Nearly 50 percent of consumers prefer to acquire products and services from businesses that offer content personalized to their needs. Despite that fact, less than half of businesses use buyer personas to guide their marketing efforts. Instead, they simply create content without true regard for their customers’ needs, preferences, and place in the buyer’s journey. Unless they are incredibly lucky, their efforts tend to miss the mark completely, leading to poor results from their marketing campaigns.
If you have already identified and defined your target audience by creating detailed buyer personas, then you are well ahead of the game. Great job. Within each persona, you can find actionable information that assists in the creation of content that boosts engagement and drives sales. Before you can dive in, however, you also need to fully explore what exactly it is that your audience needs, so you can create helpful content for your website and blog.
Why You Should Care What Your Audience Needs
Okay so, who cares, right? Web content only speaks to Google anyway. What does the target audience have to do with anything? Well, good and bad news all in one: Google has long since ditched their prior algorithms that focused on the density of relevant keywords in favor of quality metrics. And perhaps more alarmingly for those not in the know, they have been diligently tightening up those guidelines ever since. Using over 10,000 search evaluators, Google weighs how well online content answers each search query and speaks to the needs of the intended audience. Whether they are looking at landing pages or blogs, the value of the content within greatly influences how well those entities rank on the search results for that query.
In the end, it all comes back around to the needs of your target audience. If your audience can see value in your web pages and blogs, then Google will as well. When their searches return actionable information that helps them solve their expressed challenges, your target customers are much more likely to stick around and complete their purchases. Coming across info that feels way off base, on the other hand, can have your visitors hitting the back button in record time. You do not usually get a second chance either. Once your website visitors move on, they will often just continue shopping until one of your competitors presents a great solution in the right manner.
How You Can Find Out What Your Audience Needs
With Google simply caring about the user experience, you can tailor your content to the needs of your target audience to both rank well and make a great impression on your customers. To do this effectively, you must dive into the challenges your target audience faces and their preferred solutions to those problems.
Define Your Target Audiences’ Pain Points
Content quality goes much deeper than simply writing well. Your web pages and blogs must speak to the challenges, or pain points, your audience expresses through their search queries. Through customer research, you can dig deep to identify the main problems your target audience may come across in their daily lives. With a clear definition of these challenges, you can use your content to position your services and products as the ideal solutions. This ensures you directly address your customers’ needs and the reasons they are even seeking you out.
Map Their Purchase Journey
As you define your target audiences’ pain points, you can map their purchase journey to create content that offers support every step of the way. Through each stage of the buyer’s journey, your target audience will benefit from personalized information that speaks to the steps leading up to the purchase. At various points along the way, you can help by addressing their challenges, offering info about the available solutions, and assisting them in finding out how to take the next available steps. Your content can act as a guide as they work from determining there is a problem to taking the right steps in solving it.
Identify Relevant Keywords
Keyword still matter too, but really just in context to guide search engines to your content. Each keyword needs to be integrated into the content naturally and without disrupting the message in any way. Google still crawls web pages to find keywords that match search queries best and ranks them accordingly. Their ranking metrics have just changed to value quality over keyword density when it comes to ranking your content. Without relevant keywords, Google will not find your content and display it to your target audience.
Create Relevant Content Offering Leading Solutions
With info about your target audiences’ pain points, buyer’s journey, and relevant keywords, you can craft excellent content that provides the perfect level of support. As your content speaks directly to your target audience, they can build the knowledge they need to make confident purchase decisions. They will also start to view your company as a leader in the industry, which serves to build trust in your brand. You may even develop a reputation as a thought leader in your market as your website and blog garner attention and gain a loyal following.
Catering to Your Target Audience for Improved Marketing Success
When you make your target audiences’ needs your priority, it is possible to create truly relevant content that supports your marketing goals. With each web page and blog you create, you can provide your customers with the support they need to move from learning about a product or service to completing the purchase. High-quality, relevant content also helps ensure that Google continues to position your website above your competitors’ sites.
Although this might seem to take a lot of work up front, the payoff will continue long after you post your content online. You can streamline the process by partnering with the content strategists at WriterAccess. They will help you identify your audiences’ pain points, follow the buyer’s journey, research effective keywords, and create highly-engaging content for your website and blog.
Marie A. regularly produces engaging web content and informativ
e SEO articles for small and large enterprises worldwide. She utilizes her knowledge of the online landscape to create effective content marketing campaigns for her clients. She writes shareable copy with a clear call to action that does not sound salesy or pushy. Her content always reflects the company voice and mission while adhering to the preferred style guide. Through the production of optimized webpages, articles and other works, she helps business owners speak directly to their target audiences, convert site visits into sales and position themselves as leaders in their industries.
