For example, if you own a plumbing company, your target audience is property owners, both commercial and residential. Although It’s important to reach as many people as possible, and it often seems like focusing only on certain segments of the population is limiting, businesses don’t look at reaching everyone. They focus their marketing dollars and brand message on a speci c market that is more likely to buy than other markets. Because with everyone else, the percentage of energy and capital wastage increases. Target Audience is understood based on the attributes such as Age, Sex, Location-social & physical and Job Pro le. Businesses help their targets achieve their goals as a way to achieve your own goals (you get what you give). Further, in the article, we divide this audience in the following 3 to nd out the exact content type needed:

Your Customers The Person That In uences your customers Your Supporters Reaching out to all 3 of them is important and play an important role in nding the required content type. How to connect with Bloggers and In uencers

Why picking Targeted Audience is Important? Apart from the fact that no one can a ord to target everyone, choosing a speci c audience gets you closer to them as you begin to collect Audience data. Here are a few Stats on the Role of Audience data in Content Publishing:

Audience Data is a major part of publishing and there is no doubt about it. Here are 3 main reasons why:

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to grow in a speci c niche If the infographic above was too business oriented for you, here is a term you should relate with â&#x20AC;&#x201C; ROI. ROI stands for Return on Investment and this Investment can be labor, time or money.When all your energy is directed towards a

speci c niche audience, the wastage minimizes and returns increase. This is how Small businesses e ectively compete with large companies. They Build the right content for a targeted a niche market.

Plan When you are aware of what time your audience is most likely to read tweets and Facebook posts, you would design your social media marketing around that. And you can ask any content writer or marketer, Planning is the most important part of a marketing strategy.

Maintaining Continuity & Authority If you knew audience’s problems and issues, you would give them solutions. This would make you an authority. Similar content answer one problem after another would make your readers return for advice, tips and more. Making yourself an authority in the industry. If you want to be discovered online, it is simple – Be worth nding! Knowledge, continuity, and authority play long way into building an online presence and is just not possible without knowing your audience’s problems! The Complete Online Writing Process in One post

Di erent Types of Content Presentations Now that we have the technicalities gured, let’s take look at the di erent kinds of content that are taking the world by storm.

1. Gifs and Memes If copywriting is a tough task, then meet the daddy of them all. Witty memes and engaging Gifs are the seasons special and putting one together is no cakewalk. Though generally, these forms of content attend to a less detailed, mostly humorous or situational details, there are certain cases where they address some issue that is daunting the world. When Brexit happened, memes went berserk with stu like “why do English love tea? Because tea leaves.” So even if it isn’t telling a user much, it’s telling him something. And when somebody sees more than two of these, they are intrigued enough to look up the information in a much more detailed style article.

Here are some exemplar Gifs we created for social media marketing for one of our clients.

2. Videos Videos are a phenomenal viewer enticing mechanism! To begin with, you are spending no energy. Moreover, viewers process it better and it’s a whole lot more convenient. Videos do address a lot of informative things and are quite refreshing. No doubt this form of content takes a good amount of time to conceptualize and bring to life but the result is incredible. And the stats below prove the same: 52% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with best ROI. Videos are 6X more likely to be retweeted than photos and 3X times more likely than GIFs. 7 out of 10 people view brands positively after watching interesting video content. Companies which use videos in their marketing enjoy 27% higher CTR & 34% higher web conversion rates than those which don’t.

3. Listicles Forbes wrote a listicle on 5 reasons why Millennials love listicles and one of the reasons is attributed to the lack of time for the right content. So with any article with an exciting title what we really do is ‘inspectional reading’ or in simple words skim through the piece to see if this nugget of information is worth your time. And hence Listicles were born. The content under each entry does not exceed three sentences. If that is not concise, I don’t know what is. What’s even more impressive is that they are titled aptly. No wasting time deciphering that one. Your winners are “Five reasons why….” Or “10 places to visit before you die”, I mean come on! Who doesn’t want to read that? It’s the cleverest gimmick devised till date. No fancy words, no complicated gures of speech or tongue twisters. Plain, simple and incredibly inviting.

4. Review Reviews are till date the most convincing form of writing. Nearly 3 in 4 i.e. 73% shoppers are in uenced by product reviews posted online ahead of all other online content. However, they also border biased as it is usually the opinion of one person as the subject was perceived by them. A fair amount of reasoning may yield the matter but it’s fair to expect a slightly biased opinion. They can be in list form as well and are just as e ective as the information is not compromised with quality or value. There are rare elements of humor as the piece caters to a serious audience that may choose to make an investment based on the review. And almost 90% of the consumers always read online reviews before visiting a business.

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5. Lengthy and Informative These are the reason why this piece is long! These articles can be about anything under the sun and can take up any tone but are mostly serious. A fair amount of humor can be found as often as my almost non-existential one in this piece. However, these pieces are more factual as against opinionated. So if you had a piece on iPhones, the review would rave about the product while lengthy informative pieces will give you detailed feature breakdown and comparisons. As per Curata, longform blog posts generate nine times more leads than short-form posts.

6. Research based These are powerful pieces that are penned down by the people who have done the research. It is not open ended as the content is backed by their experiments or surveys. They border factual sometimes, however, they o er an exciting edge thanks to the freshness of the content. These pieces are no high on language however they are rich in information.

