Posted by Content marketing is no longer a trend but rather a big necessity for every modern business. In today’s digital marketplace, a brand’s reputation is often directly proportional to the quality of its content marketing strategy.
The age we’re living in, customers need more and more validations before they make purchasing choices. Since the competition is overwhelmingly strong in every possible niche, your brand needs to stand out from the crowd in one way or another.
If your business is targeting unique audiences, meaning that the target customers are less traditional, you’ll need to adapt your content marketing strategy accordingly. A unique audience is less predictable – they might not spend time on social media, they might not use email every day, they might not even have a phone.
Should that stop you from marketing your products and services? Not a chance!
In this post, I’m sharing several tips and tricks on how to maximize your content marketing performance when you’re dealing with unique audiences. Pay attention and take action!
Research Your Audience’s Primary Problems and Needs
You might already know that any content marketing plan requires an extensive understanding of the target audience.
First of all, you should get to know your audience better by defining the basic demographics:
- Age
- Location
- Gender
- Occupation
- Level of income
Secondly, in order to improve the impact of your marketing strategies, you have to dig deeper and discover your target audience’s primary needs and problems. That’s the only way you’ll be able to attract their attention.
One good way of doing that is to leverage survey networks. Investing in data is always a good thing, especially if you’re just beginning your content marketing journey.
If you already have a bunch of social media followers or/and email subscribers, make sure you contact them directly and ask them about their needs and issues. Reward them with a discount on their next purchase to reward them for their help.
Gaining a great understanding of your target audience is the first key to a successful content marketing campaign. When you know what the average target customer wants and needs, you’ll be able to promise the benefits and solutions to their most pressing desires.
Develop Multiple Target Personas
A unique audience is often made of more target personas. For example, your products and services may be able to help both 18’yearolds and 60’yearolds. Obviously, reaching out to a young teenager will take a certain strategy, while reaching out to the elder person will require another tactic.
For that reason, you need to take the time to create as many unique target personas. Even if they’re fifty types of audiences, do not neglect this process.
After you segment your audience, you’ll be able to personalize your messages and diversify the distribution channels in order to improve conversions.
Stay Up to Speed with the Latest Trends in Your Niche
Don’t fall behind the marketplace. When you’re targeting a unique audience, you need to constantly study the trends that come and go. Of course, if you have ten target personas that present very different characteristics and needs, you’ll need to study ten niches in order to get everything right.
It’s a lot of hard work, but it’s totally worth it. In the long run, you’ll be able to predict and anticipate your audience’s needs better than most businesses can. Use Google Trends and other trend research tools to simplify and automate the process. Also, pay attention to niche forums to see what people are discussing.
Diversify Your Content Types
To diversify your content means to produce different types of content like text, video, audio, graphics, etc.
Start with your target personas. For example, if you’re about to create a campaign that targets mid-aged adults who are looking for health guidance, decide whether you’ll serve them text content or video content. Assess the PROs and CONs of each option and decide what type of content you’ll start producing.
Also, keep in mind to be honest about your content development possibilities. If you don’t dispose of the right resources, your content might sabotage your brand’s reputation. Raise your content’s quality standards. Seek to provide only high-quality information that truly resonates with your specific audience.
If you’re not a good writer and content producer, the best thing you can do is to outsource the content production process. Here are some platforms that can help you do that:
Approach and Test Multiple Distribution Channels
The content development part comes first. Once your content is ready to be distributed, you need to figure out the best distribution channels that will help you place the right content in front of the right audience.
You can do that by A/B testing more distribution channels. How does that work?
For example, start posting on Facebook and Instagram at the same time, for two to three weeks. Observe the engagement that you receive on each channel and track down the clicks using URL shorteners like Bit.ly or website analytics like Google Analytics.
Keep testing more platforms the same way and figure out what works best for each particular audience that you target.
Leverage Native Ads
Native ads are the best types of ads that you can leverage when dealing with unique audiences. A native ad is simply an advertisement that’s placed on a specific site that you choose. Native ads can be hyperlinks, call to actions, images, and even videos that appear on niche websites.
You can take a look at some of the most popular native advertising networks or you can manually seek niche blogs and publications that are followed by your target personas.
Be careful with this type of ads. You don’t want to look too intrusive and promotional. The main purpose of native ads is to integrate advertisements naturally.
Focus on Guest Posting
Guest posting is a great way to engage with unique audiences. If you’re focusing on a specific target persona, start looking for potential blogs that might be frequently visited by your specific target customers.
Most niche blogs accept guest posting, and they even have specific pages that provide the guidelines for guest authors. If they don’t, simply email them a proposition. Offer them unique quality content in exchange for a few links that point straight to your website.
This will not only help you acquire direct targeted traffic but will also improve your search engine rankings because, for Google, all backlinks count.
Engage with Your Audience to Gather Essential Feedback
To further improve your knowledge and data, gather as much feedback as you can from the persons who are already engaging with your brand.
For example, if you receive comments on social media, reply with a useful answer followed by a relevant question. Try to develop a community that will be keen to let you know what they want from you, what they dislike about your brand, and what they hope to see in the future.
Study Your Competitors
By studying your direct competitors, you can discover amazing details that you never would have thought about. If you’re running an e-commerce brand, for example, paying attention to your competitor’s product reviews is a key strategy to understand the expectations of your target audience.
Moreover, you can study social media reviews, comments, replies, and you’ll soon figure out what to do in order to avoid complaints and attract more eyes.
Use Power Words to Improve Your Headlines
Power words are emotional words that “touch” the subconscious mind of our prospect. When powers words are effectively used in headlines, readers will feel a strong need to click on a blog post or social media update to satisfy their curiosity.
Some examples of power words:
- Hidden; Secret; Censored
- Successful; Incredible; Amazing
- Painful; Shame; Suicide
- Captivating; Charm; Delight
- Backstabbing; Annoying; Nasty
- Discount; Prize; Profit
- Free; Rich; Gift
Whenever you create a content marketing campaign that’s aimed to target a specific target persona, you should think about what would make them “tick”.
7 main types of power words categories
- Encouragement power words
- Lust power words
- Fear power words
- Anger power words
- Greed power words
- Forbidden power words
- Safety power words
You should check out this comprehensive post that outlines over 600 power words that can be leveraged in headlines.
Use these words in your blog posts, social media updates, but also in your email campaigns to improve the impact of your headlines and make your audience click and digest your content.
Takeaways
Content marketing is a fine art that will continue to rule the digital marketing environment. To master any type of art, you need to possess skills. Those skills are the results of consistent practice. The more you test your methods the faster you’ll define what works and what doesn’t.
Take our tips and tricks into close consideration and start taking action as soon as possible. Don’t try to implement everything at the same time. Take it step-by-step, analyze, measure, and optimize your results!
This is a guest post by Sharon Hooper. Sharon is a blogger, essay writer and a digital marketer who specializes in email and social media campaigns. Sharon writes about all marketing-related issues, but she is no stranger to other topics such as self-improvement and career development. Sharon is a mother of two lovely kids and a passionate long-distance runner.
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