7. Introspective There is only one reason I want to list this as a separate kind of content and that is because I simply love it! These are the ‘from the pit bottom of your heart, honest revelations’ kind of post which is a huge rage nowadays. They are inspirers and much popular among the younger crowd. It is not a lie when people say that these pieces have inspired people to write or travel places. This category includes travel, writing, art, self-help and the likes that make us content devouring monsters to sit, think, pause and ideate over ways to make our life organic and understand ourselves a little better.

8. Product description These are the most business based and aim to sell an item or an idea. Your classic information on Flipkart or Amazon products is precisely this. If we are giving this the bene t of doubt, it’s fair to say that 40% of it is about the actual product. And please don’t assume it requires no creativity. You try writing about a bed sheet with hearts on it, with literary nesse.

Deciding the Content that attracts your Audience To gain an advantage over their competitors, businesses spend millions to understand their customers and their speci c needs. This is how they maintain a competitive advantage! Servicing their consumers at a higher level than their

competitors, allows them to target more customers. Here is how to the same with content in just 2 simple steps:

Step 1 – Divide your target audience into these 3: Supporters – Social proof and Advocates of your product/services. Consumers – Customers of your product. In uencers – The Person That In uences your customers. Content has the ability to educate, entertain, inspire, and convince. And, as the infographic from Smart Insight below shows, some types of content are suited for speci c purposes.

Let’s disintegrate the Infographic above for the next step There are 4 Content Goals – Entertain, Educate, Inspire, Convince. Audience Attributes decide the content type that resonates with them – Rational or Emotional. The Content Response/Action you wish to instigate – Awareness or Purchase.

Step 2 – Choosing Content Type according to the divided Target audience Using the points we took out from Smart Insights Infographic, this step includes asking the following 3 questions based on our target audience:

1. What is the Goal you want to achieve with your content? 2. Which Content Attribute resonates with your target audience? 3. What is the response or action you expect from your audience? As we mentioned earlier, Deciding content type depends on the following answers. So, Let’s get started! The answers to these questions is based on the Infographic so please consult above if in case your speci c goal for a target audience is di erent from ours.

1. Targeted Supporters There is no online existence in the social world without supporters. It’s that big of a deal. I know you would love to hear about it from a pro, so here it goes“The most important form of support that keeps an idea going and brings it into being is your support network—your “ambassadors”—people who believe in you without reservation” – Kathy Caprino (@KathyCaprino), Forbes Let us see what Content type would attract your Supporters: 1. Content Goal: Inspire & Entertain 2. Audience Attributes: Emotional 3. Desired response or action: Awareness and Purchase. Keep in mind that your supporters are also your prospective customers. 4. Example of Content Types: Attract attention using Listicles, Gifs, Memes, Quizzes, Viral Content, Competitions and Branded Videos. Also, use inspiring content like celebrity endorsements, reviews, and community forums. This is the Content that Builds trust.

2. Consumers For many, consumers are the only target audience. So not much explanation is needed for this point. Although this constitutes the largest chunk of the target audience, it cannot survive alone in a Marketing strategy. Content makers should understand that not every content is written to convert. There are Authority, Attraction and a whole set of other things to take into consideration. Let us see what Content type would attract your Consumers: 1. Content Goal: Educate & Convince 2. Audience Attributes: Rational 3. Desired response or action: Purchase 4. Example of Content Type: Content like demos, case studies, introspective and calculators normally do the trick. And to maintain repeat purchase and referrals, use content like e-books, guides, and infographics to Inform & Educate your customers.

3. Targeted In uencers According to Neil Patel, You should have a set of 10 to 20 in uencers that you are targeting in order to extend the reach of your content and personal brand. And pretty much everyone advocates the same in the industry. That’s why we should pay special attention to this speci c point. Let’s see what Content type would attract In uencers: 1. What is the Goal you want to achieve with your content? Entertain & Educate 2. Which Content Attribute resonates with your target audience? Rational or Emotional 3. Desired response or action: Awareness 4. Example of Content Type Since the aim with in uencers is to reach Supporters and Consumers, entertaining and educational types of content like lengthy, informative, research based, guides, infographics and white papers work best. This is not to say that you can’t use entertaining content to convince or inspiring content to entertain, but playing to the strengths of each type of content can impact your results. Moreover, with changing businesses and requirements, your Content Goals might also change but the questions and the graph remain the same. The best use of this infographic is for planning your content campaigns so they’ll be as e ective as possible.

Courses, Eligibility & How to kickstart a Content Writing Career

Bottom line, content has been reshaped to look just as you want it to look. For a Snapchat generation that hates typing/reading such that images talk for them, content has gotten a makeover for survival’s sake. Fast forward to 10 years of now, content markets will be the ‘it’ thing for designing creatives. But no matter the writing style, the role of Targeted Audience would never change. And only the ones who adapt and focus content according to their audience would survive. Till then, Amen to good old content!

Related Posts: 1. The true meaning of Content Curation & Aggregation 2. Courses, Eligibility & How to Kickstart Content Writing Career 3. All about Di erent types of Content Writing Services 4. Will your business bene t from Facebook or LinkedIn?

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